Shooting While Breathing

I got a great email with the following question that will be the subject of today’s post:

Hi Steve,

I was wondering if you had any thoughts about breath control and how breathing (best) figures into the shot cycle? In the book you recommended, Professional Archery Technique, by Kirk Ethridge, Mr. Ethridge recommends to “[i]nhale deeply as you raise the bow, and exhale as you draw. When you are at full draw, your lungs should be empty.” (p. 36) The rationale seems to be one of relaxation and stillness. 

On the other hand, both Byron Ferguson (Become the Arrow, p. 18) and Anthony Camera (Shooting the Stickbow, 2nd ed., p. 275) advocate inhaling on the draw, allowing the chest to expand at anchor — though for different reasons. (Ferguson’s seems to be about using the inhalation to expand the chest and further bring the drawing elbow/arm into alignment; Camera’s seems to be that the act of drawing itself creates a natural expansion and therefore inhalation, though “while there is little if any chest expansion [at full draw], the logical progression is to continue inhaling, albeit at a slower rate.”)

What are archery coaches recommending? Is there one best (or better) answer, or is this simply a matter of “what works for you”? (For myself, the logic of breathing in makes sense, but I find the inhalation difficult on the draw, and it feels like I am having to hold my breath while at aim. I tried Ethridge’s suggestion and found, if nothing else, that I felt more relaxed/still while at aim. That seemed to be a plus. But is this physiologically “wrong”?

* * *

As far as I am concerned, you can do nothing wrong in this regard as long as you are open to what is happening to your body. The goal, is to be still and strong at the moment of release.

The only scientific study I have been made aware of reports that we are steadier/more still if we have slightly less than a whole lungful of air at that moment. If you want to try that, end with that (full breath, partial exhale) and work your way back to the beginning of the shot. I am unaware of any other serious studies, but they may exist. That, of course, is in archery. There is a great deal of study on breathing in weightlifting. In lifting very great weights, the common wisdom is to exhale upon exertion. This technique lowers internal pressures in the body and prevents injuries such as hernias. But in archery, the weights involved are not so great, so I think we are free to do almost anything.

So, I recommend you experiment as you have been doing. Try a number of breathing patterns. (Rick McKinney’s book, The Simple Art of Winning, lists several more.) The goal is stillness and control at the moment of release.

I have a couple of caveats.

1. Note whether the source is referring to Recurve/Traditional form or Compound form. I think the requirements for these forms are different enough to require different approaches (Rec/Trad has max draw weight and min time at full draw, while Compound has reduced DW and greater time at FD).
2. Take into account your personal situation. I tried all kinds of breathing patterns and couldn’t settle on one, so I just breathed as close to tidally as I could (look it up). Then I was diagnosed as having asthma which cleared a few things up. If I held a little long I ended up out of breath, so I included an extra breath into my pattern and it really helped.

So, don’t feel confined by what other people recommend and use your sense of how still and comfortable you are up to the moment of release, coupled with how you feel thereafter (you do not want to be panting and out of breath) as your guide to a consistent breathing pattern. There is no physiologically right or wrong that I can perceive in this topic.

Note For serious archers, this gets worked out one way or another, either through investigation (as you are doing) or through feedback training (doing something over and over until you find what works). Archery is a repetition sport and one based upon feel. Breathing irregularities lead to different feelings that have nothing to do with archery, so breathing needs to be consistent, whichever pattern you choose or learn.

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Will Wonders Never Cease?

For decades, competitive rules did not allow finger tabs to be marked in any way to guide those of us who string walked while shooting Barebow. You were allowed to use stitching on a tab if manufactured in, but not allowed to add any marks.

Well … New Rules! Consider what World Archery has adopted:

22.3.8.1.

A separator between the fingers to prevent pinching the arrow may be used. An anchor plate or similar device attached to the finger protection (tab) for the purpose of anchoring is permitted. The stitching shall be uniform in size and colour. Marks or lines may be added directly to the tab or on a tape placed on the face of the tab. These marks shall be uniform in size, shape and colour. Additional memoranda is not permitted. On the bow hand an ordinary glove, mitten or similar item may be worn but shall not be attached to the grip of the bow.

