How to Keep a Hot Start Going and Play Your Best Round Ever

We’ve all been there: the round is off to a perfect start. Every drive is in the short grass, you can’t seem to miss a green, you’ve snuck in a couple putts that might not normally find their home, and even those pesky knee-knockers are dead center with authority. (For help with those, check out this other article here.)

This begs the question: “How do I keep it going?”

First, acknowledge you’ve got a hot streak going. This might seem in opposition to what most people would tell you, because somehow they think that saying it out loud will make it disappear like a fairy in the woods, but I actually want you to, at least in your mind, say “Hey. This is going great, looks like it’s my day.”

THEN, I want you to immediately go, “Because it’s going great, I really need to stay right where my feet are, and focus on each shot with an intention that sometimes escapes me.”

The hardest part of playing well is to NOT cast visions of the future, where your eventual victory results in riches, glory, and eventually starting your own wine label (or is that just me?).

Your job will be to use any great shot, or even a less good shot for that matter, as a reminder to pull you back into the present, and to focus on the simple task-at-hand of the shot right in front of you.

I know, easier said than done right?

Where we are trying to center our minds is a place where the odds are always in our favor. If, by some miracle, you happened to start off poorly, then deep in the bones of your soul you would say to yourself, “Perfect, all my bad shots are used up, statistically I know it’s going to improve from here.”

And somehow, almost oppositely, you need to believe that when it has started as hot as a pistol on the hip of a cowboy, you are now dead in the middle of a hot streak that will continue at least through the end of the round.

It really does have to be that way.

And if you can create that reality, you will find that you can keep your hot streaks going. Your best rounds will just get lower and lower, as you find that there isn’t any number that actually makes you uncomfortable.

Imagine getting to -3 through 3, and then finding that you aren’t just trying to hold on to the score through the rest of the nine, but instead you want to shoot sub-30 on the front nine. This only happens when you use your brain to intensely focus on the task at hand.

Start using everything as a reminder to pull you back to the present.

Watch your hot streaks stretch.

Lift trophies.

-Michael

Oak Hill in NY