Four-time major champion and current World Number One, Rory McIlroy says focusing on two key words 'process' and 'spot' helped him deal with the pressure and script an "incredible" season.
McIlroy clinched two Major Championships -- the Open Championship and the USPGA -- last year, besides the flagship BMW PGA Championship on the European Tour.
"2014 was an incredible year for me. I got off to a decent start to the year. It was solid. I didn't have any wins for the first five months. My first win of the year was at Wentworth, a course that I've historically not played very well at. This was a huge confidence boost for me and set me up for the summer that I had," McIlroy told Laureus.Com.
"In golf, once you get on a roll and you have some momentum, you just try and ride it as long as you possibly can. I was able to hold on to it the whole way through the summer and pick up a couple of Major Championships along the way. I didn't expect to have that summer.
"You're always hoping that you're going to have a successful year but you don't expect to win two Majors in a row or to play the golf that I did. You hope you can, but it was just nice to be able to produce it when I needed it."
Talking about his mantra last year that helped him, McIlroy said: "'Process' and 'spot' were the two words and they definitely helped. They helped when I was under pressure and when I was coming down the stretch because it gave me something else to focus on, rather than the result or where my competitors were, or that I needed to make a birdie.
"To be able to focus on something else and take your mind off what you're doing and put it somewhere else, it really helped for those situations. In the future those two words might be something completely different but at least giving yourself those trigger words helps take your mind away from the result, which I think is a big thing."
McIlroy, who won the Laureus World Breakthrough Award of the Year in 2012, has been nominated for this year's Laureus World Sportsman of the Year Award.
"It's a very prestigious honour, the Laureus Awards in sport, to be nominated and be up against some of the greats of world sport. We'll see what happens; it's an honour to be nominated for the Laureus Sportsman of the Year and I hope to win it one day," McIlroy said.