Leave it to them that the marks on the tab must be “uniform in size and colour.” Why? Who cares? One archer can use blue marks and one can use green but an archer may not use blue and green at the same time? Does this offend the aesthetic senses of the WA Pecksniffs?

If you are going to allow archers with sights to put any sight marks they want on their sight (I color code the odd and even numbers of yards/meters in ten yd/m increments, to prevent mis-setting my sight (see photo).) why not let Barebow archers have the same ability? John Demmer’s tab as simple black marks on a white piece of table from 5 m to 50 m in regular increments. He knows which is which but why allow Recurve archers color coding support, even to the point of printed numbers on their sight tapes, but Barebow archers get little monochrome tick marks only?

I guess we should be thankful for small favors.

The lesson I take home and you probably should do, is to always check the rules before your archer competes. Things do change, occasionally for the better.

PS Memoranda is plural so the sentence “Additional memoranda is not permitted.” should be “Additional memoranda are not permitted.” Or “Consulting written memoranda is not allowed,” or … sniff.

How to Judge Distance to Archery Targets

I got an email with the following question: “Any tips on estimating distance when shooting 3-D?”

Good question!

Archery competitions have included unmarked yardage elements for, well, ever. Obviously bowhunters hunted game for thousands of years with no distances to the prey supplied, so being able to figure out how far to shoot is a valuable skill. Modern competitions, though, have included some innovations, such as rules that ban mental schemes for determining distance to a target! WTF?!

The use of such techniques, being mental, was hard to police, so it turned out if you wanted to win, you had to cheat (along with all of your competitors), that is using the techniques while pretending not to! FITA, now World Archery, went so far as to publish the techniques to “level the playing field” while keeping them as being illegal! (See Understanding FITA Field Archery, an extract from the FITA Field Guidelines booklet published by FITA in 1995.)

Hey, World Archery! How about making these techniques legal? After, all they are just mental skills that everyone can learn to do. Then no one would be forced to cheat to win an unmarked shoot!

The first person to publish these techniques and blow the cover of those using them was Kirk Ethridge in his book Professional Archery Technique, which is still in print because we made it so. (I hot linked it if you want a copy.) I will leave it to Kirk to discuss the fine points as he was the first.

Pet Peeves: #2 A Tall Tell Tale

In the previous post I introduced stock photography and websites offering photographs for sale. One of the largest topics for archery-related photographs for sale is based upon the tale of William Tell, a tale in which a cruel politician forces the hero to shoot an apple off of the head of his young son. The hero, of course, pulls off this shot, but I will leave the rest of the story for you to find if you are not at all familiar with it. (I have seen the story enacted as a stage play in Europe; it is a tourist attraction.)

The number of photos on the Tell theme is myriad. Real apples, cartoon apples, people with apples on their heads and fake arrows through their skulls. In actual practice I have seen wigmaker’s dummy heads used to perch apples on to be shot off and other such “novelty” shots at fundraising events.

But there are consequences. Almost every year somebody is shot in the head while re-enacting this shot (see x-ray).

My all time favorite story illustrating this bad idea happened in 1993: a man was shot through the skull with an arrow by a friend trying to knock a fuel can off his head and survived with no brain damage. Surgeons removed the arrow from the man’s head by drilling a larger hole around the tip at the skull’s back and pulling the arrow through. Paramedics saved his life by restraining him when he tried to pull the arrow out himself in the helicopter on the way to the hospital. “If he had succeeded, the flanges slicing through his brain would have killed him instantly,” said a neurosurgeon at the hospital. The arrow’s tip went 8 to 10 inches into his’ brain. He lost his right eye.

Shot through the eye with a broadhead-tipped arrow and all he lost was the eye … and possibly a friend.

Drunken yahoos aside, this is a very attractive meme to young boys.

I discourage talk of it. I refuse to allow humanoid targets, paper or 3-D, to be shot at, and apples are banned at my lessons. I encourage you to do likewise. we cannot eliminate this meme but we can discourage its re-enactment.

