Setting goals is nothing new in this little corner of the internet. New year, new season; it's all very exciting. Starting on a clean slate always feels good, and the upcoming possibilities are endless. Will my winter practice pay dividends? Is this the season I set a new personal best? Maybe I'll finally get a hole-in-one? We're on the first tee of the season and whether we make the most of it or not is up to us.
As you probably didn't even notice, I've been on a bit of a blogging hiatus since March. It was not intentional or calculated; this golf season has just been a bit different for us.
This past Saturday, I played my first COVID-19 era round of golf. I wasn't really sure what to expect. The exhaustive list of measures put in place to keep golf courses safe and allowed to operate made me wonder if it would feel like a mere shell of the game I fell in love with as a kid.
We're all quick to turn into walking advice columns when we have even a modest amount of knowledge or experience with something. In the era of Google, we've become reluctant to learn things the old fashioned way. We're losing our ability to block out the noise and dig answers out of the dirt.
There's a reason comeback stories resonate with us. There is something very human about adversity and hearing stories about those who overcome it fill us with hope and inspiration.
No matter who we are or what we do, we all feel pressure at times. Whether it's on the golf course or at work or when you're the emcee at your friend's wedding reception and everyone is counting on you not to stink. Achieving anything in life will have some level of pressure associated with it, therefore pressure isn't something we should avoid, but rather something we should embrace.
It's that time of year when those of us who have endured a long winter start to emerge from our shanties, often scruffy looking and mumbling to ourselves. Winter can be an emotionally jarring time for golfers, but that's also what makes spring the most exciting time of year...
Stay patient.
So simple.
Why is it so difficult sometimes?
I've struggled staying patient on the course at times. In my previous blog entry I wrote about how patience was taken over by frustration in our first round of the Calgary Golf Association's Riley's Best Ball event, which knocked us to the consolation side.
Since then we've mustered up a couple wins and found ourselves in the consolation quarter-final match last night on the Hawk course at Priddis Greens G&CC. It has taken me a while to implement relentless patience this season, but I have started to find some recently.
After I published my Goals for the 2017 Golf Season, I had several followers ask me to "reveal my hand" and expand on my mental game routine referenced in that post.
I am not an expert in human psychology, but I do take a keen interest in it. Even in the most common social encounters I like to observe behaviours and body language (including my own) because I find it fascinating how our minds work and react.
When it comes to golf I find it even more fascinating and I always take inventory of my thoughts in an effort to correlate them with performance. A few of my own observations:
I fell down a Google wormhole a few days ago searching out some of the most cliche sayings of all time. I had no purpose for this search other than to relentlessly avoid whatever I was supposed to be doing at the time, but then I started to realize that golf provides some strong exceptions to some of these sayings and I thought it would be fun to share them with you. Please enjoy.
