Let’s assess your golf game. How’s your golf season going so far? Grade yourself in the following facets of the game.
Driving____________________
Approach shots______________
Long Wedges________________
Finesse Wedges near green_____
Short Putting_________________
Lag Putting__________________
Mental Game_________________
After you’re done grading your performance in these areas, you are ready to set some goals. Let’s say you want to improve your driving. Be specific. Make a clear goal to improve your fairways hit (for instance) by a certain number, let’s say 2 per round. Give yourself a time limit. Perhaps a month will do. Maybe two. Then it’s time to take action.
How are you going to reach your goal? It might be to take a lesson and find the how’s and why’s—the cause and effect—behind your driving performance. But that’s not enough. You may have to improve your swing motion. Improving your motion is difficult because we golfers are often more concerned with our immediate performance than we are with doing the new motion correctly. I see this a LOT, and it’s a big problem! At first, make sure you are doing IT right! Then do IT right and hit the ball to the target. Otherwise you’ll just spin your wheels in the mud. Remember, the Secret of Golf is to find your own, personal “IT”—“when I do IT, the ball will do what I predict.”
Oh, and I’ve made the assumption that you will practice… This is the never-ending cycle of improvement. What’s more difficult is sticking to your process while taking action. You must stick to something long enough to learn it, even if you struggle with either the skill you are trying to develop, or the mechanical motion you trying to improve in order to develop that skill.
Every 2-3 months, I suggest you start the cycle all over again, including re-evaluating your action plan—the steps you took toward improvement—in the event that the improvement you had planned on did not occur. Evaluate your execution of your plan. Perhaps you didn’t stick to your new motion long enough to learn it. Perhaps you were “barking up the wrong tree:” Meaning you looked for the solution in the wrong place, which happens often when we try to learn without help and appropriate feedback.
Don’t wait till the off-season to go through this process. Do it now! Next week, we will look at the 5 Steps to Making a Swing Change.
Hit ‘em Great!