I tend to play golf the way I live my life: at times, a little off course. In the past six months – well, since I’m counting, let’s call it a decade – it seems I’ve been in the rough too often. Yet, rather than cheering myself back into the game, I tend to kick myself. OK, it’s not exactly a healthy strategy, for golf or life, but changing that game plan? Well, that’s a major life lesson, isn’t it?
And that’s why I’m here, at the Sandra Post School of Golf in Caledon, Ont. It’s a fine, no, really, it’s an impossibly idyllic summer morning, but I cannot enjoy this soft dawn light. I have not held a golf club for more than a year. Watching me whack at the ball is the most successful professional golfer Canada has ever produced. And Sandra Post takes, oh, about two minutes to determine where I’m at.
She tells me that I have a natural athletic swing and she will make very few adjustments to it. Of course, I don’t believe her. “I didn’t think so,” Post says, then videotapes my next efforts and shows me the proof. “See? That’s a nice golf swing. C’mon. Admit it. You probably play any number of sports well.”
Indeed, I play a half-dozen sports well, but hardly ever well enough for my fierce internal critic. This past year, after a film I had written fell through, my critic dug her claws deep into my confidence and began shredding any evidence of success. She took stock of the last decade of my life – I had lived in nine apartments in three cities and wandered up at least five writing paths – and concluded that I had accomplished nothing and that nothing added up. Harsh? Welcome to my world.
Luckily, I stumbled upon a gem of a book by sports psychologist Dr. Bob Rotella: Golf Is Not a Game of Perfect (Simon & Schuster). He argues that the most important thing a golfer must learn – and can learn! – is to think positively. All at once and with a blissful zing, I saw my way clear: I would take golf lessons. To help my game, sure, but really, to see if the game could help me.
So, here I am with an eight-time winner of the Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA) Tour discussing my so-called nice, athletic swing. And I can’t help but point out my jumpy weight shift, right in the heart of my swing. And that I have a wicked slice. And that my drives are always off target.
“Details,” Post says. “That’s why you’re here. To work them out.”
Details? What I see is serious work ahead.
The first golf clubs I ever laid eyes on were my father’s rusted set of Wilson irons, which he had stowed away after his family came along. One day, my brother hauled them from the tractor shed. Dusted off, those clubs shimmered, impossibly exotic.
I grew up in the country, though hardly a country club setting. When I was 15, my father suffered a series of “nervous breakdowns,” later diagnosed as Parkinson’s dementia. My mother was preoccupied with caring for him and guiding my brother who was taking over our family farm. Left to my own devices, I struggled against the loss of my father by over-empathizing with his deepening depression.
But my father’s golf clubs spoke to us of a different man. A young man so confident as to dispense with drivers and play his own game, using only irons. A man with enough ease to while away an afternoon on a game. A man we knew only from a picture: tall and handsome in a leather bomber jacket, pleated flannel slacks, a shot of jet black hair falling rakishly over gold-rimmed glasses, standing amid a group of friends, laughing.
My brother claimed the clubs as his own and taught himself how to golf. I believe the game helped him get on with his life.
I never had a chance to golf with my father or learn the game’s lessons. While I came to understand the source of my malaise, I could not seem to solve it. Think positively? I never came up with an affirmation I could actually remember. Morning pep talks required too much coffee and wore off with the caffeine. I bought a set of golf clubs after university but managed to play only a few times a year, if that. Somehow, life – or the malaise – kept getting in the way.
First shot Start with good lessons
I am not the only person who has come to Sandra Post to fine-tune a game plan. Smacking out balls is a 40-something executive, working on her confidence before a company golf tournament; a young woman, just 15, already vying for a university golf scholarship; and five young businesswomen in a group lesson, figuring the surest way to smash through the glass ceiling is with a Big Bertha driver.
We’ve come to the right person. A teacher, broadcaster and mentor, Post is deeply committed to advancing the woman’s game. And she’s a master of positive energy, confidence and fun.
“I like the kind of person golf develops,” Post tells me as she corrects the way I line up to the ball. I had been leading with my left hand. Post has me approach with my right, so that I can see the target with my stronger right eye.
I crack a ball on line with the flag – yes! – but it sheers off course at the last second. I groan. “Golf teaches you to control your emotions,” she says. Then she places her club horizontally in front of my arms so that I have to take my back swing along a surer arc. She nods for me to swing again. “And it teaches discipline and goal setting.”
I smack the ball straight at the flag and it drops, gloriously, six feet from the hole. I release a boisterous head-turning whoop. Post laughs. “And it teaches you how to relax and have fun. Because if you’re not enjoying it, you won’t play well.”
I hit a few more balls on line with the flag, while Post teases me mercilessly. “See? You haven’t had a club in your hand for a year and look at you. Doesn’t that feel good?”
Well, I’m starting to feel pretty great about my nice athletic swing. And about myself. Which is the whole point of Post’s first lesson. But I just can’t leave well enough alone. “What about my jumpy weight shift?” I ask.
Second shot Establish a positive routine
Over the next few weeks, Post teaches me the basics: driving, hitting irons, chipping and putting. After each lesson, she sends me away with an exercise to work on problems, such as my jumpy weight shift. I confess: I don’t practise much. Rather, I puzzle over other things Sandra taught me. Such as how, with a few minor adjustments, she had me hitting on target. And how these few adjustments left me feeling pretty good.
I dip back into Dr. Rotella’s book and muse over his mental approach. Most golfers, he says, step up to the ball, thinking only about fixing a problem – keep your head down, shift your weight, follow through on the swing. Dr. Rotella says this kind of approach is inherently negative because it focuses your attention on a problem rather than your target. Yet lately, that’s exactly the way I have been approaching stressful situations. In thinking about my problems and shortcomings, I lose sight of my goals.
