Better Golf Starts in Your Mind — Text Sandy free →
By Sandy Dunlop — Better Game Golf
Stories are not decoration. In my experience, they are one of the most powerful transmission systems human beings have ever invented for getting wisdom from one person to another. That is exactly why I created the 100 Scenarios series inside Better Game Golf. Each scenario is a short story, carefully chosen to do something that instruction alone cannot do: it reaches into your experience, finds something you already recognise, and shifts it. If you have ever wondered how stories can change the way you play, the answer is that they work at a level that tips and techniques simply cannot touch. They carry wisdom encoded in experience, and that is a very different thing from knowledge.
Long before there were coaching manuals or swing apps, there were stories. In many of the great apprenticeship traditions throughout history, the moment a young person moved from outsider to initiate was marked by storytelling rituals. A master would sit with the apprentice and tell the stories of the trade. Not the technical manual. Not the list of rules. The stories. The ones about what it actually felt like when things went wrong, when the pressure was unbearable, when the temptation to quit was real. These were the initiations. They said: you are not alone in what you are about to face, and here is what it looked like when someone else faced it too.
I think about this every time I work with a golfer who is trying to cross a threshold. Because that is exactly what improvement is. It is a crossing. You are moving from one version of yourself as a golfer to another. You are going literally where you have never gone before, and the guide cannot travel for you. But the guide can tell you what to expect. That is one of the deepest functions of a scenario: it maps terrain you have not yet walked. And in my work, what I want for every golfer is to be better than they ever thought they could be. Not Rory McIlroy. Not Scottie Scheffler. You surprising you. These scenarios are part of how that journey begins.
There is a reason military units have always had their stories. When a soldier joins a regiment, they are told the great stories of the battalion. Intense bravery. Extraordinary self-sacrifice. Moments when everything was on the line and someone held. Those stories are not told for entertainment. They are told because the people telling them know that under the unimaginable pressure of the front line, knowledge will not be enough. What holds is something deeper. It is the felt sense, carried in story, of what it looks like to respond well when everything is against you.
In golf, the pressure is obviously of a different order, but the psychological mechanism is identical. There are all sorts of little scenarios about Ben Hogan's practice, about Nicklaus's behaviour before every shot. These little mini stories bring to life some of the qualities and values that matter when it counts. They do not tell you what to do. They show you what it looks like when someone does it. That is a transmission of wisdom, not information. And it is the kind of transmission that has the best chance of being available to you when you are standing over a shot that matters and your nervous system is fighting you. See also my piece on choking in golf for more on what happens to performance under that kind of pressure.
Every great journey story has them. The moments of setback, the unsolvable challenges, the impossible situations. The failure. In myth and storytelling, we would call them the Dark Night of the Soul, the Dark Night of the Adventurer. They are not incidental to the story. They are the story. And what they say to anyone who hears them is: this is what the journey looks like. It is not a smooth upward line. There are times when it feels like things are falling apart, when you are going nowhere, when progress itself seems to have reversed.
In golf improvement, I see this constantly. A golfer starts to genuinely change something deep, something in the way they move or the way they think, and for a period it gets worse before it gets better. The old brain maps are being disrupted. The proprioceptive system is reporting that something feels wrong, because what feels right is wrong and what feels right is wrong... and what is wrong feels right. This is faulty sensory perception, and it is completely normal on this journey, but it is terrifying if you were not warned. A scenario that maps this territory in advance does something no instruction can do. It says: yes, this is part of it. Keep going. That is what the Dark Night scenario is for. It is not a failure. It is a landmark.
The great Chinese military historian Li Ching wrote about the importance of assailing the enemy's mental equilibrium in battle. I think about that phrase a lot in the context of golf, because what it highlights is this word: equilibrium. Centredness. Groundedness. That vital state at the core of performance. And what these scenarios are also for is preparing golfers for the unpredictable situations that will assail that equilibrium. The obvious ones are weather, traffic, illness. But also slow play, unexpected delays, a bad bounce at a critical moment. Things that have nothing to do with your swing and everything to do with your state of mind.
