EP3. How To Hit Better Tee Shots By Changing Your Perspective

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Welcome to the Mind Caddie podcast, the show that helps you improve your golf by improving the way you think. All of the ideas you hear in this podcast have been used by major champions and golfers at all levels and brought to you by the coach who taught them, Karl Morris. We bring you some of the most popular lessons found in the MindCaddy app, as well as discussions with professional and amateur golfers about how they use their mental game to shoot better scores. So you can learn from others and apply to your own game. I'm Ben, the co founder of Mind Caddie, along with Karl Morris, who has spent the past 30 years working with golfers on their mental games. If you want to learn more, you can download the Mind Caddie app from the app store and access over a hundred audio lessons, as well as scorecards and guided programs. Search Mind Caddie on the app store today. Very often when we play out on the golf course, we can sometimes struggle off the tee. As a result of the perception of what is out there at 250, 300 yards. Course designer. Can create an illusion of a whole being much more difficult than it actually is. Now this is one of the sections of our work together where it's very much about you exploring this as a concept. It's, it's not something that is correct for everybody, but it can be literally revolutionary for certain players. If you currently play well as a result of focusing on Very much out into, uh, what the ball flight is doing out at the, at the target. Well, absolutely stay with that. But for many people, what happens is that when you stand on the tee. And you look out, the design of the whole creates a perception and that perception then creates a reaction in your body. That reaction in your body then can affect the movements that you make. So perceptions create reactions, reactions create experience in the body. The experience in the body then reflects in the motion, the movement that you make. And one of the things that you can do, and it's a phrase that I borrowed from Hal Sutton. It's the idea of shrinking your world. Al talks a lot about when he was playing at his best, he felt like his world had shrunk very much down to just a few key things that he did day after day. When he started to struggle with the game, he felt like the world got too big. He felt too many people were involved. There was too much input, too much information, and as the world got. bigger. In effect, his game suffered when he shrank the world and it was more encased. His focus was more encased in a kind of narrower tunnel. He felt like that was something that was really conducive for him to play and express his best golf. And what you can do off the tee is instead of projecting out into the distance at 250, 300 yards, shrink your world. So basically what you're doing is that you're seeing that your task is to send the ball down a channel that is just in front of you. Now, this is something that I've discussed before, but it's worth reiterating. It's worth revisiting as a concept. The idea would be that you would. That you would go on the range first of all with this and you would create a gateway. So basically you'd stand on the range and walk out maybe 10 feet in front of you and place two alignment sticks. Probably about 10 feet wide, something like that, quite, quite a wide channel in front of you. But then see that your task is to simply play shots where you're sending the ball down that channel. Now, you can, you can get all kinds of intricacy with this, but basically in a nutshell, you could, you could look at the channel as you've got it in front of you and you've got the right hand laying. Of the channel where you would start the ball to the right and potentially draw it back. You've got the left hand lane of the channel where you'd start the ball to the left and fade to the middle. And then you've got this, got the central channel. So play around with the idea on the range that you're going to send some balls down the channel. See which, see which shapes tend to work best for you. Uh, of the fade, the draw, or even just trying to hit it bullet straight through, through the, through the gate, through the channel. But the key is. Once that you get out onto the golf course, what you do is you shrink your world. You're aware of the target. Of course, you're aware of where the ball is going to go in the distance. But there's a big difference between being aware of something and focusing on it. You can be aware of the middle of the fairway without focusing on it, because sometimes if you're trying to focus on that, it actually brings in the other elements that are out there. The, the, the outer bounds, the water, the trees or whatever it may be. If you shrink your world and bring it down to something that's just in front of you. And I, and I get players to simply see the task as just send it through the channel. Can you imagine that now that if you were, it basically coincides with something that every one of us have experienced that when we're hitting balls in a net. We've got the net just in front of us. And there's a tremendous freedom there because obviously there's no outcome. There's no, there's no consequence to where that shot goes. So people tend to produce better motions in a net. Well, that's just a perception, the perception of the net, as opposed to the perception of what the, what the golf course is suggesting to you. But you can play around and you can affect. And alter and manipulate your perceptions. So in effect, what you, what you're doing is with the, with the channel, is you're creating the net effect. You're creating a world that is almost like you're indoors, if you like, that you're on the tee, but your job is just to send it down the channel, just as you would send it into the net when you were practicing during the winter months. So it's a very interesting concept, a very interesting idea. The whole idea of shrinking your world is one. That we will touch on in more detail, but certainly off the tee to help you score. And if you feel on certain holes that you are affected by your perception of the hole, perception of the difficulty of the hole, then shrink your world, see a channel just in front of you, and then shape the ball within that channel.