The actions we perform as humans are always retrospective. We do something, then we analyze how we could have done that thing better. After finding a reliable, successful method of performing the action we begin to analyze it less, and less. It gets deposited into the subconscious, and habits take form.

What blows my mind is how many bad habits people develop in golf (present company heavily included). But once you start to look at the why of it all, it begins to make sense.

Essentially, golf has a ton of levels. There are many, many steps to get from total crap to average, and then twice as many to get from the middle to scratch. Golf gets exponentially harder as you get closer to par and beyond, so this leaves dramatic skill gaps. The bad habits come from figuring out how to perform a rudimentary skill effectively for your level, but not correctly fundamental for the next level.

A classic example you’ll see from beginners is that they will get good at playing their stock shot shape and not deviate when necessary. If they are a slicer, and they run into a dog-leg left hole, it’s likely they will sacrifice yardage, or hit it out-of-bounds quite a bit. The mind-blowing part is that people will go for years playing this way, whether it’s never learning how to straighten out your shot shape (or turn it the ball over), or ignoring some basic concepts of course management.

Beginners reinforce bad habits because golf is hard, and they are finally getting the ball off the ground. However, if you want to be a more successful golfer, you will need to ditch some of those bad habits and regress for a period of time.

This regression that we experience in golf is a hard thing to swallow. No one wants to have worse scores after already working so hard to achieve whatever success you’ve had. As in life, this is oftentimes the only way to improve and learn new skills. When you get a new job, you have many things to learn, and you will be somewhat bad at it for a period of time, that is normal. It’s quite rare for anyone to walk into a brand new setting and be entirely fluent, and it’s the same with golf.

If you want to learn how to hit a draw, you will need to put in some passive learning (YouTube, books, reading material, videos, etc…) and a lot of active learning, which is hitting golf balls, and/or taking lessons from a pro. People seem to get that lopsided quite a bit (especially IRL) They emphasize passive learning much more than active, and that can hinder understanding. Think of skilled laborers. Imagine a new apprentice right out of college, and has all of the newest teachings and methods, everything is still fresh in their mind. Next, imagine an older, weathered veteran who has wear marks on all of their equipment. I would bet money on the latter providing quicker service and a better product. Point being, the more you experience active learning, the actual doing or applying of whatever you are researching, the more you will learn about the concept as a whole.

So as to why does it make sense that we reinforce bad habits in golf? We are scared to fail, simple as that. We are scared that the cost to learn something new will set us back for a period of time. We are scared to get a new job (even though it could be your dream job) because we are scared to be bad at it. We are scared to go snowboarding because we will suck for a day. It’s the same in golf.

Kudos to all of you who can get past yourselves and be comfortable with failure, you will be the successful ones in life!