Why Your Junior Golfer Is Struggling With Their Mindset
Connor Stirling Peterson argues that typical mindset advice like breathing and visualization misses the real problem: unrealistic expectations and cognitive overload. Instead, junior golfers should track objective stats, set simple broad targets like "hit the green," and cut mental clutter. His students improve roughly 3.6 shots per year using this data-driven approach.
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In today's video, I'm going to be covering why your junior golfer is struggling with their mindset in tournaments. So this is gonna be a fun one. I apologize in advance for my voice, a little bit under the weather. Took my son to go to music class, and you know, kids, they get you sick. And so that's a little bit of sore throat, a little bit nasally, so I apologize for that. Anyway, let's go ahead and jump right into this. This is going to be a really important topic something I see come up a lot. And I really want to address first, like, when people think about mindset, they typically think about things like breathing techniques, or Vision 54 is kind of a popular one of like, you know, trying to envision yourself doing well, stuff like visualization. Um, and it's kind of like things along those lines, but typically that's kind of like what it falls underneath is like your process, breathing, visualization, then I don't necessarily want to dismiss those as saying that they're not valuable at all, but typically when junior golfers are struggling with their mindset, it usually stems from larger factors that those things are kind of like— it's kind of like getting run over by a car and being like, here's a Band-Aid, you know? It's like it doesn't really do a whole lot for you. And so The first thing here is our brains are very goal-oriented, right? And we kind of measure how we should feel about things, how we should react to things based off of, you know, what's our goal, what is our expectation for ourself relative to that goal, and, you know, how do we do relative, um, to whatever our target was, right? So if I go out there and I have inappropriate expectations of what I should be able to do, well, I'm going to struggle, right? And so typically a lot of mindset advice out there is like, oh well, you should visualize yourself shooting like, you know, 18 under par. And that's just like, that's not real reality at all. You know, so many people will say, hey, you know, golf is a game of mistakes. And I think that that's absolutely true. And so it follows that if you want to play better golf, you have to manage your mistakes better than everyone else. If you flip that on its head and say, well, we need to make birdie on every hole, like, that's just like the worst way you could possibly approach that. Um, you know, the reality is you don't have a lot of control over like when you hit good shots. You can't hit good shots intentionally. So it's like, it's more about managing your misses and allowing yourself, you know, some room for your luck, right? You know, if you go out there and you have 8 bogeys and you're mad because you didn't make any birdies, it's like, well, what was a birdie going to do for you? Like, birdies are harder to make. And it's like, odds are you made too many bogeys. I mean, 8 bogeys is way too many. Um, obviously this is like scale. So like, you know, it might be good for you if you're, you're shooting in the 90s or something like that. But it's like, for the most part, like, we need to cut down on the number of bogeys pretty substantially before we even need to think about making birdies. And so, you know, when I'm coaching kids, that's one of the things that we talk about, um, is what they should actually be focusing on. But anyway, back within the concept of mindset, if you go out there and you expect yourself to play a level that you don't actually play at, you will inevitably be upset with your performance. So that, that's just kind of like foundationally like true here. And that's why I advocate for being ranked on Junior Golf Scoreboard, um, tracking your statistics so that you understand from an objective perspective where your game is at. If you don't have a way to look at your game objectively with numbers rather than emotions, then you're not going to understand where you're at in your own game, and you're not going to understand what you should shoot So when you go out and shoot a number that you're unhappy with, you're just going to be pissed off about it. And then you're going to start doing random stuff, go out there and practice, work really hard, and you're just going to get worse. Like you're going to spin your wheels, you're going to stress yourself out, and it's going to suck. Um, and you know, that's something I've seen not only in myself, but with the dozens of junior golfers that I work with. So just super, super crucial. Like we start off there. It's what is You know, having the appropriate expectations for yourself is super, super crucial. I also want to continue on here a little bit with— and then I'll get into the specifics of like what I like to see players do and where I like to see players focus. When we think about mindset, typically, you know, again, like I said, we go to like breathing, we go to like process and stuff like that. Um, most of that is kind of like, in my opinion, very hard to measure, A, and it's kind of a lot of fluff, you know, if I'm being completely honest. Like, do I like Maybe be more mindful of my breathing if I'm, you know, trying to play well. Sure. Like if I'm anxious, like, you know, maybe trying to slow things down. Yeah. Um, but that's very informal. Um, the thing that I would recommend, um, and if you guys haven't already, if you guys are looking for like really tactical, like kind of like local mindset things, um, Dr. Izzy Justice is fantastic at this. I'm not going to claim credit for, um, for any of the