Why Your Junior Is Struggling And How To Level Up Their Mindset

All right, so I wanted to go live today to cover a little bit of what I'm going over in the training that I'm going to be doing a little bit later this month, uh, specifically around the number one kind of mistake, uh, or problem I see with junior golfers' mindset, uh, with parents of junior golfers' mindset and really why it's causing them to struggle to shoot the scores that they're capable of and improve. I see this, you know, so often where, you know, junior golfers are not shooting the scores that they're capable of, not necessarily because of some physical limitation, but because of the way that their mind is working, because of the decisions that they're making on the golf course, because of getting frustrated letting one, you know, bad shot lead to another bad shot and it kind of spirals. And then, you know, from a parent's perspective, it can kind of be like you're watching from the outside and be like, you've got all the things, but for some reason something isn't clicking, right? So I'm going to be kind of discussing today why that's the case and what the reason that they're not really having things click and why things might seem a little bit more difficult than they really should be. So just high level, I kind of want to address first though, what mindset really isn't. You know, I see a lot of stuff out there about like, oh well, you know, it's just breathing techniques, or oh, my, my kid just, they can't focus. And to be honest, all those things are, are just kind of symptoms. You know, it's like, okay, maybe you can calm yourself down with your breathing, right? But they all come from a bigger kind of more important thing, and that's clarity. If I do not know what to expect then I cannot prepare for anything. You know, like I can't understand how to engage in any environment if I don't know what to expect. And so a lot of the times when I talk to junior golfers and parents, the clarity of what they're trying to do is just not very clear. They don't really know what they're trying to do. And as a result of that, they think that they usually have to play at a much higher level than they actually have to. And that causes them to make decisions that prevents them from being able to score because they take on shots that they shouldn't otherwise take on. So I want to kind of like backtrack on this though, a little bit first. The, the biggest thing that if I were to sum up mindset in one, you know, major kind of idea, it's expectation management. If I can expect the right things, then all the other downstream effects are going to come out. If I expect the right things and I'm focused on the right things, then I'm going to have that focus. If I expect the right things, then I'm going to get less frustrated because I'm going to understand what I should see from myself, and I'm going to see things that fit within that because that's what happens when you know what to expect, right? So it's understanding that process is the most important thing. And I always use this analogy: if you shoot 85 and you're an 18 handicap, well, that's, that's a great day. Like, that's one of the best rounds you've ever shot. But if you shoot 75 all the time, you shoot 85, you want to go quit golf. So it's all relative to what we expect out of ourselves. And so if you find your junior golfer extremely frustrated with, you know, scores or a particular hole, it fundamentally comes from a position where they don't expect themselves to do that. And they're frustrated about why that happened to them. Most of the time, it's just because they don't know what to expect out of themselves. So backpedaling here a little bit, when we think about how much you know, better we want to get, that can really dictate what decisions we end up making about, you know, the things that we change or not. And so I like to kind of use an analogy here. You know, if I told you that you had to become a millionaire by the end of this week, you're, you're gonna die, you would use different strategies to accomplish that goal than if I told you you had to become a millionaire at some point in your lifetime, right? Like, if I told you you had to become a millionaire this next week, you'd probably start buying maybe lottery tickets, you might maybe rob a bank. You wouldn't have that many options, and you'd be kind of like, kind of pressed, and you'd probably do some things that, you know, if you were given a little bit more time, might become unreasonable, right? Versus if you just had to do it at some point in your lifetime, then the barrier would be very, very low. You'd be like, okay, well, I just need to set aside a little bit of money every single month and invest that for like 40 years. And you know, I'm going to be good to go. I can pretty much guarantee that. And so the same thing is really true with golf. So most junior golfers and parents don't know how much they should expect to improve year over year. And so it ends up becoming this cycle where we're trying to improve more than, to be honest, is reasonable. Because we create some narrative in our head about like, oh, well, you know, we're here, we should be able to get here because we hit good shots sometimes. Like, it's just, that's not how this stuff works. They don't have realistic expectations about how much they should expect to improve. And because of that, they overshoot that. And they're out there buying lottery tickets. We're always changing something, we're always adapting something. We got to have the, you know, the PGA Tour level golf swing, you know, we have to do all this stuff, we have to hit all the shots, we have to make more birdies, we're not making enough 15-footers. It's just a fundamental misunderstanding of, you know, what's realistic, um, as, as far as improvement goes. And so I'll kind of share that with you guys. I did deep dive because I was looking at my own statistics as a coach, and I wanted to make sure that I was actually doing a good job. But it wasn't just me like fluffing myself up and being like, oh look, here's this tournament that this, you know, student won, or here's this one student shot 7-under. I don't want to look at just like who are the most successful students, I want to look at what's the average student— what does the average student perform at? Because that's going to tell me a lot more about how I'm able to coach regardless of where they ended up. And so when I looked that up and calculated that, I was not happy. Um, I was expecting something that was, you know, gonna be 4, 5, 6, um, which is— which, um, is funny because when I talk to most you know, kids and students even, when I ask them, how much do you expect yourself to improve or want to improve over this next year? Usually it's like 4, 5, 6 shots. And so when I calculated that all out, it was about 2.7 shots per year was the average student's improvement that I worked with. And I was not happy about it. I was like, what on earth? Like, what is going on here? Um, I thought it was better. Like, I didn't feel great about myself. So then I was like, well, what's average? And so I went through, you know, Junior Golf Scoreboard and calculated that out and averaged about 1.18 shots per year. So that made me feel a little bit better. So 2.7 shots, about 129% faster or more improvement than average, right? And for any of you guys