#36 Don't Rely on Motivation
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Motivation comes and goes as how you FEEL. That's why you can't rely on motivation to change your game (or to change anything else in your life for that matter). Change requires work. Fortunately, the work is simple... But simple does NOT mean easy.  It's simple because it's super easy to understand, and it only takes 5-10 minutes a day. And you can do it at home.  But the hard part is that it requires DISCIPLINE. CONSISTENCY matters.  It all means that if you only do the work when you're feeling motivated, you're not gonna do the work as often. And if you don't practice FREQUENTLY for SHORT PERIODS OF TIME, your rate of improvement slows. It's another one of those things that I learned in my years at Golftec. At Golftec, we were taught from day 1 to encourage our students to take lessons WEEKLY. And I was as skeptical about weekly lessons as our students were. In regular lessons from a driving range or teaching pro, it was pretty standard that you'd encourage students to take MONTHLY lessons at the most. The thinking was always that you need time to work on what you learned during the lesson and 3 or 4 weeks would give you time to engrain it. So at Golftec when we were taught to push weekly lessons, at first I thought what a lot our students thought... that it was probably just a way to get people to burn through lessons so they'd need to buy more. But then I started to see the difference in the rate of change of the weekly lesson takers vs the monthly lesson takers and it was a night and day difference. The weekly lesson takers made changes much faster than the monthly lesson takers. In many cases the monthly lesson takers rate of change was so slow as to be nearly imperceptible when looking at their swings on video. It turns out that "taking a few weeks" to work on it was really just the student working their way all the way back to their old habit. If they took weekly lessons, at least they would only work their way HALF way back to their old habit and they were reinforcing the new habit 3 to 4 times more often than the monthly lesson takers. The key phrase from that is "reinforcing the new habit". The more often you can do that, the better. That's why I encourage the daily practice at home habit. The more barriers to practice you can remove, the better. Having to go the range is a barrier. Even having to go to the garage to get your clubs is a barrier. So put your clubs (or at least a club) where you have your practice setup. I keep my clubs in my office and the net is right outside my office. That makes practice almost inevitable. And that's a good way to think about it. Do everything you can to... Make practice inevitable.
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