Scary Words for a Coach to Hear and What it Means
NOV 09, 2025
Golf has never been described as an easy game. Instead, it’s called challenging or even maddening. It requires physical skills, mental skills, emotional control and a strategic mind. Add to that different courses with unique layouts covered in a variety of grass grown at different lengths, slopes, wind, rain, heat, cold, bunkers, water hazards, and getting paired with different competitors every day. Nope, definitely not easy.
Then, you start coaching young people who say things like, “It’s an easy course (insert other words, such as shot, hole or field)”. These players are completely immersed in the pursuit of greatness and they work their tails off. Their dreams are big and their efforts match. Along the way, they can see improvement, but then have horrible days (insert words such as shots, holes or rounds) that remind them that golf isn’t easy. The questions start to swirl in their heads and the defense mechanisms begin. One of those is to declare what they face is easy. It’s a lot like the swagger before the fight we see from boxers. Remember what Mike Tyson said, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” He was usually the guy doing the punching, so he knows! Swagger should never be confused with confidence.
It’s so tough to be confident in yourself as a teen or a young 20-something. You’re trying to figure out who you are, what you want and what you do well. Your job is to figure out your place in the world and the path you want to take into your adulthood. There’s no way you can go through this confidently, because it’s all new and who knows if anything is the right choice. The world is full of possibilities and opportunities, but the choices sometimes overwhelm. This is the age group that I’ve coached most of my career.
I always tried to keep this in mind during the process of helping them grow as players and as confident adults. The whole idea of confidence is both overblown and the foundation for greatness. Confidence can’t be chased and it doesn’t appear out of nowhere. If you’re thinking of it, you don’t have it, because it’s a quality, not a product. It comes from a combination of readiness, process and presence. Let’s talk about these three things and then get to where we can circle back on the idea of “easy”.
Readiness: So many people talk about preparedness as the key to good play and confidence on the course, but it’s impossible to ever be as prepared as you want. Sure, you can practice your tail off, go through your check-list of equipment, have a great warm-up session, arrive to the first tee 10 minutes prior to your time in a focused mental state and then have something completely crazy happen for which you couldn’t prepare and suddenly, prepared is not the goal. You think I’m making this up, but after over 30 years of coaching, I’ve seen fog roll in, players fall ill, driver shafts snap, excruciating pre-shot routines from playing partners, pants split and rolled ankles on the way to the tee. Yep, all of these things happened and some at the most important times, such as the first US Open appearance or the final round of a tournament in the final group. It’s impossible to be completely prepared when you don’t know exactly what could happen. As they say, golf is a lot like life.
Readiness is the mental state of knowing preparedness is behind you and no longer a factor. You’ve done your best and here you are. It’s the ability to accept where you are and what you need to do to be successful, no matter the circumstances. Some of the best players I’ve coached didn’t possess the best physical skills, but their readiness to compete graded at an A+ when they stepped on the first tee.
What does the opposite of readiness look like? You’re very well prepared; your game is in good shape; you’re mentally focused; you’re healthy; you have your snacks and water; etc. Then, something happens that you didn’t anticipate and you lose your mind. In other words, you were ready for a perfect day, but you weren’t ready to compete. Competition means you rise to the occasion no matter what happens. The idea of a perfect day is parallel to things being easy.
Process: Process is on par with confidence as the most overused words and the most elusive to most players. If I were to define your process, I’d say it’s your choice of actions as you play the game. The game is played physically and athletically. All of your athleticism or actions start with your mental game. Your strategy, your choice of targets, your awareness of conditions, your vision of a putt or shot, your decision making on start lines, club choices, which option to take when in trouble, and what type of chip shot to hit are all ways your mental game is constantly working to provide you with a course of action. Your process is in place to simplify, clarify and provide pace to get you from your mental game to your physical game.
Great players have a process for everything. That frees them up to not spend energy on things that don’t deserve their energy. During the heat of competition, it assures them of not missing something. A great process allows a player to get their mindset into the proper states at the proper times. Your process might mean you check the lie, check the wind, check the hole location, get your Decade target, get the distance to the target, consider how the lie, conditions and your game combine to make the shot play a distance, choose a club, see the shot, maybe take a practice swing and hit it. That’s a list of 10 things. It’s a long process if it’s new to you, yet most tour players run through this process in about 30 seconds. By being loyal to this list and being attentive to each step, the pro is sure that decisions are made with all the available data and without a reliance upon situational emotions. They have the help of their caddy to assure they stay in it, but we all know they don’t have to listen.
On the other hand, many young players practice without using their process and then try to conjure it up in tournament play. They know their home course and always pull a 7 iron on this par 3. They forget to check conditions because they’re with their buddies and the music is playing. They go for every hole location, because it’s just a practice round and there’s no worry about making a score. Their actions follow their mental games just as the pros actions follow their mental games. The young players are mentally all over the place and their process jumps from having 3 steps on one shot to 8 steps on another. Remember my definition of process; your choice of actions you take when you play the game. Process doesn’t have to be a positive force! Simply saying you have a process doesn’t mean you stick to it. Your choice of actions before and after each shot you hit matter and if you’re in the habit of swearing or hanging your head after your shot, that’s your process. Your choice of actions matter. They matter in your travel, your fitness, your warm up prior to the round, your fueling with what you eat and drink, how you plot your strategy, in your decision making, in your awareness of the conditions and in your acceptance of your circumstances before, during and after your round. Remember, choice was one of the verbs in the definition of process. The other is play. How are you going to choose to play the game?
The final component of confidence is presence. I’m using the word in the context of being present. Here are some synonyms for it from Thesaurus.com
acumen, alertness, aplomb, calmness, cool, coolness, imperturbability, quickness, self-assurance, self-command, self-possession, sensibility, sobriety, watchfulness, wits
Better yet, here are some antonyms for it, also from Thesaurus.com
absence, agitation, confusion, distance, distress, reality, upset
Do you want to have the first set of characteristics when you play or the second list? We can talk about all of this in another blog, but for now, understand that presence is the goal.
A big part of confidence is simply being present in the moment. Your ability to not get caught up in a bad swing or a bad hole that upset you or confused you is crucial to your presence. Your ability to not get ahead of yourself and start thinking of results that are not reality at the moment is also important for your confidence. The ability to be able to say “How do I get out of here?” instead of “How did I get here?” is a simple mindset gut check. Are you HERE? Can you do the best you can with what you have from where you are? If so, you’ll play with confidence, but never once will you think of your confidence. By thinking of whether or not you’re confident, you’ll lose your presence.
Okay, so let’s get back to easy and why it scares me to hear it as a coach. Easy is a word used to try to gain confidence. The course is easy, the chip is easy, a 3-footer is easy, or the field is easy are all things I’ve heard from players I’ve coached. Sure, these statements are comparisons to past experiences, past results or physical skills needed. However, none of these judgments of what you’ll face have anything to do with confidence. Instead of talking about easy, I’d rather hear about readiness, process and presence. Golf will never be easy and your confidence will come from
your ability to adapt, be resilient, trust yourself and get the best from your game. This will only happen if you’re ready, process-oriented and present over every shot.
GolfJeanne Coaching 
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