Ask most amateur golfers about their ultimate goals in the game and you'll regularly hear responses like 'record a hole-in-one', 'become a single-figure handicapper' or 'be more consistent.'
I'm here to tell you - via a world-renowned performance coach - the last one is near impossible, no matter who you are.
Karl Morris has worked with the likes of Louis Oosthuizen, Graeme McDowell, Darren Clarke, Lee Westwood, Ian Woosnam, Paul McGinley, Ryan Fox, Harry Hall and Laurie Canter over the course of his career and he's seen multiple Major wins during that time.
Outside of golf, he's even spent time with English Premier League giants Manchester United during Sir Alex Ferguson's unmatched reign of success and helped former England men's cricket captain Michael Vaughn at the peak of the test team's powers during the early 2000s.
The point is, Morris knows a thing or two about elite-level performance and what the very best to ever play sport are capable of.
And according to the author of several golf psychology books including The Mind Caddie and The Lost Art Of Putting, even the very best are never consistent in regards to excellence.
In a recent interview following Ryan Fox's incredible Open victory, Morris explained to me that when amateurs seek out his help in order to try and fulfill their ambitions, he has to reframe what they really want.
He said: "Generally, [amateurs] will come to me and say 'I'm not very consistent' or 'I want to be more consistent' - everybody wants to be more consistent.
"Then we talk about how nobody has ever been consistent in the history of the game, even the best players in the world.
"We talk about, instead of aiming at consistency, it's about working at adaptability.
"To me, if you get good at golf, you become adaptable in the sense that whatever you've got that day, you get good at getting it round.
"It might be your B game or your C game or even your D game, but you get good at getting the best out of yourself as opposed to only playing well when you play well.
"There's one player, I didn't work with him, but a top, top player once said to me he reckoned he only had his golf swing about 10 rounds a year. The rest of the time, it was something less than his best and he just had to find a way of getting it round."
While everyone is different in terms of how they might go about becoming more adaptable on the golf course, Morris shared there are three key words to remember that anyone who is hoping to improve the mental side of their game should be able to gain value from.
He said: "There's a key triangle. We talk about three words of intention, attention and attitude.
"We can relate it to Ryan Fox's shot on 15 [Sunday of The Open] when he's in the [front green-side] bunker.
"He's had a dreadful piece of luck to end up [right up against the wall on the left side], but with his caddie's help, he created a clear intention. He just needed to get the ball out backwards and back in play.
"His attention would have been on the contact with the sand. And then his attitude was one of 'I'm not going to get into stories. I'm not going to get into this shouldn't happen to me, how unlucky am I? I hit a nearly perfect shot, golf's not fair' and all of that.
"His attitude was one of acceptance, and he just got on with it. So intention, attention and attitude are really the cornerstones of the mental game.
"I mean, they're multi-layered, but those three things... if anyone looks at those three words and considers what they could be on each shot, I think that's a good starting point."
Another important point as far as reassessing the mental side of your game might well relate to focus.
In a feature I wrote recently, five pros gave me an excellent array of advice ahead of my first adult tournament, with one particular nugget from my colleague Sam De'Ath telling me to take my mind elsewhere when not considering and executing my shot.
Golf typically takes around four hours and it would be incredibly draining to concentrate for that long. So the general advice from pros and performance coach Morris is simply... don't try to.
Morris highlighted his work with 2010 Open Champion Louis Oosthuizen as an example of how only locking in at the vital time by using a particular trigger can be extremely fruitful.
Morris said: "I'll talk a lot with players about golf is five hours, but you're only actually playing golf for a couple of minutes within those five hours.
"There's no way you can focus for five hours - you'd blow a fuse. But good players find an ability switch on and switch off.
"If you look at Louis Oosthuizen one, when he won The Open in 2010, we had a trigger where he looked at a red dot on his glove. That dot was a trigger to then go into the shot, be absorbed in it and then come out of it.
"I think that's where caddies earn their money these days... in between times - what they talk to the player about in between shots.
"I think the really good ones just take them somewhere else. Then it's about switching back into the puzzle when you get to it."
