Great golf begins and ends with a player creating and maintaining a great attitude. A positive attitude is the ultimate emotional fuel for optimal golf performance. The key to any top college, PGA or LPGA players’ success is their ability to persevere in times of trouble and poor shots and keep upbeat and positive and turn their momentum towards a positive pattern of good play. If you are playing poorly, use your self-talk and thoughts to turn things around. Always find something productive or useful that you can focus on versus getting down on yourself. It is important to remember that Tiger Woods has become the dominant player in the game today not just through his shot making ability, but his ability to keep his cool and turn things around in a positive direction via his competitive attitude!

Believing in yourself is fundamental to building trust and self-confidence. Believing in yourself allows you to know that you have the requisite skills to handle whatever happens along the way on the golf course. A key component to becoming a top performer is to believe more in your talent than believing in the talent of others that you play against. An important key to this is that you must let go of worrying about whether you measure up to others. Remember, all you can do is all you can do…but that is often more than enough!

Playing your game is about playing to your talent and ability levels that only you have control over. It is about you understanding how you play and knowing that you will execute your shot according to your personal playing style. When you put more emphasis on trying to play like someone else or hit shots that you are not comfortable with, you are not playing your game. Playing within yourself is vital to playing consistent golf.

Playing one shot at a time is staying focused in the moment and giving your absolute best effort into that single moment. It is about staying in the NOW. The single greatest mental mistake that PGA and LPGA players make is that they often get ahead of themselves and start to think about score, results, and the outcomes of the day, while they are still playing! It is a vital golf maxim that you stay in the moment and execute as well as you can in the present shot. The results at the end of the day will surprise you if you can play each shot as well as you can and then total them up at the end. Remember, the golfing day is about playing golf, not counting or tallying your scores. There is time enough for counting after the playing is done!

Playing with patience and composure insures that you will play with emotional balance. It helps you to maintain a good rhythm, tempo and adhere to your desired playing strategy. Playing with patience helps you to stay in the present moment and concentrate fully on the shot at hand. Tiger Woods credits his Mother for helping him to develop his patience while he was a junior golfer growing up in California. Remember, patience is confidence waiting to happen!

Committing to every shot provides you with a chance to execute with full intent and purposefulness into each and ever shot. Commitment helps to implement positive action into every moment and eliminate negative cognitive anxiety. When you commit yourself to a shot, you are creating a positive energy flow via a goal driven behavior that will help insure what you want to happen. Failure to commit totally to your shot should always be the "other players" error, never yours.

The simplicity of your thoughts and swing keys lead to greater gains in terms of reliable scoring results. The greatest players in the history of the game have always known that the simpler they keep their swings and their thinking, the better they will be. It is a fallacy to believe that high tech and complicated swing thoughts are better for golf performance than simple and efficient swing thoughts. The best players of today understand that simple does not mean easy, but simple thoughts and swing keys are most easily repeated when the pressure of the moment shows up. Keep your swing thoughts simple and your target focus specific!

Expectations are pre-set standards that interfere with simply playing one’s game. The only expectation that works in a performance setting is that you are totally focused in the moment and strive to stay on task in that single shot sequence. Let go of the expectations of score, results, winning and the high standards of others. You must realize that the only player you need to please is yourself! Let go of the burdens of expectations and play golf with a carefree mind-set!

Trust in the conscious letting go of overcontrolling tendencies to hit the ball correctly. When you play with trust, you allow yourself to swing to the target and forget the notion of "how to swing." When you play with a trusting focus, your mind is more interested in "where" than "how." You merely swing to the target and the ball finds its way. Playing with trust is about letting go of trying hard and just playing golf. Trust is the key element in finding out how good you can become.