Confidence.

I was reading a work of Dr. Fran Pirozzolo’s last night, Mental Toughness Training, and found quite a few nuggets of knowledge.  Here is one excerpt that makes complete sense to me, is simple in its objectives and I think can help in understanding where frustrations come from on the course or anywhere in life.

“””But where does confidence come from?  Certainly, it comes from success, and we all feel confident when things are going well.  But the mentally tough person keeps his confidence level up even when things are going poorly.  Why? Because an even more basic source of self-confidence is confidence in our ability to get better — the belief that we know how to gain the skills that we need to overcome our current shortcomings.  The person who doesn’t know how to get better feels helpless, hopeless, and full of self-doubt.  The self-confident person knows that he will find a way to get the job done.  Knowledge of correct goal-setting methods is the map that can help get you where you want to go.  It’s the key to success.“””

Nothing groundbreaking here, but it’s a good reminder that whether or not you have the skills to pay the bills today isn’t always the point; the point is whether you know how to work towards those skills.  It is frequently tempting for me to get frustrated while out on the practice range and course as 90 percent of the time I’m practicing and playing alone and am far from a Tour golfer at this stage, but rather than allow frustrations to sink it is more productive to catalogue those on-course miscues as aspects of the game where practice can make the biggest difference.

It’s not about where you are today, it’s about where you how far along you are moving towards tomorrow.