Two Day Magazine

Just take it one shot at a time...

When teaching me how to play golf, my father never gave me more than two things to work on in my swing. Most of the time he would spend an entire afternoon focusing on just one part of my game, helping me perfect it until I was ready to move on to something else. He didn’t want to confuse me or fill my head with too many thoughts.

This style of teaching has always proved to be the most effective for me.

I was on the range recently, working on my swing. Not hitting it solidly, I would try a new thought to change up my swing for every shot. Whether it was my grip, ball position, or how I took the club back, I wanted a quick fix. Before I knew it, I had twenty thoughts in my head and started swinging like I had never touched a club before. Then it occurred to me that I was working on too many things at once. When I started reining it back in and sticking to a singular purpose, I slowly began hitting the ball better.

What if the same principal can be applied to other parts of our lives? I know for me, I try to fit in way too many self-improvements at once: exercise more, eat better, be nicer to people, don’t cuss so much, stop procrastinating, become a better listener, and the list goes on and on. What if, instead, I took two things or maybe just one thing at a time, and focused on improving those aspects of my life before moving to another set of issues?

In the book, The Happiness Project, author Gretchen Rubin creates a twelve-step plan for herself to become a happier person. She picks one new thing to work on every month, making it less stressful on herself. Whether it was being kinder to others, not nagging her husband so much, getting rid of clutter in the house, or trying to make more friends, Rubin details the struggles of taking on even just one of the tasks. While she certainly faced obstacles, in the end she concluded that she became a happier person because she learned to focus on one thing at a time, rather than lumping everything in at once.

How hard could it be to start my own happiness/self-improvement project? Certainly I didn’t have to do exactly as Ms. Gretchen did, and I could create my own set of rules. Each month could be dedicated to a part of myself that could use more a little more TLC. And if I didn’t feel that I had improved at the end of the month, I could stick with the same thing until I felt a shift in the right direction. There doesn’t need to be a timetable for how quickly we change. Golf is like this in life as well; for a swing change to become permanent, it sometimes takes months to undo the habit of swinging the club the wrong way.

This is where patience with ourselves comes in. Whenever I get impatient with myself on the golf course, it shows. I start making more mistakes, then I become quicker to judge myself for my failures. One bad hole turns into several bad holes, and I put more pressure on myself to start playing better. I can tell you that it never works. Never.

This is true to life. The more pressure we put on ourselves to get to a place we want to be, the harder it is to be kind and patient with our shortcomings. Of course we want things to better right away. Unfortunately, in most cases, life doesn’t work that way. Commitment to change isn’t saying, “I gave it everything I had these last two weeks and nothing is different!”

Commitment means staying on the path towards self-improvement even if you have hiccups along the way. Of course, it’s easier said than done. I’ve given up on myself plenty of times; however, I don’t believe I was committed to real change during those periods. Sure, I wanted to be better, but I threw in the towel when it became too hard. Just like with golf, if I don’t commit to a swing change, I will never get better. It’s really quite simple.

In golf, you can only hit one shot at a time. Life is pretty similar in that regard. I’m still learning to enjoy this journey, but it seems a lot less stressful now that I’m taking on just one part of myself to change at a time.

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Follow Anya on Twitter and keep up with her experiment with the Self Improvement Project @anyaalvarez

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