Can’t stop the progress

I realized today that as long as you are actively looking for results you’re not going to see any.  But once you stop looking, they just seem to appear.

This is true for me for both golf and my workouts.  At first, I would be frustrated because both worlds were not progressing how I had hoped/imagined they would, especially the workouts.  I felt like week to week nothing was improving and I would forever be stuck at the same level.  For a couple of months (April to June 2010) I fretted over this, secretly thinking that I was doomed to spend 10,000 hours on a putting green while never actually making a decent lag putt.  In the gym, I would be sisypheanly  (new word, or at least a gross misappropriation of “in a manner similar to sisyphus”) be pumping 20 Lb weights, always tiring after 30 minutes of exercise.  And, as if watching the metaphoric pot trying to boil, noticeable improvements were hard to come by.

So I gave up.

Not on golfing, but on hunting for improvements.  Each week I work harder than the previous and I have not relented in my quest for the PGA, and I will not relent until it is a truth, but judging yourself every day along the way only  results in frustrations, making your goals that much harder.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s crucial to have goals and to constantly be testing and analyzing your abilities, but there’s a big difference between tests, self-judging, and OVER judging…  A test is a good way to see where you currently stand, it’s something that illustrates what your strengths are and what you should work on.  Judging yourself a bit along the way can be good too.  Where the problems arise is when you start hoping to see improvements every day, unrealistically thinking that because you worked 8 hours at something the day before you should inherently be better the next day.  It just doesn’t always work that way.  Now, instead of fretting a bad day, I just take it as a bad day and move on, we can’t win them all, right?

I realized today that with this approach, you get pleasantly surprised when improvements start showing up, and they will!  Just have some faith in your abilities and keep up the hard work and in the long run it will all pay off!

Sorry for being a bit over-inspirational today, I’ve just had this feeling for the past couple weeks that most all of the golfing demons are out of my closet and I’ve got the cruise control set, nothing between me and the ocean that is PGA except for a few thousand hours of hard work, which I can do standing on my head…