stuff that I talk about that he talks about, but he's really big into neuroscience, actually being able to measure the brain and see what's going on and being able to deploy, um, he calls them neurohacks to be able to calm their brain down so it can execute better. Kind of a simple way to describe this is imagine your brain is like a highway system, and the cars in that highway system are thoughts, right? So if you have a thought and there's no cars on the highway, then it's going to be very easy for that car to get from one side to the other, right? Versus if you put more cars, more thoughts, then it's gonna be harder for that thought to move from one side to the other. If you have lots of cars on the highway, lots of thoughts, it's going to be very difficult to communicate any information to yourself, right? So when we get out there and we're very anxious on the golf course and we hit a bad shot, we're scared, you know, you hit 2 balls out of bounds or like whatever, that'd be an example of we have a lot of cars on the road. For PGA Tour player, this is, you know, I missed a 3-foot putt and that's very traumatizing, um, and so it triggers a lot of thoughts. So Dr. Justice has a lot of great ways to kind of manage those things, um, that are different based off of, you know, how your performance has been. Now, one of the principles I take away from what he talks about here is that if I add a bunch of thoughts, if I give you a bunch of things to think about, whether it's swing mechanics, targeting, just all sorts of stuff, right, The more things I give you to think about, the harder it will be for you to execute, right? So we all kind of understand the idea of like, you know, simple things get done, right? It's easier to do something that's simple rather than complex. It's one of the reasons why when I talk about statistics and I'm actually working with my students, I try and keep it very simple for them. I try to have like big, big ideas that are really easy to wrap their head around so their brain doesn't have to think. They can have broad goal that is still defined, but it's broad enough for their brain to kind of optimize within it. This might go, you know, over some of you guys' heads, but I'm assuming that most of you guys watching this channel are actually pretty smart, so you guys will probably be following this stuff. If we look at something like artificial intelligence right now, if you've talked at all to ChatGPT or Claude or some of these tools, you will see that they work within the context of a goal, right? If you're maybe an advertiser, you might also understand the way that, you know, Facebook or YouTube or Google's AI works where they have a particular objective. And if you add in a bunch of randomness, what ends up happening is the AI model gets kind of degraded, right? So you have to be very clear about your instructions of what you want it to do and let it do the rest. You have to give it room. And so our brains are exactly, you know, not exactly the same way, but for the sake of this example, very, you know, very similar, right? AI is built off of kind of our understanding of our own consciousness. And so if I say, hey, I want you to hit this ball at that tree trunk there. It's like, I don't know about you, like everyone says like, oh, aim small, miss small. I remember that when I was growing up. I think that's complete nonsense, um, because, you know, that these are like— at the same time, like there's also people who like drink, um, on the golf course because they get like so anxious and they play better when they're drunk. I'm not advocating for your junior golfer to go out there and drink, but point being, when we have a really small target, you have a really narrow fairway, typically players don't hit the ball better. Typically they hit the ball worse. Um, vice versa, if they have a giant fairway, you know, think like the 18th hole or the, you know, first hole at St. Andrews, those are usually the holes where we stripe it, you know, hit it really good. On the driving range would be another example, you know, we have this big wide target and we feel like we just like wail on it and we just hit it straight. And then we get to the golf course and we have like this little tiny target we're trying to hit into and we hit it like shit. Um, excuse my language, but you know, that's just kind of like the reality of it. And so when you consider that, you want to give yourself simple, broad targets to be able to be successful. Otherwise, your brain is going to be like, crap, I'm doing it wrong. In the same way with like an AI, if you're overly prompted with it, it'll be like, dude, I like, I don't know what to do. Like, your information is confusing and I can't do anything with this. In the same sense where it's like junior golfers got like 12 swing thoughts. And they're trying to like be very specific and they're like, oh, well, you're gonna shape it into this pin and like, you take a little bit of distance off and like hit the little riser. And like, what it's like, they're not gonna be able to execute on that. Cause they've got too many thoughts in their brain. Like they've got too much stuff going on. We need to have as few things on the road as possible so that we can execute. Right? So it's not to say no thoughts, no thoughts is not really possible. It's kind of like that stupid, you know, game. It's just like, as soon as you think about it, you lose. That's not how this actually works, but we want to have very simple prompts for ourselves to understand, here's what I should be thinking, right? So a good example of this is when I talk about approach shots, I hear junior golfers talk to me about stuff like, oh, I don't make enough birdies, I need to hit it closer. And then they'll describe about how they hit it to 20 feet and that's not close enough, when in reality it's like their average proximity is probably like 40 feet. So they're trying