19 February 2023|Golfing with gratitude, Thoughts about
Jon Sherman has written a really excellent book here. A book that's written by an actual golfer, about improving at golf and some of the things that have helped him along the way. There's nothing revelatory in it and you may have read a lot of similar things in other books, but it brings it all together into one easy-to-access volume.
Chapters are short and all have excellent bullet-point summaries that help reinforce what you've just read. It flows well and is easy to read.
The four foundations laid out here are Managing Expectations; Strategy; Practice and The Mental Game.
What do I take away from the book?
I found the first two sections to be really excellent and I have already started implementing them into my golf. Excluding practice for a moment, there are so many things here that strike a chord with me. My personality off the course could rightly be said to be quite different from my personality on the course. In my personal life, my best friend likes to call me Captain Sensible or Two Condoms Keith for my generally cautious approach to most things. Yet I often seem to leave that persona in the car when I get to the course and a very different one can appear. More Captain Chaos than Captain Sensible (how did I get to a handicap of 5)? One who likes to self-flagellate and criticise himself in a way that I would never allow another person to talk to me. I've been more effective at tackling him since I retired (hmm, coincidence?) and my "Golfing with Gratitude" post explains a bit about the change in mindset towards golf over recent months.
This book really helps with that too. I loved all of the examples in the Managing Expectations section that should help me (and you) to control the voice of the devil whispering in my ear. Probably due to my finance background, I like to see things backed up in facts and figures and have always liked the expression "numbers don't lie, people do".
The Strategy section gives excellent examples of course management, something we are all basically expected to know instinctively. Smarter target selection is now a core part of how I intend to play my golf in future. Especially when I marry that with the playing information I've got from ShotScope and GolfDataLab. This is where Captain Sensible needs to come into his own again and remind me of my personal limitations before trying to draw a high 3 wood over the trees on 16 at Ladybank when I've been hitting a fade all day. My new quest is to bore my partners into submission by playing sensible golf. The downside is that I've now got the "Happy Talk" song stuck in my head and it won't go away.
I'll be working on better pre and post-shot routines and I've already been doing some post-round journaling to change the internal narrative so I focus more on the good shots that are too easily forgotten in the flagellation sessions!
The description of Grit really struck a chord too. The rounds I have gotten the most pleasure from are probably not the ones where I had the lowest scores, but the ones where I've managed to get over a couple of poor holes and still posted a decent score.
The Practice section is the most "difficult" to read but we all know that practice isn't always easy and we need to persevere. One of the other books on my reading list is "The Practice Manual" by Adam Young so this is a good introduction to that.
Conclusion
There is a lot to like about this book and I highly recommend it. We will all take different things from it, but most importantly there are things there for us all to take, regardless of our level of golf. There is so much about the psychology of golf that is common with the psychology of life.
From now on I plan to course manage the cr*p out of my rounds and play the most boring/sensible/awesome golf I can. Golf without self-criticism but with self-love (Gregor, no dirty comments please) and an appreciation for the fact I'm out there with good company, enjoying the challenge and doing something I love to do.
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