Staying calm under pressure is Brian Harman’s secret weapon. In a sport where one bad swing can change everything, the 4-time PGA Tour winner — with 59 top-10 finishes and more than $43 million in earnings — has built his career on patience and focus learned long before he stepped onto golf’s biggest stages.

Brian Harman recently opened up about his unusual technique to battle match pressure in a podcast. The host asked, “Do you just shut your senses down and just, you know, hyper focus on the ball and what you gotta do? I mean, how do you deal with that kind of pressure?” Harman decided to keep things real. “If you had the perfect answer to that, you could bottle it up and sell it for a whole lot of money.” Harman understands that there is no perfect answer to dealing with the pressure on the course, especially with expectations soaring high among the audience. It’s less of a “secret sauce” and more of a personal undertaking that is unique to the golfer, as Harman put it.

Harman’s technique is less of a tactical shift. It’s more about the mindset. “For me, I kind of figured out, you know, I take it real serious, you know, and I always, I was just trying to like compartment or like try to simplify it down, you know, like for me it always felt like life and death,” Harman told the Gatekeeper Podcast. The PGA Tour pro explained that by narrowing his focus to the task at hand and treating every shot with gravity, he can keep distractions at bay. What’s unusual, however, is the internal pressure he puts on himself. Harman explained, “If I miss, you know, then this is serious.” This hints that he is intentionally hard on himself on every hole. Would that be a good solution for other golfers? Questionable.

Harman admits that there is no one-size-fits-all solution in golf. For Tiger Woods, dealing with the shot at hand with a certain level of curiosity and engagement brought real focus. But what worked for Woods won’t necessarily be a fix for other golfers. Similarly, with Harman’s unusual technique, some might end up feeling more overwhelmed instead of cooling their senses. In Harman’s own words, “There is a plenty of gurus that travel around the tour that think they’ve got the secret sauce.” The word to point out is “think,” since even the best coaches might not be on the same page as you. That is something to keep in mind when learning from the top golfers, adapting the techniques to suit you best.

Brian Harman reminds us of the individual aspect of golf. His life-or-death focus may be unusual, yet it highlights how every golfer must find their own way to stay grounded.

Different paths to the same goal

It’s not just Brian Harman who has a unique, personal way of dealing with the greens pressure. Even the world’s best golfers experience anxiety around the crowds. Dealing with that is what defines the best.

Take Tiger Woods, for example. Swing coach Butch Harmon shaped his mechanics. However, it was Dr. Jay Brunza, a Navy psychologist, who helped him sharpen his mental game in the early years. Instead of traditional visualization, Tiger tuned into his senses. It was about feeling the shot in his fingers and trusting that “the training will take over.”

At his best, Woods was fully present, approaching every stroke with intense curiosity, something that even athletes from different disciplines have resonated with. Meanwhile, Rory McIlroy has a different approach from both Woods and Harman. The Masters champion has openly admitted to performance anxiety, particularly on the first tee. His solution is counterintuitive: visualize the worst-case scenario.

By confronting what could go wrong, he finds freedom in knowing he can handle it. “If I can swing free, that’s when I play my best golf,” McIlroy explained. It’s a method that brought him peace under pressure. No wonder he’s one of the headline stars for the PGA Tour now.

From Harman to Tiger to Rory, handling pressure is personal. An individual approach to a shared struggle is where it’s at for the pros.