Successful golfers follow a different routine: focus on a target, determine your best shot to reach that target, then swing. They don’t lose time on self-doubt, second-guessing or negative thinking. Sounds good to me. I could make a few minor adjustments to the way I line up to stressful situations.
First, I determine a goal – to turn any situation into a positive and fun experience. I identify strengths to achieve it, such as my strong analytical and problem-solving abilities. Then I will simply swing clear, thinking about my goal, rather than my angst.
I feel better almost instantly. I have strengths! I have cool goals! I have a nifty golf-shot routine for life!
Third shot Put yourself in that positive routine
Now, all I have to do is apply the new approach – and along comes the perfect opportunity. One of my short films is accepted at a film festival. A cause for celebration? Don’t be ridiculous. All I can imagine is that my film sucks and now an entire theatre full of people will see it. Worse, I’ve been invited to a swank party to honour hip, cool and trendy local film-makers. And I feel, well, only local. To top off the horror, I must go alone and I know nobody.
With my old approach, I would skip the party or show up and act as if I was at a funeral. With my new golf-shot routine, I pick myself up off the floor (where I had been pressing my forehead into the carpet to stay “grounded” ). I decide it would be “positive” for my career to get to know other filmmakers and “fun” to chat about their work. I know that I have what it takes to do this. I’m curious. I can ask questions.
I arrive to see everyone knotted into cosy conversation clutches. My first inclination is to bolt, the second to bolt for the bar. Until I focus on my goal. I introduce myself to the closest person and ask a question. With the discipline of a golfer, who must perform the same stroke over and over, I repeat the process. Before I know it, I am in the middle of a knot of people yakking and having a terrific time.
Fourth shot Put your relationships into that positive routine
I congratulate myself on making a pretty fine shot in a tough situation.
Buoyed, I turn my golf-shot approach to my relationship. Since returning from my filmmaking foray in L.A., I have been moody, irritable and distant, obsessing and bellyaching about my career. It’s a typical pattern. My partner Nancy nods, bored, and I deduce that she doesn’t care. Which makes me more irritable and distant. We want to move out of our sublet, buy a house, move on, but we don’t know where or, it seems, how. We feel stuck.
My relationship goal? I want it to be fun and positive, of course. So, I set out to achieve it, as Post says, by taking one shot at a time. I head back to the first tee, the start of our relationship, and start planning the kind of fun things we used to do together. My strengths? Cooking. Weeknights, Nancy arrives home to creamy fettuccine spiked with shrimp stir-fried in vodka and peppers; a chicken roasted in leeks, cream and single malt. I arrange excursions to all our favourite things: art galleries, movies, plays. After a month of dates, we find ourselves at a wine bar, making Sunday brunch out of seafood appetizers, laughing hysterically, like old times. And suddenly we are talking about the kind of home we want: full of friends and great dinners, close to all the downtown things we love, a place that’s fun and positive. The vision for our future is exactly like the last month we’ve just enjoyed. For the first time, the image of our house is clear and we also see how we can get there. What had seemed so difficult now seems only a matter of, well, details.
Another fine shot? Hardly. It is superb.
Fifth shot Practise the positive routine, for par
I turn my attention, reluctantly, to that last knot of confusion, my career. As a writer, I must continually decide which assignments I’ll take and which ones I’ll have to pass on and yet the process always depresses me. Now, I face three major projects in three different media. I want to keep doors open; I want to do everything. But I realize I can’t spread myself thin, as I have done in the past, not if I want to be effective. Or enjoy my fun and positive relationship. Or have time to golf.
During my lessons with Post, she can tell that I am distracted with working kinks out of other areas of my life. “Golf is about making strong choices,” she tells me, suggesting that lessons are pointless without making a commitment to practise. “Golf forces you to make decisions – what club to use, what shot to make – under pressure.”
Yet, when it comes to my career, it seems as if I don’t know what I want. Here, my new golf-shot routine falters. I can’t set a goal. I can’t muster faith in my strengths. With my work, I’m like my father. I am hardest on myself. As a freelancer, I am my own boss, and I can tell you she is a tyrant.
Post tells me her biggest challenge as a professional was also psychological – learning how to stay in the moment. She’s a high-energy social person. On big game days, when she was putting for the dough, her adrenalin would shoot through the roof, which threatened to throw off the rhythm of her stroke. Post consciously focused on slowing down: eating slow, driving to the tournament slow, walking slow on the golf course, until she felt as though she were in slow motion. “It took me years to learn to channel that energy,” she tells me, “but I did it to get to the next level. Golf is all about figuring out who you are, then developing a game that will bring out your strengths.”
I ask Post if she can tell what my psychological challenge is, from the lessons we had spent together. She didn’t hesitate for a second. “You’re very competitive,” she says. “Others can just go out there and golf with friends and enjoy it, but that’s not your game. You want to do things well. You won’t be happy unless you see your game improving. But that’s going to require more practice than you’re willing to give it right now.”
Post is right. I am competitive. And just as she had to learn to channel her energy to get to the next level on the LPGA Tour, I have to learn to focus my competitiveness not against myself, but on the next level in my career.
She’s right about the practice thing, too. I have a life-stroke routine now, but it’s not enough. I have to practise it, by making smaller decisions, so it’s there to guide me through these large career decisions.
I decide not to commit to a project until I start to feel better at work. After I set that goal, what I must do next becomes very clear: fire my tyrant and hire a fun and positive boss. If you see me out on the golf course from time to time on a Friday afternoon, well, we’re working out the details of our next move.
Tee Off!
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