Acceptance and Gratitude for ‘Who’ not ‘Do’

It is my firm belief from my own experience and also the experience of my students that self-acceptance and gratitude is a real difficult concept to live by for golfers.  We as golfers tend to be so hard on ourselves and expect perfection in our golfing experience and we judge ourselves by our performance on the golf course.  Our identity tends to get wrapped up in our golf scores.  But the reality is that we are all human beings who are constantly moving forward because we learn from all we experience and that would include learning from our mistakes.  The truth is that we are not our golf scores or what we DO, but we are human BEINGS. This concept is one of the things that I write about in my book, GOLF FROM THE INSIDE OUT.

Here is a quote from one of the sections of the book: “We’ve talked about accepting ourselves, but can we be grateful for who we are?  There is a voice in our lives that says, “You are not good enough and need to be different.”  I could listen to that negative voice and live in a world of complaining about who I am but that would not be productive.  Instead I can choose to look at myself as God sees me and be thankful and grateful for who I am and what He has created in me.  Merlin Carothers says in his book POWER IN PRAISE, “I was one who was dissatisfied with the way God had made me.  He was never dissatisfied.”  Carothers realized that he just needed to be grateful for what God had created in him and what God had given him.  With that realization, he could accept himself and be at peace with who he was”

Can we separate who we are from what we do?  Can we separate ourselves from our golf scores? By doing that it is my believe that we can have more freedom to play golf because our person or identity is not dependent on performance.  Consequently our scores will probably be better!  It is a challenge to separate our WHO from our DO, but in doing that we also find our true identity apart from our performance and we can find acceptance and gratitude for WHO WE ARE which will not change no matter the score.

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