Imagine you’re on a golf course playing in your first tournament of the new year. You are going into the final 3 holes with a 5-stroke lead and are all but guaranteed to win the tournament. Your confidence level is high as you step into the tee box, but then you slice your drive and it is in the rough. The confidence you just had is shaken and now losing the lead seems possible. 16 finishes as a bogey, 17 a double bogey, and 18 a triple bogey. What should’ve been a comfortable win now turned into a catastrophic loss. This would be choking at it’s finest.

Choking is not a new problem that athletes deal with, especially in the realm of golf. We see it happening at every level of competition. One bad hole turns into two, two turns into a bad back 9. If we could hit a reset button after a bad shot to refocus, and control our thoughts, then we could limit choking from spiraling out of control. The good news? There is a way for us to press a mental reset button and get things back on track. Before we dive into how we can do that, let’s go back first.

That first example might sound a bit familiar for those who know golf history. In 1996, Greg Norman went into Sunday at Augusta with a 6-stroke lead when he stepped into the first tee box. He ended the Master’s 5 strokes back of the winner Nick Faldo. Norman’s mindset that day was tainted from the start. He thought he was going to blow the lead and lived a self-fulfilling prophecy that day. Quite simply, his thoughts were a distraction that day. If he could’ve worked with a mental performance consultant beforehand to learn how to control his thoughts then he might’ve went home with a green jacket that day.

Greg Norman is a great example of how choking happens and why. The reason is different from one athlete to the next, but at the end of the day it comes to a couple of common causes. One reason can be over-focusing. After thousands and thousands of hours practicing our sports, our movements and actions become automatic, but when we choke we start to think about every little detail of what we are doing. That attentional focusing can be our demise if it goes too far. On the other side, having distracting thoughts or a lack of attentional focus can cause us to choke. If we are on the course thinking about what every other golfer is doing instead of the task at hand our performance suffers. A third common cause of choking goes back to our body’s fight or flight response. When we are in higher pressure situations, our mind and body might trigger our fight or flight response which causes the amygdala to signal the body to release adrenaline. This leads to an accelerated heart rate, rapid breathing, and attentional narrowing.

All of those causes have solutions to help reduce the chance of choking occurring. Each unique person will benefit from different strategies to help them overcome these common causes. The strategy that I choose to teach a majority of the athletes I consult with is a quick mindfulness exercise to lower heart rate and reset your focus to a single point. This reset technique is referred to as “the pause”. I learned this from Dr. Kadushin, a professor at Boston University, about 2 years ago and has been used in my daily practice since.

There are 2 main components to how I teach the pause to my athletes. First, deep breathing. Taking deep breaths allows our body to lower the heart rate and signal the amygdala that we are safe. So, if the sport situation we are in is stressful and triggers the fight or flight response, deep breathing is a great relaxation exercise to go to. The second component is a trigger word. I have my athletes come up with an extremely random word or phrase (i.e. pink elephant) to think about while they are going through their breathing cycle. The goal is to narrow your focus into just that word or phrase while you breath to stop your mind from wandering. This can help you stop worrying about what your opponents are doing, what you want to eat for dinner, what is going on in your swing, and relax your mind.

Instead of using a word, we have seen examples of athletes using visual cues to help them know when to reset. A now popular example is San Francisco 49ers Tight End George Kittle’s wrist tape. Kittle draws a red circle on his wrist tape and whenever he needs to reset he pushes his “reset button”. One of my athletes wrote a message on their lacrosse stick. It is important to remember that what works for one person to reset might not work for you. Play around with the pause, make it your own. Practice it during practice, throughout your day, in-between meetings or classes. Become great at being able to refocus in a moment through your trigger.

I want to leave you with one last example. Not of an athlete choking, but an athlete embracing the moment to put together a performance of a lifetime. In 2020, Dustin Johnson made history at the Master’s. He joined an elite club of golfers, that Greg Norman missed out on, to wear the green jacket. He didn’t just win the Master’s though, he dominated the tournament. He finished -20, setting a course record. DJ did this in a year with a lot of distractions, a ton of pressure, and opponents nipping at his heels. So how did he pull it off? He stayed in the moment. Johnson relied on his mindfulness training, not worrying about the scores of Smith, Im, or Thomas. His only focus was on what he could control, his shots, his putts, his score. He had the same doubters that Greg Norman did questioning why he has struggled at major tournaments. The difference was all in their approach to the mental side of the game.