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Mastering Your Mental Game: Secrets from My Twenty-Five Years on the PGA Tour―A Practical Guide to Improving Your Performance in Sports, Work, and Life
A behind-the-scenes sage of the golf world and renowned sports psychologist reveals her methods to achieving elite performance in sports, work, and life, drawing from her experience with top PGA Tour earners and championship winners.
Over the past twenty-five years Julie Elion has been the silent force behind some of the most prominent athletes of our time. Her clients on the PGA Tour, who have included Justin Thomas, Max Homa, and Wyndam Clark, have racked up over $500 million in career earnings and twenty-five major championship wins. Known as “Stealth” for her discreet but potent coaching style, Elion has been honing her unique methods for decades. Now, she’s ready to share her winning strategies in this transformative guide that blends sport psychology and mindfulness to help improve the way you think, perform, and succeed.
Elion’s approach goes far beyond traditional sports psychology. Her philosophy is holistic. By integrating classical sport psychology tools focused on behavioral and cognitive cues with a deeper appreciation and understanding of oneself, she helps individuals unlock peak performance. Her clients gain insight into their personal history, character, family, and relationships and then use those insights to become stronger athletes and leaders. Elion has worked one on one to empower business leaders, executives, and teams across various sports including the NBA, NFL, MLB, WMBA, and LPGA.
Packed with practical tools, Mastering Your Mental Game will help you overcome mental blocks, build resilience, and reach your highest potential. Whether you’re a golfer chasing championships, an athlete pursuing greatness, or a professional striving for career breakthroughs, Elion’s insights will give you the edge you need to achieve excellence.
Over the past twenty-five years Julie Elion has been the silent force behind some of the most prominent athletes of our time. Her clients on the PGA Tour, who have included Justin Thomas, Max Homa, and Wyndam Clark, have racked up over $500 million in career earnings and twenty-five major championship wins. Known as “Stealth” for her discreet but potent coaching style, Elion has been honing her unique methods for decades. Now, she’s ready to share her winning strategies in this transformative guide that blends sport psychology and mindfulness to help improve the way you think, perform, and succeed.
Elion’s approach goes far beyond traditional sports psychology. Her philosophy is holistic. By integrating classical sport psychology tools focused on behavioral and cognitive cues with a deeper appreciation and understanding of oneself, she helps individuals unlock peak performance. Her clients gain insight into their personal history, character, family, and relationships and then use those insights to become stronger athletes and leaders. Elion has worked one on one to empower business leaders, executives, and teams across various sports including the NBA, NFL, MLB, WMBA, and LPGA.
Packed with practical tools, Mastering Your Mental Game will help you overcome mental blocks, build resilience, and reach your highest potential. Whether you’re a golfer chasing championships, an athlete pursuing greatness, or a professional striving for career breakthroughs, Elion’s insights will give you the edge you need to achieve excellence.
- GenresSelf HelpNonfiction
256 pages, Hardcover
Published June 2, 2026
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A Still Ball, a Restless Mind
Julie Elion’s “Mastering Your Mental Game” Explores the Emotional Work Beneath Golf, Pressure, Failure, and the Next Shot
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | May 17th, 2026
Golf is a public test disguised as a pleasant walk under witnesses. It offers grass, sky, weather, rules, company, and just enough silence to hear the small committee meeting in the skull. The ball waits. The mind does not.
One can call the game a sport, a pastime, a business, or a ruinously expensive walk between humiliations. Julie Elion’s “Mastering Your Mental Game” understands this cheerful cruelty. The sharper insight is not that golf resembles life in some tidy inspirational way, as if every bunker were secretly a seminar. It is that the game reveals unfinished business with uncommon efficiency. The shot is small. The reaction often is not.
Elion writes from the off-camera edge of professional golf: practice ranges, caddie areas, hotel meetings, family dining rooms, and the stunned quiet after a player has come apart. For more than twenty-five years, she has worked around the PGA Tour as a mental coach, often discreetly, sometimes invisibly, with players who wanted help but did not want to be seen needing it. “Stealth,” her old nickname, captures the secrecy and social choreography of the job; “Backhoe,” her newer one, reveals the method. She does not want to buff the surface of performance. She wants to dig under it.
