The Daily Divot: Value of Acceptance
Value of Acceptance
“When we understand the value of acceptance, stress subsides. Acceptance is pragmatic. We can’t change what has already happened, but we can choose our reaction.”
- Laurence Endersen
This quote from Pebbles of Perception wasn’t written with golf in mind, but like life, golf has a way of testing us.
In a recent Daily Quote called No Pain, No Gain we talked about the struggle and frustration that golf can bring. The way to move past those stresses is acceptance.
You MUST come to some level of acceptance with the last shot, the last hole, or maybe the last round. This gets easier (but never easy) with practice.
It’s not an all-or-nothing proposition. You’ll never get to a totally unemotional zen state. I still get pissed. I still occasionally want to throw my driver into a lake after a terrible shot. But I’ve gotten incrementally better at accepting, resetting, and then evaluating the next shot to where it’s helped me reduce the frequency of disasters.
Think of it as getting just 10% better at accepting a bad shot and how that in turn can slightly reduce your stress and eventually your scores.