Pete Styles – PGA Teaching Pro

Having confidence in your game or having confidence in one part of your game is so much like having a 15th club in your bag, you know always golfers will not carry 14 clubs but playing with confidence is almost like having that extra club. It’s almost like cheating for some players. But golfers – some golfers are confident across the whole spectrum of their games. They just walk onto the first tee expecting to play well. Other golfers have confidence in varying parts of their games and a lot of that is down to the sort of the history of what they’ve done previously. So if you’ve never missed a putt from 6 feet in your life and I gave you a 6 foot putt, you would walk up to it with confidence. You will expect to rattle in.

I’m not quite in a fortunate position. I’ve not always hold my 6 footers. I’ve missed quite a few. I’ve missed quite a few shots in that as well. So now when I get a 6 foot and maybe that little bit of doubt that creeps into my mind that maybe I’m going to miss this one. And the same sort of thing would happen with your chip and your pitch shots if you get a 80 to a 100 yard pitch shot, I personally would have quite lot of confidence in that. I’m okay at that distance. I’ve never really struggled from there. But if you’ve just gone through a period of fatting the golf ball and hitting the ground heavy then probably your confidence is going to be a little bit lower and we want to work hard now to try and restore that confidence, try and build that confidence back up.

Now the first place is yes improving the technique. Get the technique right. Get the results flowing first on the driving range then take them out onto a practice area and hit them off grass onto a real chipping green or pitching green, get the confidence built there. Then go out on the golf course in a practice round. Next go out on the golf course in a competition. Then go out in a competition under some pressure when you’re about to win the thing or you’re trying to beat somebody in a match play. That’s when you really start to sort of test your game. So almost builds up in stages from the range to the course to the pressure to winning the match using this confidence to try and propel you all the way along.

Now what we’re generally seeing golfers’ techniques when they’re not confident is they do all the things that lead to the fat shot. So they get too quick. They get leaned back. They don’t drive forwards through the ball. We get a golfer who snaps it and just hits it from the back leg and that will cause him to hit it fat. Whereas if you can be a bit more confident, we’re going to turn nicely, drive through to the left then have that nice relaxed finish position. So confidence is going to be driven from the technique and the technique is going to be driven from having more confidence.