Why Golfers Fail to
Reach their Potential 

For the vast majority of amateur golfers, high scores and bad shots are common place. Improving your golf swing either by taking lessons or reading tips from magazines is often a waste of time and money. 

In this article I'm going to shed light on the reasons why golfers fail to reach their potential and what you can do about it.

Have you just got back from the golf course totally disillusioned with your consistently poor standard of golf? 

Every time you go to the golf course you wonder if this will be the day you turn your poor scores around, but find time and again that you just don't know how to go about improving your game. 

A Poor Return on Effort 

Golfers the world over struggle daily with their golf game. They invest many hours on the driving range and at their local golf club searching for ways to lower their scores. 

They spend money on the latest golf club technology, they take golf lessons and they read golf magazines and watch DVD's by the experts but for the most part success still eludes them. 

The Simple Cause and Effect Nature of Golf Improvement Your golf swing functionality and your level of thinking is the CAUSATIVE factor in the performance equation, and the results you're currently achieving are the EFFECTS. 

As cause and effect is the law of the universe it means that your results have the potential to improve if you can understand and identify the critical factors (Causes) that influence your poor play. 

Critical to Improvement Elements 

For you to improve your game, doing the same thing over and over which universally is how many golfers attempt change will simply not do. 

For change to occur you need to identify the CRITICAL TO IMPROVEMENT (CTI) elements that significantly affect your outcomes. By identifying these CTI elements you can figure out how to make the improvements that will dramatically reduce the mistakes you make during a round and enhance your performance. 

Golf Success is in the Details

When you slice a drive into the trees, everything you did to produce that slice can easily be explained. If you slice the ball consistently then we can make three simple and accurate assumptions about what took place. 

1. The club-face was open at impact 

2. The path of the club-head was either inside to out or outside to in. 

3. The angle of approach of the club-head was either too steep or too shallow. A slight change in these causative factors will change your results. 

Do You Really Understand What You're Doing? 

The trouble with the slice is not the fact that the club-face is open at impact, it's that you focus your attention on where the ball is going rather than it's cause. 

In other words you tend to focus your emotional energy on your outcomes which shifts your attention from the critical factor/s that would help you to improve your golf swing. 

You Are What You Think About 

If you take golf lessons remember that they won't make one bit of difference if you don't change the way you think about your results. In golf you have to "believe it first, to see it" rather than the way most people think about it, "you have to see it first, to believe it." 

Start thinking about WHAT you want everyday with great clarity and in time you will completely eliminate thoughts of bad shots. 

Five Things you can do in 2006 to become a more successful golfer 

1. Think about a goal of developing a different shot to the one you've been hitting. eg If you have a tendency to slice then start thinking about hooking your shots. 

2. Top golfers work on the critical to improvement elements that make a difference. What are your critical to improvement elements? 

3. Practice more on your weaknesses and less on what you're good at. It's easy to hit the shots we're good at, but it's much harder to work on the shots that give us grief. 

4. Be an optimist, the number one quality of successful golfers (in fact anybody) is optimism, or a positive mental attitude. 

5. Improving your golf swing is based on thousands of trials. The more trials the higher the probability that you will discover what works and what doesn't. When you find what works EUREKA! 

It's simple cause and effect, the very nature of improvement. 

Lawrence Montague is one of Australia's leading Golf Instructors, and director of the Australian High Performance Golf Academy based at Palm Meadows Resort on the Gold Coast, Queensland Australia. www.golf-school-australia.com 

He and his team train amateur and professional golfers for the major golf tours around the world. For more information on attending his golf school see www.golf-school-australia.com 

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