How to Stay in the Present Mind, Control Anger, Nerves & Emotions in Golf

To stay in the present moment means that you have no concern for the outcome of the shot you are playing. You are so completely focussed on the task at hand that your mind is completely occupied, your body relaxed and you can play the shot confidently without worry. In the present your mind does not wander from the task at hand and think about bad results of a shot or past poor performances.

One of the big problems with not being in the present moment is that the golfer may allow their conscious mind to go back in time and think about a past poor performance and negative events, which lowers their confidence and ability to hit the shot confidently. An example of this would be: “I have missed a short putt just like this one twice already today, I don’t want to miss this one too!”

Just as bad is allowing your mind to wander into the future and worry about playing badly, or the consequences if you hit a bad shot. An example of this would be: “If I miss this putt then I lose the hole and match!”

Staying in the present mind is to be so completely absorbed in the moment that there is no room for past or future thinking that interferes with performance. A fairly simple sounding thing to do but far from it in reality unless you are a Zen Master!

The problem is that we have a part of our brain that is attempting to protect us in a rather bizarre way by warning us of past poor performance in the hope we don’t repeat it. “Watch out! Don’t slice it in the woods here!” may be a well intentioned warning but it’s very unhelpful when we are trying to stay calm, confident and in the zone I’m sure you will agree!

It is not that we want our minds to stop warning us of potential problems but untimely warnings that actually spoil performance can be done without. After all you would not want your mind forgetting to warn you about stepping in front of a bus now would you? A bad shot can bring humiliation, disappointment and anger so it is little wonder that our minds want to warn us against doing anything that could have a negative outcome, especially if it may be humiliating. We fear humiliation worse than death so it’s a powerful emotion that your mind wants to avoid.

Golf by it’s very nature is one of those sports where there is a lot of down time between shots and ample opportunity to get thinking about possible problems. In a sport that is fast paced and constantly moving you will become very focussed on the game and have no time for your mind to wander to “What if!”.

All sports have some time at some point to allow thinking to wander but golf is also a game where the ball is always stationary when it is played and our thoughts can wander negatively virtually all the time. Sports like tennis allow thoughts to wander between points but while the games are underway where actual shots are hit the players are much more absorbed naturally in the present. They will still need to keep their mind focussed between points, games and sets but sports like golf or snooker, pool and some others are even more challenging.

The faster the pace of the game means less opportunity for your mind to wander out of the present time at the crucial moment, just as the ball (or other object such as a puck) is played.

Developing a deep focus ability in order to control your thinking and keep the mind focussed in on specifics like targeting is ultimately a learnable skill. The technique called “anchoring” from the field of NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) is a highly effective at triggering and controlling your emotional states by the Mental Game of Golf Now we have much more control.

The World Cheapest Laptop

India has developed the world’s cheapest touch screen laptop, which is expected to cost under £20.

In reality, the Sakshat has more in common with the Apple iPad than a laptop because it gives only basic features.

These include Web browsing, PDF viewing and videoconferencing, although it has been designed to allow for future customisation and development.

The computer has been developed as an affordable option for students and was, itself, designed by students at the Indian Institute of Technology and the Indian Institute of Science.

India’s Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal said, “We have reached a stage that, today, the motherboard, its chip, the processing, connectivity, all of them cumulatively, cost around Rs1,500 (£20), including memory, display – everything.”

Sibal said he is now inviting entrepreneurs and manufacturers to come forward to produce the Sakshat. He added that the price had been calculated to cover the complete production cycle but he hoped that economies of scale might bring the price down to £13 or even as low as £7 when the devices go on sale next year.

The initiative to produce an extremely cheap computer was triggered as part of the Indian government’s National Mission on Education Through Information and Communication Technology, which aims to provide high quality digital content free of cost to all learners in the country.

About three per cent of India’s annual budget is spent on education, and literacy rates have improved in over 64 per cent of its 1.2 billion population. But most state-run schools still have inadequate facilities. The government hopes e-learning resources will help to improve that situation.

Opera 10 Review(It’s Already Released)

Opera has always been packed with features, but it has yet to garner the same kind of publicity thatInternet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome enjoy. And that’s a shame, because version 10 of the venerable Web browser adds a slew of clever features that anyone who surfs the Web will welcome.

Like previous versions, Opera 10 is fast, configurable, and clean-looking–and it offers just about everything you’d expect in a modern browser, including a pop-up blocker, plug-ins, an RSS reader, and an antiphishing tool. Unlike competing browsers, it also has a surprisingly good built-in e-mail client, with support for POP3 and IMAP servers, the ability to create incoming message rules, and a spam filter. And, once again in this version, Opera bristles with features too numerous to mention in this short review, yet it packs them all into an elegant, simple-to-use interface.

The new features don’t clutter up the browser or make it more difficult to use. Overall, Opera 10 is sleeker-looking than previous versions. But Opera’s added beauty is more than skin-deep. Tab handling, for example, has improved, in that you can now configure the browser so that thumbnails of all of your tabs appear above each tab; the thumbnails are resizable as well.

Another worthy addition is the new Speed Dial feature (pictured above). Speed Dial improves onSafari 4‘s similar Top Sites feature by virtue of being more configurable. You can customize the page that appears whenever you open a new tab in Opera so that anywhere from 4 to 24 of your favorite Web sites display as thumbnails. That way, you can more quickly get to the sites you visit most often, with a simple click on a thumbnail. The feature is turned on by default, and the settings seem to offer no way to turn it off–not that you’d want to, though, because it has no downside.

Opera has always displayed pages quickly, and the newest version is even speedier, particularly on interactive sites that use a lot of resources, such as Facebook and Gmail. Opera claims a 40 percent increase in speed, but we couldn’t verify that.

Among other new features are an inline spelling checker (which will be particularly welcome to bloggers) and Opera Turbo, a compression technology that Opera says will allow you to surf faster on slow connections, such as via dial-up. As a broadband user, I was not able to test this feature, so I can’t vouch for it.

Surprisingly, given how many features Opera has, it still lacks one feature that IE, Firefox, andChrome all have: a privacy mode that makes all traces of your Web-surfing session vanish after you close the browser. If such a feature is important to you, Opera isn’t the best choice.

Should you replace your current browser with Opera? Which browser you use is a personal decision, so we can’t give a one-size-fits-all answer. But anyone who has ever wished that their browser were faster and more feature-packed will certainly want to give Opera 10 a try.