How should Sergio Garcia cope with his critics?

“If you have no critics you’ll likely have no success”

Malcolm X

I’ve written about Sergio many times before. Like Phil Mickelson, the level of natural talent is huge and it has been very painful to see his recent slump and even more painful to see him blaming his “luck” and acting a little like a spoilt brat at last years British Open.

But it’s clear that he is a sensitive soul and in the light of my recent posts about dealing with negative swing thoughts Sergio clearly needs to toughen up a bit in this area. His post tournament interview comments were revealing.

When asked about how he coped with criticism and the media he replied:

“It definitely gives me something to prove. You’re going to criticise the best player in the history of golf (Tiger Woods), so how are you not going to criticise somebody else who is smaller than that? The only thing I can do is keep getting better so that I make your job harder to be able to criticise me. I know when I’m putting badly and when I’m putting well, so nobody else needs to tell me. There have been times when you doubt yourself. You don’t know if you’re working on the right things.

The only thing this tells me is to keep working hard and believe in myself”

The problem with much of that statement is that he clearly cares far too much about the media. He lets the comments get to him. And the concept of working hard to prove the media wrong or provide them with less to criticise is ludicrous (even though we can all be guilty of this). What Sergio needs to do is just focus on his game and forget about the media. Look how he even regards himself as “smaller” than Tiger – all that does is help to reinforce in his own mind that Tiger is “the man” and cannot be beaten. He must (and granted that isn’t easy) forget about Tiger and do this for himself and the goals that he sets himself.

I say this from the perspective of receiving a lot of criticism early in my challenge for even “daring to dream” and I did let it get to me – no doubt about it. But, by the end of the year, I had worked so hard at this area of my game that I had simply no interest in metaphorically sticking two fingers up at the naysayers who said it couldn’t be done. By that stage it was purely about me and my challenge and that provides immense clarity. I fear that until Sergio truly does “believe” and really can ignore the media then he will still struggle with this regardless of how hard he works and his undoubted incredible talent.

I’ve written about this before but there was one book that really helped me out with this process. It’s not exactly an easy read but the lessons inside are incredibly valuable. I recommend and buy it relentlessly for my business clients since the concept of not caring what others think and focusing on the goal or task in hand is one of the most crucial skills in all areas of life.

I cannot recommend it highly enough and if I could get an address for Sergio I’d send him a copy myself.

Thick Face Black Heart

The ultimate manifestation of the concepts in the book are what I term the “Tiger smirk”. This is the smirk he puts on when being criticised by a news reporter. It just oozes self-belief. Self-belief built up by years of hard work coupled with an incredibly focused and strong mind. A mind that really doesn’t care what others think.