Entry 25.2

Well, here we are. Day one of a brand-new semester. New opportunities for you to learn, grow and mature as you work towards becoming a PGA member. New people to meet and hang out with. New shots will present themselves on the golf course. New challenges in your classes to tackle. For some of you, all this newness is exactly what you want. For others, you wish that life would just stay the same. I know there are times when I just want life to slow down and stop all the change. We crave stability in life. My mornings are where I want stability. When something gets put on my schedule that changes my routine, I’m not really a fan. I want to wake up at 0515, start my warmup at 0520 and get after is until 0630. Then I feed my cat who is constantly annoyed that I wait to feed her until after my workout and not before it. Then I make my breakfast of 4 eggs, 2 pieces of bacon, 2 pieces of cheddar cheese and 2 Sister Schubert’s Dinner Rolls. Then I get ready for the rest of my day whatever that may be, weekdays I prepare to come to work and hang out with all of you. I do things in the same order, every day of the week. Well except weekends. On weekends, after waking up at my normal time (I set an alarm, but I don’t really need it), I try to fall back asleep until 7. Shelby always kids around with me about how I am the embodiment of “creature of habit.” I understand that sometimes I am going to have to change my routine, but I don’t like it. But its not about the routine, it is about control. In a world full of hustle and bustle and constant change, I just want to be in control of part of it. But with work I don’t want things to be the same. If I had to go to work and do the same thing every single day, I would go nuts. I crave different challenges that seemingly pop up randomly. But even if you look at my day big picture, I have just about every hour of my workday scheduled to be something: administrative time, lessons, Teaching Club, Movement Clinics, etc. I make changes, but the same basic structure is there. When I was in the Army, one of my mentors, Santa (no, not the jolly chubby man in a red suit) used to jokingly call me a robot partly because of how structured my life was. But there has always been one part of my life that I want constant change. It’s just not a part of life most people associate with change.

It might surprise you that I am not a fan of school. That might surprise many of my former professors as well. Was I good at school? Yes, if you look at the normal data points. On paper, I’ve always been a good student. Your typical straight A student for most of my life. When I was younger that was because of fear. I did not want my parents to get a report card with a “B” on it because my father made it very clear that the only acceptable grade on my report card was an “A.” If you looked off the report card though, it was a vastly different story. I was a menace. I still remember being in constant trouble. Whether I was doing calisthenics in the aisle between seats in 1st or 2nd grade (can’t quite remember that much) or climbing out my window when I was homeschooled, I was a problem child. When I got to high school, things calmed down a little bit. But something changed. Because of what classes I took when homeschooled, I was ahead of my peers in math. Not just a little ahead. Way ahead. I took the two math class the school offered I hadn’t yet taken yet and was looking forward to the free period the other two years. But during that free period on the first day of my junior year I was called to the principal’s office. I started sweating trying to figure out how I had messed up that bad that fast. But when I got there, I was informed that the school was going to require me to take a class during my free period. Then a life changing moment happened. I was asked what I wanted to take. It was up to me. The only caveat was that I would have to teach myself as no teachers were available during that period (I went to a small private school). Having homeschooled, I was used to teaching myself. The answer was easy for me, I wanted to take more math. I’ve always enjoyed math. Over the next couple of years, I took Calculus I, Calculus II and Trigonometry. My senior year the school decided that I had taken enough math so I finally had my extra free period. The first semester, I built the computer lab for the school (I’ve always enjoy tech). Those math classes were the ones I enjoyed the most throughout high school. But back to nothing to do second semester, so to keep me busy, I was placed back with some of my classmates in a new math class, Remedial Mathematics. I still remember flipping the book open to the first page to catch up on the material from first semester and finding the first lesson covered what a number was. Needless to say, I was extremely bored in that class. Thinking about it, it may be the reason I fell out of love with mathematics. College the first time was a little better because of electives. I could take whatever I wanted. I really enjoyed learning languages, so I took Russian, German, and French (on top of my Spanish minor), an introduction to baking class, and some other random classes. When I went back to school (here at Methodist), my choices were a little limited as I didn’t need any electives and decided taking the minimum class load was the best as I was figuring out life after 3 major TBIs that resulted in some memory issues. What I can tell you is that I did not want to be business major. I wanted to take kinesiology with a counseling minor. But it wasn’t an option. Business Administration it is. If I had the chance to do it over, I would have been an Economics major but o well. What I can tell you is that I did not enjoy most of my business classes. Not that I didn’t learn anything, I learned a ton. And yes, for the record, I use my business education every day. The classes I think I use the most? Macro- and Micro- economics, Negotiations and Business Strategy (I took those 4 classes with only two professors: Dr. Baker and Prof. Wayland). I enjoyed those classes because of how the professors taught me to think, not because of the content. But it wasn’t until after I finished my formal classes that I started to really enjoy learning again.