She begins with Wyndham Clark at the 2023 U.S. Open, standing in the 18th fairway at Los Angeles Country Club with the tournament close enough to touch and still fragile enough to vanish. Only months earlier, Clark had been skeptical of mental coaching, wary that all of it was just another fluent version of nothing. When he wins, the scene becomes the book’s first proof: goals, reframing, crowd noise, and practiced composure under pressure. The galleries are chanting for Rickie Fowler; Clark turns that sound into fuel. After the final putt, he cries when he sees Elion. A major championship, in this telling, is not merely won by a swing. It is survived by a self.
That self is the person who keeps arriving over the ball. “Mastering Your Mental Game” is packaged as a field manual for performance in sports, work, and life, and it is one. Readers who come for drills will get them: box breathing, mission statements, reset cues, meditation, pre-shot routines, “think box, shot box,” and small rituals such as the rip of Velcro on a glove or a conscious line between decision and execution. These are pocket rituals, meant to be carried into the next shot rather than admired afterward. Still, Elion’s less marketable, more useful claim is that tools become Band-Aids if the player refuses to examine the wound. Sometimes a bad shot is only turf, timing, and a face left open. Sometimes it is an old father’s criticism, a coach’s limiting remark, a childhood’s instability, a fear of being seen, or an identity so fused to results that the scorecard starts looking like a diagnostic chart.
The method stops sounding like a slogan when Elion turns to her own life. Her childhood was shaped by a volatile household, a mother who mixed holistic health convictions with alcohol and drug abuse, and a father whose severe mental illness ended in suicide when Elion was six. She grew up parentified and watchful, reading rooms because her safety depended on it. Therapy, especially with a childhood therapist who taught her visualization and mental shifting, gave her an early experience of inner refuge. This is not memoir sprinkled in for flavor. It is the place where the method begins before it has a name. Elion’s authority does not come only from standing near famous golfers. It comes from having learned, painfully young, that the mind can be both hazard and shelter.
That origin helps explain why the book is most persuasive when it shows that no golfer is quite alone over the ball. The game may look individual on television: one player, one club, one ball, one name alone atop the leaderboard. Elion keeps showing the crowd inside the solitary shot. Caddies read not only wind and yardage but adrenaline, fear, irritation, and the split second when advice becomes noise. Spouses, agents, coaches, parents, sponsors, galleries, gambling spectators, and old family voices all stand somewhere near the ball. The teamwork chapter is where the solitary golfer finally gets crowded. Professional golf becomes a team sport hiding inside an individual one. Elion’s description of caddies as the hairdressers of professional golf – recipients of confession, complaint, despair, and vanity – is funny because it is exact. It is also generous. The caddie is not scenery. The caddie is witness.
The chapters work like range drills: name the miss, find the habit, rehearse the reset, try again. Anxiety, shame, anger, pressure, confidence, grief, teamwork – each subject gets an anecdote, a principle, an application, and a small kit of resets. The design works like a bucket of range balls: repetitive, plain, and useful because it asks you to do the thing again. After a while, one begins to sense the lesson before it arrives: notice the feeling, do not judge it, return to neutral, examine its roots later, practice before pressure. As instruction, the repetition is defensible. As prose, it can become coached past the point of surprise.
Elion’s sentences coach. They are clear, patient, explanatory, sometimes repetitive because repetition is part of training, and rarely interested in showing off. She is best when she stays close to the ground: the player intentionally hooking drives in a pro-am to practice separating shame from identity; Justin Thomas after a miserable round at the Players Championship, beating balls on the range until the next day’s course-record-tying 62 becomes possible; a tour player pretending not to know Elion on a practice tee because being seen with a mental coach still feels too revealing. In those moments, the book has the grain of the off-camera game: range grass, fluorescent locker-room light, hotel sleep, sponsor logos, professional disappointment under a sponsor cap.
The prose slackens when Elion keeps teaching after the scene has already done the work. She draws on a large crowd of authorities: athletes, psychologists, spiritual teachers, public figures, poets, and familiar frameworks. Some illuminate; others overfurnish the room. The book invokes enough self-improving quotations to make one imagine a very earnest clubhouse wall, each plaque waiting patiently to better you. This is usually sincere rather than pompous, but Elion’s own experience is often stronger than the borrowed maxims around it. When she trusts what she has seen, the sentences find their edge. When she stacks outside validation, the book becomes more shelf-ready.
The phrase that does the most work is “observe, don’t judge.” Elion distinguishes self-evaluation from turning a miss into a verdict. Evaluation has its place: on the range, in practice, after the round, in honest reflection. Judgment, especially in the middle of performance, can turn a missed putt into a small felony against the self.