What we know from how to play your best golf when you're dreading the round is that the golfing nervous system responds to threat before it responds to reason. If you have already encountered a scenario about what to do when your playing partner is taking forty-five minutes per hole, you have a resource. If you have never imagined it, your equilibrium takes the full hit. These scenarios are, in a sense, a form of mental rehearsal. Not of perfect shots, but of real conditions. The wisdom tradition has always known this. We just stopped telling the stories.
(Try: Equilibrium Under Pressure — available in the Training section of the app)
We live in a world saturated with golf information. Tips, drills, swing analyses, launch monitor data. And yet most golfers who consume all of it are not significantly better. I think this matters deeply, and it is one of the reasons I built the scenarios series the way I did. Information gives you knowledge. A scenario gives you something closer to wisdom, and wisdom is different. It comes from experience. It is encoded in story. It lives in a part of you that responds to narrative rather than instruction.
Consider what happens when you read a technical tip versus when you hear a story about a golfer who faced the same situation you are dreading and found their way through it. The tip arrives in your conscious mind. The story does something more. It finds a resonance. It lands somewhere deeper. And when you are on the course and the situation arises for real, what you can access is not the cognitive tip but the felt memory of the story. This is why many cultures throughout history placed storytelling rituals at the very centre of their most important transitions. The wisdom that is encoded in story is more durable, more portable, and more available under pressure than knowledge has ever been.
What has happened in modernity is that we have largely lost initiation rituals. The formal ceremony of being welcomed into a community of practice, told its great stories, and warned about its great challenges, has mostly disappeared. We get onboarding documents instead. We get YouTube tutorials. And there is nothing wrong with those things as far as they go, but they are not the same. They do not carry the same charge. They do not mark a threshold in the same way.
What I am trying to do with the 100 Scenarios is a modest attempt to replace something that has gone missing. To bring back, in a small way, the function of those storytelling rituals in the context of golf improvement. Each scenario is a little piece of that wisdom tradition, compressed into a short story, designed to find the golfer who needs it. Some of them you will hear and simply nod. Yes, I get that. But it is also possible that some of them will be transformative. They will get you going in another direction. They will land in a way you did not expect. That is the power of a little mini story. That is the power of the scenario format done well.
Inside Better Game Golf, the 100 Scenarios series is built to be used over a sustained period of practice. Each week brings a new set of scenarios, and together they cover the terrain of what actually happens to golfers on the journey from here to better than they ever thought they could be. Some cover the mental game directly. Some address physical habits and the difficulty of breaking what your brain has stored as the familiar and safe response. Some are about the journey itself, the setbacks, the plateaus, the moments of apparent regression that are actually signs of deep change happening.
These are not anecdotes loosely collected. They are chosen because each one does a specific job. They are short enough to hold your attention and long enough to let the wisdom settle. And importantly, they work alongside the rest of the Better Game Golf programme: the breath work, the body work, the mental and emotional disciplines that give you practical agency over your golfing body mind. If you want to explore the full range of what this programme covers, you can start your free 7-day trial and let Sandy's AI caddie walk you through the first scenarios and exercises.
One of the practical realities of golf is that you cannot take a coaching manual onto the fairway. You cannot pause mid-round to re-read a technical chapter. But you can carry a story. A well-constructed scenario, once it has landed properly, becomes part of your resources. It is retrievable. It is available when your equilibrium is under assault. It is available when the four-footer matters and your hands are telling you things your brain does not want to hear. I have seen this happen repeatedly with golfers doing this work. The scenario about the missed shot and what to do in the next sixty seconds suddenly becomes real. Not as a memory of advice, but as a felt sense of: I know this moment. Someone else was here, and here is what they did.
That is why, if you are looking for all my thinking on the mental side of golf, you will find all mental game articles here. The scenarios live inside that world, alongside pieces like the 4-step reset every golfer needs after a bad shot and the art of minimising bad. They are all part of the same transmission.
