Honest Assessment of Your Performance

Tiger Woods in his early career tied with several guys going into the last day and they just left him in a cloud of dust. And they asked him, “Well, Tiger what happened today?” He said, “While I did not score as well today as I had hoped, I feel that my performance forced my opponents to up their game to levels they have never seen before.”

I'll never forget that line, because what he was saying is even though he didn't shoot as good a score as he could, he forced his opponents to play better than had ever played before. That's a backhanded pat on his own back, and I gotta believe he believed every word of it.

Honest assessment. “Every now and then, for whatever reason, I just have one of those days.”

One of the quickest comments I've heard after not shooting quite as well as you could is just two words: “been better.”  But there, you miss an opportunity to make an affirmation.