PSYCHOLOGY
When you practice, are you able to stay focused on a specific goal for a specified period of time? Or,
once you feel like you understand a specific skill and have success with it, do you stop working on
it and move on to something else? Or, do you find yourself distracted, bouncing around from one
technical thought to the next? Full sustained concentration on the skill being worked on is critical
to its development. Mastery of the early steps in the process of skill building allows for more rapid
and sustained growth.
5. Deliberate practice involves feedback and modification of efforts in response to that feedback.
Early in the training process much of the feedback will come from the teacher or coach, who will
monitor progress, point out problems, and offer ways to address those problems. With time and
experience students must learn to monitor themselves, spot mistakes, and adjust accordingly.
When you are practicing, how do you get feedback? Do you practice with a coach? Do you use
video analysis? A training aid? If not, how do you know when you’ve correctly performed the
intended behavior? If you’re not getting accurate and meaningful feedback, then you’re most likely
guessing about what’s actually happening putting your development as a golfer in the hands of
chance. Accurate feedback is critical, so make sure you’re getting it.
6. Deliberate practice both produces and depends on effective mental representations. Improving
performance goes hand in hand with improving mental representations; as one’s performance
improves, the representations become more detailed and effective, in turn making it possible to
improve even more. Mental representations make it possible to monitor how one is doing, both
in practice and in actual performance. They show the right way to do something and allow one to
notice when doing something wrong and to correct it.
If you’re not familiar with the term “mental representation”, think of it as the collection of thoughts,
feelings, and behaviors you associate with specific things in the world. For example, if I say the
word “mom”, instantly a “mental representation” of what “mom” means to you will come to your
mind. You might see an image of your mom in your mind and certain thoughts and feelings
might pop up as well. Mental representations don’t only exist for objects. Our brains naturally
develop them for behaviors as well. What Ericsson and his colleagues have discovered is that
expert performers have more well developed and comprehensive mental representations for the
behaviors they excel at than inexpert performers.
7. Deliberate practice nearly always involves building or modifying previously acquired skills by
focusing on particular aspects of those skills and working to improve them specifically; over time
this step-by-step improvement will eventually lead to expert performance. Because of the way
that new skills are built on top of existing skills, it is important for teachers to provide beginners
with the correct fundamental skills in order to minimize the chances that the student will have to
relearn those fundamental skills later when at a more advanced level.
Does the “expert” you’re working with focus on the importance of developing the fundamental
skills from which expert performance is built upon? Are you clear about what those fundamental
technical, mental, and physical skills are? If you are struggling to progress in the way you would
like, it might be worth getting some coaching and going back to the fundamentals.
18 | CSGA Links // July, 2017
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