How should we tackle the opening holes?

Mental coach Duncan McCarthy shares his thoughts on how to get off to a smooth start in your next club medal.

We will never shoot our 60-something round on the 1st tee. A lot of us go to the 1st tee with expectations, especially if we’ve hit it well on the practice ground but a lot of us force the issue too early on in the round. See the first three holes as a way of easing our way in. Let’s get some quality habits rolling first and foremost, let’s make some good decisions and follow them with 100 per cent commitment. Let’s see where the game is at.

If you think of Formula 1, it’s only after the first few laps where you are in the race and you confirm what your strategy is going to be and it’s the same on the course. What shot shape are you hitting? If you’re hitting it left to right all the time then just accept that and don’t battle it and play with it. That’s a smart early decision as the course is not the place to try and solve this type of issue.

Your goal is to shoot numbers and that is a bi-product of how well you do your job in your process. Build your score and ease your way into the round. The first might be a par 5 and we’ll tell ourselves that we need to make a birdie but most of us will make a bogey by thinking this way.

The first three holes might be some of the hardest holes on the course or they might come in the middle or at the end, and we know that, but we still need to play that recording in our mind of how we want to play that hole but without bringing the emotion and tension to that situation. A hole might be hard but we can only deal with the tee shot first. Then we might rip it down the middle and we’ll be flying or we might knock it in the trees but let’s just deal with the first stage of the process rather than thinking about a loop of four holes that might be tricky.

Don’t get emotional

We hear a lot about great rounds beginning with a bogey and the amount of great rounds that finish strongly is frightening and that is one of the biggest reasons. If we get off to a poor start or we have a poor front nine then our expectations are done. We’ve almost accepted that it’s not going to happen and we take our foot off the gas but it’s more that we’re now free-wheeling. And now we’re not playing with the emotional side and our best golf comes out.

A lot of us get to the 1st tee and are ultimately playing away from fear and we don’t want to mess up. If we mess up then that good round could go. Any fear or expectation are all results focused, they’re all looking towards the outcome. We want to go to the 1st tee with a process goal and to have something that we can control. So it might be that we want to pride ourselves on making great decisions or to accept any outcome or to switch off between shots by engaging in more dialogue in between shots.

The results are a bi-product of what we can control and that will help a lot of us.