Aligning Expectations with Reality
As you can imagine, I spend a lot of time thinking about golf. How to help others play better. How I can play better. How I can play more golf, fit golf into my life better. Golf is on my mind in some form or fashion probably 10 of the 16 I’m awake every day. (Well, I wish it was 16. Our newborn has her own opinions on that 😅)
But the further along I get on my thinking-about-golf journey, the more zoomed out my perspective becomes. I spend more time now thinking about what golf means to me than how I actually play.
Maybe this is because I’m not getting to play as much in this season of life. But I also think in talking to more and more people of extremely diverse backgrounds, both in 1-on-1 mental coaching sessions or interviewing guests on The Mental Golf Show, I’ve learned that your answer to one question can make a massive difference in how you play.
That question is:
What is golf to you?
Depending on how you answer that one question will determine so much about how you go about playing a round of golf. It will dictate your relationship with practice, success, failure, improvement, enjoyment, and so on.
Just this week I released a conversation I had with Mike Berland. Mike has been a strategic advisor to politicians and companies such as airbnb, Meta, MLB, and Nike. And he’s also an author of a handful of books, of which his most recent is called Not About Golf: The Life Changing Joy of Playing The Game. In that book as well as in our podcast conversation he talks a lot about this question. He talks a lot about getting clear on what the game of golf means to you.
And he says that golf certainly mean the same thing to everyone. But more importantly, knowing your own relationship with the game and acting in alignment with that relationship.
An example of the opposite would be believing that golf is just a game, it doesn’t mean that much, it’s just a fun activity you get to do on occasion. Yet whenever you play you react to bad shots as if it’s the end of the world.
In Mike’s view this separation of expectation and reality is what causes a lot of strife in golf. But when you align your expectations of golf closer to what reality gives you, you will become much more content with golf, and end up finding much more joy in the game.
Ultimately, this alignment of expectations and reality will mostly likely end in not having expectations at all. You end up just experiencing golf as it is in the present, without much thought of what might happen in the future. You simply do your best while your playing or practicing, and you move on and stay in the present.
As I get older, I find myself needing this reminder more and more. Because with every passing day I’m getting further away from the days when I could practice for hours and hours and play all the time. So my reality has changed, but often my expectations lag behind.
I appreciate Mike’s reminder. You should go listen to the episode. It’s a refreshing changeup from most of the episodes of The Mental Golf Show.
One thing for you to work on this week:
Get clear on what golf is to you. Align your expectations closer to reality. It will improve your relationship with the game, and most likely help you play better.