INTENTIONAL SUCCESS

Q

You are now working as a “mind coach” – what exactly does that mean?

A

I stumbled on this course in Sydney in the late 1980s when all those self-help books came out. It had nothing to do with golf but I was pretty desperate. It was all about my mindset, nothing I’d ever been taught. I started to put this stuff from the course into practice and it totally switched my game around. I’d been this struggling player … now all these girls started asking, ‘what have you done with your golf game?’. But it was all just how I approached the game.

Q

So what exactly did the course suggest you do?

A

A big part of it was just catching my thinking. A big part of my internal dialogue was self-destructive. The average golfer does it on a daily basis. Like when a someone asks how a golfer is going, they say ‘ah, I’m playing badly and shouldn’t be here’. They are saying they are playing badly and haven’t even hit off. Or if you hit one shot and say, ‘it’s going to be one of those days’.

Q

You mentioned you struggled mentally. So what do you say to yourself?

A

If I hit bogey-bogey to start I’d say to myself, ‘you’re a professional golfer, you can have six birdies out here’. It was just training those thoughts and instructing your own brain to think. I was someone who was never going to win a cent but went on to win nine tournaments. Anyone who was on tour with me at the time used to say, ‘you should write a book’, so that’s what I did (called Intentional Success).