The biggest obstacle to overcome when playing golf is self-doubt. If you can learn to think differently about your golf game, you will see a difference in your scores. A round of golf can be compared to life. Both are a journey that you feel compelled to see through to the end. Is it frustrating? Yes. Is it disappointing sometimes? Yes. But is it worth it? Yes. Yes.
No matter how badly or how well you played the last hole, the next hole presents a brand new opportunity to win. So it is with life. Every morning that you get out of bed is another brand new opportunity to get it right. If you can adopt the attitude that the last hole was a fiasco but this one does not have to be that way, you can end up with a great score. If you watch Tiger Woods play golf, you may see him get really upset with himself when he misses his target, but you will also see him recover and move on to the next hole and look forward to it.
Life presents itself the same way. We cannot seem to get over some things and put them behind us. We carry them to the next phase in life, and now that phase is no longer a brand-new opportunity, but a place to bring old baggage and mistakes from the past. We never get to live in the moment when the moment is all we really have.
Hanging on to the last bad hole reduces your self-confidence. You start thinking to yourself that you are going to mess up this hole just as you did the last one. It is not that you want to repeat the last hole; you just cannot see how this one is going to be any better. Isn’t that what most of us do with life? We get up every morning grumpy and grouchy, expecting our day to be just like it was yesterday and the day before and the day before that. We have no expectations that today is going to be different, and unless a miracle happens, we get what we expect.
In our golf game and in our lives, we lose the one main objective to playing the game: to have fun! If you are not a pro golfer making a living at playing golf, what do you care if you are a lousy player? Your only objective for playing golf should be TO HAVE FUN! Nothing else really matters.
Now you are probably thinking that the main objective in life cannot be to have fun. You have too many responsibilities just to have fun. The bills need to be paid. There is no way you can afford to live your life to have fun, but that depends on what your definition of fun happens to be. When you look it up in a thesaurus, you will find synonyms such as pleasure, play, amusement, sport, relaxation, and so forth. We have been taught that you cannot have fun and take care of your responsibilities, but don’t you see that you can change your paradigm and realize that you can see your responsibilities as fun? It’s all in how you look at it.
1 Comment
July 8, 2009 at 4:33 pm
I totally agree. So much of the game comes from your confidence and frame of mind. Golf is a game of strategy and skill — but there is also a huge component of the game that is played out entirely in your mind. That is what I love about the game!