{"id":10521,"date":"2026-05-30T11:45:23","date_gmt":"2026-05-30T11:45:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/10521\/"},"modified":"2026-05-30T11:45:23","modified_gmt":"2026-05-30T11:45:23","slug":"the-mental-exercise-you-should-go-through-after-every-round-of-golf-how-to-play-golf","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/10521\/","title":{"rendered":"The mental exercise you should go through after every round of golf | How To Play Golf"},"content":{"rendered":"

Golf Digest senior writer Alex Myers is on a one-year mission to see how good he can get at golf through daily training, practice and playing. Read more from his \u201cLate Scratch?\u201d series here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The drawback with doing a hands-on experiment like this project<\/a> is that sometimes the content can get in the way of potential progress. My first official event of 2026 led to a worthwhile story about all my (mostly avoidable) mistakes<\/a> and provided me with a solid blueprint for what not to do the next time I tee it up in a tournament. But when the goal is getting better, I learned later about a more succinct way to assess my rounds going forward.<\/p>\n

After playing in that qualifier, I reached out to my mental coach, Josh Nichols<\/a>, for some advice. The 2017 U.S. Mid-Am runner-up certainly has the tournament chops to help others and I found his words both insightful and encouraging. But he also gave me a journaling exercise to try.<\/p>\n

Luke Kerr-Dineen has written about how keeping a golf swing journal<\/a> is a constructive way of referencing back to what you’ve worked on in the past. And plenty of PGA Tour pros keep track of their thoughts, perhaps none more famously than Justin Thomas\u2019 writing out his yearly goals and then assessing how he did at the end of the season.<\/p>\n

Nichols suggested that after a round I write down three things that I did well, one thing I can improve, and how I plan to improve that one thing.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou’re kind of over-indexing from our normal negativity bias,\u201d Nichols says of the 3-to-1 positive-to-negative ratio. \u201cYou’re outweighing it with a few things you did really well that you’re highlighting. On all these calls that I do with players, it’s always, \u2018I played pretty good, but here I did this, this, this, this, and all these bad things, and here’s all these things I need to work on and how I still suck.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

But with those three things you did well, Nichols makes an important distinction.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not three things that went well, but three things I did well. That’s very different,\u201d says Nichols, who started doing this a decade ago at the suggestion of his coach, Robert Linville, the owner of Precision Golf School in Greensboro, N.C. \u201cSo three things that I did well, even if the result wasn\u2019t good.\u201d<\/p>\n

But while you want to keep the overall theme of the journal positive, you do want to focus on the negative as well if you\u2019re going to improve. To a point.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou limit it to one thing you didn\u2019t do well because we can only handle so much,\u201d Nichols says. \u201cAnd it\u2019s not one thing that shows me how bad I am at golf, but one thing I could improve\u2014and then specifically how can I improve that thing?\u201d<\/p>\n

Nichols says he often looks at his stats to find that one thing to work on, more proof that keeping stats is important<\/a> for planning what to practice. For me there’s a lot, but lag putting that day really jumped out.<\/p>\n

Nichols has gotten more nuanced with journaling through the years and suggests it\u2019s something you can do on a daily basis even if you\u2019re not playing golf to help with other aspects of your life.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs I evolved with this journal, it became more things like, I didn’t respond very well to that mistake. Or I was holding on too tight to results, and I was steering that shot on 17, I was playing pretty well, but then I guided it out there because I was getting protective. And so my answers got a little bit more process, mental-oriented, and more thoughtful and deeper as I went along,\u201d says Nichols. \u201cBut for your purposes, it doesn’t have to be all that. Drawing out one thing that you could improve is a lot better than rattling 15 things off the top of your head. Limit it to one.\u201d<\/p>\n

Taking Nichols\u2019 advice, I went ahead and did this exercise for that tough round at the MGA Public Links qualifier:<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not sure which was harder: Finding three things I did well or limiting myself to one thing I could improve. But writing it out, specifically the latter, gave me something concrete to work with (More on that putting drill later).<\/p>\n

Anyway, I’m going to give this journal thing a try going forward. And, hopefully, I’ll have more nice things to write about my next round.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Golf Digest senior writer Alex Myers is on a one-year mission to see how good he can get…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":10522,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[166,44,1069,2777,163,3484,82,4904],"class_list":["post-10521","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news","tag-game-improvement","tag-golf","tag-how-to","tag-instruction","tag-late-scratch","tag-mental-game","tag-story","tag-the-mental-exercise-you-should-go-through-after-every-round-of-golf"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10521","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10521"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10521\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10522"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10521"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10521"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10521"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}