Golf Sports Psychology Research in Ottawa

[Adska]

Hi everyone,

I’ve been a member for a few years now on this board more as a passive observer, rather than an active contributor. It’s always served me well since I started and I feel like I need to take advantage of it more!

For the past 5 years, I’ve been studying Psychology at Carleton University. I’m currently doing my Master’s degree and I wanted to share my area of research in hopes that it may help/inspire some of the avid lovers of the game out there. I’ve been tremendously interested in the dynamics of sports psychology ever since I started playing golf. Over the seven years that I have been playing, I continued to read and study everything I could regarding the game, but I was most fascinated by the Rotella, and various popular psych books you can purchase at any golf, or bookstore.

Last year for my honours thesis, I conducted a study at my home course where I examined the role that shyness, psychological coping styles, and anxiety/arousal may play in affecting golf putting. People who participated in my study were both women and men, had a range of handicaps from +0.8 to 42.6, and varied in age from 18 to 70. I wanted to have a wide variety of people, and skill in my sample to make sure that any interesting conclusions can be generalized to EVERY golfer, rather than a specific group (e.g., scratch players, beginners, etc.).

Everyone filled out questionnaires measuring how shy they were, and what type of coping methods they used to deal with everyday problems (e.g. Do you keep your feelings bottled up inside?, Do you try and act as if you are not upset?, etc.). I then got each golfer to come out to the practice putting green where I set up a putting game where points could be accumulated for lagging the ball a certain distance from the hole. ] I also took various measurements of each persons anxiety/arousal level throughout. Each golfer had 3 putts from 20, 40, and 60 feet away, and I assigned them a score at completion.

For the second part of the experiment, I offered to double the money that each golfer was receiving for participation (everyone got $10 for initially taking part... 15 minutes of work... playing GOLF no less!) if they could beat their score from the first time. However, I brought out our pro-shop director with a video camera who was also there to watch, and videotape their putting stroke.

After the data was collected and analysed, I found some interesting results and won an award from the Canadian Psychological Association for an Outstanding Honours Thesis. On the strength of these findings, I’ve also received enough funding to continue this area of research further for my Master’s thesis. With any study, it's merely only a brick in an entire castle... the work is never ending.

Essentially, what was found is that how shy of a person you are in general can have an impact on your putting performance under pressure in a few different ways. Because golf is a social game by nature, people who tend to feel nervous in social settings may be at a disadvantage in a game where “all eyes are on you” when it’s your turn to play. People who were shy, also tended to be more anxious when performing under stress. In turn, the more anxious people were, the less likely they were to perform well. Interestingly though, those who were shy in normal situations but NOT anxious when performing actually performed better than those who were not shy to begin with! Lastly, it was found that people who used positive coping methods to deal with problems in their life, seemed to performed better in stressful situations, regardless of how shy or anxious they were.

I’m currently spending the winter writing up a manuscript of these findings, which I hope to get published in a sports psychology journal. From a nerdy-academic perspective, there’s a whole lot of psycho-babble and theory (which I won’t get into here) that attempts to address why this happens, with ways to potentially counter-act being an anxious person on the golf course. Nevertheless I thought it was a pretty cool finding to share with people like us on this board who are in a never-ending battle of improvement with this game!!



I recently started to work with a few local competitive amateurs, and someone who is playing professionally down in the states, to help them come up with ways to think better and manage stress/arousal/anxiety when playing. I’m hoping to continue on with this area of research, and would love to make a career out of studying the mental side of sports (see: Golf) as a career. I think we have a great golf city, with an immense resource of excellent courses, players, and fans of the game to keep a project like this sustainable for quite sometime!

If anyone has any questions, I’d love to chat, help, debate, discuss… anything!

Adam

[mysticalwarrior]

Adam love to help you further
I am a Hypnotist by trade and do Hypnosis for Golf and various other sports but I love doing it for golf
The human mind is an amazing critter. If you have done something once and done it well just once then its in your mind and your body and it knows how to replicate the shot at any given time all you have to do is bring out of your subconscious mind to your now brain to take advantage of your mind. If you want to talk give me a holler and we'll see what we do and compare notes to help you with your study

Gary

[jvincent]

A hypnotist, a psychologist, and priest walk into a bar............

[mberube]

Adam, great article. Very interesting. I am always fascinated in the power of the mind.

Gary, does hypnosis work on everyone? I have a feeling it would not work on my. I’m the type of person who can’t completely relax and takes a long time to fall asleep thus making me think I would never be able to relax enough to be hypnoses (SP?).

Mike

[mysticalwarrior]

Does hypnosis work on everybody?
so far yes I have been told that 95% of the population can be hypnotized I have a 100% success rate so far and I know someday I will run into one person that cant be hypnotized The worst case I have had is one woman who went into hypnosis but wouldn't stay in hypnosis.
Hypnosis is like this have you ever driven your car home and didn't know how you got there? That is a state of trance or a level of hypnosis everyday you are in and out of hypnosis when you day dream or even when you read a book you are going into a light trance. There are two times in everyday you go into trance when you are going to sleep and when you are waking up. A state of trance is when you go into a Theta state and there are 6 levels of theta and they are between a waking state and sleep.
So to answer your question I can probably hypnotize you. we have a lot of different techniques that work on different people the key to a hypnosis is you, the more intelligent you are the easier it is and you actually wanting to go into hypnosis, if you dont want to ,then I cant hypnotize you. I cannot make you do anything you wouldnt do or dont want to do in other words if you dont want it to happen it wont happen. There are a lot of misunderstandings about hypnosis so if you want an idea of what hypnosis is like go to www.mjhypnosis.ca and see if I answered it better for you there
hope this answered some of your questions
Gary

[BC MIST]

The human mind is an amazing critter. If you have done something once and done it well just once then its in your mind and your body and it knows how to replicate the shot at any given time all you have to do is bring out of your subconscious mind to your now brain to take advantage of your mind.