The point sounds simple until one remembers how many people have ruined not just a hole but an afternoon, a dinner, or a household by refusing to leave the last mistake where it happened. Elion is especially sharp about the way judgment becomes a burden, and the way burdens travel. An angry golfer does not merely suffer. He changes the weather for everyone in the foursome.
Because anger has legs, the anger chapter lands hard. Elion begins with an amateur event made miserable by a club-throwing player, then moves to her time with the Washington Wizards during the 2009 locker-room gun confrontation involving Gilbert Arenas and Javaris Crittenton. It is an extreme example, almost too dramatic for the chapter, yet it clarifies her point: anger is rarely private once it enters a shared space. A golfer’s outburst, a teammate’s sulk, an executive’s clipped tone, a parent’s rage in the car – these emotional events seep. Elion’s solution is not suppression. She allows for a defined burst of anger, then insists on awareness, reset, and later excavation. The immediate ritual matters. The root matters more.
The chapters on anxiety and shame have the strongest pulse. Elion handles labels warily, especially the dreaded yips. She does not deny that athletes experience sudden breakdowns in once-automatic skills; she distrusts the way naming the condition can give it a little office in the brain. “Yips” and “choking” can become identities, and identities have a way of defending their lease. Her treatment of shame cuts even deeper. The pro-am experiment in which a player deliberately hooks drives into the woods is one of the book’s best teaching scenes. The setup is almost comic; the implication is not. What if you could fail visibly and remain yourself?
Shame, for Elion, is the silent underwriter of much bad behavior. It hides under anger, self-deprecation, perfectionism, impostor feelings, and the fear that visible performance will expose some preexisting insufficiency. Golf, with its scorecards, rankings, shot tracers, gambling markets, and social-media commentary, has become an exquisitely efficient embarrassment machine. Elion’s desert-island thought experiment is useful here: would the same shot hurt the same way if no one were watching? For many players, the answer is no. The book does some of its finest work in that gap between the event and its audience, between the swing and the person who believes he has just been judged.
The chapter with the sharpest institutional consequence is “Stigma.” Elion recounts asking a PGA Tour official why tournaments have trailers for physical therapy, equipment, and workouts, but not for mental care. The reply is revealing: who would be seen walking in? That question condenses decades of secrecy and masculine performance culture into one logistical objection. Elion’s answer is plain and right: support for the mind should not be treated as less real than support for the body. The death of Grayson Murray gives the chapter its grief-struck edge, and Elion’s critique of golf’s slow response keeps it from becoming merely elegiac. Here the book steps outside the individual psyche and becomes a field note from a sport in transition.
The final chapter is alert to the present market for care without chasing it. It speaks to athlete vulnerability, public measurement, the shame that lingers even after public language improves, and the rush to package care for scale. Elion’s skepticism about app-mediated and AI-mediated support is measured rather than cranky. She understands the access problem. Tools that reach more people matter.
But she refuses to confuse a virtual assistant with the human act of being heard. Her appeal to active listening is not nostalgic trim. It is the moral hinge of the book. One cannot outsource the mirror entirely.
The boldest swerve comes in “Grief.” Elion writes about a friend who dies of cancer and about the way grief compounds, calling forth older losses and stored pain. She then connects grief, carefully, to golf’s smaller experiences of loss: missed chances, bad breaks, vanished form, aging, and the knowledge that even great players lose far more often than they win. This could have collapsed into bathos. A dead friend and a pulled tee shot do not belong on the same moral scale, and Elion knows it. Her caveat is essential. Still, the chapter stretches the book in the direction it has been preparing for all along. If the person over the ball is the subject, then mortality cannot be left in the parking lot. The mental game includes how one lives with endings.
The risk is real. At times, the book asks golf to carry considerable metaphorical freight: trauma, death, work, civic repair, technological alienation, family systems, and the future of care. The final chapter’s vision of golf as sanctuary, mirror, etiquette school, community builder, and civic balm is moving, but occasionally idealized. Golf can create intimacy across difference; it can also reproduce exclusion, expense, and hierarchy. Elion nods toward bad behavior, especially in discussing Ryder Cup ugliness, but the book’s gratitude for the game sometimes rounds off its harder social facts. The gift of golf is real, but it still comes with gates.
