Great post. Lots of thought and energy went into that, and I know that you will see the rewards.

You have me thinking again about how to set practical progressive goals for things like character traits. I have always felt a little wishy washy in that area. When the goal is “I want to be more humble”, I say I will check my actions to look for opportunities to be humble, and that is certainly a big benefit and will change me. That process is slow, and can lead itself to sporadic results or ‘dry streches’.

The problem I have often found is lack of concrete plans leads to slow results. In wanting to shoot under 80, it is easy to create intermediate steps and goals that flow nicely into the goal of scoring 80. I find that it is not easy to do this with character goals that are much more nebulous.

I doing some reading I have started being able to create some meaningful sub-goals(concrete) that support changing character traits. It still takes me a lot of effort and thought just to come up with them, and sometimes they are not even good(but that will change with time).

A few examples : If I want to grow humility : maybe setting up time to serve at a soup kitchen.

For fear, maybe I would list some things I that have always scared me, and decide to tackle one every month. Handle some snakes, find a public speaking opportunity, etc.

For discipline ideas like fasts are great. Maybe swear of TV for 48 hours, or junk food for a week. Celebrate the success. Kind of like weight training, were you give yourself a shock and then slowly increase intensity. Mini success bread encouragement and change. Soon you realize you can go a week with TV or a month without junk food.

Just some more food for thought. Thanks for encouraging me to think through some of this stuff.

Excellent input. Not being hung up on score is something I’ll be spending a lot of effort on. I’m going to take each shot as it comes and go from there.

As far as finding time for this, I thought it was going to be tough at first. But it comes down to what I said about making decisions. I might spend an hour a day on it (sometimes more, sometimes less) and sometimes I do several posts at the same time and don’t do anything for a few days. But that time comes from replacing non-productive time. Now, if I’m going to sit and watch TV or surf the web, I make a decision whether that’s more important than writing something. Almost always the blog wins because it fits in with my goals. And usually it’s not a difficult choice.

I enjoy your blog. Being new to golf, I like to read about golfers developing their game (all aspects of their game). The best of these types of blogs are the ones frequently updated. I don’t know how you find time to do it, but I look forward to reading it each day.

On stat keeping, scoring/practice rounds, and putting the numbers out there… Our scores will never be good enough. That’s the nature of the game. Progress comes at a pace that came never catch our desire. While I don’t like to think in these terms (but it’s hard not to), know that there are many golfers who’s goals are to score as well as you at any given time.

I think you should determine when to play a practice round well before you step up to the first tee. I’d like to see you set a minimum ratio of scoring to practice rounds.

I really don’t like to call them scoring rounds either. I prefer to call them progress rounds because they are how we record our progress.

I don’t like thinking about score for that matter either. When I play a progress round, I like to think of it as a great driving range that provides a different situation for every shot. Each shot should be the focus of any round, progress or practice. So don’t think of score, think of progress. When you find yourself in that situation where you’ve hit a couple bad shots on the course in the past, think of it as an opportunity to check your progress. How did you do? Did you hit that draw off of a fade lie? Did your practice lead to progress? Yes? Great! No? Plan on practicing that shot some more and move on to the next shot where you have another opportunity to check your progress on another shot type. Don’t think about recovery, don’t think about settling for bogey or salvaging a double. Think only about your progress on each type of shot. The worst thing that can possibly happen during a round of golf is you have lots of shots to practice.

Here’s another thing that will help you forget about score. After your round, don’t add up your score. In fact, don’t add up you score till after you’ve had one session at the range to work on the shots you need work on. In my opinion, to score well, you have to forget about the score.

-G