How To Stay Calm In Tournaments

All right, what's going on everyone? So in today's video, I'm going to be going over how to stay calm in tournaments. I put a lot of work into this video today. So if you're new to the channel and you enjoy it, please go ahead and hit that subscribe button and like the video. Helps a ton getting the channel out there to more people. And like I said, I put a ton of work into this. And so that's the way you guys can show me that you guys actually enjoy stuff like this. So yeah, today I'm going to be digging deep into how to stay calm in tournaments. And the— it really starts with a foundation here. And that's the idea that expectations equal reality. You know, if we have a certain expectation of ourselves, then that's how we're going to react. At a neuroscience level, that's how our brain is going to react. But just at a very high level, very common sense, You know, if you go out there and you expect to shoot 85 and you shoot 90, you're going to be upset. If you shoot 95, you're going to be really upset. If you shoot 80, you're going to be, you know, reasonably happy. At the same time though, if you expect to shoot 75 and you shoot 80, well, you know, then you're, you're not going to be very happy, right? So that is really what all this comes down to, um, is just expectations are going to dictate our reality for us on the golf course. And so if we have really high expectations for ourselves, if we expect a lot out of ourselves, then we kind of end up in this conundrum where it puts a lot of pressure on us. So if you're a junior golfer, you're watching this video, uh, if you're, if you're the parent of a junior golfer and you're watching this video and your child really struggles with anxiety, um, they get on the golf course, they're nervous, um, or you just kind of have a sense that they've got this load on them, it's probably because they have very high expectations of themselves. Themselves. And this is a little bit of a catch-22, because if you go to most psychologists, most sports psychologists, they'll tell you, oh well, you know, it's just golf, you know, you can't put that much pressure on yourself, it's just a game, all that. And that's not super helpful, because your junior golfer is good at golf because they put high pressure on themselves, that they have high expectations for themselves. And so it's learning how to manage this stuff correctly, because if we don't, well, we know what happens, right? We, um, get out there and we don't perform at that level. We fall short of that and we get really, really frustrated, right? And so this really comes down to— and I've been having lots of conversations with parents and junior golfers over the last few weeks, and that's why I wanted to make this video— a lot of parents and junior golfers think that they have a mindset problem when actually they have an expectations problem. They, they think that they have issues to do with, um, you know, why they're a slow starter or why they get anxiety on the golf course or why why they're underperforming in their eyes. And the reality is they just don't understand their game very well, and so they don't have appropriate expectations. And so our expectations are a product of the models that we use, right? And models are just a way of thinking, right? That it's a way that we use a frame of reference to try and predict the future. We use a model in order to do— excuse me. And so for the most part, When I see junior golfers or parents talk about their game, they do one of two things. Either they're, they're this guy, they're thinking about their best golf ever, and that's kind of their, their mode of trying to understand what they're going to shoot next. They think that they've got it figured out, they feel really confident, they feel like, ah, if I can just get a good start, then we're going to be in a really great spot and we're going to do really, really well. And they're kind of looking at this high-end performance of themselves. Or it's the opposite, they're looking at their worst golf. They're, they're really, uh, you know, not feeling good about their game overall, and it's really, really frustrating. And it's kind of one of those two things that most players use to forecast the future. Now, this one, it's not super accurate, right? We can't just look at our best golf and say that's who we are now, right? We can't just go out there and shoot 62 and be like, well, you know, if I can just shoot 62 all the time, that'd be amazing. No, you're going to shoot some 71s, and those are fine scores too, relative to where you're at, depending on where you're at. And at the same time, if you're just always focused on the worst parts of your game, well then we're just kind of depressed, you know. We're not actually going out there and feeling good about our game. We're really struggling. And so we don't want to be either of these. And just fundamentally here, good models are going to be able to predict reality effectively. You know, like if a model is good, it's going to predict the future very, very well. And that, that means it's useful. A bad model is not going to predict the future. A bad model of thinking is saying, I think this is going to happen. And then I go out there and I don't perform at that level, or I don't perform within that range or whatever the case may be. And so if you see this, or if your junior golfer sees this, then that, that's probably the case. We're using models that are not effective. We're using modes of thinking that are not very effective. And so that's really the main objective of this video is to help you guys look at this a little bit different. So a good model means realistically we're not being very surprised. We go out there and we perform, and it's kind of what we expected. That's where we want to get to. And there's a bunch of layers to this. There's a bunch of layers to psychology, neuroscience of this. But just safety as a starting point here, we want to be able to go out on the golf course and pretty much perform close to what we expect if we want to get optimal results. and so that's really the foundation here. Now I want to introduce you to a concept of the normal distribution, and this might be a concept that