Things have been a bit difficult of late, I’m unemployed and, as blogged previously, my car blew up. Michelle has been fantastic and has really helped to keep my spirits up. The other thing that’s helped has been the golf and this blog. I keep my mind off things by visualising hitting the perfect tee shot on all 18 holes at the club. I have moved onto other shots and putting but the putting lets me down; somehow, even in my imagination, I can’t make decent putts. I have sunk pretty good long putts on very rare occasions but mostly I’m rubbish; I don’t seem to be able to read the greens or judge how hard to hit the ball. This calls for some serious work, visualisation is all very well for the other parts of the game but for putting nothing beats hours of practice.
I have decided to utilise my enforced period of inactivity to practice at the club when I can. I check for jobs every day but that only takes a couple of hours so it leaves plenty of time to bat a ball about the practice green. As Michelle works a couple of miles from the club, I can drop her off and then go practice for an hour or so. I can be home by 11.30-12 o’clock, leaving lots of time to surf the net for job.
I am also trying to re-build her website. She has recently signed a contract for a book deal, and I’m trying to tie her blog ‘Throw away your loincloth’ with a live feed into the website. This isn’t as easy as it first sounds. For experienced web designers it’s a piece of the proverbial, but for me using ancient software it’s not that simple. There is far more jargon than golf and picking it up is a bit of game. I am a ‘monkey see, monkey do’ kind of person, reading how to do things doesn’t always sink in. However if someone shows me, and allows me to do it for myself, I can pick up things very quickly. I do have to write things down though.
I did manage to find a way of getting the javascript for the feed and set up a style to appear on the web page. It isn’t perfect but it works, took me hours though!
Does this approach apply to golf? Well, by reading some of the golfing magazines I have picked up some tips, especially from Butch Harman. I have also borrowed a copy of ‘Golf for Dummies’ which has been useful. Watching other people, although it can be informative, is difficult as I can’t switch my eyes into slow motion. This contrasts with my method of learning technical stuff.
I am also reading ‘Dream On’ by John Richardson, in which he details his quest to go from scoring over 100 to scoring a par round in a year. It’s a very good book and one which resonates with me as I try to go from 140 to 100. He gives some good tips on how to improve your game; these make sense to me as I don’t have the mindset of a club golfer, having only just taken the game up. The secret is practice and, more importantly, self-belief. This is an important lesson for life too; I have become very down due to unemployment and have lost my confidence due to only having one interview, and failing to get a second one. I have always suffered to a degree with a lack of self-belief, but I have always managed to get the job done so I must have some ability! Unfortunately these days, moving out of the industry you’ve been in for years is very difficult. I’m told that ‘You have transferable skills’ but alas no-one really wants transferable skills, they want experience within their own industry-or pieces of paper. Experience of similar kit is not enough; I have gained most of mine within the newspaper printing industry, but most of the jobs are in pharmaceuticals, food production and packaging or other FMCG industries.
If visualisation helps with golf, then I’m going to apply it to job hunting. I will see the job I want in my email inbox tomorrow, I will apply and I will get a reply and an interview. The rest is then up to me.
If not I’ll go and play golf instead, I need the practice.
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