Competition Nerves
Many golfers find the ‘on stage’ part of their sport to be quite frightening and difficult to cope with and they find that the embarrassment of being watched interferes with their performance and more often than not reduces them to an ‘also ran’.
Some people find that being watched is so difficult to come to terms with that they never actually play in competition and there are others who try their best but continued to practise ‘being nervous’ and never realise their ambitions.
Many champions do not have these problems and actually enjoy performing in front of others and have the ability to imagine that they are alone when at the ‘work’ time of their sport within their ‘personal bubble’ – a place of total isolation.
This isolation they find is a place free from all distraction with no noise interference, no eye distraction, and no negative feelings at all, just a place to get on with the job to be done in the pleasurable way and in controlled relaxation which makes performing a pleasure and more importantly makes performing easy.
You must be alone inside your personal bubble for many obvious reasons and perhaps the most serious one is the influence of people you personally dislike and it seems to be a fact of life that there is always someone like this around and you can allow them to interfere with your play.
You can also be distracted by close friends and relatives, often not allowing them to attend on competition day and this cannot be right, can it?
So practise being inside your personal bubble by having something special to think about at the time you are ‘on stage’ and establish a target aiming ritual which is a series of concentration steps from the time you enter your bubble until the time you come out wearing the necessary smile of satisfaction which we all must use more often.
Remember, composure comes prior to this ritual, then the mental rehearsal and target aiming.