to optimize for something they can't even do. And you You know, their idea is just like, well, I'm not good enough. So like, and then they get a 60-yard shot and they're trying to hit the little perfect little flighted spinner or whatever, and you know, they chunk it or they blade it, right? Uh, and it's like, I would just rather they're trying to hit the ball on the green at all, right? Or trying to hit it to a particular distance independent of the green, right? Trying to execute on something that's a broad enough target but also defined enough, right? It's not just like hit the shot. Right? It's hit the shot a specific distance, you know, which we take care of by selecting the club, you know, it's to a particular target, right? On the green is, is my preference. You know, you can get really granular with this. You know, Scott Fawcett has done a fantastic job of being super granular about targets. In my experience though, the problem— it works really well, I will say it works really well if you have a caddie. A caddie could just be like, hey, let's land it there. Fantastic. But if you've got an individual player, I just kind of look at it as like, I kind of feel like the juice isn't worth the squeeze. Um, yeah, maybe, you know, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe there's other people out there who've done it more and, you know, are just better at it. But when I consider— just so you guys are familiar with Scott Fawcett, um, Decade Golf— they're pretty much— what he's done is he's been able to define, okay, exactly where on the green or what range of targets should you be able to hit. Because he's going to say, like, just aiming on the green is not a good enough target because if you look at, like, the 18th hole at St. Andrews, the green is, like, way too big. So you can't say that. And while I agree with that, I think the sentiment is still mostly helpful for most players. Say, let me hit this on the green, and then if the green is enormous, then they start thinking, it's like, okay, well, how aggressive can I get while I still feel like I have a high confidence of putting this ball on the green? It's kind of the way that that ends up working, right? So again, that would be a good example of a broad enough target that you can still execute on. But anyway, for, for Scott, you know, he gets very granular about like, okay, well, I've got this bunker right here, and so, you know, that's +1 or +2 depending on how how hard this bunker is. You know, let's say my shot's from 150 yards, so I've got 8 from any side of the green, biasing toward like the short side here. Then it's like I've got this bunker here, so now it's 10. So it's 10 from the left side of the green. Then I also have to be 10 short of the long of the green. Like, you guys can just see, like, listening to me, it's just like, that's a lot. And then it's like, let's say you're hitting out of the rough, so that's another +2. So now we're at, you know, 12 from the left side, and it's also short. And so yeah, I mean, maybe like the correct spot is probably like over here somewhere. Have we taken into consideration this pin? But it's also like, to get there and to do that consistently, there's just a lot of thoughts because when you're considering like, what about the wind, you do that calculation. Okay, cool. What about your swing thoughts? Like, you're gonna have that. It's like you just got so many cars on the road, it's just difficult to communicate that information, right? So anyway, big targets I find to be more easily executed on than smaller targets because it requires, you know, pure thoughts essentially. So hopefully, hopefully this makes sense to you guys. Um, anyway, Dr. Justice has a bunch of fantastic stuff, so if you guys are kind of looking for more like tactical things, highly recommend him. Anyway, where do I like to start players? I already gave you a little bit of that. I like big targets, right? I like realistic things we can do. I do not like a player saying, well, I don't hit enough fairways. It's like, your shot pattern is too big to actually hit a ton of fairways. Like, you're going to be in the rough sometimes. If you're pissed off every time you're in the rough, it's like you don't have realistic expectations. And so it's like, that's where I kind of come back to this and be like, oh, I'm gonna work on my breathing to try to get it the fairway. It's like, you have the wrong expectations, right? I don't care, I don't care how good your breathing is. You're not doing that consistently. And you might have it work a few times, but it doesn't mean that it's gonna work as like an overall system, right? So one of my goals for all my students is no penalty shots. That's realistic. Like, and even then, like, you can play golf courses that are tight enough where it's just like, hey, it's probably gonna happen. But then it becomes like, okay, cool. When that does happen to me, how do I mentally manage that? Rather than being like, oh well, you know, I can't believe this happened. It's like, of course it can happen. Like, like it happens to PGA Tour players, it can happen to you, right? Um, so that's one of the big ones that I have. Hitting it on the green on the second shot, not even going to be accomplished every single time, but it's a better goal than, you know, let's try and hit it close. It's like, you can't intentionally hit it close. It's like, you got your number and it's like, try and get on the green somewhere. Like, that's a good, good target. It's very easy to understand and be like, on the green. Like, you don't have to— like, I can tell that to a 6-year-old and they're going to understand that. Once we're on the green, 10% of the total distance is kind of like the rule of thumb that I like to use for eye putting, right? Or even our shorter putts, you can even kind of understand. It's like, you're going to make your fair share of putts if you have a 