Still, the close clarifies the book’s ambition. Elion has not written a bag of quick tricks for lower scores. She is asking what kind of arrangement a person has with failure, attention, other people, and the self. That places “Mastering Your Mental Game” in conversation with W. Timothy Gallwey’s “The Inner Game of Tennis” and Bob Rotella’s “Golf Is Not a Game of Perfect,” though Elion’s version is more therapeutic, autobiographical, and openly concerned with stigma. Gallwey’s classic is cleaner, Rotella’s more distilled. Elion’s is messier, warmer, more crowded, and sometimes more affecting because of that crowding. It is full of people: players, caddies, spouses, fathers, coaches, executives, friends, children, the dead, and the versions of ourselves that keep arriving uninvited over the ball.
The book works because golf matters here not as grand metaphor, but as exacting miniature. A bad shot is not a tragedy. But the reaction to it can reveal an entire private arrangement with shame, blame, luck, patience, and self-forgiveness. Its most persistent cost is that Elion sometimes explains this past the point of grace. The best scenes already know what the summaries repeat. Yet repetition is also part of practice, and this is, finally, a training book: reset, notice, breathe, forgive, examine, return.
At 86/100, “Mastering Your Mental Game” lands as a 4/5 Goodreads read: more emotionally intelligent than elegant, more useful than compressed, more humane than formally adventurous. Its excellence is not polish but attention – sustained attention to pain without melodrama, and to performance without macho varnish. Elion knows that the next shot is never just the next shot. It is the previous reaction, the old wound, the chosen breath, the person beside you, the silence before impact, and the permission – absurd, ordinary, generous – to begin again from wherever the ball has come to rest.
Julie Elion’s “Mastering Your Mental Game” Explores the Emotional Work Beneath Golf, Pressure, Failure, and the Next Shot
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | May 17th, 2026
Golf is a public test disguised as a pleasant walk under witnesses. It offers grass, sky, weather, rules, company, and just enough silence to hear the small committee meeting in the skull. The ball waits. The mind does not.
One can call the game a sport, a pastime, a business, or a ruinously expensive walk between humiliations. Julie Elion’s “Mastering Your Mental Game” understands this cheerful cruelty. The sharper insight is not that golf resembles life in some tidy inspirational way, as if every bunker were secretly a seminar. It is that the game reveals unfinished business with uncommon efficiency. The shot is small. The reaction often is not.
Elion writes from the off-camera edge of professional golf: practice ranges, caddie areas, hotel meetings, family dining rooms, and the stunned quiet after a player has come apart. For more than twenty-five years, she has worked around the PGA Tour as a mental coach, often discreetly, sometimes invisibly, with players who wanted help but did not want to be seen needing it. “Stealth,” her old nickname, captures the secrecy and social choreography of the job; “Backhoe,” her newer one, reveals the method. She does not want to buff the surface of performance. She wants to dig under it.
She begins with Wyndham Clark at the 2023 U.S. Open, standing in the 18th fairway at Los Angeles Country Club with the tournament close enough to touch and still fragile enough to vanish. Only months earlier, Clark had been skeptical of mental coaching, wary that all of it was just another fluent version of nothing. When he wins, the scene becomes the book’s first proof: goals, reframing, crowd noise, and practiced composure under pressure. The galleries are chanting for Rickie Fowler; Clark turns that sound into fuel. After the final putt, he cries when he sees Elion. A major championship, in this telling, is not merely won by a swing. It is survived by a self.
That self is the person who keeps arriving over the ball. “Mastering Your Mental Game” is packaged as a field manual for performance in sports, work, and life, and it is one. Readers who come for drills will get them: box breathing, mission statements, reset cues, meditation, pre-shot routines, “think box, shot box,” and small rituals such as the rip of Velcro on a glove or a conscious line between decision and execution. These are pocket rituals, meant to be carried into the next shot rather than admired afterward. Still, Elion’s less marketable, more useful claim is that tools become Band-Aids if the player refuses to examine the wound. Sometimes a bad shot is only turf, timing, and a face left open. Sometimes it is an old father’s criticism, a coach’s limiting remark, a childhood’s instability, a fear of being seen, or an identity so fused to results that the scorecard starts looking like a diagnostic chart.
