The way you spend your practice time can have a profound effect on the way you perform during a game or tournament. In fact, most players are wasting up to 80% of their practice time.
The difference between effective and ineffective practice boils down to these three keys:
Key 1: Facts not Feelings
How do you know what you don’t know?
In the December 1999 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Dr David Dunning and Dr Justin Kruger documented that most incompetent people do not actually know that they are incompetent, in part because the skills required for competence are the same skills necessary to recognize incompetence.
This deficiency in “self monitoring skills,” Dunning says, “helps explain the tendency of the humour-impaired to persist in telling jokes that are not funny, of day traders to repeatedly jump into the market and keep losing out and ‘entrepreneurs’ to keep setting up another business, that quickly goes into liquidation.”
We can also add the golfer who consistently OVERRATES their skills, such as her short game or the number of fairways hit.
Other research suggests that overconfidence is also very prevalent whereby people can often dramatically overestimate their true capabilities. We have already discussed at length about the need to build up a persons self image but this building of CONFIDENCE must never be confused with establishing COMPETENCE.
How do you know what you don’t know, if you don’t know it?
The answer is, at least in golf, to digitise your experience – KEEP STATISTICS!
Make sure that you have at your disposal, information on YOUR game, the fairways you hit, the greens in regulation, putts, up and downs, sand saves.
This is no different than a business monitoring profit and loss, you wouldn’t want to just guess where your time and money was being spent.
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