Do you always shoot 4 under for nine?
When I was an assistant pro at Markland Wood back in the 1970’s, I had two pro’s over one day for a practice round for a tournament that the club was hosting.
As we played the front nine, I chatted away with them, giving them “the tour”, and I hardly paid any attention to my own game, and after nine holes I realized I had shot 4 under for the nine !
One of them remarked, “Do you always shoot 4 under for nine” ? Hardly ! I was generally a 76 shooter, but I had been so distracted from the “golf demons” as I was conversing with them, the untapped “relaxed concentration” that Tim Gallwey talks about in “The Inner Game of Golf” was obviously unleashed.
That often happens to many golfers, when they have “blown up” and “ruined” their score, at which point, they give up and just relax, not “caring” anymore, and then all of a sudden they start playing much better.
The trick is to get into that frame of mind right from the first hole, and ideally be able to do it every round. The best players can and do achieve that more often than not, and it’s one of the factors that seperates the great players from the great “range players”, i.e. players who strike the ball great on the range, but can’t take their game’s to the course.
There are many books written on how to achieve peak performance, whether it be in sports or any other activity. In his book “..His Key approach to golf”, Sam Snead talked about what he called detachment as being one of the attitudes necessary for a golfer to be able to compete effectively.
He wrote :
“A player feels on top of the world on one hole and ready for murder on the next, all because of one missed putt, or an unlucky lie, or a demoralizingly good shot by an opponent. To be consistently effective, you must put a certain distance between yourself and what happens to you out on the course. I’m not suggesting you can be indifferent to results: you must care intensely in order to score well in golf. But you also must protect yourself from the consequences when things don’t go as planned. That I call detachment”
In other chapters of the book he goes on to talk about how he combines “caring” with “not caring”, and also how his mind goes “blank” when it’s time to hit a golf shot.
It’s interesting to note that Sam didn’t write his book until he was 63 years old. At that point I guess he resigned himself to the fact that he couldn’t compete on the regular P.G.A. tour and was willing to give up some of his “secrets” 
Mike