This week has seen the 2012 Srixon Coaching Summit.  Where the Asia Pacific’s leading PGA Professionals meet.  With an amazing array of keynote speakers this years summit did not disappoint.

Dr. Ric Charlesworth speaking on “Reflections of a Coaching Life”, engaging stories and insights to a coaching career filled with some amazing successes.  Sharing his experiences on coaching both the men’s and women’s Australian Hockey Team.  Detailing the Australian Men’s Hockey Team’s journey in London.  How cruel the game of hockey can be.  The Australian team was only ever behind for 10 minutes in the entire tournament, all games.  That 10 minute period was the difference between playing for Gold rather than bronze.

Michael Hebron PGA Master Professional from America speaking on “Modernizing Approaches to Learning”. Work your instrument, making conscious attempts to learn, learning is a survival skill, the rules are for the golf club, inconsistency is part of the deal of golf, it’s not a hard game, how questions are asked, we are all great learners, no judgements.

S – Students
M – Minds
A – Are
R – Really
T – Talented

Tony Bennett PGA of GB and I Master Professional speaking on “Skill & Attributes of the Modern PGA Professional” With over 40 years of experience educating, coaching and influencing the pathway and direction of golf in Great Britain.  Creating a modern professional, adding value to your club, generating new and innovative ideas on education and development of the game.

Denis McDade the 2012 Australian Teaching Professional of the year.  “The Changing Demographics of the Junior Golfer and Coping With the Challenges they Present Coaches”  An amazing presentation specifically designed with junior golfers and junior golfer development in mind.  Structuring and running a golf class for early primary school children.

Mark Sweeney the Innovator and Founder of AimPoint Technologies.  “Accelerated Skill Acquisition in Putting”

Matthew Frelich PGA of America and VP of Sales and Business Development at Trackman. “Is that a Good Coach” A fresh look into club delivery, ball flight and performance assessment for golf.

Dr David Alred, specialist in mental preparation, skill acquisition and performing under pressure.   “The 8 Principals of Performing Under Pressure”  Although touching on the 2003 Rugby World Cup loss to England, Dr David Alred is one of the most profound speakers and if you ever get an opportunity to listen to one of his presentations I recommend you do.  You will not regret it for a moment.

I look forward to sharing with you as much information as possible to encourage you and develop your game.

One other speaker I failed to mention was Virginia Irwin.  I had the pleasure of co-presenting with Master professional Peter Knight on “What Women Want”  It was a fantastic opportunity to share with the members some very important information pertaining to women specifically.  I would like to thank Peter very much for inviting me to participate in the study with him and look forward to releasing the findings of our survey as soon as possible.

Knowledge is everything.  If you cease to learn to cease to grow.  Be your best always.

Using Clean Language can be a spectacularly effective way to create deep rapport with another person. The Clean Language questions compel you to listen carefully to what the other person says, so that you can use their exact words in your questions.  This combination of exquisite listening and uses the other person’s words typically makes them feel that you like and respect them, and are deeply interested in what they have to say – a great basis for rapport.

So, how does this compare with NLP rapport techniques?

Words and metaphors

Using the other person’s words – their terminology for things – is standard practice within NLP. In using their terminology rather than your own you are showing your flexibility to match their ‘map of the world’. Using the other person’s metaphors is also an accepted NLP rapport technique.

However, Clean Language takes both these ideas much further than NLP. Clean Language uses only the client’s words and the Clean Language questions. There is no room for the ‘softeners’ which are encouraged in many NLP rapport trainings, and certainly no opportunity to introduce clever reframes or ‘Sleight of Mouth’ techniques.

In a fully ‘Clean’ session, the facilitator might muse silently to himself about the implications of a particular client metaphor. But he would not mention these musings to the client, or seek to extend or enhance the metaphor. In Clean Language, it’s not the  facilitator’s job to change anything, least of all the client’s metaphors. Any changes emerge organically, from the client.

Eye contact

It’s an accepted part of NLP lore that lots of eye contact is a good thing. In Clean Language, however, it’s thought that eye contact can distract the client – we want them to pay attention to their internal world, to their thoughts, rather than focussing on the person asking the questions. Think about it – when you are given directions, you don’t maintain eye contact with the other person. Instead, you pay attention to the internal map of the route which you are creating.

Body language

When two people are in rapport, their bodies often synchronise with each other. They will sit in the same position, or perhaps raise their glasses to drink at exactly the same time.   This natural effect is exploited as the NLP rapport technique ‘matching and mirroring’: the idea is that if you would like to get into deeper rapport with a person, you should deliberately match their body position, gestures, breathing rate etc.

