I live in Northern California, a place that has some of the most beautiful areas in the world. On a recent golf road trip, I played one of the toughest courses in the California, Fort Ord The Bayonet Course. As I was heading down to the course, I took my family on a scenic route over to the 280 freeway, which heads out of San Francisco, well up above the city and the sprawl of Silicon Valley.
As we headed down on this beautiful highway my family and I enjoyed the incredible views. I was looking into what the future might bring at the tournament that I was about to embark upon. As we got closer to Palo Alto my young son, Luke, looked out his side of the car and asked with great surprise, "what's that?"
He was looking at the silo that contained the mile-long laser that split the atom and perhaps changed everything in this world as we know it. Now if you have ever been in a conversation with a 3-year-old about any topic that catches their curiosity, never mind how they split the atom, you would know what was about to transpire.
Long after the series of "why" questions and "what's that," I had a moment of awareness that helps me understand myself better and allows me to be a better person and a better father and a better golfer. Through this conversation with Luke, and thank God for the knowledge that I happen to remember from some research and information that I happened to be listening to in my past somewhere, it became apparent what it meant for the world when they split the atom. Have you ever wondered how your cell phone keeps getting smaller or that laptop of yours has been able to pack so much into it?
It's because the atom is made up of nothing, absolutely nothing. You see, when they split the smallest form of matter down to see what's inside of it they got some quirk, or whatever they called it, and eventually they came to the realization that the atom is 99.999 percent nothing and the other .0001 percent is also nothing. In fact, the very smallest of the smallest particles cannot be seen, the only way that we know that they are there is because they leave a trail of where they were. They would not be there unless we put our attention on them. And that is the part that helps me. When I put my attention on something it becomes part of my world, maybe not right away but it does in some way.
We are made of the same stuff for the most part as a computer. We are energy, information and memory. Our body's cells change every year. It's got new cells every where. Your brain is new cells and yet you can remember how to do something that would have been in your old brain, something like riding a bike or swing a golf club.
For those of you that play a lot of golf your mind and body may have better memory of hitting a golf ball than someone that hasn't picked up a club for a while but your memory may contain negative stuff.
Where do you want to put your attention? The problem does not exist unless you put your attention on it. So many times in my past I have played golf with my attention on the feeling of tension, instead of the mantra of nothingness. This is something that I learned from teaching Curt Schilling. I taught him the golf swing and he shared with me what you have to do to throw a fast ball.
Curt puts his attention on nothingness. My educated guess tells me that so do the PGA tour pros, who are not out there struggling. It may be something simple like that, or perhaps it is a swing flaw that needs to change. Put all of your attention on the changed swing, look at pictures of it, find the pro swing on tour with the motion that you seek and watch it as much as you can. Watch yourself in a mirror or your shadow making the swing change that you want. It will run its course to change, but it will emerge. It will only be a struggle when you see it in that light, because your attention is on struggle. I have a little story about this.
There once were two men that had the same job of delivering bread on their bicycles. They had to pedal uphill for 10 miles every day as they dropped off the loaves of bread. One man hated everything about the job, he even hated his bicycle. The other man loved everything about his job, he even found reasons to love it more. The trip up the hill made his legs and his heart strong, his family got free bread and the smell of being around the bread made him happy.
The bakery became so popular that the owner expanded. He opened another place and he gave the positive man a promotion to run the new shop. The shop was a tremendous success.
For more information, visit 7mythsofgolf.com.
Billy Bondaruk was recently recoginzed as one of the top 9 instructors in Northern California.
