{"id":1068574,"date":"2026-07-04T19:30:51","date_gmt":"2026-07-04T19:30:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/1068574\/"},"modified":"2026-07-04T19:30:51","modified_gmt":"2026-07-04T19:30:51","slug":"some-of-the-best-golfers-in-the-world-have-done-this-mental-exercise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/1068574\/","title":{"rendered":"Some of the best golfers in the world have done this mental exercise"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Peak newsletter<\/strong> \ud83e\udde0 | This is an excerpt from The Athletic\u2019s weekly newsletter covering the mental side of sports. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/athletic\/newsletters\/peak\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\">Sign up here<\/a>\u00a0to receive the Peak newsletter directly in your inbox.<\/p>\n<p>When Julie Elion first meets with prospective clients, she gives them two prompts:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Tell me what you\u2019re great at mentally.<\/li>\n<li>Then tell me where you need to improve.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Elion is a mental performance specialist who works with some of the best golfers in the world, including Justin Thomas and Wyndham Clark, the winner of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/athletic\/7381331\/2026\/06\/21\/wyndham-clark-us-open-winner-shinnecock-hills\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\">the 2026 U.S. Open<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Her goal:<\/strong> help golfers become more conscious of themselves. Those two questions are the starting point.<\/p>\n<p>She usually suggests 10 items for each of the two lists, but that number is arbitrary. Take a minute and try it.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"aligncenter wp-image-7416163 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/alex-trebek-trebek.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"640\" height=\"334\"\/><\/p>\n<p>If you struggled to come up with 10 things you\u2019re great at mentally, then you are like \u201c75 to 90 percent\u201d of Elion\u2019s clients, she said.<\/p>\n<p>The \u201cneeds improvement\u201d list is usually much easier (and longer). That\u2019s why the wording of the question was important to her: \u201cDon\u2019t tell me what you\u2019re bad at. I want to know what you want to improve.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>Here\u2019s the really interesting thing, though:<\/strong> Elion told me she\u2019s never had a golfer who was ranked in the top 50 in the world not be able to tell her 10 things they\u2019re good at mentally.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe ones way below that,\u201d she said, \u201cjust go on and on about what they need to improve on.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s a bit of a chicken-or-egg question: Are the best golfers able to come up with 10 good things because they\u2019ve been successful? Or did they experience success because they can identify the good parts about themselves?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Elion\u2019s take:<\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\">\u201cI think elite athletes aren\u2019t afraid to acknowledge what they work on and how good they are and how they love competing and how they just want to improve. They\u2019re usually pretty good at acknowledging what\u2019s true inside themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s the point of the two-list exercise: to find what\u2019s true inside. Elion describes it as \u201cstarting to excavate in an honest way with yourself.\u201d I first came across the idea of the two lists in Elion\u2019s book, \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.simonandschuster.com\/books\/Mastering-Your-Mental-Game\/Julie-Elion\/9781668202050\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener noreferrer\">Mastering Your Mental Game<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The good list is important; it reinforces strengths and provides a foundation for mental renovations. But the improvement list is the one from which she works.<\/p>\n<p>She suggests selecting one item from the list and then zooming in to create tools and a plan to improve it.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s really the beginning of knowing yourself and working on it,\u201d she said. \u201cJust like we go to the gym and try to eat better. It\u2019s one thing to state that, and it\u2019s another thing to make a decision that you\u2019re going to do that, and then it\u2019s another thing to have tasks that keep you on track.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>One more example:<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>She had a golfer once who wrote on his list that he wanted to improve his anxiety on the first tee. He projected what he thought people were thinking as he stood over the ball: I can\u2019t wait to see this swing. He would feel self-conscious and embarrassed.<\/p>\n<p>As a result, his nerves were dreadful.<\/p>\n<p>Sure enough, Elion and the golfer looked at the data and realized he was bogeying most of the first holes on the first day of tournaments.<\/p>\n<p>The question was how they were going to get rid of those first-tee jitters.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Elion\u2019s solution:<\/strong> have the golfer intentionally hit his first tee shot into the water.<\/p>\n<p>It was during a pro-am event, not a major tournament, so the stakes weren\u2019t as high. She had him imagine it: his shaking hands, how he would feel in his body, what he would say.<\/p>\n<p>When he got to the first tee, she wanted him to shake hands with his playing partners that day and look them in the eye. To remind himself: We are all human. We all have parts of ourselves or our game that we struggle with.<\/p>\n<p>Then he smoked the ball into the water.<\/p>\n<p>Afterward, Elion said, \u201cHe realized that whatever was flowing up in terms of embarrassment was so much bigger than reality.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/athletic\/7292172\/2026\/05\/20\/jack-crawford-nfl-standup-comedy-failure\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\">It wasn\u2019t that bad<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cHe reports as of this week that it\u2019s gone,\u201d she told me recently. \u201cIt could come back.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s the way it goes with the mental side of sports. But the list is a good place to start.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/athletic\/newsletters\/peak\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\">Sign up here<\/a>\u00a0to receive the Peak newsletter directly in your inbox.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Peak newsletter \ud83e\udde0 | This is an excerpt from The Athletic\u2019s weekly newsletter covering the mental side of&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1068575,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[4106],"tags":[2826,131080,79,25711,16,15],"class_list":["post-1068574","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-golf","tag-golf","tag-peak","tag-sports","tag-sports-business","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116863372424537974","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1068574","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1068574"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1068574\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1068575"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1068574"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1068574"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1068574"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}