Jul 31, 2010
Mike & Billy receive
a LIVE report from the Irish Open from Dan with
GolfCentralDaily.com. Joining Mike & Billy in the first hour
of the show is Bob Skura, Author of "How Great Golfers Think" and
"Peanuts, Pianos & Pavlov's Dog. Check out his website at
www.howgreatgolfersthink.com.
Background Bob Skura
Background Bob Skura
Bob discovered the
secrets to the mental game of golf in response to failure. He had
ambitions to play professionally but a stint on the Canadian tour
didn’t turn out as planned.
He was 21 at the
time, and like most golfers, was perplexed by why he could shoot
the lights out one day and hit it sideways the
next.
So Bob sat down and
took stock of his attributes.
First he wondered if
his physique was the problem. There were players on the Tour who
were taller, smaller, heavier and lighter than Bob. They were
making a great living at it, so he eliminated body type as a
factor.
Then he wondered if
his mechanics were good enough. Some players like Anthony Kim swing
perfectly on plane, but others like Jim Furyk and Kenny Perry have
unorthodox styles, yet still manage to win big money. So Bob
concluded that swing mechanics alone don’t determine a golfer’s
success.
Finally Bob
considered his equipment and training. But he realized that all of
the money he had spent over the years on drivers, utility clubs,
books, videos and swing aids had done more to make his basement
look like a golf warehouse than help him lower his
scores.
So Bob concluded that
the secret to making those days of stellar performance a more
frequent occurrence wasn’t based on anything he could do
physically.
The answer had to
have something to do with what was going on between his
ears.
Intrigued by these
observations, Bob began reading all the psychology literature he
could find on human performance, hoping to uncover secrets to the
mental game.
For many years he
studied the ideas of more than 100 renowned psychologists like
Maria Montessori (childhood education), Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
(Guru of Flow), D.H. Meichenbaum (SIT Stress Inoculation Training),
Lev Vygotsky (function of language in human development), Edwin
Locke and Gary Latham (goal-setting), and Albert Bandura
(self-efficacy).
As a result Bob came
to realize that our mental skills – how we think, talk and play –
are as fundamental to success in the mental game of golf as grip,
posture and alignment are to the physical
game.
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