PDF Summary:Golf Is Not a Game of Perfect, by Bob Rotella

If you’ve ever talked yourself out of choosing the right club or agonized over whether to try to muscle it over a water hazard, Golf Is Not a Game of Perfect is here to help. In this book, professional golf coach and psychologist Bob Rotella provides a framework for improving the mental side of your golf game. Rotella argues that controlling your thoughts, cultivating confidence, and strategizing effectively can have a bigger impact on your game than making changes to your swing.

In this guide, we’ll detail Rotella’s techniques for choosing the right thoughts, goals, and shots. Alongside Rotella’s recommendations, we’ll include the psychological context that informs Rotella’s approach, as well as compare and contrast his advice with other techniques from coaching and sports psychology.

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Once developed, a high level of confidence will enable you to make better decisions and better swings. Confidence helps you avoid second-guessing and fully commit to your choices, thereby improving the quality of your decision-making. Confidence also enables you to think less while swinging and instead rely on the muscle memory and golf skill that you already possess.

(Shortform note: Rotella argues that confidence is a major factor in athletic success. However, there’s still debate on how much confidence impacts performance. Some studies have shown that while confidence improves performance, it's only by a small amount. Not only this, but the relationship between confidence and performance is understudied in certain demographics, including women and middle-aged athletes.)

Set Ambitious Goals and Commit

Rotella argues that the first step in building confidence is setting ambitious goals. When you set an ambitious goal, like winning a tournament, you’re saying that you believe you have what it takes to accomplish your goal. This inner affirmation of your potential helps to establish confidence and can help motivate you to continue to improve.

(Shortform note: While it’s good to set ambitious goals, avoid setting unattainable goals. Unattainable goals are goals that you lack the time, resources, or commitment to actualize. Experts note that setting unattainable goals can lead you to become demoralized when you inevitably fail. This kind of failure can stunt your confidence, leading you to perform poorly.)

Once you’ve set your ambitious goals, commit yourself to a program of improvement. What this program looks like depends on your goals and your schedule. If you’re a professional athlete with no other major commitments, it might make sense to commit 40+ hours a week to improving your game. However, if you’re an amateur golfer with other commitments, you might only be able to devote a few hours to practice each week.

(Shortform note: As you set up your practice schedule, consider committing to multiple short practice sessions a week. Research shows that due to the limits of your attention span, you learn more efficiently in multiple short sessions than in a single long session. To take advantage of this phenomenon, consider committing 30 minutes or an hour to golf each day instead of, for instance, practicing for four hours once per week.)

Regardless of how much time you’re able to devote to golf, focus on nothing but golf for the duration of your allotted practice time. It can be tempting to take a break from practice to scroll social media or answer emails, but allowing yourself to become distracted robs you of your practice time and can reduce your motivation.

(Shortform note: In Deep Work, Cal Newport argues that to deeply focus on a task you need to create an environment that’s free of distractions. This can be difficult in golf because you’re unlikely to find an environment with no distractions. However, there are steps you can take to minimize distractions while practicing golf. For instance, you can try to move away from areas of the range where golfers are socializing or let others know that you won’t be available for work calls or emails while you’re practicing.)

Overcoming Fear

Once you’ve set your goals and committed yourself to working toward them, the next step in building confidence is overcoming fear. You must learn to overcome the fear of hitting bad shots and playing bad rounds because such fear can have a disastrous effect on your golf game. According to Rotella, fear disrupts your muscle memory, leading you to hit bad shots. In response to hitting these bad shots, your fear deepens, leading you to hit even more bad shots, and launching a vicious cycle that can ruin a round of golf.

Rotella notes that fear is distinct from nervous excitement. While fear is a mental struggle, nervous excitement refers to your body’s natural response to stressful situations. When you enter these situations, your body increases your heart rate and releases adrenaline in preparation for you to exert yourself. In some cases, the physical characteristics of nervous excitement can actually improve your game.

(Shortform note: While Rotella argues that fear is a mental experience and not a physiological one, many in the scientific community disagree. According to experts, fear is associated with a host of physiological symptoms often referred to as the fight-or-flight response, including elevated heart rate and blood pressure, elevated blood glucose levels, and dilated pupils. This response is your body’s way of preparing to deal with dangerous situations. Some authors suggest that the physiological effects of fear may temporarily boost your physical capabilities, though Rotella might argue that the mental disadvantages outweigh the physical benefits.)

To avoid succumbing to fear during your rounds, Rotella recommends focusing on the processes of playing and improving and not the results of individual shots and rounds. When you’re focused too narrowly on the results of your shots, bad shots and round scores feel exceptionally demoralizing. However, when you zoom out and focus on your overall commitment to improving your game, bad shots will feel less significant and less painful when considered in the context of your overall upward trajectory.

(Shortform note: Similar to Rotella’s recommendation not to focus on short-term results, in Atomic Habits, James Clear contends that instead of focusing on the goals you’d like to achieve, you should focus on the person you’d like to become. Clear argues that by building habits around who you’d like to be, you’ll set yourself up for continual success, whereas focusing on individual goals may not lead to long-term change.)