that are wondering, to maintain your ranking on Junior Golf Scoreboard, you have to improve by 1.63 shots. So as more kids come into your class, you actually have to become better relative to the overall group just because of, you know, how rankings and averages work. So anyway, if I told you that you are going to be average if you improve by 1.18, and if you wanted to guarantee, you know, if you wanted to be better than average, let's say you wanted to guarantee 2 shots, then that's realistically— I mean, I can't calculate this off the top of my head, but that's not very much per month as far as improvement goes. You know, I know for, for myself with the, the 2.7 over the course of a year, that's 0.23 shots per month. And so when we think about that, when we think about the low-hanging fruit in your game, let's take something for example like 3-putting. If we go from 10% 3-putting to 5% 3-putting Well, that's going to save about 0.9 shots per round. So the equivalent of that, if you're going to take the 2.7, that's like 4 months almost worth of work. When's the last time you guys were just focused on one thing for 4 months, knowing that if you could accomplish that, that is significantly faster improvement? Than the average. And so another way that I would kind of look at this, I know I'm using a lot of kind of like financial analogies, but they're kind of the best ones that I can find, is you take a guy like Warren Buffett. Warren Buffett became extraordinarily wealthy not by trying to hit home runs with buying cryptocurrency or stuff like that. He just knew the stuff that he understood and only did that and just tried to not make any like massive catastrophic errors and just Save the money he's got, do a little bit better, maybe. That was his strategy, and he's wildly successful. And the same thing is true within junior golf and trying to improve, is realizing that 1.18 shots on the one hand is not a very big hurdle, but on the other hand, that's, that's the average across like everybody. And some— that means half the people are doing worse than that. So if you think about that and you say strategically, okay, cool, we're at wherever we're at, How do we make sure and guarantee that we at least improve what's average and then maybe a little bit better on top of that? And what you'll kind of end up finding is there's a lot fewer things you need to worry about on a day-to-day basis. You can be a little bit more okay with just kind of keeping your game where you're— where it's at. Find the low-hanging fruit and just get hyper-focused on that. And if you can do that consistently, what'll end up happening is you'll actually get better than average results because the people who are improving on average they're doing all the stuff that, you know, you're probably doing right now. It's just like, it's kind of chaos, you know, day to day. Um, you go out there on the driving range and it's just like, I would just work on whatever we feel like working on. We're probably not measuring our stuff. We probably don't know what the long game for it is. We probably have an idea, maybe, but we can't say, if I improve this by 5%, I know what's gonna happen, I know what my score should be. We don't have any of that stuff calculated. So, um, as far as like the mindset stuff goes and taking a step back here, it really comes down to appropriate expectations. Understanding the average is 1.18 shots per year. If you can improve by 2, like, that's significant. Like, that's a lot better. And so that, that really comes down to, you know, understanding your numbers, understanding what to do with those numbers. And just, you're not going to develop by leaps and bounds, you know, month over month over month. You need to get really good at the basic stuff. And it's not about, you know, becoming this, you know, player you can shoot in the 60s all overnight. It's about making sure that you go from never shooting 80 85 to maybe never shooting 84 and just inching along over a long period of time. That's, that's really the biggest thing I can leave you guys with, you know. Like, if you've got a 10-year-old, an 11-year-old, 12-year-old, 13-year-old, it's, it's developing a process that can be done for years and you can stay focused on that, and not get, you know, scatterbrained. Because once you get scatterbrained, you get, you know, chaotic. That's when you're going to go backwards, right? You know, how many of us have decided we're going to go do a swing overhaul and be like, oh well, you know, it's going to cost me, you know, I'm shooting way worse now, but in the future is going to be way better, maybe, I hope. Like that type of stuff is, you know, dubious at best. And so when you guys are just thinking about long-term progress, it's really having that process and that, that plan to know, okay, cool, here's how we can get better consistently month over month by a little bit, like a tiny, tiny bit, like 0.1, 0.2 shots. And the only way you can do that stuff is if you measure. That's the only way to do it. You have to measure. You have to know what you're doing. You have to know what every skill correlates to, which statistic you're tracking. You have to understand all that stuff. You have to understand what to expect out of yourself, out of your junior golfer. Um, and but if you do that you're gonna have a lot lower stress, you know, round in and round out. So I just want to kind of share that with you guys. It's not so much that it's like you need breathing exercises or you need more focuses. You need more clarity. You need to know what you're trying to do so you can narrow that focus. Because when we don't know what to do, we have to look everywhere. We get anxiety because we don't know what thing to choose. But if you do know what thing to choose, you do know what to focus on, then all you have to do is focus on that single-mindedly. And if you can do that, you'll improve much, much faster than average. So that's going to be something that I'm going to be doubling down on with all of my students this year is really understanding that we need to take these like small base hits and take those very seriously. If we can do that, you know, the goal is to get that 2.7 up to maybe in the 3 or a little bit over 3 range, but it comes from those small incremental improvements. And I would encourage all of you guys to adopt that same philosophy. And, and really try and get incrementally better, small amounts. Be more realistic about where you're at. If your scoring average is 81, see if you can get it to 79, right, over this next year. That would be my encouragement to you guys. So hopefully this is helpful, and like I said, I'm gonna be doing much deeper dive into that. So if you haven't already, especially if you're in the Facebook group, go ahead and fill out the survey just so I can have a quick clear picture of exactly what you guys are struggling with, um, so I can make sure that that training is really good. Probably going to do that in the next, uh, week, so I'll keep you guys posted on when the exact date that I want to do that is on. But I'll be doing that over Zoom, so at the end of it you guys will be able to ask all the questions you want, um, go back and forth with me, uh, one-on-one. So, um, definitely fill out that survey if you guys want to attend that. So that's it for tonight, and, um, hope this was helpful for you guys.