Karl Morris: Best Laid Plans… Okay so you didn’t win any of the big blub competitions this year and now your mind is turning towards swing...
Karl Morris: Best Laid Plans…
Okay so you didn’t win any of the big blub competitions this year and now your mind is turning towards swing changes you might make or fitness regimes you might undertake at the end of the season to make you a whole different player in time for next year’s campaign. The problem is that 99.9% of us will make absolutely NO CHANGE whatsoever!
That is not me being negative or dismissive of you or myself. It is just a fact of human life. Most people do not change. They stay the same. The biggest predictor for most people of where they will be in twelve months time is to look at exactly where they are now. They will still be there!
There are obviously tremendous exceptions to this and some people do change but in the main it is as you were. Golf is a great reflector of this life scenario. After playing golf for more than a couple of years how many people continue to keep getting their handicap down and reducing their scores? Very, very few.
Why is this? Why do so many of us want to change but find it almost impossible. Would we change if we absolutely HAD to? If it was a matter of life or death? Surely?
Well perhaps not!
In a paper presented by Dr Edward Miller, Dean of the Medical School and CEO of the hospital at Johns Hopkins University in the USA.
He talked about patients whose arteries are so clogged that any kind of exertion is terribly painful for them. It hurts too much to take a long walk. It hurts too much to do almost anything. So surgeons have to implant pieces of plastic to prop open their arteries or remove veins from their legs to stitch near the heart so the blood can bypass the blocked passages. The procedures are traumatic and very expensive – they can cost more than $100,000. More than one and a half MILLION people EVERY year in the USA undergo coronary bypass graft or angioplasty surgery at a total price of $60 Billion. Although these surgeries are astonishing feats they are no more than temporary fixes. The operations relieve patients pain for at least a while but only rarely prevent the heart attacks they are heading towards.
Knowing these grim statistics, doctors tell their patients: if you want to keep the pain from coming back, and if you don’t want to have to repeat the surgery, and if you want to stop the curse of heart disease before it kills you, then you HAVE to switch to a healthier lifestyle. You HAVE to stop smoking, stop drinking, stop overeating, START exercising and relieve your stress.
But VERY VERY few do.
Miller states: “If you look at people after coronary-artery bypass grafting two years later,90% of them have NOT changed their lifestyle”. Incredible!
Perhaps a bit heavy to think about but on a significantly less important scale what chance do we have of reducing our handicap then? Are we doomed to stay the same?
No is the good news but I do think that we all need to understand our brains a bit more. Think of it this way, in all of us there is a ‘thinker and a doer’. The thinker thinks about what it would like life to be like whilst the doer well it just does. The thinker is all about the future, the doer wants satisfying NOW! You may think that you want to go to the range tomorrow night after work but the doer might get its way after a hard day at the office and just plonk you in front of the TV.
I would never claim to have all of the answers to this problem for us all but one thing that really does seem to have an impact is to focus on really SHORT TERM goals. Instead of ‘getting down to scratch or winning a major’ ask yourself ‘what are you going to do THIS week?’ What are you going to do TODAY? It seems that the ‘thinker and the doer’ can work a lot more in tandem as a harmonious team when goals are framed this way. The thinker is still doing its planning but the doer gets to have a ‘little victory’ every day. A thought for all of us to consider and then to ACT on!
Check out Karl’s website www.golf-brain.com
Okay so you didn’t win any of the big blub competitions this year and now your mind is turning towards swing changes you might make or fitness regimes you might undertake at the end of the season to make you a whole different player in time for next year’s campaign. The problem is that 99.9% of us will make absolutely NO CHANGE whatsoever!
There are obviously tremendous exceptions to this and some people do change but in the main it is as you were. Golf is a great reflector of this life scenario. After playing golf for more than a couple of years how many people continue to keep getting their handicap down and reducing their scores? Very, very few.
Why is this? Why do so many of us want to change but find it almost impossible. Would we change if we absolutely HAD to? If it was a matter of life or death? Surely?
Well perhaps not!
In a paper presented by Dr Edward Miller, Dean of the Medical School and CEO of the hospital at Johns Hopkins University in the USA.
He talked about patients whose arteries are so clogged that any kind of exertion is terribly painful for them. It hurts too much to take a long walk. It hurts too much to do almost anything. So surgeons have to implant pieces of plastic to prop open their arteries or remove veins from their legs to stitch near the heart so the blood can bypass the blocked passages. The procedures are traumatic and very expensive – they can cost more than $100,000. More than one and a half MILLION people EVERY year in the USA undergo coronary bypass graft or angioplasty surgery at a total price of $60 Billion. Although these surgeries are astonishing feats they are no more than temporary fixes. The operations relieve patients pain for at least a while but only rarely prevent the heart attacks they are heading towards.
Knowing these grim statistics, doctors tell their patients: if you want to keep the pain from coming back, and if you don’t want to have to repeat the surgery, and if you want to stop the curse of heart disease before it kills you, then you HAVE to switch to a healthier lifestyle. You HAVE to stop smoking, stop drinking, stop overeating, START exercising and relieve your stress.
But VERY VERY few do.
Miller states: “If you look at people after coronary-artery bypass grafting two years later,90% of them have NOT changed their lifestyle”. Incredible!
Perhaps a bit heavy to think about but on a significantly less important scale what chance do we have of reducing our handicap then? Are we doomed to stay the same?
No is the good news but I do think that we all need to understand our brains a bit more. Think of it this way, in all of us there is a ‘thinker and a doer’. The thinker thinks about what it would like life to be like whilst the doer well it just does. The thinker is all about the future, the doer wants satisfying NOW! You may think that you want to go to the range tomorrow night after work but the doer might get its way after a hard day at the office and just plonk you in front of the TV.
I would never claim to have all of the answers to this problem for us all but one thing that really does seem to have an impact is to focus on really SHORT TERM goals. Instead of ‘getting down to scratch or winning a major’ ask yourself ‘what are you going to do THIS week?’ What are you going to do TODAY? It seems that the ‘thinker and the doer’ can work a lot more in tandem as a harmonious team when goals are framed this way. The thinker is still doing its planning but the doer gets to have a ‘little victory’ every day. A thought for all of us to consider and then to ACT on!
Check out Karl’s website www.golf-brain.com
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