(And don’t get me started on Archery Tag. It may be fun but it is a bad idea.)

Pet Peeves: #1 Finger Atop the Arrow

I visit a number of stock photo sites looking for interesting archery photos. There are any number of themes I see that give me the willies. This post and the next are on two of these.

Stock photography is a practice in which photographers take photos and offer them for sale through stock photography agencies. This business used to be confined to well-heeled advertising agencies and the like, but with the advent of the Internet, it is now available to all: all customers and all photographers.

So professional and amateur photographers alike can take photos, upload them to a stock photography site and let the site sell them for them. The site allows customers to use search engines to find photographs they like. I search the terms “archery” and “bow and arrow” along with others.

But many purveyors of archery-related stock photos seem not to be deterred by their lack of knowledge about archery. Take this photo for example:

Does anyone shoot in business attire any more? It doesn’t matter as the expected sales of this photograph are about business folks “hitting their targets,” as in sales targets, or growth targets. However this guy has a death grip on the bow, has four fingers wrapped around the bowstring and is torquing the string so much that the arrow has lifted off of the rest.

There are a great many of such photos available.

One of my pet peeves is archers wrapping a finger over the arrow, ostensibly to keep it from falling off the rest. This is a time honored practice as indicated by this print, made in 1892.

So, if it has been around for so long, why is it not an acceptable practice now?

Good question.

The problem now is two fold: #1 over time the downward pressure on the arrow rest will cause the rest to distort and/or break. Odysseus in the etching had no such problem because the arrow rest was his top bow hand finger; #2 is that this behavior masks things we need to correct. If a student draws his bow sans arrow finger, and the arrow falls off of the rest, either there is something wrong with the rest or there is something wrong with the archer’s form. Not allowing the arrow to fall off and expose the problem allows the archer to continue to practice “doing it wrong.” (This is also why I do not recommend the “Whisker Biscuit” rest to young archers. The arrow cannot fall off of the rest, so all kinds of incorrect practices are tolerated.)

 

 

 

The Danger in Copying Pros

In every sport, copying professionals is a common theme. The question is: should archers do it? My answer is no … unless you want to become that much of an expert and copy everything, including practice volumes, coaching, equipment … everything. Otherwise this is not a good idea.

This topic came up because of an article on a golf blog. (There he goes again talking about golf … well, I wouldn’t have to if you sent in more questions for me to write on! ;o) The blog post addressed whether you should play with a new ball each time or play with used balls. So, what do you think, is it better to play with a new ball at the beginning of a round of golf or one of the used balls in your bag?

If you used the behavior of golf pros, who you can watch perform on TV, as model behavior of how “experts” do things, you will probably answer “use a new ball,” there is less risk that way.

The author of the blog post took samples of used balls from a company that sells them. The company had three different grades of used balls, so he got some of each (all from the same manufacturer, same model). He put the three levels of used balls and new balls of the same kind through some launch monitor tests. The results? No real difference between their performance.

So, why do the pros take a ball out of play when it has a tiny blemish in it? Well, I think there are two factors. One, they get their balls for free. And two, they are exhibiting behaviors that benefit their ball sponsors. (To be fair, they may also be eliminating marks on their ball which may be distracting when they are looking at the ball.) They are certainly not criticized for using too many balls by their sponsor, I am sure. If the manufacturers can get amateurs to ape the pros (taking perfectly good balls out of play), they will sell a lot more balls, so it is in their economic interests to do just that.

In archery, we do much of the same thing. We accept recommendations from professional and other elite archers regarding our equipment and our technique. They tell us that XYZ really works for them and we almost automatically think “I want me some of that!” In all reality, they are so skilled that almost any move or any equipment will work better for them than we can do. I consider all such recommendations of sponsored archers to be hype.