you've seen in math class, or maybe you're not quite there yet, but all this, all this does is this shows on what's called a normal distribution of numbers what numbers we should expect. And this is for any set of numbers that have variance in them, right? They're not always the same. and there's some kind of middle point, and there's some amount of kind of randomness within those numbers. So this could be random numbers, which is probably what it is in most school settings. But for you, um, or your child, you can think about this as the scores they shoot in golf, right? Because they're not all the same. They're kind of— some, they're bunched toward the middle, and then there's some on the outside, right? And those happen less often. That's really the way to look at this. And so at the top of this, in this kind of middle portion here, we have scoring average, right? This is our average score. And you'd be surprised the number of junior golfers who do not actually know what their average score is. They have an idea of what it is, but usually it's something over kind of in this upper third, or, um, yeah, for lack of a better term, this over to the right here, um, either, you know, 1 or 2 standard deviations up. And so I'm kind of jumping ahead there. But the technical term for this measurement on the bottom, the plus and the minus of 1 and the Greek letters and all that stuff, is just consistency. The technical term is standard deviation, but that's, that's just a way for you to understand how much variance there is in these scores. And so most junior golfers would express this as consistency. I feel like I shoot the same scores all the time, or I don't shoot the same scores all the time. That would be the way to be thinking about this. And so for the most part, just so you guys know, the average player is about plus or minus 4. Plus or minus 3 is really, really good. Uh, Tiger in 2000 was plus or minus like 2.7, so it was really, really good. I'd say outside of 4, you know, if it was 5 or 6, I would say is a less consistent player than a player who obviously has a scoring differential of like— or, uh, not scoring differential, uh, standard deviation of like 3 or 2.7, like I said, with with Tiger there. So a better player in general is going to have less variance, or they're going to be more consistent. A poor player is going to tend to have more variance or be a little bit less consistent. Now here's kind of what the average quote-unquote mindset ends up being: I want to shoot essentially in the second or third standard deviation, um, of my game, because I don't really have a concept of where I should be. I look at the best scores that I have and I say, oh, I want to shoot that, or I want to be somewhere in that range. So I want to shoot 72, I want to win an AJGA event. And the kind of standard advice is, is this kind of like, you know, you need to feel more confident about yourself. Like, you've got the game, you get your lesson with your coach, you're striping it out there on the driving range, they're just like, you know, you've got all the shots, I just need to go out there and do it. And having lived this, having actually done this and been a junior golfer and had that advice given to me, it's not very effective. And if, if you're a junior golfer doing this, or if you're a junior golfer and you're watching this, you're doing that, you probably have this sense of just kind of like, oh, you gotta feel confident, but there's still those nagging thoughts in your head that you can't get rid of. And the harder you try to get rid of them, the more it kind of like comes out and manifests itself as, as issues. Um, and that's kind of, you know, what I see for most junior golfers, right? They're being told that they need to be more confident, they feel like they're right there but there's something that's in the way. And so obviously this video is going to explain why. Now here's kind of the elite mindset. Here's what I would want you to adopt as a frame of reference for this instead. I just need to perform at the level that I'm at. And if I want to get better, I— if I want to perform better, I need to get better. And so there's kind of an exercise for you guys. If we look at, you know, this summer here, a lot of you guys watch this, you're probably playing in tournaments and stuff. We look at June, July, August, right? We're going to play a certain number of tournaments, which means we're going to play a certain number of rounds, and we have scores that we should expect of ourselves, right? And this is true for, for everyone. This is, you know, very straightforward exercise. Now let's say we play in 2 tournaments that are each 36-hole tournaments, which is what you guys should be doing if you want to be ranked. Let's say we're playing 2 tournaments in June, July, and August. So we're playing 4 rounds, 4 rounds, 4 rounds, and in total we're gonna have 12 rounds. Sorry. And so a lot of you guys are probably in something similar to this, a very similar situation here, or we're roughly playing in maybe 12 events. And a lot of the times you might be tempted to look at one of these events, or several of these events in particular, and say, I really want to do well in this event. And hopefully this kind of helps you understand why that's not very helpful, why that's not a very useful way to look at this. Because if I want to go out in a particular round and shoot a really good score, that, that's cool, but there's nothing I can do to cause that to happen any more likely than any other round. And so it's not a very helpful way to, to approach things. You want to be able to look at this and say, okay, cool, I've got 12 events and I have a particular range of scores that I expect out of myself. and I can just know ahead of time this is probably what I'm gonna shoot. And so we wanna go back to this normal distribution model to say, okay, well, what kind of a player am I and what can I expect of myself? So in this case, let's just say we have a scoring average of 76 and we have at least, you know, 10 rounds that we're looking at, maybe more. But we have a decent sense where it was like, okay, cool, this is my scoring average. And it's not gonna be exactly 76, it'd be like 76.3 or, you