For many golfers, the pressure of competing against others can be a source of fear and anxiety. The fear of being outperformed by a competitor can make it difficult to play well. The key to mitigating fear of competition is, once again, focusing on process and not results. Rotella notes that while your opponents in the context of a single round are the other golfers, in the long term, you compete against yourself.

Manage Your Social Fears on the Course

Fear is especially common when performing in front of a group, as you do when you’re competing in a tournament. The fear that wells up when you have to perform a skill in front of others is known as performance anxiety. To manage performance anxiety, experts recommend mindfulness practices such as deep breathing and meditation, as well as avoiding caffeine, sugar, and any other stimulating substances.

It’s also common to become anxious when you compare yourself unfavorably to your fellow competitors. If you struggle with this, there are two strategies you can use to shift your mindset. First, experts recommend documenting your achievements, which can help mitigate feelings of insecurity that lead you to negatively compare yourself to others. Second, get to know your competitors by asking them for advice or talking shop, which can help you see them more positively.

Focus On Positive Memories to Build Confidence

As you continue building your confidence, choose to remember positive golf experiences while ignoring negative ones. Rotella argues that by remembering your best shots as you play and practice, you’ll be able to relax and play better, which in turn bolsters your confidence. Just as remembering good shots can help you play better, remembering bad shots can inspire fear, distract you, and lead you to play worse.

To take advantage of this phenomenon, take a moment to appreciate your good shots and attempt to commit them to memory. By the same token, move on quickly from bad shots, making use of Rotella’s strategies for responding to adversity–lowering expectations, laughing things off, and striving to enjoy the game.

(Shortform note: If you struggle to recall your best shots and biggest achievements in golf, it could help to create a list of them. Experts argue that listing your successes can help boost self-worth and performance. Having a list to refer to is helpful when you’re having trouble remembering positive experiences in the moment—just be sure you add to the list each time you hit a great shot or finish with a great score.)

Rotella notes that some clients have been confused by his advice regarding memory. Clients pointed out that by ignoring their bad shots while focusing on the good, they’d build confidence based on inaccurate information. However, according to Rotella, it doesn’t matter that selective memory is inaccurate because the point is to build confidence and play better, not to accurately remember previous rounds of golf.

Positivity’s Potential Pitfalls

While Rotella argues it benefits you to forget about bad shots, other experts believe that ignoring your mistakes may lead you to repeat them. These experts note that relentless positivity can become toxic, especially if it leads you to ignore legitimate problems. For instance, in golf, toxic positivity might lead you to ignore flaws in your game that could be corrected with a little practice.

Along with toxic positivity, you may also want to avoid developing overconfidence. While Rotella advises you to use your memories to build confidence, even if that confidence isn’t always representative of reality, other experts note that overconfidence can lead you to take unnecessary and sometimes dangerous risks. While you probably won’t end up in physical danger on the golf course, overconfidence may lead you to take risky shots that will hurt your score if they don’t pan out.

Use Confidence to Access Intuition

According to Rotella, when you’ve built up your confidence, you’ll be able to use your intuition to make strong decisions in the game. Intuition refers to your mind’s ability to tap into your reservoir of skill and golf experience and use that information to rapidly determine the best course of action in a given situation. Your intuition presents you with your initial idea about how to approach a shot, and conscious re-evaluation of the situation produces second and third guesses.

(Shortform note: While Rotella contends that relying on intuition enables you to make the best possible decisions, some authors argue that intuition isn’t so reliable. Experts note that the brain’s tendency to sort things into patterns sometimes leads it to produce faulty judgments. In other words, when you receive new information, your brain will try to match that information up with a pattern it already knows, even if the match isn’t completely accurate.)

When you’re playing with confidence, it’s easier to believe that your initial, intuitive plan for each shot is the best. As Rotella argues, this is usually the case, and by confidently following your intuition, you’ll choose better shots and shoot lower scores. However, when your confidence is low, your lack of belief in yourself can lead you to second-guess your plan for how to approach a shot. When you second-guess, you may end up choosing a weaker plan for your next shot. If you choose many suboptimal shots throughout the round, your score may increase by several strokes.

For example, imagine that you hit into a deep bunker just off the green. Based on your instincts, your first thought is to shoot straight for the hole, as you’re pretty confident in your sand wedge. However, as you prepare to hit the shot, your confidence falters, and you consider aiming for the front of the green to avoid accidentally overhitting the ball and rolling off the back of the green. After some waffling, you elect to shoot for the front of the green. During your swing, your uncertainty about the plan distracts you, causing you to hit a weak shot that doesn’t make it out of the bunker. If you had been confident enough to play intuitively, you would have shot for the hole, and even if you missed, you’d probably have at least gotten out of the bunker. Instead, lacking confidence, you chose a shot that cost you at least one stroke.

(Shortform note: Rotella’s assertion that you should go with your first, intuitive idea for each shot is backed up by some scientific research. When asked to predict uncertain future events, people were generally most accurate on their first guess. Not only this, but the longer participants took to revise their estimates, the more inaccurate their predictions were, suggesting that the more time you spend thinking, the more your decision-making suffers.)