10% error, right? So if you have a 10% error on a 3-foot putt, you make every single one of them essentially, which is what they do on the PGA Tour because the hole is like 4.25 inches wide. So anyway, when you miss the green, hitting the next shot on the green, not getting up and down, because getting it up and down every single time is not realistic at all. It also is going to have a lot to do with whether or not you're in a good spot. You know, if I miss the ball over here, I'm not getting that up and down most likely. You know, it's like, yeah, could I hit this like crazy flop shot with some spin? Maybe. But it's just like, if I make bogey from over here, who— like, which skill's fault is that? It was my approach shots, right? So Long story short, we want to keep things simple. The other thing that's super, super important here, and this is kind of like where I'll finish off, is an app that I'm building to be able to track player statistics. Still in like, you know, pre-beta right now, but that's something you guys are interested in. You want me to do all this stuff for your child and, you know, get exclusive access to this app once it's out, all stuff like that, then go ahead. There's an application below this video. And at the same time, you know, if you're just kind of like new to you know, Division 1 golf and, and, um, being able to help your child develop, then I've also got a pacing calculator below this video. Um, you can go ahead and download that as well to kind of figure out where your child is at based on where they're at in their game. And like I said, the application's there if you want to work one-on-one with me and help me do all this stuff for your child. So anyway, just thought I'd throw that out there. Anyway, continuing back with this tool, what it does— and this is really what I do for all my students, just from a high-level perspective of like, especially with their statistics, is understanding like where are our high-level statistics. But more importantly, I want to draw you guys' attention to what's their scoring average, right? So what are they shooting? What should they shoot based off of their statistics? And what is the variance or standard deviation between those rounds? And this is super, super helpful. Now I need to unbug this because, you know, this should be a little bit broader. But anyway, we want to be able to see like, okay, cool, if I've got a scoring average that I should be shooting about 78 So in this case, I'm overperforming my scoring average, and I've got a variance on that of almost 4 shots. If I go into a tournament and shoot 80, 83, and the conditions are kind of tough, does that mean I play bad? Did I actually like play bad relative— you know, I was shooting 75 and or 75.5, I go into a tournament, shoot 80, 83, did I play bad? Most people would say yes, right? But if we look at this from a math-based perspective, it's like, well, what I should have been shooting. Also, to be clear, what I should have been shooting is just based off these statistics. I'm just adding these numbers up. But anyway, based on what I should be shooting, it's, it's just kind of like it was an unfortunate round. It wasn't my best, but it's like if I have the context of just like one round of golf, it's like that does mean nothing. Like, that's why I don't like doing in-person stuff where I like come out to see a player or they come out to see me, because I'm just like, what are we going to do? Like, I'm going to watch you play one round of golf. Maybe you're nervous, maybe you play good. Both of those tell me nothing. It's like, maybe I can get some, like, qualitative stuff about your ball flight, but like, I've seen enough data to know it's like, if you're hitting 75% of your greens, like, you got a decent control over your ball flight. Like, you know what to do. And a lot of that comes from just getting better at those skills. I'd rather have the focus directed toward the statistic and the skill and, you know, focusing on the right things rather than like, I'm gonna come see you and all of a sudden you're gonna be 10 shots better. Like, that doesn't work. Like, even with the best coaches that I know, it's like or spend a lot of time together. I was calculating this out the other day. One of the best coaches I know, per hour that he spends with a player who's improving substantially, like 4 or 5 shots per year, which is, you know, outrageous— you know, my average student improves by about 3.6 shots per year. Granted, I'm not seeing them in person, but, um, for him, they're improving by about 0.1 shot per hour spent with him. Consider that. And I was just like, we're looking at very small, minute changes, right? And so that's not even like to count like the dollar spent there as well. But anyway, that's, that's not there. We want to look at this from the perspective of big picture, right? If I go into a tournament and I shoot 80-83, is it helpful for me to be like, oh, well, you know, I should have shot better? It's like, well, based on your statistics, no, you shouldn't have. No, you shouldn't have. Like, it's not enough data to say like, oh, you know, that wasn't good or whatever. It's what you shot. What you want to do is look at it from a big picture perspective. A, within those skills that I outlined, were there any of those that needed to like just could be easily improved, right? There's maybe a strategic mistake you're making. All right, cool, let's implement that on the next tournament and see how that impacts our statistics. It might not impact them at all, right? Like, we don't, we, we don't have enough data there after, you know, even two tournaments, right? We got four rounds of golf, that's nothing, right? So we got to understand big picture, zoom out, look at your overall game and say, like, was this within range? You know, if I went out there and shot 95 that would be something serious, you know, because it's like way