know, 81.1 or whatever the case is for you. And then there's going to be a certain amount of variance. So I'm just taking this as an example here. And so we look at these 12 rounds, we say, okay, cool, how do we apply this model? Well, we're going to want to look at that and say, okay, we're playing 12 rounds of golf and looking at these two middle numbers is 34.1, 34.1 is a percentage of the time that those outcomes are going to happen. We can say that 60 to 68% of the time times 12. So if you want to do this in a calculator, 12 times 0.68 is going to equal about 8.14 rounds. So about 8 rounds here. And so based on that, we're going to be able to say, okay, cool, this player, they play these 12 rounds, we're going to expect about 8 of those rounds to be somewhere between 72 and 80. We're going to expect about 0.6 of those rounds, so 1 to 2, to be somewhere between 68 and 72. And then we're going to expect 1.6 of those rounds to be somewhere between 80 and 84, right? And then we're going to kind of have a wild card in here. We're going to have a little bit of randomness that, you know, could spring up here that is, you know, probably going to be somewhere between 64 and 68 if we play really, really well, or we could be on the 84 and 80 or 84 to 88 range. We don't know what's going to happen, but if this is who you are, then it would be very straightforward to say, okay, these numbers are going to play themselves out in some combination. These events, you don't know which numbers you're going to shoot before you shoot them, and you're not going to know which events are you're going to do well on or poorly. And all you can do is just do your best to play to this level. And so those scores will just manifest themselves simply because that's the level of golf that you play. And so how do we change our scores? In this case. You say, okay, great Connor, um, that's fine, but I want to play better. I want to have better performance in tournaments. Um, you know, maybe I can understand my game a little bit better. Maybe I can accept that my scores aren't as good as I would like them to be, but nonetheless I want better scores. How do I do that? Well, let's, let's go ahead and through this. This is what a lot of players say, you know, they think I need to make more birdies. I'm right there, you know, I'm just, just, you know I just need one lesson to get things straightened out and we're going to be good. 65 all the time. Or, you know, I just need to get up and down more often. My short game needs to get sharper. I just need to make more birdies, stuff like that. And these are just, they're too vague and they're not accurate. And so this is more the line of thinking that you need to kind of adopt. I, and really the specificity in this, I need to 3-putt 3% instead of 8%. Right. Specific understanding, something like improving is a lifelong process, right? There's no one place you can get to where it's like, now I'm good with my golf. It doesn't matter if you go to shoot 74, 72, or 70, whatever the case is, you know, you could be Scottie Scheffler, he's still trying to get better. And so accepting that and saying, okay, cool, there's not one time where I've just got it, we're always trying to improve. We're always gonna have ebbs and flows in our game. We're gonna have some times where we play like, you'll feel like we're playing really, really well. And then there's gonna be some times where we feel like we're playing poorly. And then there's gonna be a lot of the time where we feel like we're just kind of playing meh. That's normal. That's, that's what we're aiming for here. And you want to have the specificity within even something like 3-putting. I need to make 90% of my 3-footers instead of 70%, right? That's the thought process. Thought process— I can't speak today— um, do you guys want to have? Like, that's really the approach here. And so step 1 is just accept where you're at. If you don't know where you're at, you know, go log your rounds, start tracking your stats, see where you're at. Step 1, accept it. And so you're going to have your own version of this, right? You're going to have your, your standard deviation, you're going to have your average, all that. That's just going to be there. And step 2 is going to be right, ask the right questions. Now we have the information, now we just have to say, okay, what do I do with it, right? So here's a good first question: how do I go from, let's say your scoring average was 77.16, how do I go from that 76.16 as fast as possible? Now we're getting a little bit more specific. We're not saying, hey, we got it figured out. We're saying we're going to improve. What's the smallest amount that we're going to improve by? One shot seems to make a lot of sense. Probably doesn't make a lot of sense to say I want to improve by a tenth of a shot. Maybe if you're a PGA Tour player, that makes sense. But for most players, about one shot seems reasonable. 10 shots, too much. One shot is good. Well, the follow-up question to that is, why do I shoot 76.16 on average in the first place and not 76.16? Right, that, that would be a reasonable question to ask. Why do I shoot these scores in the first place? And so this is the way that I like to go about solving that problem, because if you just look at your numbers, tell you, oh, you know, what strokes gained say, it's like that gives you a decent idea of where you perform versus an arbitrary group of players. But I find this to be a lot more effective. And so this is what I do with my students. I like to look at penalty rate, green regulation, scrambling, 3-putts, and birdie conversion rate. So that tells me what's happening off the tee, tells me how many greens we're hitting, tells me what happens when we don't hit the green regulation, tells me how many times we can bogey from the green. Then it tells me what happens when we hit the green as far as making birdies or not. And that is going to kind of spit out a scoring average, expected scoring average based on those numbers. This isn't going to be perfect, but it's pretty dang close. And then we can sort of say something like, okay, well, how much is this player going to improve? If we make a particular change. So in this case, this player