- you breathe faster, your body tightens up, your heart rate increases and so on.

These stress messages you’re sending to your brain only make your body tighten up more sabotaging your abilities to perform properly. This unfortunate cycle will continue until you learn to break this broken record set on self-destruct.

In a tense situation the best way to regain your composure is to work in the opposite direction, to get your body to calm down, this in turn will allow your mind to calm down by taking several deep breathes, and by pushing away any negative thoughts.

There's a good method called "Treeing" which seems appropriate since you’re on the golf course with plenty of trees. What you do is take your emotions in this case negative thoughts and put them onto something else.

Some older cultures throughout the world have used this technique for centuries. They learned to pass their bad feelings or negative emotions to a tree, hence the name. So next time when you’re on the golf course and you’re losing your cool find a tree and push or touch it physically releasing your pressure that you’re feeling into the object and leave it there.

After you have dealt with the past it's time to move on to the future which in this case is a new hole, or shot at hand. Remember you can't change the past, but you can profoundly affect your future with the proper mind set. There's no longer a reason to carry all this emotional baggage to the next hole so let it go. So next time you see a player in the woods a lot during a round maybe they’re just getting rid of some issues that are bothering them.

This is all easier said than done, but like all things with a little practice and some discipline you'll be recovering from poor shots quicker and salvaging your round instead of going from bad to worse. The best players in the world all have their own particular methods for staying cool, so watch how they handle poor shots while they are in town.

It's traits like staying cool when everyone else is losing their heads that make the difference from being a good player to becoming a great player.