How Not To Choke

Sports psychologist Bob Rotella says the secret to great performances--in golf and in the boardroom--is in the mind.

By Monte Burke, Forbes
November 26, 2007

The fourth hole at Glenmore Country Club in Keswick, Va. is a very long par 3 and rife with danger. From the tee box the green looks as tiny as a tea saucer and has two sand traps guarding its front. A thicket of high grass lines the left of the hole and a creek snakes along the right.

I grip my 2-iron and step toward the ball, trying mightily to block out negative thoughts. "I want you to focus only on your target," says the man standing a few feet away. Coming from a golfing buddy that would be a wisecrack, but this is from Robert Rotella, sports psychologist. We're a few holes into our session, the same drill he's performed for 100 of the world's best professional golfers.

According to Rotella, the trap, grass and creek are just distractions, manifestations of my self-critical conscious brain, which needs to be sublimated in favor of my more intuitive and instinctual unconscious brain. I'm supposed to focus only on the flagstick and visualize the ball getting there. I let it rip. The ball flies off the club head and goes straight ... into the thick grass, where it will remain, gone for good. Score one for life's distractions. "Hey, you struck that really well," Rotella says, cheerfully.

Rotella, a trim 58-year-old with dark, bushy eyebrows and deeply etched laugh lines, has fashioned a career out of teaching the virtues of optimism. His brand of therapy owes more to Norman Vincent Peale than to Sigmund Freud, but there is scientific support for the power of positive thinking. Psychologist Albert Bandura of Stanford University has written extensively about the connection between positive thoughts and better sports performance, demonstrating that belief in oneself improves motor skills.

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