Golf Boot Camp Diary 2005

February 3, 2005
I arrive in Tampa – a 2 ½ hour flight from the cold and snow of Toronto – but even here it’s cloudy and cool. I don’t know exactly what to expect – I have had lessons from John Cochrane before, but this is going to be much more intensive. I do expect to be stretched physically and mentally. Indeed the essence of Boot Camp is about stretching: stretching your body and your mind, putting yourself into positions that you have never been before and with feedback as to where you ought to be. My golf mind had been stretched several years ago when I first saw my swing on video; it was a horrific experience. What I had thought was an elegant powerful swing was actually a flat, flippy swipe at the ball. It was only after seeing myself on film, however, that I realized that I was going to have to redo my swing from scratch.

Day 1: Damp and chilly with a cold wind
We start really early (7am) bundled up in our rain suits at the River Hills Country Club, (www.riverhillsgolf.com) where John Cochrane has a place for his golf school at the end of the practice range with all the amenities, including full-length mirrors, swing plane guides, video replay and so on. We start with an hour-and-a-half of stretching in front of the mirrors so that we can tie together images and feelings of the golf swing. One of the primary objectives of the stretching is to separate your upper and lower body so that you can create torque on the downswing, twisting the lower body through while holding the upper body back. John believes in putting the body into “extreme” correct poses during stretching so that you can really feel what the various positions during the swing should be. “What feels like a large change to your body,” he says, “Is usually quite small. As a result there is a huge difference between what you think you are doing and what you are actually doing. By putting yourself into poses that are, say, 125% of where you need to be, you are likely to get much closer to 100% when you perform the moves in the full swing.”

But these poses feel so strange – “How on earth can one strike a golf ball from here?” I wonder. Everything feels counter to what I know (and do). When I try to repeat the new positions on the practice tee I feel hopeless: if you don’t think you can get back to the ball it requires an act of faith to take the club away! Out on the course it’s even worse – any tendency to focus on results causes the body to default to its old habits. John lets us play only about five holes before we head back to the mirrors: “When you lose focus on what you have to do,” he says, “You start to teach your mind the wrong things: you have to get that focus back before practicing again.” Back to the mirrors, back to the practice tee and then back to the mirrors again. By the end of the day, after 11 hours of concentrated effort, I feel physically drained. We finish our excellent Japanese-style dinner early and after a hot bath and some aspirin I am fast asleep by 8.30 pm.

Day 2: Cool, foggy start but becoming sunny and windy
Another early start! The days consist of a variable pattern of guided stretching and mirror drills, ball-striking (from putting and chipping to iron play and driving) and course play. One finds the positions in front of the mirrors and practices them with weighted clubs to “burn in” the feelings, which one then “produces” them on the practice tee before going to the course to see if you can reproduce them there. The flexibility that this stretching builds is the key to creating power through the swing. But the change in context from practice tee to course, which is a challenge at the best of times, is now huge. The new positions, which I feel only gropingly on the practice tee, become totally elusive out on the course. Any hint of focusing on either the ball or the results of a shot leads to immediate disaster. “Stay internal,” says John, “Focus on what you have to do: emotionalizing about results gets in the way of understanding what you have to do.” Easy for him to say; his results are great. When I contrast my miserable outcomes with my semi-competent, pre-camp swing my frustration turns to anger. The only thing that sustains me is my knowledge of the change process…“This is what change in any situation is all about,” I think to myself. “It begins with a crisis: a loss of competence and the failure of old habits to produce the right results. Only then do you realize that you have to change.” After another 11 hours I am mentally drained, although I notice that my body is not quite as tired as it was on Day 1. The evening sequence is the same: pleasant dinner, hot bath, aspirins, bed.

Day 3: Warming up – sunny with a light breeze
After the early start and stretching I find that on the practice tee I am paying better attention to the moves I have to make and am less preoccupied with where the ball is going. It’s still not easy – by the time I have focused on setting the club on the right position and plane on the back swing, the downswing sometimes takes my by surprise. And I am still having trouble believing that I can get back to the ball from the top of the backswing – it just feels so awkward. Out on the course my old preoccupation with the ball and where it is going returns with a vengeance. I hit one good drive but the very next one is dreadful. “Why was that shot bad? What changed?” asks John. “I am not sure,” I reply, “I thought I made the right moves.” “When you say ‘thought’ it means you don’t know,” says John. “You have to put your hands and the club where you want them to be throughout the swing. That first good drive switched your focus from internal to external – what changed between the two shots was your mind. Focus on what you have to do!”

Almost everyone’s golf swing is a complex interaction of compensatory moves and positions. As John puts me into new positions and removes the primary faults, the compensations that have been useful to me now become useless; worse than that they get in the way of doing what I have to do. Talk about strengths becoming weaknesses! Yet my mind doesn’t want to forget them: my bad habits are the source of my feelings of competence and power and I have relied on them for so long... One thing I do start to notice, however, is that although I am hitting poor shots, I am not scoring too badly. The ball is always near the fairway or the green and my chipping and putting have started to improve. Dinner, bath, aspirins, bed.

