Today I realized that one of the major stumbling blocks to changing anything is the lack of total commitment to the process. A few days earlier I took a golf lesson from Jimmy. Jimmy is a local pro, at Westchester golf course. What’s great about Jimmy as an instructor he never gives you more than you need at the moment. I hadn’t taken a lesson from Jimmy in over a year, but I started having some difficulty with my take-away and decided to go get a check up.
Jimmy immediately recognized the problem and gave me some adjustment to make in my take-away and particularly in the area of were the club head was at during the mid way point of the swing. I had been flying the club head open and then working hard to square it back up on the follow through. Sometimes it worked, but most of the time it didn’t. It was causing my right elbow to chicken wing and some erratic plane adjustment to occur on the way down.
After making the adjustments I was really striking the ball well on the range, I went to the course a few hours later and again was striking the ball well. It wasn’t until the 3rd day that I started to have real problems. I was in a small skins game and playing at 8 AM in the morning. I am not really a morning player, but I wanted to play with my companions, as well as, play Rancho, which is a good public course in L.A.
From the 1st tee until about the 12 the, I couldn’t hit anything off the Tee. I just kept toping it. I finally patched something together and got through the rest of the round, and even managed to win a few skins in the process. Later on the same day I went to Penmar a local 9-hole course near my house with my son Pharoah. It was there that I realized that I wasn’t totally committed to changing the aspect of my swing that Jimmy and I had worked on 3 days earlier.
As I made a commitment to focus on the lesson, an ease and relaxation came over me. I could feel the position of were I wanted the club and also realized a few things that I wasn’t doing on the take away. The main awareness had to do with how uncommitted I had been with the swing change. I was sort of faking it and not fully connected to one of the main requirements of change-commitment.
Change requires you to totally let go of what you’ve held to be sacred and dear up until that point. If you try and do a switch you have moved away from the energy that surrounds change, and in my case, a world of confusion. I had so many swing thoughts going through my head that I couldn’t hear my heart at all. The heart is the generator for the change Process. If your heart is not in it, it is nearly impossible to really have an effective change process. The heart produces the luvv and courage you need to manifest the change.
Golf and life are very much connected. The golf course presents tremendous opportunities to learn, develop and adjust. Businesses that try to change, but who are really just making choices and not decisions on how they do things, very rarely make effective changes.
What I realized on the course regarding my swing was that I was going to either have to fully commit to the change or not. What wasn’t going to work was me making different choices on each swing and in some cases, have several different swing thoughts gong through my head at the same time. All that would lead to was continued frustration and doubt.
Once I became solid in my direction, made a decision, the easier it became to listen, follow directions and acknowledge that learning required doing.
There is no middle grown with change, either you’re in or you’re out. If you are making choices, then you are not making the decisions that are needed for change.
I understand your " committ" to change and sticking with it. I think it is great and something that is so hard to do for most like quitting smoking. I smoked for 15 years and after 3 attempts finally was able to stop now for 10 yrs. But anyway my committ was to be very open minded while going through a club fitting last year at the Carlsbad golf center by a Titleist rep who was club fitter of the year 2 years ago. She asked me to be " open minded" and I told her no problems. Well I went from a stiff flex to a regular even though my speed was fine for a stiff but my "tempo" told her I should go with the regular flex. And the 1 shaft I told her I did not want that I felt I had no feel for ended up being the proper shaft for me but just in a different flex. Go figure. But I do have to say my irons have improved. Now I hope this weekend maybe next I will drive back down south and get my woods looked at with the launch monitor and maybe change some shafts there too.
