Commit to your golf score improvement

In the next 2 lessons I want to talk about the word commitment. Yeah, I know, you've already committed to wanting to get better at golf right? You might have even taken the time to write down your golf goal as I have been pounding on you to do right? If not, better get on that! I was going to do these lessons in about the same order that the CD's are in, but, I've changed my mind and just decided to put the lessons down as they come to me in thinking of their importance to your game. My research just keeps finding all sorts of interesting information and I don't want to wait until that section to tell you about something I get excited about and want you to know. Here's my thoughts on this concept that you hear thrown around a lot in golf circles.

Now, do I mean the commitment to a particular shot or a commitment to myself. Both. Today, let's start with commitment to myself (yourself) as a golfer. It's absolutely great that you have come to the conclusion now that you have infinite potential to improve at this game and anything else you want in life. If I have helped with that and done nothing more for folks, then I will die a happy guy when it's my turn to go. If I haven't, stay tuned for more on this in future lessons or email me and I'll get you there if it kills me! One of the things I am noticing about doing this business and my writings is that a lot of folks have everything they need already to be an excellent golfer and all they really need is someone to give them permission, to push them, to excite them to take what they already have and turn it into golf greatness reality. I want to do that for you because that's what keeps me going every day. Really! Lately I have been more on fire than usual because of my new training in NLP and hypnosis and learning more about how our minds work and I can't believe all the tools we have at our disposal to make things happen that I wasn't aware of before.

More on that later but getting back to point here. Part of commitment to yourself, that is,implied in part of the meaning of that word is "action." You know this deep down, but far too often, we get a new energy from an outside source (me?) and then it slowly fizzles out over time and then you end up reverting back to your old ways. The antidote to this, is Action. Constant, continuous action, no matter how small or insignificant it might seem at first glance. When nobody's around, and nobody's checking on you. Here's the big key as I talked about in CD1: Incremental action. Always, always ask yourself something like "did I do something today in my round or my warmup that is a step toward improving?" Before the round, tell yourself that one of your main goals today is make sure I learn something, take something from my round for that incremental action like the POW's did every day. I have read a very good book I can recommend to you that might shed some more light on this subject and help propel you and it's called "ACTION! Nothing happens until something moves" by Robert Ringer.

The other implied meaning in the word "commitment" is "follow-through." Once you make a commitment to yourself about your intention to improve at golf, you might be tempted down the line to "justify" a slacking off of your plan. It's real easy to do as we do it all the time with things we want to improve on for ourselves like exercising, eating, drinking, and smoking. The way to ensure you follow through with your commitments is to make your committing statements to another person, outloud and in writing both. You see, we as humans are programmed by thousands of years of our ancestry to follow through with what we say we will do with other humans. 

For instance,In the past, before modern civilization, it was absolutely necessary for survival that humans cooperated with each other. If a person said that they would trade an animal today,for an amount of a crop when it came in, and when the crop came in the farmer didn't follow through with his end of the bargain, it wouldn't just be a little court case and a collection agency matter as it is today. No, the person who didn't follow through and reneged on the deal would never be able to make a deal with anyone in the village again and that person would starve! Over generations, those that didn't follow through on their commitments to others just died out and those that did, lived. This isn't just cultural, it's hard-wired into our brains after so many thousands of years of this selection process. Being called a hypocrite is the ultimate insult for many of us and for good reason. If you want to learn more about things like this that us humans do and why, there's an excellent book called Influence by Robert Cialdini and I'll give you more items from it in future subject matters.

You all know that it is difficult at times to change our old ways of thinking and that sometimes we have to play "little games" with ourself to get over mental hurdles. There is nothing wrong with this and it is not a sign of weakness, in fact, it's a sign of strength that you now understand a little bit more about your own mind and can use it to direct your future instead of just waiting for things to happen to you. I'm going to give you more of these kinds of ideas to help you do just that.

 If you are an extremeley strong-willed and mentally disciplined person who doesn't need this kind of thing, great, do it your way but I must warn you that it is written in too many books about golfers who have put every ounce of mental strength into their commitment to improve and all it ends up doing is putting more tension and stress through unfulfilled expectations. Real improvement in mental management for golf should come easy and without "trying." From psychocybernetics: "our creator made ample provisions for us to live successfully  in this or any other age by providing us with a built-in creative mechanism." Our trouble is that we ignore the creative mechanism and try to do everything and solve all our problems by conscious thought, or "forebrain thinking."
So, just simply make your commitment to yourself and someone else. Make it clear that you will always be moving forward. And that you will take small incremental action continuously throughout your golfing life. And then, just let it happen, and it will!

Next lesson, I will "follow-through" with my promise to talking about committing on the course.

Until then,
Greens and fairways!

Craig

Craig