IT'S GOOD FOR YOUR GAME

Emotionalizing the good and ‘factualizing’ the bad

By T.J. Tomasi

To play your best golf, you need to remember what you did correctly so you can do it again. Strangely enough, the remembering process begins with how we forget -- a useful tool in a game like golf where it's so easy to make mistakes, and the memories of them seem to last forever.

Emotionalize to immortalize

Memories are our past experience captured in molecules that find a home in special docking receptors located in the brain. The more receptors the experience commands, the stronger and more resilient the memory. You tag an experience as save-worthy by emotionalizing it, and in response to the emotion, your brain swathes the memory in recall chemicals. Due to these chemicals, you are not likely to ever forget where you were on Sept. 11, 2001 -- it is docked in your memory receptors for life.

However, if an experience is not marked, neural housekeeping erases the receptors to clear space for new memories, aka, you forget. The takeaway here is that memory loss can be prevented by a tagging process that you should make part of your swing routine for every shot: You must treat the good and the bad differently, sending the former to permanent memory and the latter to a temporary holding pen.

The player pictured here uses a routine before every shot that helps her emotionalize the good swings for permanent retention while treating the bad results as temporary, to be fixed at the next practice session. Strict adherence to this good/bad tagging process allows her to stockpile "tracks of excellence" while minimizing "tracks of failure."

The memories of her good shots are strong because she has emotionalized the results, thereby creating lots of receptor space to store the good swing outcomes. By conscious intervention she has made warehousing her successes a priority. She deals with her bad outcomes as facts so the engrams of the bad are weak with only a few receptors allotted to them ― and these will be swept clean after the next practice session has made them irrelevant.

Remember, the tagging process will run on its own unless you take control by using a swing routine specially designed to ensure a steady buildup of golf memories where every shot has either a good outcome that becomes a part of your performance history or a bad outcome that guides your near-term practice. Either way, by knowing how to run your own brain, you win.

Dr. T.J. Tomasi is a teaching professional in Port St. Lucie, Fla. Visit his website at tomasigolf.com.