Developing your Potential

Developing your Potential

By Dennis M Clark

Developing your potential is one of the most over-used and yet under-taught areas in golf coaching. It is a vital area and when developed correctly and fully has the propensity to deliver the greatest advancement to your game

It is a great piece of advertising and most coaching schemes will make this claim and yet fail to even acknowledge our potential let alone develop it.

The first step under these schemes is to totally ignore our potential as they attempt to fit us into their concept of how we should swing a golf club.

The concept here is to develop our golfing potential but in the process they ignore our natural potential and in doing so inhibit our achievement.

Now our natural potential is the innate talents we possess and the development of this allows us to grow as it has done in most areas of our life so far. The refinement of these talents allows ownership of ability to perform certain acts to a high standard on a regular basis.
The main point here is ownership.

A simple analogy is learning to ride a bike. The mechanics of riding a bike were technically simple but we struggled and fell off a number of times.
Some might say that what allowed us to succeed was the refinement of technique, but what allowed us that refinement.
Through our innate talents (natural potential) we gained the awareness and feel of balance, of momentum, of steering, of controllable and uncontrollable speed. The more we developed our potential the better and easier it became, the less self doubt we experienced, with this confidence grew as did an ownership of ability to perform an act to a high standard regularly.
It didn’t happen perfectly every time, but we didn’t question it we accepted it and got on with enjoying the ride.

If we can do this with riding a bike, which can cause injury, why can’t we carry that same ability through to golf?

The main reason is that we aren’t taught to base golf learning around our natural abilities, we aren’t taught to develop our real potential.

We are taken out of our potential and told to perform a lot of foreign movements, quite often put on a computer screen and told we don’t look like some top performer who we will never look like anyway.

Our golf swing becomes a workshop of trying to remember to get into all these positions while hitting a good shot. Most of the time we don’t really know whether we achieved all the positions or not. If the shot was good we guess we must have and if it wasn’t we’re left struggling with the analysis of which position didn’t work.

But one thing is for certain. We never achieve that state of ownership no matter how hard we try and this is because we haven’t learned to understand our potential and how to truly use it.

This, not only technique, is what separates the good players from the rest.

Ownership doesn’t mean we will do it perfectly every time, but it does allow us to stand over a golf ball with knowledge rather than fear and this allows us the freedom to actually play golf and what’s more to enjoy it fully.

You see, we don’t actually have golf potential, we have natural potential to be developed in the form of golf.

Copyright Dennis M Clark 2007