The method stops sounding like a slogan when Elion turns to her own life. Her childhood was shaped by a volatile household, a mother who mixed holistic health convictions with alcohol and drug abuse, and a father whose severe mental illness ended in suicide when Elion was six. She grew up parentified and watchful, reading rooms because her safety depended on it. Therapy, especially with a childhood therapist who taught her visualization and mental shifting, gave her an early experience of inner refuge. This is not memoir sprinkled in for flavor. It is the place where the method begins before it has a name. Elion’s authority does not come only from standing near famous golfers. It comes from having learned, painfully young, that the mind can be both hazard and shelter.
That origin helps explain why the book is most persuasive when it shows that no golfer is quite alone over the ball. The game may look individual on television: one player, one club, one ball, one name alone atop the leaderboard. Elion keeps showing the crowd inside the solitary shot. Caddies read not only wind and yardage but adrenaline, fear, irritation, and the split second when advice becomes noise. Spouses, agents, coaches, parents, sponsors, galleries, gambling spectators, and old family voices all stand somewhere near the ball. The teamwork chapter is where the solitary golfer finally gets crowded. Professional golf becomes a team sport hiding inside an individual one. Elion’s description of caddies as the hairdressers of professional golf – recipients of confession, complaint, despair, and vanity – is funny because it is exact. It is also generous. The caddie is not scenery. The caddie is witness.
The chapters work like range drills: name the miss, find the habit, rehearse the reset, try again. Anxiety, shame, anger, pressure, confidence, grief, teamwork – each subject gets an anecdote, a principle, an application, and a small kit of resets. The design works like a bucket of range balls: repetitive, plain, and useful because it asks you to do the thing again. After a while, one begins to sense the lesson before it arrives: notice the feeling, do not judge it, return to neutral, examine its roots later, practice before pressure. As instruction, the repetition is defensible. As prose, it can become coached past the point of surprise.
Elion’s sentences coach. They are clear, patient, explanatory, sometimes repetitive because repetition is part of training, and rarely interested in showing off. She is best when she stays close to the ground: the player intentionally hooking drives in a pro-am to practice separating shame from identity; Justin Thomas after a miserable round at the Players Championship, beating balls on the range until the next day’s course-record-tying 62 becomes possible; a tour player pretending not to know Elion on a practice tee because being seen with a mental coach still feels too revealing. In those moments, the book has the grain of the off-camera game: range grass, fluorescent locker-room light, hotel sleep, sponsor logos, professional disappointment under a sponsor cap.
The prose slackens when Elion keeps teaching after the scene has already done the work. She draws on a large crowd of authorities: athletes, psychologists, spiritual teachers, public figures, poets, and familiar frameworks. Some illuminate; others overfurnish the room. The book invokes enough self-improving quotations to make one imagine a very earnest clubhouse wall, each plaque waiting patiently to better you. This is usually sincere rather than pompous, but Elion’s own experience is often stronger than the borrowed maxims around it. When she trusts what she has seen, the sentences find their edge. When she stacks outside validation, the book becomes more shelf-ready.
The phrase that does the most work is “observe, don’t judge.” Elion distinguishes self-evaluation from turning a miss into a verdict. Evaluation has its place: on the range, in practice, after the round, in honest reflection. Judgment, especially in the middle of performance, can turn a missed putt into a small felony against the self.
The point sounds simple until one remembers how many people have ruined not just a hole but an afternoon, a dinner, or a household by refusing to leave the last mistake where it happened. Elion is especially sharp about the way judgment becomes a burden, and the way burdens travel. An angry golfer does not merely suffer. He changes the weather for everyone in the foursome.
Because anger has legs, the anger chapter lands hard. Elion begins with an amateur event made miserable by a club-throwing player, then moves to her time with the Washington Wizards during the 2009 locker-room gun confrontation involving Gilbert Arenas and Javaris Crittenton. It is an extreme example, almost too dramatic for the chapter, yet it clarifies her point: anger is rarely private once it enters a shared space. A golfer’s outburst, a teammate’s sulk, an executive’s clipped tone, a parent’s rage in the car – these emotional events seep. Elion’s solution is not suppression. She allows for a defined burst of anger, then insists on awareness, reset, and later excavation. The immediate ritual matters. The root matters more.
The chapters on anxiety and shame have the strongest pulse. Elion handles labels warily, especially the dreaded yips. She does not deny that athletes experience sudden breakdowns in once-automatic skills; she distrusts the way naming the condition can give it a little office in the brain. “Yips” and “choking” can become identities, and identities have a way of defending their lease. Her treatment of shame cuts even deeper. The pro-am experiment in which a player deliberately hooks drives into the woods is one of the book’s best teaching scenes. The setup is almost comic; the implication is not. What if you could fail visibly and remain yourself?
