Recipe For Success

I was golfing with a friend the other day. On one tee box I teed up the ball then stepped back to assess the situation. I did a play by play commentary on what I saw. There were the trees on the left side. There was a green surrounded by bunkers. Must have been a par 3 for me to be concerned about bunkers around the green. There was a river between me and the green. And there was a strong left to right wind. After having said all that I started saying “this is a recipe for disaster”. Before I had a chance to say disaster my friend piped up and said “success”. I stopped my pre-shot routine, stepped back and asked him what he had just said. He repeated that this was a recipe for success. What a wakeup call that was.

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to golf with another neighbor. One I had not golfed with before. When we got to the 17th hole he told me how that hole was his nemesis. He could tell exactly what would go wrong. And trust me. Everything he said would happen, did happen. Not sure that ball will ever see the light of day again. As we walked from tee box to green he talked about how when you picture a bad shot you surely will have a bad shot. We talked about losing our confidence when we come across certain holes that have created problems in the past. We get spooked. We picture disaster. Our body seems to go spastic. Our brains turn to mush. It’s as if we had never before swung a golf club.

Watching TV the other day I saw a commercial featuring Florida Orange Juice. I have seen the commercial before and may have mentioned it in a previous blurb. There are actually 3 of them featuring a mother, a father and a son. The commercial depicts any one of the 3 pouring orange juice in the morning. Sitting around the table with them are people that they will be involved with during the day. Sitting around the table with the father are the newspaper carrier, computer techy, his secretary and his daughter. Each of them informs the man how they will be involved in screwing up his day for him. That is like knowing each morning what will all go wrong that day. That would be a recipe for disaster in my books. I suspect there are days that I would go right back to bed if I knew what was awaiting me. ( I wish someone would have given me a heads up this weekend on what would all go wrong with my golf game. I would have stayed in bed)

They say golf is 90 % mental. You can talk yourself out of any shot. When I look back at many of my experiences I suspect that I talked myself out of a lot of success. I have this ability to just see the hazards. We visualize disaster. Many times when we have had an inordinate amount of challenges we become like my neighbor did on that 17th hole. We become spooked. Always afraid of what may be lurking around the corner. And when we actually succeed at something we think we were lucky. We think it can’t be. We look back and try to figure out how that could have happened.

We need a shift in attitude. A paradigm shift as it were. Go from our negative, toxic way of thinking to a positive, uplifting thought pattern. We know things can and will go wrong. That is part of life. How we react, how we handle negativity and how we move on from adversity will define our life. Remember, we are good. We can make that shot. We have before. It can be a recipe for success. Make it a good one.
“Dare to dream, dare to try, dare to fail, dare to succeed”