First Tee Nerves
It’s a balmy Saturday in Summer and you are about to play in your first TSG official event. How are you feeling on the first tee? Are you suffering from first tee nerves? Just want to get it away? Make sure you don’t top it?
If any of these thoughts sound familiar then lets get you feeling more comfortable on the first tee. The first thing to realise is everyone feels it! If you ever get the chance to read an interview with a tour player, they will tell you they too get first tee nerves. The difference is they are trained on how to hold those nerves.
What we are going to talk about in this blog is a really good visualisation technique to improve your confidence. It is something you can do at home, five minutes a day that will transform the way you think about your golf.
Firstly you need to get yourself relaxed, so have a few deep breaths and close your eyes.
It is important to build the picture first and uses ALL your senses; imagine the first tee, you’re walking up to the first tee, feel your legs moving, the weight of your bag, you can see your mates, hear the crunch of the gravel, smell the freshly cut grass, taste the coffee on your tongue as you take a sip.
Now you’re on the tee, as above, hear, see, feel, smell, taste everything, from you putting your bag down, getting a ball out your bag, teeing it up.
From this point, I’d like you to imagine yourself feeling confident, standing tall!
Go through your routine and picture a pure, high drive down the middle. (Be realistic with this, there is no point imagining a shot you can’t hit!).
Feel yourself being confident as you stand to the ball and feel a really good swing, hear and feel the connection with the ball. Imagine seeing your shot flying into the middle of the fairway – your friends saying “shot”….no first tee nerves here!
The more times you do this, you brain will think its real, believe it has actually happened! So when you come to do it for real, your brain believes you can hit a good shot, in fact, it won’t expect anything else.
First time you try this you may find it is not overly effective, but visualisation is a skill that you need to work at.
As I said, five minutes a day is all it will take and over a week or two the images will become more and more vivid and real. The more real the image, the better for helping improve your first tee nerves and building your confidence.
So FIVE minutes while you’re waiting for the bus, FIVE minutes a day not using Facebook – do some visualisation and start nailing those first tee shots!
