My first manager out of college used to say that occasionally. I understood what he meant, but it took a while before it really sunk in. What he was telling me was that in a day or a week or a month, no matter how good our “plan” is, it’s going to be outdated. Things change. We learn new information. We change our goals. But it’s the act of planning that prepares us to deal with those things. As we go through the planning process, it makes us aware of alternatives. It helps us discover pitfalls. It helps us refine our goals. In the end, we’re left with the actual plan, but more importantly, we’re ready to refine it when things change. As I’ve discussed here and there, without goals, we’re just wandering through life. We need goals to help guide us. They must be clearly defined, and it’s of benefit to put deadlines on them. Once we decide upon a goal, it’s all talk until we start taking action toward reaching it. At first
Mental Game Improvement in Action
We spent a lot of time over the last week talking about the mental game and the psychology of golf. I went through what I felt were my biggest flaws in that area and laid out my plan for addressing them. Well, I had a chance to take what I’ve been working on to the course on Sunday for a nine hole round. Before I went out, I had a specific plan that stated what I wanted to accomplish. Here are the basics: Play with discipline. The round was to be a scoring round, and I was planning on keeping stats. There would be no quitting or switching to practice mode. Live in each moment and play each shot without worrying about the previous shot. Do not fixate on the score. For each and every shot, devise a plan, absolutely commit to it, and execute. Resist the temptation to bring range-oriented swing thoughts to the course. No working on technical details. Keep the swing thoughts simple. I have to say that being honest with myself
Talk is Cheap: Achieving Goals
In my recent post about what separates the best from the rest, HappyRock asked me what I’m doing to achieve my goals. I addressed it in a follow-up comment, but it really deserves a post of its own. The stock answer is that I’m working on my fitness, weight loss, and practicing the various aspects of the game. But that’s not enough. If I lose all the weight I want to lose, get reasonably fit, and play to scratch, I’m still not going to be good enough. My basic premise in what separates the best from the rest is that mental game is the biggest factor once a player gets to a certain point. I listed out a bunch of aspects of the mental game that I feel are factors. The question is, what am I doing to develop those things? Right now, this blog is my biggest vessel for mental development. It sounds strange, but when you find a way to be totally honest with yourself and expose your deepest, darkest, inner flaws in
Digging For Discipline
To be successful in my journey, I need to be able to do more than hit a driver 300 yards or be a decent lag putter. I need to mentally groom myself for success. That includes every facet of my life. Recently, I was talking to my friend, The Happy Rock about goals. He remarked that my to-do list should really have some time frames attached. Goals without target dates can be dangerous because they leave us an out. We tend to put things off and not maximize our time because we don’t have deadlines staring us in the face. Pretty soon time passes and we’re still at square one. I’ve said in the past that I’m not putting a deadline on my overall goals, but there’s no reason that I can’t come up with some target dates for the individual steps. I thought about it for a while and started to think about the things I’m doing to accomplish my goals and I came to the conclusion that I have a discipline problem. It’s
Fix One Issue, Uncover Another
One of the nice things about doing this blog is that I learn from it myself. I pretty much lay out what’s in my head and augment it with a little research and fact checking to make sure I’m not out in left field and also to fill in gaps in my own knowledge. Beyond that, it keeps the things that I need to do fresh in my mind. If I was doing all the things that I know are correct, then I’d already be on tour. The point is for me to absorb these things, but also to share them with you, in hopes that they help your game as well. I’m doing my best to plug all the holes. At first, my game had as many holes as a pasta strainer, but slowly I’m plugging them up. Unfortunately, I can’t address them all at once. You’ve seen me identify alignment as a problem area in my game, but until now I hadn’t actively addressed it because I just have been working on so
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