Concentration on the golf course

Joyce Wethered, an English golfer whose heyday was in the 1920s, and is regarded as one of the best female golfers of all time, was on the green and putting in the 1920 English Open when a train came roaring by. (Golf courses in those days were built next to rail lines to make it easy to get to the course, since few people had cars.) The story goes, as an example of her superior power of concentration, that she was so wrapped up in her putt that she never noticed the train.

But let’s think about this for a moment. Trains make lots of noise. When one goes by and it’s less than 100 feet away, it’s loud, and you hear it. If, however, you’re truly concentrating with a moving mind, the noise won’t bother you. You won’t pay attention to it because it’s irrelevant to what you’re trying to accomplish. That’s what happened to her.

When you are truly concentrating, your power of perception increases. You notice more things. Along with that, though, comes filtering out information that is not relevant to your task at hand. Your moving mind attends to whatever is important and the rest gets discarded.

We all think we know what it means to concentrate. We “bear down,” “zero in.” We force our mind to pay attention to one thing and fight to exclude distractions. We are taught from an early age that trying hard and concentrating are the same thing. We continue to concentrate in this way not because it works, but because it is what we were taught.

We have learned that since the body must do hard work to achieve results, so must the mind. We are also aware that we seldom concentrate in this way, because, quite frankly, most of us avoid hard work if we can.

This is all a misunderstanding of what it means to concentrate. There are many other misunderstandings. Concentration is the easiest thing in the world to do. It’s nothing more than being able to maintain your mental focus without pause.

-- from The Golfing Self

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