I once had a sponsored pro archer tell me that his bow sponsor’s bow was more accurate than its competition. But bows don’t provide accuracy. They provide arrow launch speeds. They provide arrow launch angles and they provide consistency in both of those things (either good or bad). But they do not provide accuracy … at all. The archer provides that by properly aiming the bow and executing shots consistently. The professional archer making this claim was not trying to con anyone; he was just trying to help sell his sponsor’s product by saying something nice. He himself may have seen an increase in his scores with his new bow, but that comes from an increase in consistency (indicated by a decrease in group size) while he was making sure the arrows ended up in or near the 10-ring.

So, what is the harm in aping a pro? The harm comes from pursuing a goal one is not prepared or physically equipped to achieve, which equates to a waste of time and money, often lots and lots of money. For example, some high performing pro tells us that his new stabilizer system is why he won Tournament X. So, you run out a buy such a system. You put it on your bow and, well, it feels different. Most of us stop there thinking we have made our archery setup “better.” But has it? The only way you can tell is to compare round scores (or something else indicating scorability) before and after the change. Most of us never do that.

Do not get me wrong, you can buy better performance! The most obvious example is replacing a set of banged up, poorly tuned arrows with a set of new weight-matched, highly tuned arrows. You will see a big difference in performance before and after this change. But will you get such a change from one set of weight-matched, highly tuned arrows with another set from another manufacturer? My guess is that you will not see a difference. If you are an elite archer, you might see a small difference and elite archers are frequently checking out new equipment very, very carefully looking for those things that make very small differences in their ability to score. But ask yourself, if someone offered you money to shoot their equipment and it didn’t hurt your scores, would you take the money? Would you say nice things about your sponsor and their equipment?

Think about it. There is a big difference between pro and amateur athlete’s situations, with regard to both ability and budget.

The Problem With Expectations

We all have desires that go along with our goals. For example, I wanted to win tournaments, even when that desire was irrational as I was a middle of the pack archer. But there is a critical point where these things turn from positives into negatives and that is when expectations are created.

When we expect to shoot well, maybe expect to place or win, this can be a positive thing if we are close to a position to make that happen. In Tiger Woods heyday, he expected to win every time he entered a golf tournament. In this manner he put pressure on himself to perform and perform he did.

But if our expectations are not met, then what happens? You guessed it: disappointment, anger, or even worse: outright frustration. Well, these things are hardly scarring; they are just feelings, no? I suggest that they are a real problem. I can’t prove this, but I suspect it is true: when performing, if we feel intense disappointment or frustration, there are consequences. I think that when we feel disappointment or frustration while performing, we subconsciously reach back onto our memory shelf (my metaphor) and pluck off a solution in the form of a previous shooting technique that we experienced some success with. This is how we can find ourselves doing things like we used to do them, even years earlier. (“Gosh, I haven’t done that in a long time.”) That switch to a previous way of shooting cannot be successful as you haven’t practiced that in a very long time. (Those things, previous shooting techniques, never go away. Like bicycle riding (you never forget how to ride them) all physical techniques for complicated processes are stored in long term memory, awaiting just the proper stimulus to trigger recall.) But such a switch can thoroughly mess up your current technique, especially if you do not notice the switch.

What to do? I think you have to learn to leave your expectations in the car. You don’t need them on the range. Disappointment and frustration result from comparisons between how you have been shooting and how you expected to shoot. Without the expectations, the comparisons are much harder to make.

So, are we supposed to be robots? No, we just need to learn what it feels like to have goals and objectives, and yet at the same time have no expectations about what will happen today. Hall of Fame golfer Moe Norman referred to this as an Alert Attitude of Indifference. I think this mental state is a hallmark of “being in The Zone.” Again, something I cannot prove, but highly suspect. People who have had such peak performance experiences claim that they felt detached from the outcome while they were immersed in it. This is what I am addressing here. Help you students to find that mental state. A good time to start is when they admit to frustration as the topic comes up naturally.

Skill and Tempo

I have been thinking a lot about the difference between acquiring archery technique and acquiring archery skill lately. Taking the chance that I may be oversimplifying this in this post, when you have learned archery technique fairly well, you have learned how to group your shots on a target; moving that group into the highest scoring zone of the target requires skill(s).