(Try: The 100 Scenarios Library — available in the Training section of the app)
A golf tip is a piece of information. It tells you what to do with a specific part of your body or your swing at a specific moment. It arrives in the conscious mind and is useful as far as it goes. A scenario is something different in kind, not just in format. It is a short story that carries wisdom encoded in experience. What I have found in my work is that when a golfer reads or hears a well-constructed scenario about a situation they will face on the course, something happens that a tip cannot replicate. The story lands somewhere deeper. It creates a felt memory. And when the real situation arrives on the course, what the golfer can access is not a cognitive instruction but a lived resonance with the scenario. That is a more durable resource under pressure. That is the difference between knowledge and wisdom, and it is central to why scenarios are at the heart of this series inside Better Game Golf.
Because the journey to being better than you ever thought you could be is long, varied, and full of unexpected terrain. One scenario cannot cover the ground. Over 100, you start to build a complete map of what this journey actually looks like: the setbacks, the breakthroughs, the moments when equilibrium is assailed, the Dark Night of the Adventurer, the unexpected delays and disruptions that have nothing to do with your swing but everything to do with your state of mind. Each scenario does a specific job. Some will resonate immediately. Some you will file away and suddenly find available three months later when the situation they described arrives for real. The series as a whole is an attempt to replace, in a modest way, the storytelling rituals that many cultures used to transmit the wisdom of a practice to those new to it. It is not a comprehensive technical manual. It is something more like an initiation.
The great Chinese military historian Li Ching wrote about the importance of assailing the enemy's mental equilibrium in battle. I use that phrase a lot because what it names is exactly what happens to golfers under pressure. Your equilibrium, your centredness, your groundedness, which is so core to performance, gets assailed. By the situation. By the weather. By slow play. By your own thoughts about what a bad result will mean. And if you were not prepared for that assault, it lands with its full force. A scenario that has already mapped that territory changes the situation. You have been told, in story form, what to expect. You are not facing it cold. That preparation does not remove the pressure, but it means your equilibrium has a better chance of holding. The scenarios work alongside practical tools like breath work and pre-shot routines to give you real resources in real moments.
I think this is genuinely possible, and I also think it depends on the story and the golfer and the moment. What I say about the scenarios is that many of them will be relevant. You will hear them and say yes, I get that. But it is also possible that some of them will be transformative. They will get you going in another direction. Not every scenario will do that for every golfer. But some will land in a way that shifts something. That is the power of mini stories. They find the person who needs them. What I am not claiming is that a story alone is sufficient. The scenarios work inside a broader programme that includes body work, breath work, mental skills, and the full golfing body mind approach. Story is one transmission channel among several. But it is a powerful one, and it is one that most golf instruction completely ignores.
In myth and storytelling, the Dark Night of the Soul or the Dark Night of the Adventurer is the point in the journey where the hero faces what appears to be insurmountable failure. Things have not gone to plan. Progress has reversed. The way forward is not visible. In golf improvement, this maps directly onto something very real. When you are genuinely trying to change deep habits, the brain resists. What feels right is wrong and what is wrong feels right. That is faulty sensory perception, and it is a real physiological phenomenon, not a sign of failure. For a period, things may feel worse before they feel better. A golfer who was not warned about this often gives up at exactly the moment when they were closest to a real shift. A scenario that maps this territory in advance does something invaluable. It says: this is a landmark, not a dead end. Keep going. That is why the Dark Night scenarios are among the most important in the series.
The scenarios series is one element inside a full programme rooted in what I call the golfing body mind. The programme draws on three systems thinking approaches: the Initial Alexander Technique for integrated movement, Psychosynthesis for the undivided self, and the Eastern disciplines of Yoga, Zen and Tai Chi for states of mind. The 7-day introductory course covers breath work, body work, mental work, imagination work, emotion work, spirit work, and soul work. The scenarios live alongside all of that as a wisdom transmission layer. They provide the stories that give context, meaning, and felt preparation for what the exercises are building practically. Together, these elements support a journey whose only promised destination is that you become better than you ever thought you could be. Not a guaranteed score. Not a specific handicap. You, surprising you.
Start your free 7-day trial at bettergamegolf.com — let Sandy's AI caddie walk you through these concepts on your next round.
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