It’s an observable fact that experienced Clean Language facilitators do often match their client’s body position and breathing. But this is usually not deliberate: it’s certainly not a formal part of the approach. And they will reduce their gestures to the very minimum, so that they can use their hands for other things – specifically, to direct the client’s attention to the symbols in their metaphoric landscape.

Gestures are in fact at the centre of the most dramatic difference between NLP rapport techniques and the Clean Language approach. In NLP, if the client gestures towards themselves – for example, pointing to their heart – and the practitioner wanted to reference that gesture, the facilitator would ‘mirror’ the gesture by pointing towards their own heart. In contrast, in Clean Language the gesture is assumed to refer to a specific location in space, and the facilitator who wanted to refer to it would gently point towards the client’s heart.
Source Clean Change

Just like a doctor prescribes medication, a good golf instructor intends certain tips only for certain students. The following is strictly for golfers who struggle to get pitches in the air because they don’t effectively use the bounce of the wedge. Is this you? If your ball flight is low, your divots are deep and your club tends to catch in the turf, then all symptoms point to yes.

Your hands are probably too far forward at impact, excessively activating the leading edge of the club. This creates an unforgiving situation in which you must make perfect contact. Even so, the height to your shots will be limited. You must learn to employ the club’s bounce, or to strike the ground with at least a bit of the trailing edge. This is often a better player’s problem, as the instinct of most beginners is to scoop the ball with the shaft leaning too far back through impact.

Try this: Put your left hand in your pocket, and swing the wedge with your right arm only. Feel the clubhead pass your hand as it bottoms out. Now, pretend you’re on a putting green and hit the pitch. It would be a sin to take a divot, and the only way to avoid doing so is to properly use the bounce.

Practice this on a patch of closely mowed turf on your range, not on a green. I don’t want to get an angry letter from your course’s superintendent.

Source Kevin Hinton

Some of your body’s joints are designed to be super mobile. And some aren’t. One of the most-common areas where golfers feel pain and succumb to injury is at the elbow joint. Why? There are many reasons, including the repetitive stress placed on your elbows from striking the ground over and over. But another big reason is that you lack mobility in the joints that surround–and protect–your less-mobile elbow joint. And when those joints don’t do their job, the elbow has to take an added amount of punishment. Your cartilage wears out. Tendons get inflamed. You feel pain. Sound familiar?

If you’re looking for help to prevent this pain from recurring, you need to improve your shoulder mobility, particularly before you play. Increasing the shoulder’s range of motion and also getting the blood flowing through the joint will allow you to swing the golf club without adding stress to your already banged-up elbows. And, as an added bonus, you’ll also be protecting the rotator-cuff muscles of your shoulder from tearing. That’s a less-common injury for golfers, but it can happen.

Your shoulders are extremely mobile, as evidenced by the amount of flexibility a pitcher, swimmer, or gymnast has in performing their sports. So before you tee it up, get those muscles nice and warm.

Source Roger Schifferman

When you miss a fairway you are confronted with a number of options as to what you will do to extricate yourself from the situation. You might have to hit a golf shot with a hook or slice curve, or hit it higher or lower than usual.

If you practice hitting straight shots on the driving range most of the time you again will find yourself in a difficult position to bounce back if you cannot competently shape your shots to get you back into play or better.

Without exception top class tournament professional golfers are experts at controlling ball-flight and our students practice curving shots into small targets on the range so they are completely confident at playing these important shots when they arise.

How about you? Can you hook and slice when you need to?…

Source Pro Tour Golf College

Golf is a game of bad golf shots more than it is a game of good shots. That’s why sports psychologist Bob Rotella’s book was titled “Golf is Not a Game of Perfect.” Golf is one of those games that really only suits two types of people; golfers that thrive on challenge and who have a high tolerance threshold for hardship and adversity, and golfers who want to learn how to.

If you don’t fit into either of those categories then my best advice is for you to look for another easier game to play because you will not enjoy playing golf. That is the reality of elite level amateur golf and pro tour golf; it’s a tough game that suits tough minded individuals, because the majority of golf shots you will hit will be at times a lot less than you expected and you will need to be able to handle it and not let it affect your progress.

How you handle the constant and never ending challenges you face during a round of golf will determine to a great extent how successful you will be at playing the game of golf competitively. Since most of your golf shots will end up somewhere other than where you want them to you really need to prepare yourself better for it. Golf is one of the few games where you practice usually in a different place to where you perform, and this creates a lot of problems for golfers wanting to lower their golf score average.