In May 2023 all I had left to satisfy graduation requirements was 10 months of internships. My plan was as soon as I graduated and was elected to PGA membership, I was going to start the PGA Specialized program. When it came time to make that happen, I decided not to. I didn’t want to go back to school. I don’t enjoy school remember. But I love learning. Like LOVE learning. Cannot get enough of it. At first glance, that may seem like a little bit of an oxymoron. I love learning, but I don’t enjoy school. Let’s talk about the reason why I decided not to enroll in the PGA Specialized program. Between May 2023 and May 2024, I was able to decide what I wanted to learn. No one was telling me which book to read, what chapters in that book to read and when to read them. The decision was mine. Remember that control over my life that I talked about? Now that I have control of my education, I am loathed to give it up. If I enroll in the PGA Specialized program, someone would be telling me what to learn or how to learn it and right now, I just don’t want that. Not that someday I won’t. Just not right now. I’m enjoying my education my way too much right now. I have total control over it. I can dabble here and there, sample a little bit of this and then change my mind and going a completely different direction. Since I have finished my formal education at MU (I graduated in May 2024), I have taken a few golf specific courses. TPI Level 1, TPI Level 2 Golf, TPI Level 2 Power, and TPI Level 2 Fitness as well as the Golf Digest Instructors Course. I think there is another one, but I can’t remember off the top of my head. But I have also studied a myriad of topics, some which are golf specific and many not. I’ve read books on the biomechanics of the golf swing, technical books on the golf swing, and books on the mental and emotional aspects of the game of golf. But I’ve also read books that weren’t through the lens of golf at all. Books on coaching other sports, motor learning, how general learning happens, one book on the body’s fascial slings and another on the muscle slings, a book on the correct use of statistics in research, one on problem solving in a general sense, and a book on the proper mechanics of breathing and how breathing affects our endurance, strength, precision and mental health. Next up is a book on the vagus nerve or fear. I haven’t decided which one to read first. Why am I telling you all this? The point isn’t to impress you with all this knowledge. My goal is to weave all these things into how I teach and if I hadn’t told you this, for you to never know that I did it. The point is that now that I’m in control of my learning, I can bob and weave in and out of whatever I want to learn. There were so many topics in school that I wanted to know more about, but because it didn’t fit the structure of the class, the teacher didn’t want to get into it. And frankly, I didn’t have the time to learn it on my own and sometimes I wish I pushed aside my goal to graduate with a 4.0 and did it anyway.

If I had taken an assessment on my level of grit during school, I would’ve scored very well. Psychologist Angela Duckworth defined grit as “passion and perseverance.” Passion is consistency of interests (knowing exactly what you want) while perseverance is work ethic and resilience. We tend to think of grit as something desirable, but in reality, grit can get us into a whole bunch of trouble. Not like trouble with the law trouble, but trouble in the sense that it keeps us stuck in a lane of life that we want to get out of but just won’t because well “we’ve got grit”. I’ve always thought that I’ve been a gritty person. I’ve gone through a whole bunch of stuff in my life that I just had to, for lack of a better term, grit my teeth and bear. Because of that, grit has become a habit in my life, and I started tackling everything with grit. I see an end goal and stick with it even when all the signs are telling me to jump ship. While I am proud of my 4.0 GPA here at Methodist, I should’ve taking those tangents that popped up during my classes and forgotten about the 4.0. Why? Because that’s how I love to learn. And after studying learning in general, that is how the best learning happens. When I decided that I wanted to teach and coach, I also set the goal for myself to become the #1 golf coach in the country. I have recently set that goal aside. Not that I wouldn’t love to make that happen, but if I make it a goal, I have pigeonholed myself into a corner because of my gritty habit. I take away my ability to flex and go off in another direction that just pops up because I would need to stick to my current path. If I didn’t listen to Robert Frost and take the road less taken, I would never have read all those books with topics that weren’t golf books. Why? Because they were not directly tied to golf. Every single one of those is a tangent and apparently random. Some I happened across while scrolling through Audible, others while walking through the bookstore and yet others were suggestions from Amazon based on the books I have purchased.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I do not want you to quit school. What I want you to do is broaden your minds. Some of you have already decided what you want to do in life, whether that is playing on the PGA Tour, being a Director of Golf at a prestigious club or owning your own golf clothing line. Many of you are some of the grittiest people I have ever met. In this context, that isn’t a good thing. Having grit is like putting on blinders and shutting out all the other possibilities. You only see your end goal and not all the tangents that you could be taking. Computational neuroscientist Ogi Ogas said “If you get someone into a context that suits them, they’ll more likely work hard and it will look like grit from the outside.” It’s not a question of whether you have grit, it’s a question of when you should have it. Take control but don’t be afraid to shift paths when something better comes along.