What if you have done something once and NOT well? Is that stored in your subconscious, too? How does the subconscious discriminate between well and not well? Judging by the number of "over the top" golfers, I would suggest that it does not.

Does what you say above mean that the retention rate for doing something is 100%? If something is stored in my subconscious, why do I have to bring it out to my "now" (presumably conscious??) brain? What is the most effective way to bring out your "perfect," subconscious golf swing, to hit the ball perfectly? What factors inhibit the perfect subconscious swing from hitting the ball perfectly.

My research has provided me with answers to all these questions and many more, but I would love to hear from someone whose business is dealing with people's minds.

BTW: I was part of Adska's project and have read his final thesis. It's superb!!!

[mysticalwarrior]

in answer to your question yes it stores all the things you have done whether its good or bad the biggest problem is to retrieve what is needed and when under hypnosis its actually very easy its like police forensic work we go back in time in your mind to when you actually hit the good ball and your body remembers every thing right along with it so now we have your mind primed and your body ready to go.
The biggest thing we do with hypnosis is goal setting or even mental imagery. Its also great for the yips usually it can be remedied in one to two sessions usually one.
Can we make you play the piano well no not if you have never played the piano and its the same with golf. If you have never hit a good ball I cant help you youve never hit a good ball so until you do the best we can do is get you ready make you calm and peaceful and not to worry about the external things so you can concentrate on what you need to do in order to do it.
Golf is a mind game most of our mistakes happen because we make them happen. I cant remember who said it but the quote goes something like this "the last thing on your mind is the shot you make" see the water think of the water be one with the water and so is your ball.
Gary

[Adska]

The great thing about psychology in general, is that each of us has an intuitive understanding of the processes involved in thinking, feeling, behaving, etc. When clinical psychologists work with patients suffering from depression, anxiety disorders, or anything one would undergo therapy for, the goal is to help the patient in becoming their own therapist.

A lot of people engage in dichotomous thinking (yes/no, black/white, sick/not-sick), and tend to polarize their views on the world. One of the biggest challenges is to get people to view personality characteristics, or ailments on a continuum. For example, we aren't either happy, or not; sad or not; angry or not, etc. Each of us could be arbitrarily assigned a number out of let's say 100 on basically every dimension you can think of. These characteristics are dynamic in the sense that they can change day to day, and situation to situation. There are some people who have indicated in survey data that they would rather choose death than having to speak in public, yet can perform music in front of even a larger group with no issues whatsoever.

The point is, situational circumstances appear to dictate a large part of how we perform. Teaching people how to become aware of the situations that either inhibit, or enhance performance is the challenge. The best example that I feel like everyone can relate to is the phenomenon of hitting the ball pure and effortlessly on the range, only to feel like a foreign-body has taken over on the golf course. What's changed? The objective definitely hasn't. Intuitively, it's easy to understand that external pressures (consequences of hitting a bad shot, the absence of a second-chance, people watching) contribute in some way to decreased performance. HOW they contribute is the interesting part. A complex interaction exists between each person's belief in themselves, their coping strategies, the importance that is placed on the event (in this case, golf), and their overall skill level.

Self-awareness is one of the characteristics that we all vary on immensely. Some of us are highly self-conscious people and are aware (perhaps to a fault) of our image around others (e.g. How does my hair look? am I acting like a fool? I hope I'm not talking too much…, Does she even notice me? etc.). Other people (we ALL know many, I'm sure), are completely naive to how others are perceiving them. Being aware of how others are perceiving us is called external self-consciousness. However, there are people who are also acutely aware of their own bodies: their thoughts, the way they feel inside both physically and emotionally. This awareness is called internal self-consciousness. People who experience regular panic attacks are known to be HIGHLY internally self-conscious to a point that bodily sensations are misinterpreted. We can all be assigned a degree of how externally, and internally self-conscious we are.

My research has generally found that external self-consciousness appears to be detrimental in pressure-filled situations. However, how a person interprets the situation will dictate how much their performance will be influenced. The interesting thing is that this does not hold true for all sports. In fact, sprinters, offensive lineman, and swimmers, all appear to benefit from being anxious. Archery, darts, figure skating, and the short game in golf are the exact opposite. The less anxious/aroused you are when performing, the better: period.

BC, I've got a lot to say about the subconscious, but I've got to do some non-golf related work for a bit right now unfortunately...

[Kilroy]

The best example that I feel like everyone can relate to is the phenomenon of hitting the ball pure and effortlessly on the range, only to feel like a foreign-body has taken over on the golf course.

Charles Barkley did a magnificent job of demonstrating this on the "Hank Haney Projet" this past week. Yikes what a meltdown. It's obviously demons in his head.