When you look at a typical driving range or practice fairway you realise pretty quickly that they look very different to golf holes. A golf range is relatively flat in design and wide and the tee area is also flat. The target areas will usually have flags or mounds for you to hit shots to. The driving range is nothing like the design of a golf hole which is designed to challenge you from the tee all the way to the green with narrow fairways, bunkers and sloping greens designed to make you think.

So the way you go about practicing your golf skills away from the golf course could be having a dramatic effect on the way you play. If you practice on perfectly manicured tee’s all the time, how can you expect to pull off great recovery shots from tough lies around the golf course like these ones?

Source Pro Tour Golf College

“Top PGA tour golfers like 2011 US Open and 2012 PGA golf champion Rory McIlroy have highly developed, highly specific and very high paying golf skills which help them to produce a consistently low competitive score average when they compete on one of the PGA or LPGA tours.”

In every golfers game there are three or possibly four golf skills that would guarantee improved golf scores by developing and improving them. The eighty-twenty principle helps us to understand that approximately 20 percent of your golf skills accounts for eighty percent of the results you produce in every round; so it’s important that you identify these critical to performance skills if you want to move to lower golf scores faster.

If you need some help in identifying your critical to perform skills come and get tested.

Are You Guilty of Practicing Only Swing Technique?

Solution: Use other types of training: competitive, routine, shot shaping, and mental skills.

There is nothing better than the feel of a well-struck shot or the sight of a drive soaring through the air.  Striking the ball correctly is one of the most impressive aspects of the game, especially when you are the one doing the striking.  Perhaps this is the reason for such a preoccupation with the golf swing with both players and coaches.

A constant focus on swing technique, no matter how justified it may seem will be detrimental to the overall development of your game and the ability to transfer your practice to the course.

In order to create a more seamless transfer, other types of practice must be utilised.  When you go to the course, the focus is on scoring rather than swing positions (at least it should be).  Other types of practice include competitive drills; performance in these has a direct correlation to performance on the course.  Ideally you should do some competitive practice a few times a week and record the results so you can monitor your progress.

Routines should be considered to be part of the shot.  As such they should be practiced at every session.  When you practice routines, include shot visualisation, planning, focussing and creating your playing state.  Development of your routines is a skill and should be treated the same as the development of any other skill.

Routines include pre-shot (assessment of lie, target, wind direction and strength), shot (walk-in, looks and waggles, etc) and post-shot (no emotional attachment to a poor shot and full emotional attachment to a great shot).  Shot shaping is useful not only for developing a skill that you can use on the course, but there is an added benefit: noting the shapes that are easy or difficult to play can point to areas that need to be addressed with your swing.  If one shot is difficult to hit (for example a draw), then practicing hitting the draw will positively influence your entire swing.

Mental skills including visualisation, self-talk, goal setting, state management, concentration, etc can all be practiced during any training session.  There is no need to develop them in isolation, as they can all be incorporated into any practice (except perhaps for relaxation).  In fact they are either developed as good habits or bad habits during your practice as you respond to good and poor shots you hit while practicing.

My Challenge to You – develop your own practice plan for a 2-hour session incorporating every type of practice.

Source Peter Knight

Here are a few thoughts on Rory’s bunker game and what you can learn.

1. Make a ‘normal’ swing
Many of the students I see impart far too much slice spin onto their bunker shots, often because they have been taught to do so. They aim their bodies way to the left, set the clubface quite open, then cut across the ball to excess. This makes it difficult to get the ball started on the intended line. The ball will also spin to the right once it hits the green, again reducing the chances of the ball tracking toward the hole.

I find that all this effort does not seem to add that much loft to the shot, and it also presents a challenge in controlling distance when such a glancing blow is applied. I don’t see tour players doing so except in extreme situations. The average player would do much better by setting the body and clubface only slightly open, and then making a normal-feeling swing.

2. Take dead aim
If your goal is to get the ball out of the bunker, that is likely the best you’ll do. If your goal, however, is to hole every bunker shot, you’ll likely do so quite rarely, but I guarantee you’ll hit a lot more stiff. It’s the same idea as when sport psychologist  Dr. Bob Rotella asks his tour players to hole every shot within 100 yards. It doesn’t happen that often, but setting high standards and narrowing your focus can significantly tighten your shot dispersion. A great short-game practice drill is to hit a routine greenside shot until you hole it, be it a chip, pitch or bunker shot. You’ll be amazed how quickly it can happen. If you are a higher handicapper, make your goal to get the ball within a grip’s length. Before long, you’ll be holing out shots in practice and taking your increased confidence onto the golf course.

Source Kevin Hinton