are you putting in the work to be where you think you should be?
by bill reeb
during golf season, i like to hit practice balls at the driving range. i also like to take lessons with my golf professional – mostly playing lessons as opposed to ball striking lessons, because just hitting the ball is far less of a problem than the lapse of synapses striking properly in my brain.
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to clarify, during a normal game, i try to hit shots that i have no business hitting, or forget to stay in the moment, or fail to focus on hitting one shot at a time. but during my playing lessons, i review with the pro what i plan to do and why i am making the shot choices i am proposing. it should be no surprise that with this level of concentration and shot-by-shot focus, i play some of my best golf with my pro in tow.
i remember a specific session a couple of years ago when i was confidently standing over the ball, had a clear picture in my mind of the shot i wanted to make and then just horribly chunked it (i hit more earth than ball). i looked at my pro in embarrassment and said, “i don’t understand how i can miss a shot this badly given how much i practice.”
in his response, robbin, my pro, recalled a recent teaching event he attended for golf professionals. he commented that when he went out to play 18 holes of golf during this event, he saw phil mickelson, one of the best golfers in the world, putting four-foot-length putts over and over on the practice green. my pro thought it was odd when he turned the nine and he saw phil still practicing four-foot putts. and when he completed his 18 holes (a little more than four hours from when he started), there was phil, still practicing those same four-foot putts. my pro was intrigued, so he walked up to phil and asked him if it was common for him to putt for four or five hours straight, especially a similar length putt. phil’s comment was something like, “i practice putting four-foot putts for several hours, and when i decide it is time to go home, i have to make 100 in a row before i will allow myself to leave.” while this is not an exact quote, it was close enough for me to get the message.
phil is a pro golfer and one of the best in the world. putting is a major function within how he makes a living. yet with all of this practice, for those of us who watch golf, we have all seen phil miss four-foot putts on tour. so to paraphrase robbin’s response regarding my chunked shot, “what do you expect given that you play golf for fun and only practice a couple of hours a week during a couple of months a year?” to put this into more generic terms:
anytime you have unrealistic expectations given the work you are doing, you are setting yourself up to get stuck because of feeling unsuccessful or unhappy about your performance.
what am i frustrated with because i am not improving as fast as expected? where might i be losing momentum doing the work because i am expecting unrealistic gains?