When I was working as a golf professional, there was a group of golfers that went out every Saturday. They all shoot 115 pretty consistently. It was just his number. But if one of them shot 118, he walked away from the 18th green.
No one had told him that 115 was good. It was just what they expected so 118 felt like a miss.
I got it.
I played highly competitive golf for a long time and now I’m a mom of two who works, makes dinner and squeezes in nine holes when I can. I’m always mad when a 15-footer for birdie doesn’t fall. It is internal. I’m not crazy outwardly but the thought is always: I should have done this.
Why should I have? Nobody keeps score but me.
A bad shot is a comparison
A bad shot is only bad compared to what you expected to happen. The ball ended up 10 feet short and that’s all he did. Hit the same shot with a different golfer’s expectations and it’s good. It’s bad because you had a bar in the head and that shot didn’t get over it.
Where does the bar come from?
That bar doesn’t come from the pros. We like to blame par and what we see on TV, but that’s not what got those golfers and that’s not what brings me. It comes from us. We have a great nine, a day when everything worked and, instead of filing as the best we did, our boss files as normal. Since then, anything less feels like a miss.
And you only go in one direction. When you get better, the bar moves. When you get worse, he stays right where he was, waiting for you at every turn.
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Because you can’t just go down
That is why the bar placed where it is so difficult to fix. It’s not a number you chose, because you can’t just choose a lower one. You can’t see it. You will only find where it is when the ball is right.
I tried.
I’ll get to the first tee and say to me today is just to be out there, forget about par, forget what I had to shoot, just put the ball in the hole however many shots they take. So I three-putt the second hole and here it is again: I should have done this.
What if you took them?
So what if you took it? No par, no 115, no number you have to hit. A 118 is just a 118 and nobody gets off the 18th green mad.
But no one leaves happy.
Those golfers didn’t remember the 118. They remembered the day it was 112, when they finished their bar. The same bar that made 118 feel bad is what made 112 feel great. You don’t have one without the other.
What do I do instead
That’s why I’m not telling you to lower your bar to make the game more enjoyable. I tried and I can’t. But I started to do one thing. When the ball ends up short and I feel the heat coming on, I stop and ask what I was expected to do.
Not what must they did
What I was waiting. Most of the time, the answer is a blow that I hit once, a long time ago, that my head decided was normal.
It doesn’t make me happy with a “bad” turn or a “bad” shot. What it does is separate the two things that are mixed. The ball ended up short of the hole and that’s the whole event. The disappointment came from me. Once I see that, I can ask if what I expected was right and, most of the time, I can set it a little more realistically.
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