One advantage of being in a different city each week is that I get to play golf with many people. I love golf. It’s like business. You work hard to get to the green and you wind up in the hole.
Golf is actually a great game for dealing with difficult people. You can put their names on the golf balls and tee ’em up.
This technique will change your attitude. When you hit it in the water, you just say, “Drown, you rascal.” If you can’t find it in the woods, you just say, “I hope nobody finds you.” I’m just kidding. One reason that I play golf is that it is cheaper than Prozac.
Sometimes I play with people that I don’t know. Last week I played with a guy who missed the ball on his first swing. He stepped back, stepped up to the ball, swung and missed it again. He put his club down, and I said what a caddy once told me, “Don’t quit now — you have a no-hitter going.”
I often play with a guy who is just playing pretty badly. He throws his clubs and says something like, “This is a dumb, stupid game,” and other words in his vocabulary. His friend, knowing that I’m a psychologist, will ask if we can help him. I reply that we can drop all of his balls in the water. The friend wonders what good that will do, and I say, “It will save a lot of time.”
Or maybe we can re-grip his clubs with Ritalin; maybe that will calm him down. He doesn’t need help with his emotions. He has some of the best emotions I have seen. I will put his frustration and anger up against anyone’s. What this man needs is not emotional management skills. What he needs is a golf lesson, and what I need is a helmet because golf is becoming a contact sport.
This reminds me of clients I had when counseling. They want to treat the symptoms rather than look deeper to see that their out-of-control living is causing their out-of-control emotions. Some clients would say that their life wasn’t worth living, and I would have to bite my tongue to keep from saying that they were right; their life wasn’t worth living.
Many people told me that they just needed a little more time to get it together. I have had the opportunity to play golf with the same man over a period of years. Guess what? Time didn’t help. He was just as frustrated and angry this year as he was last year. He didn’t need more time; he needed a lesson.
He needed direction, not time.
Let’s say that you won the national Snickers contest, which means that you won $1 million. All you had to do was find the hidden Snickers bar with your name on it. The bar was in New Mexico, and you lived in Florida. You had 24 hours to find it. You were then in New Mexico and frantic. You received a call from Snickers headquarters asking what you needed — more time, or the address where the Snickers bar was located? You didn’t need more time; you needed direction. As a matter of fact, they could have tripled your time and it wouldn’t have helped. What you needed was direction.
The wrong direction in golf is the rough. When in the rough, we usually need another person to help us think objectively so we can get out quickly. I can’t tell you how many times I have played with a guy who is in the rough, and he decides to go for the green. He is going to hit his ball between 25 trees and 1,000 limbs and end up on the green. This is the same guy who just missed a 30-yard-wide fairway on the previous shot. The problem is he is like most of us; he would rather hope for a miracle than take his medicine and chip onto the fairway.
Time marches on, and let’s be honest: Many of us are just as angry and frustrated as we were last year or the year before. Why don’t you have a lesson? Talk to a counselor or a friend. Talk to someone who is objective and can help you understand how you ended up in the rough of life rather than on the fairway.
A Catholic priest and a pastor were watching the last green of a championship tournament. The player made the sign of the cross before putting. The pastor said that he must be one of the priest’s guys. The pastor then asked the priest, “What does that mean?” The priest said that it didn’t mean anything if he couldn’t putt.
Be sure that you have developed the gifts that God has given you, you are going in the right direction, and then take dead aim. You will be surprised at how far your life goes down the fairway.