I was reminded while walking our dog this morning that if you are out walking with another, if the other wants to walk faster or slower than you do, it is quite problematic. Matching your pace to that of an elderly parent is an exercise in patience (and love, and …). Trying to walk a dog who wants to go at a difference pace is also a struggle.

What we tend not to recognize is that the pace at which we shoot arrows, our shooting tempo, is also a key factor in reaching higher levels of performance … but we are often unaware of our own tempo while shooting. And then when we find our good tempo, that idiot with a timer and a whistle keeps interrupting us to go score and fetch our arrows.

To explore this, you can ask your archers to explore shooting very, very slowly and very, very quickly to see if either “works.” They almost never do work (because, I think, every archer wants to show off a little and overdoes it). I then go into “Goldilocks’ Mode” and give them the “too fast, too slow, just right” speech about shooting tempo.

To get tempo on your side, you need to find the tempo that works for you (or for your student) … and then find ways to hang onto it.

You can count off shots in practice to find your tempo, but this is not advised to do in competition (as counting is conscious thinking) unless you have lost your tempo and are desperate to get it back. Like any other part of shooting, shooting in tempo can be memorized.

There are other things to use (metronomes!), counting off your shots on video, etc. A longish exercise is for you, as coach, to time shots with a stopwatch (I time from stabilizer tip moving upward to release) and then logging those times with arrow scores. If you find a “magic zone,” where high quality shots exist, then you can train around that zone. One way is to simply start the stopwatch at tip raise and if they shoot too early you say “Too early, do it again.” If they get to the end of the time zone, you say “Let down!” Eventually more and more shots will occur in the right time, then the archer can relax and concentrate on shooting quality shots alone.

I suggest to you, that if you have advanced archers in your care, some tempo training may just elevate their skill and performances. (Happy archer, happy coach!)

PS For those of you who object to skill being separated from technique, and who claim that technique is involved in developing skill, I say “Yes, and your point is … ?” My point is that it is not just technique that drives better scores. Shooting perfect shot after perfect shot and getting lousy groups because you possess no tuning ability cannot be solved by working harder on your technique. By calling these things “archery skill” we might just get developing archers to focus on such things and even get them excited to learn more and the higher scores than may result from that learning.

If you want to learn more about all of the things you need to know about target archery that doesn’t involve “how to shoot arrows” may I suggest (Warning! Shameless plug incoming! Warning):

 

Another Barebow Question! (This Time: Draw Length Control)

Here’s the question:

“I have switched back to Barebow shooting from Olympic style. I also switched to a three fingers under (3FU) string grip. I am having some difficulty in determining how far to draw back and how high. I am trying to eliminate string slap to my face. I haven’t come across anyone yet who can help me but of course I have just started on this endeavour.”

* * *

Wonderful question. Barebow, in this case it is Recurve Barebow, is so much simpler than other styles, which is why it is so hard! Compared to Olympic Recurve, you don’t have help from a clicker or long rod stabilizers, or side rods, or bow sights. The clicker is what the Olympians use to give them excellent draw length control. In Barebow, we don’t get one … but that doesn’t mean you can’t use one in practice!

Draw length control is critical in Barebow. This is because we are “shooting off of the point,” that is using the arrow point to aim with. Starting from the fact that the arrow is anchored under our aiming eye (critical for windage control) and slants upward to the point which we sight across to our point of aim (POA), if we underdraw the bow, the arrow will protrude outward from the rest more (outward and upward), resulting in us lowering our bow to get it onto our sight line to the POA. But short drawing weakens the bow making our arrows hit lower, and so does lowering the bow! In the reverse situation, overdrawing the bow, causes the arrow to protrude outward from the rest less (less forward means downward also), resulting in us raising our bow to get it onto our sight line to the POA. Double whammy again. Both of these things cause the arrows to fly high.

Conclusion: Barebow is particularly sensitive to draw length.

Now, is this a problem. But your targets can answer that question. If your groups are round, your draw length is well controlled. If it were a problem you would have extra high and low impact points, making your groups elongated up-down.

