My name is Zach Frazer, I am a junior at Furman University and I am on the golf team. A couple weeks ago I played in the Carolinas Open at Myers Park Country Club and had my best finish in almost three years.
Going into the event I had played poorly for the better of a year. All summer I had continuously made sloppy errors and played well below the standard I know I am capable of. Golf was not as fun as it had been in the past. Throughout the summer my goal was to stay confident, positive, and most importantly, objective, about my results. The Carolinas Open was my last chance to do that during my summer season and a great chance to flip the script.
Over the three days I posted my three best consecutive rounds ever and my lowest score to par in a three day tournament. It was exhilarating finally being in contention again in a tournament after all the work I had put in over the last two years. Nerves were high during the last day but I was able to stick to my process and trust in my abilities to cap off a good tournament. Most importantly, I enjoyed the rounds I played.
Golf can be a cruel game, months of practice can seemingly never pay off, and then when it does, it can seem to leave you just as quickly. It is volatile and frustrating and something I know about all too well. While golf is an important part of my life, it sometimes seems to control too much of my emotions. The most important thing for me this summer was trying to separate my life from my golf game. This tournament was months of hard work, mental work, and determination to finally find a headspace that allowed me to play my best golf. However, as soon as it came, it seemed to leave again.
Since that tournament I have not played nearly as well as I would have expected to. My mind has seemed to revert back to letting golf control my emotions and I am not enjoying the rounds as much as I want to. Ironically, where I have learned the most is actually from the last two weeks, not the three days where I played my best. Golf is a grind, if we are not reinforcing positive thoughts, we are reinforcing negative ones. If we are not being diligent and focused in our practice, we are training the wrong way. If we are not sharpening our minds constantly to create the right headspace, then we will fall back into the same faults and ways that held us back in the first place.
Often when we “make it” we stop doing and thinking about the things that got us to that point in the first place. The best thing that we can do is admit that we do not have things figured out. We have to always continue to learn, grow, and adapt to the situations at hand. The more golf I play, the more I find it imitates life. The things I have learned through golf are almost perfectly applied to many aspects of my life. I think the most important thing that golf has taught me is to work as hard as I possibly can, but not take things too seriously. When we allow ourselves to enjoy the things we do, not only do we do them better, but we also have the determination to do them longer. It is not about letting our actions influence our enjoyment of something. It is about enjoying each second we get to spend doing the things we choose to do, and then allowing that mindset to help us achieve our full potential in all we do.
The Carolina’s open taught me about how important our mindset is in our success and interpretation of life. We will never perfect our minds, but we must always be working on it because if we aren’t, we are regressing.