Shame, for Elion, is the silent underwriter of much bad behavior. It hides under anger, self-deprecation, perfectionism, impostor feelings, and the fear that visible performance will expose some preexisting insufficiency. Golf, with its scorecards, rankings, shot tracers, gambling markets, and social-media commentary, has become an exquisitely efficient embarrassment machine. Elion’s desert-island thought experiment is useful here: would the same shot hurt the same way if no one were watching? For many players, the answer is no. The book does some of its finest work in that gap between the event and its audience, between the swing and the person who believes he has just been judged.
The chapter with the sharpest institutional consequence is “Stigma.” Elion recounts asking a PGA Tour official why tournaments have trailers for physical therapy, equipment, and workouts, but not for mental care. The reply is revealing: who would be seen walking in? That question condenses decades of secrecy and masculine performance culture into one logistical objection. Elion’s answer is plain and right: support for the mind should not be treated as less real than support for the body. The death of Grayson Murray gives the chapter its grief-struck edge, and Elion’s critique of golf’s slow response keeps it from becoming merely elegiac. Here the book steps outside the individual psyche and becomes a field note from a sport in transition.
The final chapter is alert to the present market for care without chasing it. It speaks to athlete vulnerability, public measurement, the shame that lingers even after public language improves, and the rush to package care for scale. Elion’s skepticism about app-mediated and AI-mediated support is measured rather than cranky. She understands the access problem. Tools that reach more people matter.
But she refuses to confuse a virtual assistant with the human act of being heard. Her appeal to active listening is not nostalgic trim. It is the moral hinge of the book. One cannot outsource the mirror entirely.
The boldest swerve comes in “Grief.” Elion writes about a friend who dies of cancer and about the way grief compounds, calling forth older losses and stored pain. She then connects grief, carefully, to golf’s smaller experiences of loss: missed chances, bad breaks, vanished form, aging, and the knowledge that even great players lose far more often than they win. This could have collapsed into bathos. A dead friend and a pulled tee shot do not belong on the same moral scale, and Elion knows it. Her caveat is essential. Still, the chapter stretches the book in the direction it has been preparing for all along. If the person over the ball is the subject, then mortality cannot be left in the parking lot. The mental game includes how one lives with endings.
The risk is real. At times, the book asks golf to carry considerable metaphorical freight: trauma, death, work, civic repair, technological alienation, family systems, and the future of care. The final chapter’s vision of golf as sanctuary, mirror, etiquette school, community builder, and civic balm is moving, but occasionally idealized. Golf can create intimacy across difference; it can also reproduce exclusion, expense, and hierarchy. Elion nods toward bad behavior, especially in discussing Ryder Cup ugliness, but the book’s gratitude for the game sometimes rounds off its harder social facts. The gift of golf is real, but it still comes with gates.
Still, the close clarifies the book’s ambition. Elion has not written a bag of quick tricks for lower scores. She is asking what kind of arrangement a person has with failure, attention, other people, and the self. That places “Mastering Your Mental Game” in conversation with W. Timothy Gallwey’s “The Inner Game of Tennis” and Bob Rotella’s “Golf Is Not a Game of Perfect,” though Elion’s version is more therapeutic, autobiographical, and openly concerned with stigma. Gallwey’s classic is cleaner, Rotella’s more distilled. Elion’s is messier, warmer, more crowded, and sometimes more affecting because of that crowding. It is full of people: players, caddies, spouses, fathers, coaches, executives, friends, children, the dead, and the versions of ourselves that keep arriving uninvited over the ball.
The book works because golf matters here not as grand metaphor, but as exacting miniature. A bad shot is not a tragedy. But the reaction to it can reveal an entire private arrangement with shame, blame, luck, patience, and self-forgiveness. Its most persistent cost is that Elion sometimes explains this past the point of grace. The best scenes already know what the summaries repeat. Yet repetition is also part of practice, and this is, finally, a training book: reset, notice, breathe, forgive, examine, return.
At 86/100, “Mastering Your Mental Game” lands as a 4/5 Goodreads read: more emotionally intelligent than elegant, more useful than compressed, more humane than formally adventurous. Its excellence is not polish but attention – sustained attention to pain without melodrama, and to performance without macho varnish. Elion knows that the next shot is never just the next shot. It is the previous reaction, the old wound, the chosen breath, the person beside you, the silence before impact, and the permission – absurd, ordinary, generous – to begin again from wherever the ball has come to rest.
