Pete Finch – PGA Teaching Pro

Controlling your emotions when you are playing a social round of golf is one thing. Controlling your emotions when under pressure is another thing entirely. Now a lot of people who watches videos and a lot of people generally I'm sure you can relate have very high pressured jobs where they perform certain skills.

So a surgeon for example, obviously very high pressured. He is performing a set of skills, which not everyone can do, a little bit like golf. The only thing is the more and more you practice, the better and better you will become at that skill that's why you have simple surgeries to begin with before moving onto the more complex surgeries, so you are practicing under the pressure, but you are growing your skill-set.

It's exactly the same thing for golf, it is very very rare unless a person comes from another sport and background where they are dealing with pressure. The people can play golf to a high level under pressure straight away, it's about gaining the experience, it's about learning and it's about being able to judge where you are at with your game and control your emotions accordingly. Experience is crucial, however there is a way that you can build a pure experience more quickly and get set into certain modes and certain routines that can help you perform much better.

Now to do that a pre-shot routine is an absolutely essential thing to have. Pre-shot routines is a very simple set of things you go for before you hit every single shot, the more you do it, the more experienced you will become with it and the more comfortable you will become with that pre-shot routine as well.

Pre-shot routines take many forms and they can be very individual to the person who is applying them. But for a basic pre-shot routine you need to be following some very simple principles. First of all, assessing the line, so in this particular line I've got slightly [indiscernible] [0:02:05] so I know I don't have to do anything too strange. I'm going to try and hit this ball out there about 160 yards, so I've got my eight iron selected then what I'm going to do is I’m going to stand behind the ball, I will press onto the side just for the sake of the camera, then stand behind the ball, pick out my target line where I want the ball to go and then figure out what shape of shot that I want to hit.

So I want to hit a little bit of a fade here, so I'm going to wipe at my stance very very slightly. So I picked out my target line, I picked out the shot that I want to hit, I know that I need to start this ball slightly left of target so I'm going to pick a mark just in front of the ball to where my club face is at, I'm going to take a couple of practice swings, focus it on my target first of all, and then focus it on the eventual target on my second shot just trying to feel that shot shape.

Now I'm going to get settled in, set my clue over the intermediate target, open on my stance to play that fade, checking the target once more and then let it go. Now throughout that entire routine, I've asked myself questions about what I want to do about the shots that I want to hit and in no time would I let my emotions cloud my judgment because I'm going through the same principles every single time. There is no time to think about anything else.

If you can get into a routine where you are doing that very very often, you will be able to control your emotions much better and more importantly be able to apply this routine when playing under pressure.