What if that is what I have?

So, you need to get your draw length under control. There are two factors: full draw position and practice. The standard descriptions of full draw position describe an archer very, very close to the end of the range of motion of what we call “the draw.” Any time you get near the end of the range of motion of any of your body parts you will feel muscles tensing. (Open you arm as far as it will go, push it a little. Feel any thing? Turn your head as far to the right as it will go. Feel any muscle tension? That.) The tension you feel when you are at the end of “the draw” motion, we call “back tension.” The existence of the muscle tension you feel in your upper mid back tells you two things: a) you are using the right muscles, and b) you are near the end of the range of motion. If you don’t feel that tension, then at least one of the two is missing.

So, believe it or not, a clicker installed on your bow … for practice … can help you with both of these things.

With OR archers we do something called a Clicker Check. We ask you to draw through your clicker, but instead of loosing the shot we ask you to keep expanding with your best possible form and then let down. What coach is looking for is how far you can get past the rear edge of your clicker. What we want to see is about a quarter inch (5-7 mm) past. (The last archer I tested was at two inches past, nowhere near full draw.) We do not want to be all the way to the farthest extent of the range of motion in the draw but really close. (We need to allow for day-to-day differences in your energy level.)

So, installing a clicker temporarily allows you to check whether your full draw position is a good one. Then, practice shooting with the clicker focusing on the feel in your back. That feel is something you are going to focus on while shooting. (I recommend you pause 2-3 seconds after the clicker clicks (all the time feeling the feel) so as to not create a dependence of the clicker when shooting Barebow.)

Last, there is something the old guys have to contribute and by ‘old” I mean at least five centuries. In olden days, arrows were draw to the back of the longbow/composite bow, whatever, as a matter of course. It was noticed that the arrow point/pile had a distinctive shape (or feel) when in the full draw position. In medieval times and later with the use of target points, the shape of the “head” was likened to a full moon sitting on the horizon. In any case, when you are at full draw, you are looking at your arrow head in any case as it is your bow sight. When you are shooting well, shoot arrows while focused on the appearance the arrow head makes sitting on your arrow rest. Looking for this shape, once part of your shooting routine will add some credence to the “back tension feeling” telling you that you are at full draw. (This is not as sensitive as in the old days when we “shot off of the knuckle.” The arrow made a dent in the flesh of your hand and the “full moon shape” had a natural horizon. Elevated arrow rests make this less definitive (IMHO, of course).

Getting symmetrical arrow groups tells you when you have it down.

Getting small, symmetrical groups is another task.

Hope this helps!

Oh, and if you are getting string rubs on your face, either you are drawing too deep along your face or you are not turning your head far enough. The draw can go back no farther than the “corner” of the chin in this style although I have seen a recent appeal to a much, much longer draw which I cannot recommend as I have no experience with it nor do I know anyone who does. My experience is that deep draws that cause “chin rubs” are generally caused by the bow shoulder, not by not getting your draw shoulder around far enough. If your bow arm isn’t at 180° to your chest at the shoulder (that is in the same plane), there is no way your rear shoulder can compensate.

As to how high to anchor, having more than one anchor is common in Barebow but many try mightily to use only one. If you are shooting long distances, then the low anchor is recommended. If shorter as in Field Archery under WA, then a higher anchor is probably wise.

As I said, I hope this helps!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ten Ways To Develop a Winner’s Attitude for … Archery

You may be getting tired of me using golf wisdom to create the same for archers, but they are doing the work we have not done. They have more people doing the kind of work we need to do and I am just riding their wave. This piece appeared on www.golfstateofmind.com on July 16, 2016 and was written by David MacKenzie, a Canadian golf mental coach.

Read it and tell me if it translates to archery for you.

