Focus on attitude for success

This week the Royal Golf Club's PGA Teaching Professional, Martin Robinson, gives you tips on mental preparedness

I was fortunate enough this week to play golf with retired soccer star Lee Sharpe, a former English international and Manchester United winger.

I am always fascinated to speak to sportsmen about what it takes to be successful, what qualities and circumstances are needed to achieve greatness?

I have found that these qualities often transcend sports. How can some of his lessons learned on the football pitch and the locker room help you on the golf course?

He told me of a manager he once had who actually instilled a loss in confidence in the team through just a few misjudged words and actions.

At the start of one season during a first team talk the boss suggested that the team was good enough to avoid relegation (not finish in the bottom three). The squad of players, however, thought beforehand that they could finish in the top six.

That is the golfing equivalent of telling yourself that you are good enough to break 100 when your handicap is 18 and a good round would be to break 90!

Why would you want to place a limit on your performance by instilling such a defeatist attitude on yourself or your team?

Set your sights high, aim to achieve the best score you can on every hole you play and don't give any thought to your overall score until you have finished, the same applies to each shot you play, think about which part of the green you would like to hit instead of simply hoping to hit the green, always focus on a small target instead of an area.

Throughout the season Lee's manager at the time (he played for a host of clubs, home and abroad) also would insist on showing the team all their defensive mistakes straight after the game and would play videos of the team they were about to play, scoring goals, immediately before the coming game.

If you can't see the harm in this to a player's mentality let me put it in a golfing context. Before each round you play, you remind yourself of how good your opponents are and think about your weaknesses - remember your state of mind has a direct link to how you physically perform. If you feel inadequate, guess what? You are going to perform that way!

Let's break this state of mind down further, after each hole you think about what you did wrong and why it happened, you don't have a week to digest this like a footballer, you have a matter of seconds, you will go into the next shot thinking about the past, negative results instead of positive, cluttered instead of focused - certainly not a state conducive to your best performance.

Before you go out to play a round or before you hit a shot, you should play vivid images of success in your mind, particularly when you find yourself starting to think about bad performances from the past.

If the last thing in your mind before every shot is seeing the shot exactly as you would like to execute it, your chances of success are at their highest. Lee's years at Man United were the most successful of his career and he assured me that the whole team had an invincible winning mentality, and they only thought of success.

If you change the way you think the rewards will follow.