Goal Setting (Episode 1)

Have you ever set your sights on a golfing goal, only to find yourself lost in the rough of uncertainty on how to achieve it? Fear not! Our latest episode arms you with the strategies to set effective, actionable targets that will refine your game and get you closer to those elusive aspirations, whether it's attaining a scratch handicap or hoisting the club championship trophy. Discover the subtle art of embracing the goals within your swing's reach, and learn how to drive your focus towards the greens in regulation, a proven statistic that can significantly lower your handicap. 

Join me as we navigate the fairways of ambition and the sand traps of overzealous goal-setting. I'll share personal tales and tips on the importance of precision in your approach shots, aiming for conservative targets, and the significant impact these tactics can have on your game. Plus, we'll explore the green's finer points, unravel the mysteries behind successful putts, and reveal how to master those crucial six-footers. Get ready to refine your approach, improve your stats, and tee up for success in your golfing journey.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

It's that time of year when people tend to look towards setting goals and creating aspirations for the year ahead. If you're listening to this later on in the year, it's still equally applicable in terms of having clarity of what you want to actually achieve and what you want to actually experience from the game of golf. I'm going to look at this over a couple of sessions, and the first one being an understanding of outcome goals and how. There can be some tricky terrain with this, in the sense that I think it's absolutely fine to set some clear outcomes. I actually call outcomes called directions, in the sense that you set a direction. So, let's say, the direction that you're interested in, the outcome you're interested in achieving, is a scratch handicap or the outcome, the direction that you want is to get onto a certain tour, or play for your county team, or win a club championship, or whatever it may be. There's a myriad of different potential outcomes that you could look at would appeal to you, like the fires of passion inside you. I think that's great. To set a direction is giving you fuel to take action. Within that, then, I think it's really important and we tend to all fall into this trap is the realisation that a lot of those outcomes are actually not as much under our control as we like to think. Whether you win the club championship is not totally down to you. Whether you get selected for your county team is not totally down to you, in the sense that there are other people involved. Whether you get your tour card can be the sake of one shot either way. So outcomes in terms of scores can be heavily influenced by you, but not totally controlled by you.

Speaker 1: 2:02

What I've found is a much better way of doing this is to set a direction in terms of the outcome that you desire. Have clarity on that. Get excited about getting your tour card, get excited about winning your club championship, see your name on the board. All of those things that we've perhaps heard in the past I think are absolutely fine. But it's kind of like, once you've done that, write them down, but put the envelope in the drawer and then dig a little bit deeper in terms of your game and look at some specifics of areas where you do have a little bit more control.

Speaker 1: 2:38

So, for instance, an obvious one for me would be greens in regulation. We've talked before on these programmes about the importance of greens in regulation. Now, if there's any statistic in golf that is going to have an impact on your score, it would be greens in regulation. So if you want to achieve some of those things that we've already just mentioned, those outcome goals, I would say a clear port of call is to increase your greens in regulation Directly. The work of many statisticians has suggested that an increase in greens in regulation can have a direct correlation in terms of handicap reduction. So be aware of what your current greens in regulation statistic is, but then drill down.

Speaker 1: 3:29

I think it would be really good over these next few rounds that you play to set an intention of increasing greens in regulation but then become really aware of what is actually happening in the sense that if you're not hitting enough greens in regulation, if your greens in regulation statistic is low, what is it that actually is causing that? Is it because you're just not hitting enough fairways? Is it because you're approach shot? Get some detail on that. Are you missing to the left? Are you missing to the right? The lowest hanging fruit is that you'll be missing a lot of greens short. That might be a contact issue that you can work on, but it also can be remedied by very simply aiming a little bit more at the middle of the green, a conservative target in the middle of the green, rather than going for the flag but middle of the green target to a back yardage. I've found that one single thing can make a huge difference in terms of the statistics of greens in regulation doing nothing else with the game but simply aiming at the middle of the green and then go into a back yardage. But this is the kind of idea that I want you to just really consider with goal setting is set the directions but then drill down into these individual areas.

Speaker 1: 4:46

I think another great area to look at is on the greens. You can divide that open too. Hold out six feet and in what? What is it? What are you liking that area, what I call opportunity, six feet to 20 feet and then feel, and so, in particular on this, you could look at what's your conversion rate from six to 20 feet, what tends to happen with that.

Speaker 1: 5:09

And then a great thing that you can do is in your practice. It takes a little bit of time and application, but this is one of the single most important things that you can do in terms of getting better at the opportunity range, that's, six to 20 feet range, go to the putting green, hit 18 different ports from 18 different places, random distances, between six, six and 20 feet. So you'd go 12 feet, 20 feet, 8 feet, completely at random, but then on every port, note down what actually happens. Because what you want to do is start to become acquainted by your tendencies and the brain learns from error and the Transformation effects of this exercise. With many players, when they really get clear about what they actually do in that area and then the brain starts to adjust, do you tend to miss low side, high side, short long. It's amazing how the self-corrective mechanism kicks in. But overall, this principle With goals is to set some clear directions, put those, put the envelope away after you set the direction and then focus on, drill down into the specific areas.

Speaker 1: 6:18

Things like greens in regulation, things like ports you can choose lots of different areas within the game to look at. Set some real specific goals there that then encourage you to practice in a certain way, encourage you to build skills and, if you can, if you those sub goals of those areas, those statistical areas, if you can improve those areas, then a lot of the directions that you set, a lot of the outcomes that you desire will take care of themselves. So I have a real good think about that and on the, on the, on the next session that we're going to do, we'll talk about what I think is an even more important goal to set, even than directions, and then the specific outcomes.