Resilience…Your 15th Club
I always find myself rooting for the underdog. Why? I love when a player stares an obstacle in the face, determined to beat the odds. Never giving up until the last putt is in the hole. This is resilience. Golf is full of challenges. The weather doesn’t always cooperate. Somedays are windy, hot, or cold. Course conditions change from day to day. Some rounds you wonder if the green superintendent had a bad morning with pin placements tucked next to every greenside bunker! These facts don’t have to defeat you. Although we can’t always control what happens on the golf course, we can control our responses. There are many strategies to nurture resilience. This is the first in a series of blog posts to help you develop mental toughness.
What fuels resilience? Gratitude. Under stress our focus tends to narrow making it difficult for us to see possible solutions. We hit a poor shot and dive down a negative rabbit hole, giving up on a round before it’s over. The next time you struggle to recover from a mishit or bad hole, take a moment to reflect on what is good in your life. It doesn’t have to be extravagant. A clear blue sky. Your golf buddies. The physical ability to swing a golf club. Gratitude charges us with an energy of abundance and possibility versus a scarcity mentality that leads us to play in “guard and protect mode.” It will put you in a mental, physical, and emotional state to bounce back. What we place our attention on enlarges. If you focus on what is going wrong in your round, you’ll get more of it.
Keep the momentum of gratitude flowing off the golf course too. I keep a daily gratitude journal. For those of you who hated writing papers in school, don’t panic! You don’t need to write eloquent prose. No one is checking your grammar! Simply jot down a list of what you appreciate. Still not convinced. That’s ok. Grab a marker and write “Thankful?” on your shampoo bottle. Every time you head to the shower, take stock in your blessings. The principle of gratitude is simple and fuels your resolve to keep going no matter what challenge you face on or off the golf course.