10 Ways to Create a Winner’s Attitude for Golf

1. NOTICE WHAT YOU SAY (TO YOURSELF AND TO OTHERS)
   When I ask a new student to describe their game or recent rounds, those with a winning attitude for golf will immediately go into the all the positives. There’s a positive tone and lots of positive adjectives. Those that need to work on their attitude, will highlight more negatives and things they don’t currently have in their game – it’s more pessimistic.
2. DEFINE YOUR PURPOSE
   Some players don’t have a winning attitude for golf because they don’t know their purpose for playing. If you don’t ask yourself why you are playing golf and how it’s going to fulfill you in the future, it will manifest itself in a poor attitude. Your purpose or “why” and a having a target in mind provides drive and optimism. Ask yourself what this is and write down the answer.
3. FAKE IT UNTIL YOU BELIEVE IT!
   This isn’t about trying to change other people’s perception of you or pretending to others that you are something that you are not. This is about changing your behaviors by acting in a certain way. E.g. If you want to be a more confident and mentally tough golfer, then act like it! Walk and talk like you are one. Use more positive body language and smile! Over time you’ll start to think and feel more like that person you want to become.
4. CHOOSE TO BE IN A GOOD MOOD
   Your mood is something that you have control over. Those people with a winner’s attitude use the positive energy created by a good mood. The best time to get into a good mood is first thing in the morning. If you haven’t already read my “Killer Morning Routine” article, please do so. I do my best to set myself up for a productive and positive day, by sticking to this routine.
5. BE GRATEFUL
   Those with a winning attitude for golf regularly express gratitude for the simply being able to play the game, irrespective of the result. Last week I asked one of my Tour player students what his goals are for the week and one of them was to maintain an attitude of gratitude and remind himself about how lucky he is to play this game. When you do this, you’ll immediately feel lighter and more content.
6. SURROUND YOURSELF WITH OTHERS WITH A WINNING ATTITUDE
   Seek out others with a more positive attitude and do your best to avoid the company of people who have a poor attitude. A winning attitude is infectious – you’ll be inspired and motivated to achieve your goals by spending more time with the people that you admire.
7. CHANGE HOW YOU VIEW MISTAKES
   “I never learned anything from a match that I won.”– Ben Hogan
   Those with a winning attitude for golf see every round as a learning experience no matter what the outcome, and that any mistakes and failures can be learned from and reduced in the future. This is also called a “Growth Mindset”. The opposite of a Growth Mindset is a “Fixed Mindset” where failure and mistakes are seen as a reflection of ability level, instead of something you can change. Those with a winning golf attitude believe there is no limit to their success – they can keep growing with every round, even if it’s just a little. It’s most apparent whether a player has a winning attitude for golf in the face of adversity or defeat. Winner’s are able to look at defeat objectively, without complaining, blaming or dwelling.
8. BE ABLE TO LAUGH AT YOURSELF
   Taking yourself too seriously and being too self-absorbed is not a trait of someone with a winning attitude. Research shows that those that can laugh at themselves are generally more cheerful in their demeanor, which is an important attribute for being able to handle stress. By being more cheerful, you are more able to ease tension during intense moments. Part of developing a winning attitude for golf is about having less of a sense of self on the course. Laughing at yourself isn’t about putting yourself down, it’s about realizing that no one is perfect and mistakes happen. Laughter is a powerful tool for improving mental toughness and resiliency. Zach Johnson says: “Realizing bad shots happen is the best way to deal with them. Take the drama out of a bad shot. Use humor or laughter to make it go away, and then move on.”
9. SPEND MORE TIME IN THE PRESENT
   Learning how to stay more in the present moment is great for keeping a winner’s attitude. There are so many benefits to it. Rather than spending time speculating about the future or worrying about the past (which can cause performance anxiety), stay in the moment more often and you’ll see improvement in your attitude.
10. AVOID COMPARING YOURSELF TO OTHERS (IN THE WRONG WAY)
    One of the traps that I find many golfers fall into, especially junior golfers, is comparing themselves to other players. They can easily get into that Fixed Mindset and be envious of another player’s skills. By being envious about another player’s game, you are essentially telling yourself you are a weaker player. Remember that competition is a good thing – it drives us to get better. Notice whether you are looking at other player’s game for motivation (growth mindset) or envy (fixed mindset).

Well … ?