The first is confidence in yourself as a person. This separates you from golf, or any other single endeavor. Do you like yourself? What is your value to you? If you start to question yourself because you play golf poorly you are not putting a very high value on you as a person.

The second type of confidence is performance confidence. This is about how well you expect to perform. Some people have little confidence in their ability to play well even if all the evidence strongly suggests that they will perform well. These people usually have low self-esteem and therefore have little of the first type of confidence mentioned above. Without good confidence in yourself as a person, it is not likely that a golfer will have high performance confidence.

Others have great amounts of confidence in their ability to perform well, even though they have not put in the necessary time and training to build up their level of play. These people begin each tournament or round with the greatest expectation and often feel very disappointed after a few holes of average or poor play. These golfers have not learned how to develop true confidence and instead rely on wishful thinking.

The first step in building up true confidence is to give the youth the understanding that golf is not life and that it is something that develops and improves over time. They do not need to play well to enjoy the game. Talk to them about how uneven and unpredictable the game actually is. Help them be ready for anything so that they can enjoy the experience without tying it to their own value as a person. If you think you are motivating someone by belittling them, think again. You are simply modeling being a bully and if they buy into your thinking they will not develop true confidence because they will strive to satisfy others and not set their own goals and limits.

One way to help a young player is to have them break down their game into five or six categories or components. Make sure that menta preparation is one of the categories. (Didn’t think of that one did you?) The other categories could include such things as short putts, long putts, distance, accuracy, sand shots, and other elements that are easily kept track of. Ask the young golfer to make a list and, in a practice round, keep track of what actually went well and what areas were problems. It is hard to mess up in everything.

After the round go over the results and look for the good and the bad. Talk up the strengths and show him or her how to improve. Then go over the problem areas and talk about what is needed to improve. Always have the belief that they are exactly where they should be as to level of play. If you get upset, you teach them that they are wrong or off base or not trying – and you make it hard for them to emotionally be available to put energy into practice. By breaking golf down into these components you help them enjoy the positive and tackle the negative.

Remember the old saying, “A bad day on the golf course is better than a good day at the office”. Help the young golfer understand why this is true.

And remember to build up the person, break down the problems, stress the positive and model having fun doing it all.

I would estimate that at least 95% of my short game shots (from within 20 yards of the edge of the green) are played with a chip and run technique, and the other 5% is made up of putts from off the green, pitches, and bunker shots.

Getting the ball on the ground and rolling as soon as possible greatly increases the chances of the ball’s behavior being predictable. That is not to say that a chip and run is always very low to the ground; just as low as possible. A chip and run style shot can be played with the most lofted wedge in your bag, in which case some people might refer to the shot as a “pitch and run.”

In many cases where the average golfer tries to pitch the ball up in the air, the “risk vs. reward” and the uncontrollable nature of a pitch (especially from a marginal lie) make it a poor choice.

There are many more (seemingly endless) details about putting, of course, but if you turn these fundamental concepts into habits it will take you a long way toward being a consistently good putter

Imagine a baseball player’s set-up when waiting for their pitch to be delivered (See Image A). Their arms are soft and relaxed so they can generate more bat speed. That is the feeling you need with your setup in golf. At address, the arms should be relaxed and hanging down from your shoulders, tension free. At impact in baseball, the player’s arms are stretched out to full extension but it is the swinging motion of the bat that creates this. (As the body turns, the arms swing around the body on an arc as in the golf swing.) At impact, the relaxed arms are stretched out by centrifugal force due to the swinging motion of the arms. The left arm and club reach their straightest point just past impact. This is a result of the arms being relaxed and tension free in the swing

Most professional golfers have one shot that they hit more or less religiously, whether it be a fade, draw, straight, whatever. While some work the ball on most shots, very few try and work the ball in a different direction for each shot, and this includes the best in the world. Vijay Singh is known for “cutting” or fading each shot he plays. How often does he waiver from this? Hardly ever.

While watching a clinic that he and Rocco Mediate performed, the inevitable question came from the crowd, “How do you work the ball with the driver? We want to see you draw the ball”. This innocent golfer expected some magical “swing thought” or “tip” that would give them insight into taking their own game to the next level and hitting that coveted high draw with the driver. Vijay’s first response to the question? “With the driver? I’ll hit a fade and then Rocco will hit a draw.” Can Vijay not hit a draw with a driver? Of course he can, but he admitted to only hitting a “handful” per year on Tour, and even then only when it was absolutely necessary. Vijay responded again to the crowd’s persistence with his classic wit, “If you can’t hit the ball straight why would you want to curve it?” I love this guy.

The moral to this story is that Vijay and Rocco both have shots that they “own” and feel most comfortable with and they don’t veer from this. Rocco went on to call it a “golfer’s instinct.” Rocco feels the most comfortable hitting shots that work right to left and he doesn’t try and hit a shot that he hasn’t practiced for thousands of hours. Even with a lot of practice time available to the pro’s, they don’t cut into the quality of their practice by trying to maintain three different ball flights, they stick with one and that gets all their focus. In other words, these two top professional golfers religiously practice one shot and stick with it. They know they can count on it because it gets the vast majority of their practice time and they build their game around that shot rather than hitting shots they are less comfortable with to fit a particular hole. Many of the greats, from Ben Hogan to Jack Nicklaus have had one ball flight that they preferred to hit over any other and they stuck with it hitting it on the majority of their shots, not trying to hit something on a consistent basis that was against their “instinct.”

The first question many of you will have after reading this is “What about Tiger Woods?” It’s true, Tiger does shape his shots to fit the hole and pin locations – but, you’re NOT Tiger Woods, no matter what Nike tells you and even Tiger sticks with a predominantly right to left ball flight with his irons as his “stock” shot. You, as a golfer with limited practice time compared to a professional, if you are trying to learn to work the ball in both ways AND hit it straight, you are essentially dividing your practice time by 1/3 for each shot. You already have a very limited amount of practice time, so devote your game to “one shot.” What fits your eye best, your natural swing and your instinctive way to swing the club? Decide on that shot from this day forward, that is the shot you will hit 95% of the time – if not 100%. Don’t get caught up in being able to work the ball every way possible and believing that you “aren’t very good because you can’t draw the ball”, be caught up in hitting the ball “one way” and don’t think that you can’t reach the next level of your golfing career by not having every shot in the book because neither does Vijay – and I can guarantee that he practices more than you

As he progressed with then instructor Butch Harmon, his swing morphed into the swing that we all came to admire. His very classic, high hands, wide swing exhibited many pure two plane traits and allowed him to develop more ball flight control than anyone before him. However, his swing was still relatively compact at the top, something Tiger felt cost him distance. With the prodigious distances the “youngsters” are hitting the ball these days, Tiger felt he needed to make a change to allow his swing to become longer while maintaining control. Tiger also places a lot of emphasis on swing plane and felt that this aspect of his swing needed to change as well.