outside of like what I should expect out of myself. Like, it's terrible. If I shot 62, I shouldn't expect that I'm going to shoot 62 ever in the near future, right? It's going to be like, wow, that was crazy. And when I go and shoot 76 the next day, it's kind of like, well, we're back to reality here. Like, that's just how it goes. Like, if a PGA Tour player was like, oh, I shot 62 last week, you know, if I could shoot 62 all 4 rounds of the PGA Tour event, like, that'll do good. It's like That's not realistic, you know, like that's, that's ridiculous. But junior golfers be like, well, I shot 72, so like, you know, why did I shoot 81? It's like, because you shot the best score you've ever shot, it's not surprising you're going to revert back to your average. Just so you guys can understand here, like, that's really the point I'm trying to drive home. So just to kind of wrap things up here, when we're thinking about mindset, it's important to have big targets and really understand what we're trying to do. If we have reasonable expectations, then it makes more sense to kind of handle that, that momentary mindset stuff. Because if you get out there and you understand all this stuff, you're still like nervous on the tee and your hands are shaking, it's like, okay, cool. Like, there's ways you can solve that. And, you know, Dr. Justice would be my first, first stop on the road for that. But if you don't understand all this stuff and you don't understand what you should be shooting, you don't understand the statistics, you don't understand, you know, the skills that go into this stuff that you should really be focusing on rather than the overall score, well, you're, you're screwed from the get-go. Like, you're just going to be— put it like this, Maybe this system is a great way to get cars off the road, right? A better way to get cars off the road is just not put them on the damn road, right? So it's like, you can get really good at taking cars off the road. It's like, why you put so many cars on the road, right? We want as few cars on the road as possible, but we want the right cars on the road. And understanding having the right targets is going to allow you to do that, right? That's what the company's called, Targeted Golf, right? It's kind of the idea of like, you have the right targets, you're focusing on the right things. You want to play Division 1 golf, you want to know where are we trying to get to, what are the programs recruiting, We want to have clear expectations and clear targets for ourselves so that we can go out there and execute, right? Because if we see ourselves moving toward our goal, we'll feel motivated and we'll want to do the thing. If we see ourselves putting in a lot of work and not getting better, or even in our own perception not getting better, we will stop doing the work, right? So if I have a student come to me and they did better and they're on a good track, but they view themselves as they're doing worse, Well, then they're going to struggle. They're not going to continue to do the thing, right? So that's why having these expectations are so crucial, because for me as a coach, I can point to this and be like, hey, actually, you did good. So like, yeah, it was unfortunate. Yeah, you didn't do as well as you wanted to, but like, dude, welcome to the club. You know, like, that's all of us, right? It's important to understand, it's like, at the end of the day, I'll leave you guys with this. At the end of the day, we can only control our inputs, right? We have our outputs, which are our scores. We can control our inputs, which would be our practice, which would be our prep for a tournament, which would be the things that we do during a tournament. We have our inputs, and then we get our outputs, which is whatever we end up shooting, right? And so if we want to get better outputs, we need to put in better inputs. It's really that simple. And one of the inputs would be our expectations, like what should we expect of ourselves? If we have a better expectation for ourselves, we'll get better results because we'll be more calm. And if we're more calm, we're probably going to play better. Not every time, But on a balance of probabilities, if I'm less stressed out, if I have fewer cars on the road, I'm going to play better. So hopefully this gives you guys a different perspective on mindset. And realistically, like, if your child is struggling, this is something to really be thinking about and saying like, okay, like, where should they be shooting? And maybe they're actually better than they think, but they're just not as good as they think that they are, right? I, I know that's a little bit paradoxical, but it's like you think that you should shoot 72 when your scoring average is, I don't know, 80, right? And it's like when you go out there and shoot 83, it's like maybe you didn't play bad, maybe you're just not as good as you thought you were. And so instead of being upset you didn't shoot 72, it should be going back to the drawing board saying, why do I shoot 80 on average? These statistics, right? And saying, okay, cool, what do we need to do to improve these skills over a long period of time? What do we need to put into our practice? How are we going to measure if that practice is effective? So on and so forth. So that's really the thing I want you guys to take away from this. If this is something that you guys want help with, you want one-on-one support with, again, application below. You can work directly one-on-one with us. And then same thing, if you guys are kind of like unsure of where your child stands and what they need to do to play Division 1 golf, I've also got the pacing calculator link below. And if you want videos like this every single week, I've also got a newsletter opt-in so you guys can sign up for my newsletter and get videos like this every single week. So hope you guys enjoyed, and I'll see you guys in the next one.