July 1, 2026
Very well written book that is not just about golf. A lot of worthwhile things to think about no matter what the topic on one's mental health. Being about golf and sports generally it made it more interesting to me.
Even more timely as her client (mentioned prominently in the book) just won the U.S. Open which included its share of mental challenges.
Worth the read.
Even more timely as her client (mentioned prominently in the book) just won the U.S. Open which included its share of mental challenges.
Worth the read.
July 28, 2026
There are more em dashes in this book than in every other book I have ever read combined. Most paragraphs have at least two, if not more. Just unreadable.
July 28, 2026
Listened to the audio book! Enjoyable listen and insightful for her work with pros. Maybe can apply to my own game on the course
July 2, 2026
Eye Opening
Great book! So many useful things to implement into my golf game and more importantly, my life!
I’m about to start reading it again!
Great book! So many useful things to implement into my golf game and more importantly, my life!
I’m about to start reading it again!
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
I’m a big fan of books about sports psychology and the techniques that help athletes perform at elite levels and reach the top. Even though I don’t play golf and don’t know much about it, I discovered some useful tools that are helpful to everyone.
The author makes a compelling argument that living a life of self-reflection is truly worthwhile. Knowing yourself and what makes you tick is key. Julie helps us build our toolkit with practical things we can incorporate into our lives, from setting goals to understanding what drives us.
I appreciate that she provides actionable steps at the end of many chapters to help us work through things like anger, anxiety, and judgment. Tools that can often be used in real time on the golf course, too.
Mastering Your Mental Game is packed with stories from her 25 years of working with golfers, both PGA and collegiate, as well as athletes in the NBA and NFL. These are people who need to perform at a high level under intense pressure. I found that the skills she teaches them are incredibly beneficial for anyone and can contribute to a calmer disposition and more meaningful relationships, maybe even a better golf game.
The chapter on stigma was particularly insightful, highlighting how mental health care is still largely considered taboo in professional golf. It’s a shame that athletes who could greatly benefit from the help of a therapist or sports psychologist might avoid it out of fear of stigma. That makes the athletes who publicly share that they seek help all the more remarkable.
Overall, the book was insightful and helpful, and I really enjoyed it.
Special thanks to the author, Avid Reader Press, and NetGalley for the gifted copy.
The author makes a compelling argument that living a life of self-reflection is truly worthwhile. Knowing yourself and what makes you tick is key. Julie helps us build our toolkit with practical things we can incorporate into our lives, from setting goals to understanding what drives us.
I appreciate that she provides actionable steps at the end of many chapters to help us work through things like anger, anxiety, and judgment. Tools that can often be used in real time on the golf course, too.
Mastering Your Mental Game is packed with stories from her 25 years of working with golfers, both PGA and collegiate, as well as athletes in the NBA and NFL. These are people who need to perform at a high level under intense pressure. I found that the skills she teaches them are incredibly beneficial for anyone and can contribute to a calmer disposition and more meaningful relationships, maybe even a better golf game.
The chapter on stigma was particularly insightful, highlighting how mental health care is still largely considered taboo in professional golf. It’s a shame that athletes who could greatly benefit from the help of a therapist or sports psychologist might avoid it out of fear of stigma. That makes the athletes who publicly share that they seek help all the more remarkable.
Overall, the book was insightful and helpful, and I really enjoyed it.
Special thanks to the author, Avid Reader Press, and NetGalley for the gifted copy.
June 15, 2026
Nice easy read
Julie writes well and tells a good story about the importance of mental health, listening, communication, team work, etc. Mental Health is gradually growing in awareness and it’s been long overdue. I was almost expecting something out-of-the-box, some burst of new insight and what I got was lots of validation to the goal of this book. I wouldn’t say, as the title of the book states, there are any “Secrets” though just continued importance for awareness — that’s not much of a secret these days.
Julie writes well and tells a good story about the importance of mental health, listening, communication, team work, etc. Mental Health is gradually growing in awareness and it’s been long overdue. I was almost expecting something out-of-the-box, some burst of new insight and what I got was lots of validation to the goal of this book. I wouldn’t say, as the title of the book states, there are any “Secrets” though just continued importance for awareness — that’s not much of a secret these days.
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