Play Pragmatically

Alongside your efforts to build confidence, Rotella recommends that you take a pragmatic approach to your play. Specifically, to elevate your game, focus on short shots and choose easy shots.

Focus on Approach Shots

Rotella argues that most of your practice time should be dedicated to improving your short game. While it’s tempting to focus on relatively flashy long irons and drives, the shots that will save you the most strokes over the course of the round are the shots you take near the green, from max-range wedge shots to chipping from the edge of the green, and everything in between. Rotella argues that improving your mechanics on these shots will improve your scores faster than any other course of practice.

(Shortform note: In addition to having a relatively small impact on your score, long shots may also be more difficult to perfect in practice. Experts argue that for many golfers, trying to perfect tee shots may be a waste of time, as it takes a lot of time and natural ability that most people don’t possess. By contrast, these experts note that because the short game doesn’t rely on physical strength or the complicated mechanics of a full swing, even casual golfers can improve their short games with a little practice.)

While Rotella recommends that you spend a lot of time practicing short shots, he notes that it usually isn’t beneficial to spend a lot of time practicing putting, as he believes that putting is more mental than mechanical.

(Shortform note: While Rotella argues that you shouldn’t practice putting as it’s a mental task, some researchers assert that putting practice can improve your game—so long as you practice mentally. These researchers found that by observing others' putting and mentally envisioning how to sink each putt, study participants increased their skill and subsequently shot better scores without practicing a single stroke.)

Don’t Change Your Swing All at Once

When you do practice your longer shots, focus on improving your swing incrementally. While there may be several different facets of your swing that you’d like to correct, Rotella contends that swing mechanics are too complicated to juggle more than one change at a time. When you try to change too many things at the same time, it’s harder to get each one exactly right. As a result, your swing may worsen as you incorporate imperfect versions of the changes you desire. Instead, focus on correcting one mechanic at a time, and don’t move on until the new mechanic is so thoroughly learned that you do it correctly without thinking about it.

(Shortform note: In contrast with Rotella’s advice, some authors argue that there may be psychological advantages to trying to change multiple bad habits at the same time. These authors contend that bad habits are often interlinked and that changing one linked habit without the others may lead you to relapse. For example, if you always smoke cigarettes while drinking, you may find it difficult to quit smoking unless you give up drinking too. In the context of a golf swing, bad habits can also be interlinked—looking up from the ball too late or too early can negatively affect your follow-through. In situations where you find that your bad habits are interconnected, it may be worth trying to change them in unison.)

Select Easy Shots

In addition to pragmatically focusing on short shots, Rotella recommends that you choose easy shots whenever possible, as you’re likely to feel more confident and relaxed when you take low-difficulty shots, which increases the likelihood that you’ll be able to hit the ball well. By contrast, when you choose more difficult shots, your perception of the shot’s difficulty can cause your confidence to waver, which can negatively affect your swing.

For example, suppose you’re a long way from the hole on your second shot on a par four. You’re torn between wanting to play a conservative shot that sets you up for an easy chip on, or more riskily trying to aim for the green, which you know is on the edge of your maximum range. In this scenario, Rotella recommends you choose the setup shot, as it’s easier and will make you feel more confident. On the other hand, if you aim for the riskier strategy and shoot for the green, your anxiety about the shot’s difficulty might lead you to take a bad swing.

(Shortform note: To choose easier shots, remember that certain types of shots are more mechanically complicated than others. Golf experts assert that chip shots are easier than pitches and putts are easier than chips. These experts argue that because of the relative mechanical simplicity of putts and chips, most golfers are much more consistent when hitting these types of shots. Whenever possible, choose a mechanically simple shot, as it will often be easier and more consistent than the alternatives.)

Select Your Shots in Advance

Before important rounds, Rotella recommends making a detailed, shot-by-shot plan for each hole. Choosing shots in advance is advantageous because you’re more likely to think clearly before a round than under the intense pressure of competition.

(Shortform note: While Rotella contends that it's difficult to think under pressure, others have argued that under certain conditions, stress can help you think more quickly and decisively. Research has shown that stressed minds process negative information much faster than calm minds do. Experts theorize that this enables you to quickly process and respond to dangerous situations—on the golf course, this tendency may help you respond to adverse conditions and recover from poor shots.)

To develop your plan, Rotella suggests walking the course a day or two before playing it. Walking the course allows you to better estimate the yardage, hazards, and lie you’ll be facing on key shots, along with any other factors that might affect your shots. As you walk the course, imagine the shots you’d like to hit on each hole. For each hole, choose a set of easy shots that make you feel confident. Doing so ensures you’ll have a safe, reliable plan when the big day arrives.

(Shortform note: If you’re unable to walk the course before a big round, consider using online tools to craft your strategy. Experts note that there are online guides to many popular courses and that when these aren’t available, Google Earth can be used to get a rough overview of a course. Using Google Earth, you can spot hazards and accurately measure distances, enabling you to plan your strategy without setting foot on the course.)