Helping Golfers Reach Your Goals for 2009

January 1 usually brings us to contemplate and assess the previous year and make a plan for the year to come. I have been setting written goals since 1987 and have tried a variety of methods. A couple of key things have come from this that I want to share with you.

I now set goals in several areas: family, spiritual, career, economic, emotional, mental and giving. These are my main ones and I sometimes add a category here or there. Career is where I include teaching golf and my own golf game.

I brainstorm my potential goals in each area and write as fast as I can without prioritizing for 2 or 3 minutes per category. Once I do this for all my categories, I go back and pick my most important goals from each category and set a time frame (1 year or less, 3, 5, 10, 20). I record these in a section of my planner that is easy for me to look at on a regular basis.

All that being said, here is what I have found to be the key to reaching my goals: planning the process for reaching these goals. The way this has broken down for me is daily standards that I live up to that virtually insures my success.

When you dig deeper to figure out why you want your goals, it is because of the perceived emotions you receive from reaching the goal. An example would be a goal of winning the flight in your club championship or getting a new car. If you were to win your flight, you would feel satisfied and/or adulation. A new car would be a feeling of pride and new fun. When you break down why human beings do things, it comes down to desire for positive emotions or wanting to avoid negative emotions. I have consciously written down the emotions I like to feel on a daily basis, the emotions I perceive I would get by reaching my goals.

When I learned this, it led to a daily standard called Peak State. Three things determine your emotion or state:

1. Your physical movements
2. What you choose to focus on
3. Your beliefs and self talk.

I use all three, but I have found controlling what I focus on to be the most effective. I start each day with a sense of thankfulness and gratitude by asking questions. Examples would be ‘What do I have to be thankful for?’ (Which is a lot), ‘Who do I love and who loves me?’, and ‘How can I help someone reach their goals today?’. The answers to these questions lead to positive emotions. There are so many bad questions that most of us ask to ourselves ‘Why am I so unlucky?’, ‘Why can’t I ever get a break?’ etc. which leads to mediocre or negative emotions. The problem has been that most of us don’t realize it.

I am proposing to you that you set your goals for 2009 and then commit to the process of daily Peak State that leads to reaching your goals and gives you one of the secrets to life that I wish I had learned at a younger age. That secret is that emotion is what we are seeking and the goals we set (and hopefully reach) are the vehicles to feel the emotion. By knowing that the emotion is what you are truly after, you have tools (like good questions) to feel the emotions in advance and have fun as you move daily toward reaching your goals.

This is extremely important in the mental side of playing your best golf. I will talk more about this in a later post. Have a great 2009 and I hope there is a thought or idea that is helpful to you.