Swinging It Right...

After 2 years of sweating it out on the range and struggling on the golf course, saw a glimmer of light in the game yesterday. Here are my learnings:

1. Learning is like a hockey stick, especially if you do it the right way. Your reduce your results in the beginning because you are unlearning a lot of stuff. Your performance goes right down to rock bottom and then the turn-around happens. It's really about slowing down to speed up.

2. You have to have childlike trust and faith in your coach. Without that, I wouldn’t have been able to sustain the phase of unlearning to hit rock bottom. Imagine my consternation (humiliation is a more honest choice of word), when someone who had started playing only a month back was hitting longer shots than me in a game we were playing together. Without that trust, I would have dumped my kit in the nearest garbage bin and walked out to go back to squash :-)

3. You have to have pollyanna optimism in the face of everything that isn’t working. At the beginning of the year, when I wrote down my 2018 one-pager, I declared to myself that I would end the year with 18 handicap when I wasn’t even able to hit one in 10 balls. Now, 9 in 10 balls are up in the air and 5 of them in the direction I intended. My coach says I will hit my target and I am going along with that :-)

4. There is truth in the 10,000 hours and daily practise. My 9-year old son has declared he wants to be a professional golfer. So, being a big believer in ‘focus on the input side of things’, the 10,000 hours and daily practise, we hit the golf course 6 days of the week. Fortunately, the club is closed once a week :-) This daily practise thing has done more magic to my swing than anything else. Of course, only clocking 10,000 hours is not of any value, if you aren’t practising the right technique as my son reminds me.
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5. if you don’t love what you are doing, you will never be able to clock the 10,000 hours to cut-over to mastery. You will be fighting your inner resistance more than enjoying the process of learning. Either fall in love with what you do or find something that you love. Both paths lead you to freedom.

6. You have a choice, in golf and in life - play a good game or play a great game. Both are very different paths and have very different outcomes. Be aware of the choice you are making.

7. My coach says you have to be the fittest person you know before you can be the best golfer. Your physical body is the only house you are getting to live in this lifetime. The well-being of your physical body depends on work on itself; and the well-being of your mental, spiritual and emotional bodies. 

8. Einstein credits his success as a scientist to his ability to step away to his violin. I totally get him when I step away to walk into the golf course. What do you step away into to find your source of creativity & innovation.

9. Golf connects us. Once a week, it is family golf where all four of us spend 3 hours together, anger or upset, in the beautiful tranquil greens walking together from hole to hole, away from the busy-ness of life, no longer being able to run away from each other or from one's own self, experiencing the joy of being together. It took me 3 years to make this happen. Intentions get fulfilled, only if you stay with them long enough.

What is the new thing that you are learning and what is your biggest insight from there?

​Love, Jyoti.