"Focus on how you hit the ball than the result"
There I was in the Pakuwon Driving Range. The first lesson was to pick the right stick for a beginner as me. My Instructor let me choose any stick in the bag, but he recommends that I use the number seven or eight. As far as I can remember, he told me that the smaller the number the longer the stick would be and the harder it gets to use. So I picked number eight as recommended.
Since the beginning, he told me that I have to use my left hand to hit the ball while the right is just for assisting. When I use my right hand to hit the ball (I have been a righty as long as I live), I always end up hitting the golf stick to the mat and missed the ball. If I focus on controlling my left hand and let my right hand out of my attention, I will, most of the time, hit the ball and made the beautiful 'woot' sound as the stick lightly touched the mat.
My job is not done. In order to deliver the ball curvely, I have to pay my attention to hit the ball. Focus on the ball and not on the result. More than twenty times in a 150 balls game, he kept on reminding me to keep looking at the ball even when I have done a half way swing(When the iron staff almost touched the ball).
If there is a beginning and a middle, it has to have an end. Before a swing, we have to choose the right stick. In the process of a swing, left hand and focus are the main thing and to close a good swing, we have to make a 'big' swing. I tend to close my swing quickly. This means that right after I hit the ball, I eagerly search for where the ball had landed and forget about the swing. This will make my swing smaller than it should. A small swing will not hit the ball straight and far.
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I realized that all these golf's 'golden rules' speak in my other things too. Sometimes in work/school/any other social places, we have to use our left hand. Meaning that we work together with people we don't really know/comfortable with might leads to better outcome than we worked with people we always work with.
Focus on the process, even tough it seems so sure. Focus till the end of the process/forcus till the job is done. I tend to look for the 'glory' behind the job, and that tends to drag the results down. Same goes with the closing of the swing. Seemed nothing could go wrong, and I overlooked it. Well, that cause my ball to go out of line, hit the fence and roll to the ground.
And when the swing is done, relax, we still have enough time to look where the ball will land because we have done a good full swing.
This is my golf experience.
Ivo Christa
July-August Summer '09
Picture of Tiger wood its not mine, taken from google image and it belong to its owner