would improve by 0.9 shots if they improve their 3-putting from 8.89 to 3.89. And this is the fastest path for this player as opposed to any of these other numbers changing. This has the most impact on their scores right away. And so that's the process I want to go through, and that's the process that you want to go through when you're tracking your numbers to say, okay, cool, where am I at? And then what's going to improve me the fastest. But we want to— don't want to just stop there. We want to say, okay, cool, why are we 3-putting? Like I said, well, we're going to look at our lag putting here. Right here you can kind of see that I've got the average second putt distance, right? So if we're looking at our lag putting, our evaluation of how good is our lag putting is just like, what's the second putt that we have, you know, how close are we getting it? And so in this case, and, and this is actually my numbers from 35 to 40 feet, I need to do a little bit better. Everything else is pretty dang solid. I'm not really going to run into a whole lot of trouble, but this distance is going to be a little bit of an issue. And if I'm hitting a lot of greens, then I'm going to have a lot of 37-footers. I just have to accept that. That's going to be part of the game. I can't complain, be like, I want to hit more to 20 feet. That's just not going to happen. Shot patterns are too big for that. So I can say, okay, cool, 35 to 40 feet, we need to get better. Then I can also look at my short putting and say, all right, well, 4-footers, we need to make more of those. And let me see if I can move my, my head here. But then from 6 feet as well, we need to get better at, at those as well. So if I'm looking at my, my putting here, I can say objectively, like, I want to 3-putt less often. That's going to cause me to get 1% or 1 shot better as fast as possible. But then the next layer of that is, well, I need to get better at my lag putting from this specific distance. I need to get better at making these shorter putts from the specific distance, because those are the two areas that— those are the two legs of that stool that are falling apart for me. Everything else is pretty dang solid, so I don't need to waste my time doing those other things. I just need to focus in on where I'm really losing the most shots. And that's gonna be play golf. You know, I can't just go out there and, you know, grind for 3, 4, 5 days on the putting green. I have to go and practice and then go play and see if I got better, because the only reason we practice is to get better at golf. And the only way that we know that is if we go out and play golf and we measure it. And this is the most crucial thing here, is that we've got to go out there and play. We can't just go out there and practice hard and practice hard and practice hard. We have to actually go out and prove to ourselves that we got better. And then you want to watch the numbers change. And if you are improving then that means your practice is effective. If you are not improving, then your practice is not effective. And that gives you a really, really straightforward frame here. And this is the stuff you want to be focused on. You want to be looking at your averages and just trying to improve that rather than worrying about what you shoot in any particular round, because again, you don't know. And so if we were to skip all the way back to the beginning here, you could have all these tournaments that you want to do well in and say, okay, cool, well, I might come out in this, this June tournament here, I might go 84-83. That doesn't mean that I had bad mindset necessarily. That doesn't mean that there was some major hole in my game. That could just be that randomness. I could go out there and shoot 69-81, and again, that doesn't mean that there's bad mindset in that day too. That just means that's what happened. That, that just means that was how I happened to perform. And so this is just the, the main takeaway here is don't read so much in each individual round, each individual shot, and always say it's a mindset thing. Look at your numbers and, and use those numbers to say, okay, cool, what's the trajectory of my game? What's the variance of my game? And then you can ask, start asking questions about like, oh well, this seems a little bit odd, maybe there's a mindset issue. Going on, but that's really the way to be thinking about this stuff. And so again, I'm not just making this stuff up. This is what coaches are looking at. They're looking at your scoring average and how that compares to the golf courses you're playing, right? Your scoring differential— is it moving in a positive direction? That really is the, the crux of this. And so if you're doing that, you don't need to worry about what you're doing in each individual tournament. It doesn't really matter. And you're going to go out there and perform well in some tournaments, and you're not going to perform well in other tournaments, and that's okay. And so just at the end of the day, this is to help you and encourage you to play better in more tournaments by instead of trying to say, how do I perform or outperform my numbers, how do I just go into tournaments and just keep the main thing the main thing? How do I just focus on improving myself and improving my scores, improving my skills and demonstrating that, it really comes down to understanding where you're at, what your, your main thing is that you're working on, and then just focusing there and allowing the rest of this to just play out and allowing you to shoot solid scores without so much of the stress involved. Not saying this is going to completely get rid of all the stress, but this is at least going to help you come from a more healthy position on where your tournament golf is relative to the overall game that you have, making sure that you're playing in enough tournaments so you can actually see like Okay, here's where my game's at and I'm pretty much performing at the level that I need to, or I'm not. And then you can start to ask questions why. So hopefully this video was helpful for you guys. If it was, go ahead, please leave me a like here and subscribe to the channel if you're not already, and I'll see you guys in the next video.