The best player in the world proves you don’t have to feel good about your swing to commit to each shot

Entering the second LPGA tournament of 2026, the No. 1 player in the world was feeling stressed. Jeeno Thitikul was struggling with her irons. She’d been working with her coach, trying to find something—a drill, a swing thought, anything to get her iron game back to where she liked it. But they didn’t find a fix before the tournament started. She’d have to play the Honda LPGA Thailand with what she had.

“My coach saw me all the time before coming here, practicing, and then I kind of stress out and I have a lot of swing thoughts to think about for the irons,” Thitikul said

Thitikul didn’t want to start the tournament with a head full of swing thoughts. The week was more charged than normal for the 23-year-old, as she was playing in her home country where she’d never won an LPGA Tour event before. But even with the stress of an uncertain iron game, she won the Honda LPGA Thailand by a shot over Chizzy Iwai.

“Obviously, I don't know how I came to this position to win the tournament. I think it's just proving to yourself that you don't have to need perfect shots all the time to be able to win the tournaments,” Thitikul said after the victory, her eighth on the LPGA. “You just need confidence and a lot of commitment on it.”

She highlights an important distinction here. How you feel about your game, and how you’re able to commit to a shot are two separate things. And that’s something amateurs would benefit from knowing.

Standing over a shot, stressed about how poorly you’ve been hitting your irons, head swimming with swing thoughts that aren’t working, it’s easy to let all that negativity seep into how you feel about the shot you’re about to hit. But Thitikul proves that you can be stressed about your swing and still feel committed and confident about the shot that needs to be executed. And it’s the latter that’s more important.

“The key is to commit to something helpful, doable and simple when your swing doesn’t feel good,” performance gurus Pia Nilsson and Lynn Marriott told Golf Digest via text after Thitikul’s win. “It could be: hold your finish for three seconds, relaxed shoulders, smooth tempo, see the target in a bright color, feel your core. It’s about giving yourself a doable action goal that is under your control.”

The stress surrounding poor iron play leading up to the tournament suddenly becomes irrelevant when the goal is to commit to the shot by holding your finish for three seconds.

Along with commitment, Thitikul said she needed confidence to make the win happen. It sounds counterintuitive, to be able to feel confident while a part of your game feels like it’s in shambles. If you’ve seen the ball go awry in the days leading up to a tournament, how can you feel confident while playing the tournament?

Nilsson and Marriott say that players are in charge of creating their own confidence.

“We believe in creating confidence by doing something that makes you feel more confident. Many players wait to get confident by waiting for evidence from an outcome. We believe the evidence is in the doing before the outcome,” they explain.

Instead of waiting to hit a good shot to feel confident—and putting yourself in the position to lose that confidence as soon as you hit a bad shot – find something unrelated to where the ball ends up that gives you confidence.

“For some the confidence action could be having a strong body language, confident voice to yourself, calm eyes, deep breath, specific self created positive self talk, peppy steps,” Nilsson and Marriott say.

It’s rare to stand on the first tee feeling 100 percent certainty about every aspect of one’s game—even for the pros. But no matter the state of your game, you can choose to commit to each shot. You can choose to feel confident. And from there, better shots are more likely to follow.