Showing results by narrator "Dr. Joseph Parent" in All Categories

From the best-selling author of Zen Golf: Mastering the Mental Game and the tennis champion and world record holder of the Golden Set comes the most innovative and powerful book since The Inner Game of Tennis. Combining deep Eastern wisdom and practical tennis expertise, Zen Tennis will help you get out of your own way and into the zone.

In chapters such as "During Your Swing Is Not the Time to Give Yourself a Lesson" and "How to Enjoy a Bad Round of Golf," the author guides golfers with simple yet powerful techniques to prepare for, execute, and, equally important, respond to the results of any golf shot. The author, Dr. Joseph Parent, is a PGA Tour Instructor who draws on his teaching experience to offer special methods that have led to amazing improvements in the games of professionals and amateurs alike.

Confidence, as every golfer knows, is the key to peak performance on the greens. Zen Putting: Mastering the Mental Game builds your confidence through a thinking-outside-the-box approach that helps golfers of all levels get out of their own way and roll the ball better than ever.

Simple yet powerful keys for keeping your composure and the mental edge over your opponents, which will help you play with more consistency, experience less frustration, and shoot lower scores.

Dr. Joe Parent has drawn on a career coaching the masters to write a hundred easy to understand yet powerful tips for improving any golfer’s score, from the essentials of the mental game to helpful hints to keep your composure. As with his other books, you will find yourself returning time and again to hear what Masters and PGA Champion Vijay Singh call “lessons that make the mental game seem so simple".

My teacher, Ösel Tendzin, had a favorite response when his meditation students would ask how to control their thoughts and emotions. He’d say, “You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf. One person will struggle with the waves and be battered about. Another person will learn to ride them. Same waves, very different experiences.” We experience waves of emotions through the course of a tournament, a round of golf, or even a single golf hole.

Once there were two monks walking along a path through the woods. When they came to a stream, they encountered a young woman dressed in fine silks, unable to get across without ruining her clothes. One of the monks offered to carry her on his back. She climbed on, they all crossed the stream, and on the other side he set her down. She thanked him, and the two monks continued on their way. The monastery to which these monks belonged had a rule prohibiting them from touching women.

We’re so hard on ourselves. We tie our self-worth to the results of our actions, to how well we hit a golf shot or what score we make on a hole. When things go badly, we start to doubt our basic goodness as human beings. We start to say things like “What’s wrong with me?” We usually can’t accept making a mistake, despite the fact that we know everybody makes them.

There is a very clear correspondence between our state of mind and how our body manifests. When our mind has anxiety or fear, our body feels tight and agitated. When we are discouraged or depressed, our body feels heavy and sluggish. When we are confident and at ease, our body feels energetic and responsive. Our mental state affects our posture, how our body looks as we stand or walk.

In the martial arts and similar mind­-body traditions of the East, the body’s “center of gravity” is the source from which all movement and energy flow. It is located a few inches below the navel, in the center of the torso. Awareness of this center of gravity is extremely helpful in golf.

Chris, a good junior golfer, came for a lesson. He complained that his swing gave him trouble when he “got quick at the top.” That usually refers to an especially quick start to the downswing. It sometimes reflects a premature transition, starting the downswing before the backswing is complete. He showed me his swing routine, how he approached and set up to the ball, then how he swung.

To deal with last­-minute thoughts, those internal conversations about the shot right before you swing, I suggest an approach taken from body surfing. If you want to swim out where the wave starts so you can ride it in, you have to get past the breakers. Fighting through these breakers takes a lot of strength and energy, and more often than not the waves knock you back.

Every golfer has had the experience of setting up to a shot and not feeling completely comfortable with some aspect of it. We might have a vague feeling that something is not quite right, or we might know what’s wrong but not bother to do anything about it. In either case, when we “go ahead and hit it anyway,” the result is usually terrible. I call that kind of shot an “anyway.” Anytime we can reflect on a shot and say, “You know, I knew better,” that was an anyway.

Impatience compounds mistakes. Making a poor shot, we should accept the situation and play the smartest shot from there. Instead, we try to make it all up with the next shot. If we miss a few putts, we begin pressing to get our approach shots closer to the pin, often taking unwarranted risks and suffering the consequences. Stephen had been playing golf for just three years, but had taken lessons regularly. Still, he had never broken 100.

Facing a difficult recovery shot is a particular situation that’s likely to give rise to an anyway. There’s a method to avoid compounding one mistake with another. When you set up as though to play the shot, tune in to your body. Using the body scan, feel how comfortable or uncomfortable you are. You’ll intuitively sense the difficulty of the shot you’re planning.

Once a Zen master was listening to a student complain about his uncontrollable temper. The student said, “I’m a very angry person. Please help me to change.”

“Sounds like a big problem. Let’s see this terrible anger of yours,” the master demanded of the student.

There are reactions to good and bad shots that are common to most golfers. If we hit a drive down the middle of the fairway, we might bend down and pick up our tee before the shot has even landed. If we hit a poor shot, we follow it to the finish and get upset. Here’s a post-shot routine that reverses those responses. When you hit a shot that comes out just the way you pictured it, get some emotion going.

Everyone agrees that when we have a lot of thoughts while swinging, poor results follow. Why wouldn’t we want to be thinking during our swing? Why wouldn’t thinking help our body to do what our mind wants it to do? To understand this dynamic, we need to understand different aspects of mind and how they relate to the action of our body swinging a golf club. The many expressions of mind can be described in various ways.

The mental skills necessary to play your best golf need to be learned and groomed, just as good swing techniques do. The tendency to “focus on the negative” needs to be replaced with the habit of accentuating the positive. A conversation with a touring professional provides a good illustration of this point. After the first round of a tournament, I asked Andy how the day went.

A man from town asked an old farmer to be on a citizens’ committee that would work on improving the town. The farmer asked, “Do you want me to be involved or committed?” Puzzled, the man asked, “What’s the difference?” The farmer answered, “It’s like a bacon and eggs breakfast. The chicken is involved, but the pig is committed.” Commitment involves believing without a doubt that the plan you’ve made is the best one.