The mental exercise you should go through after every round of golf

Golf Digest senior writer Alex Myers is on a one-year mission to see how good he can get at golf through daily training, practice and playing. Read more from his “Late Scratch?” series here.

The drawback with doing a hands-on experiment like this project is that sometimes the content can get in the way of potential progress. My first official event of 2026 led to a worthwhile story about all my (mostly avoidable) mistakes and provided me with a solid blueprint for what not to do the next time I tee it up in a tournament. But when the goal is getting better, I learned later about a more succinct way to assess my rounds going forward.

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Keep a journal

After playing in that qualifier, I reached out to my mental coach, Josh Nichols, for some advice. The 2017 U.S. Mid-Am runner-up certainly has the tournament chops to help others and I found his words both insightful and encouraging. But he also gave me a journaling exercise to try.

Luke Kerr-Dineen has written about how keeping a golf swing journal is a constructive way of referencing back to what you’ve worked on in the past. And plenty of PGA Tour pros keep track of their thoughts, perhaps none more famously than Justin Thomas’ writing out his yearly goals and then assessing how he did at the end of the season.

Nichols suggested that after a round I write down three things that I did well, one thing I can improve, and how I plan to improve that one thing.

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“You’re kind of over-indexing from our normal negativity bias,” Nichols says of the 3-to-1 positive-to-negative ratio. “You’re outweighing it with a few things you did really well that you’re highlighting. On all these calls that I do with players, it’s always, ‘I played pretty good, but here I did this, this, this, this, and all these bad things, and here’s all these things I need to work on and how I still suck.’”

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But with those three things you did well, Nichols makes an important distinction.

“It’s not three things that went well, but three things I did well. That’s very different,” says Nichols, who started doing this a decade ago at the suggestion of his coach, Robert Linville, the owner of Precision Golf School in Greensboro, N.C. “So three things that I did well, even if the result wasn’t good.”

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Keep it simple

But while you want to keep the overall theme of the journal positive, you do want to focus on the negative as well if you’re going to improve. To a point.

“You limit it to one thing you didn’t do well because we can only handle so much,” Nichols says. “And it’s not one thing that shows me how bad I am at golf, but one thing I could improve—and then specifically how can I improve that thing?”

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Nichols says he often looks at his stats to find that one thing to work on, more proof that keeping stats is important for planning what to practice. For me there’s a lot, but lag putting that day really jumped out.

Nichols has gotten more nuanced with journaling through the years and suggests it’s something you can do on a daily basis even if you’re not playing golf to help with other aspects of your life.

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“As I evolved with this journal, it became more things like, I didn’t respond very well to that mistake. Or I was holding on too tight to results, and I was steering that shot on 17, I was playing pretty well, but then I guided it out there because I was getting protective. And so my answers got a little bit more process, mental-oriented, and more thoughtful and deeper as I went along,” says Nichols. “But for your purposes, it doesn’t have to be all that. Drawing out one thing that you could improve is a lot better than rattling 15 things off the top of your head. Limit it to one.”

Taking Nichols’ advice, I went ahead and did this exercise for that tough round at the MGA Public Links qualifier:

I’m not sure which was harder: Finding three things I did well or limiting myself to one thing I could improve. But writing it out, specifically the latter, gave me something concrete to work with (More on that putting drill later).

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Anyway, I’m going to give this journal thing a try going forward. And, hopefully, I’ll have more nice things to write about my next round.

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