As Dr. Bob Rotella titled his famous book, “Golf Is Not A Game Of Perfect.”
Unfortunately, very few golfers really accept this to be true. Instead, they go out on the course expecting perfection and their “A game” to show up, and then struggle to cope when it’s not there.
I heard an interesting statistic recently, from a reliable source: Tour players (on average) make 80 percent of their money in a season from five events.
What does this tell us? It tells us that they have their A game a handful of times in a season. The rest of the time they are managing their B or C game.
But one of the reasons that they are Tour players is that they are generally very good at dealing with misses and not letting them affect their ability to score, with whatever game they have on that day.
Golf is easy when you have your A game, but the fact is you are more likely to have your B or C game during any round. Golf is a difficult game most of the time. It’s not just about how many good shots you hit, but also about how well you’re able to deal with your misses.
If you can do this well and learn how to bounce back, you can still achieve success with your B or C game
I recently had an in-depth conversation with one of my Tour player students about strategies to bounce back from bogeys (or worse). She admitted that, in her last tournament, she didn’t do the best job of it and let some of her misses create doubt and get herself down, leading to more bogeys than normal.
We worked through the strategies she has in her “mental game tool box,” to recover quickly and I’d like to share some of them with you.