Day 4 – A steady warming trend
Another early start but the weather is warming up and for the first time we are out of our rain pants. After the usually warm-up stretches in front of the mirrors we are off to the chipping green. It’s in the chipping that I am starting to get the first sense of a new competence and the way to achieve it – know what you have to do, visualize what you have to do, feel what you have do and then do what you have to do. John has us chipping with four clubs: sand wedge, pitching wedge, 8 iron and 6 iron. He gives us some simple rules of thumb about how far each club will fly the ball on a flat green – a sand wedge pitches the ball about ¾ of the way to the hole; a pitching wedge travels about halfway in the air, an 8 iron about ⅓ of the way and with a 6 iron you have to pitch the ball about ¼ of the way to the hole, allowing it to run the rest of the way. John has us adopt the same routine every time we set up: weight 80% on the left foot, ball two inches back from the left heel (so that the club strikes it a descending blow); two practice swing looking at the hole, one swing looking at the target area to land the ball and then chip the ball making the same movement with a flat left wrist. And if you do it like that, you get the results you practice!

Out on the practice range my pitching is starting to come together. We practice pitching at 20, 40, 60 and 80 yards, noting how far we have to take the club back each time and making sure that we replicate the swing positions. Out on the course I am still struggling with the full swing but, with my chipping and putting much improved, I can usually get up and down in three shots or less. Dinner, bath, aspirins, bed.

Day 5 – A beautiful day with a warm sun and light breezes
The stretching is now a whole lot easier: even though I had been working on my flexibility before the camp, I hadn’t realized how stiff and inflexible I really was. Now, although I am tired, my body is starting to feel a lot better and I can hit the positions a lot more easily. I still have trouble producing them in the full swing but on the video I can see the improvement in the action of my lower body – it’s several “frames” ahead of where it was only four days ago. It’s clear that I still have a long way to go but with the new feedback to guide me, I know that I am on the right track and I know what I have to do to make it happen. For example, I know how to set myself up in front of a mirror so that I can practice the right poses, feeling the positions I have to put the club in. The strength in both my arms is improving and I can hold the weighted club in those positions more easily than before. Out on the course my ball striking still isn’t nearly what it should be, but amazingly I am scoring much better. Put me within 80 yards of the green and I now feel that I have a reasonable chance of getting up and down. When chipping I am pretty confident that I can get down in two from almost anywhere.

We go to an excellent local steakhouse for dinner with a fine wine list. Round the table the talk is all about golf and the camp. It’s amazing that after five solid days of golf we are still talking about the game. But we have shared a great deal together about discipline and focus and learning and there is a sense of accomplishment for in the process we have all grown and changed.

Back in Toronto it’s still cold with flurries of snow. The golf courses won’t be open for at least another two months, but with a mirror in the basement I won’t lack for opportunities to practice my golf skills. One thing the boot camp does reinforce, however, is that the process of change – learning – is identical in both golf and management. And, as is true in both activities, everybody wants to improve but nobody wants to change. Not really. Because change involves discomfort and a loss of competence and power; and this can lead to frustration and anger. Getting through that demands a high commitment to the goal and a coach who can give you feedback on what you have to do: it also helps to understand the change process and what you are going to experience.

If anything change is easier in golf than it is in management because at least someone can tell you what you did, what you should be doing and give you timely, specific feedback on exactly what drills you have to do. Management is much more complex: feedback is usually delayed and non-specific and getting it is often a challenge, particularly as you rise in seniority. It’s also difficult to find the right drills to practice and simulations in which they can be rehearsed. Every organization is full of bad habits and, just as is the case with the golf swing, these habits are a source of power and feelings of competence – to someone – which is why changing them is so difficult.

Reflections Two Months Later

The boot camp really helped me change in a way that one-hour lessons have not. The concentrated effort forced me to put my body into the right positions and gave me a set of drills that will allow me to learn to do it better over time. During the boot camp it was all I could do to get my body into the right position in front of the mirror! Even though I was doing the steps one at a time, it was a struggle to hold the positions. As soon as I stepped on to the practice tee, let alone the course, things began to come apart. Now, two months later, after 15 minute drill sessions twice a day I am starting to feel that I can produce the moves with speed and power from start to finish. Redoing the base of my swing has changed everything else – all those weird moves I made to compensate for poor fundamentals are no longer necessary: my swing is much simpler. My ball-striking has improved dramatically and the ball now travels much straighter with little side-spin.

The experience reinforces everything I wrote in Learning from the Links except that now I have a deeper understanding of it. The process has to be done bottom-up – issuing instructions from the top isn’t any more effective in golf than it is in management. In management the people who do the best job of this are still Toyota in their Toyota Production System (TPS). What they do is create the conditions for timely, specific feedback as low as possible in the organization. This allows them to fix problems and learn at the lowest possible level of the organization – continually improving the base of their “swing” – after that it’s practice, practice, practice.