Everyone needs a caddy.  Not just on the golf course, but in life.  If we had someone coaching us along the way, assessing performance, giving useful feedback, we’d have an immediate behavior-changer to help us quickly improve in specific ways.

Several weeks ago, I played golf with a friend.  He would probably say he is not very good. 

While there is some merit to his perspective, some of his “not being very good” comes from not being able to see his own swing.  Playing sports, we don’t step back and watch ourselves.  We just do it.  The same holds true in much of life. We slog away. 

As we played, I offered some small tips along the way.  For those non-golfers reading this, it’s amusing for anyone to ever offer anyone else advice on the golf course because 99% of us are not experts and have no idea what we are doing.  But we think we can still help others.

So when I suggest anything, it’s all about keeping it simple and getting the person I’m advising to focus on one thing, like the wind being in our face, so take a club you can hit farther, for example.  Or, I might say, “See that tree?   Aim it there.”

These are the types of suggestions that golfers at any level can process.  It’s one basic thought, and they can focus on that.

My partner that day, who we’ll call Hank just for fun, was a magnificent student.  He listened, he applied, he improved.

Hank got harassed in our foursome because he was expected to be the worst player in our group (by far) but kept winning holes for us by hitting great shots.  He did what he was capable of, and didn’t try to do more than that.  There’s a lesson in that as well.

Finishing the front nine, Hank came in with a 48, far below his usual score.  He enjoyed the round, and I was having fun caddying him.

Several months ago, I took on the task of coaching another good friend on the golf course.  Before teeing off on the first hole, I said, “I’m going to caddy you today.”  He was amenable.

His score typically ranges from 94-102, depending on the difficulty of the course.  That day, he shot an 88.  Maybe his caddy saved him six strokes, maybe not.

What I would argue is that he focused more that day on each shot.  He stayed in the moment.  He paid attention to one key thought on his swing, and executed it to the best of his ability.

Put all that together, and you have an improved round.  Would he have shot the same score without a caddy?  Quite possibly.  We’ll never be able to fully answer that.

But we can argue that taking simple advice well, and implementing small changes cause things to improve on the golf course.  This is also applicable to life.

We can all use a life caddy.  But, you must listen and take the suggested steps or it’s pointless. You’ll make the same mistakes over and over.

That’s what happens repeatedly to golfers.  They mess up a hole or several shots in a row and don’t know how to adapt or don’t even want to try.  Success is about executing and implementing a change.

Hank didn’t play as well on the back nine, carding a 61, which was almost a stroke-and-a-half worse per hole.  The advice provided to him slowed to a trickle compared to the front nine.

He might have been tired or lost focus.  Or it could be that he needed his caddy to help guide him through.

When a drought turns to flood, you change.  The saturated landscape forces adjustments on you.  This may seem like a small thing, but pushing you out of your repeat-behavior zone leads to bigger positive adjustments in your life.

In North Texas, where we live, a drought strangled the area the past five years.  Our home is just off Lake Grapevine, and we’ve watched the levels steadily drop year after year after year.  “I’ve never seen the lake levels this low” was the local mantra, one repeated frequently during dog walks with neighbors or bumping into others on the bike/jogging path.

Watering levels for yards were restricted near the beginning of the five-year dearth of rain, and further tightened down in the last year.  As you looked at the sky, your prayers frequently centered on seeking guidance on how to bring a long, steady, consistent, saturating rain. 

Getting a five minute rain shower became a good thing.  Twenty minutes of moisture falling became an anomaly.  Anything longer than that was unheard of during that five-year period.

During that time, like most humans, I developed patterns that adapted to the environment.  Where I biked and ran in the morning was wide open because more and more land became exposed as the drought continued. 

In two weeks, that busted.  So much rain fell in the past two weeks that every area lake has not only filled to capacity, but gone over their banks and started covering vegetation typically never lapping their shores.

A week ago, you couldn’t hike where you had the week before.  This week, you can’t hike where you did last week.  Who knows what next week will bring?  The weather forces you to change behavior.

It also exposes you to new things.  Recently, for example, my morning bike trek took me down the paved path on my normal route.  Suddenly, I hit a low spot where the lake had come up and covered the asphalt in enough water to force me to slow down and consider what to do next.

At that moment, a large fish decided to jump.  “Hmmm,” this made me think, “if you were a fisherman, you could now toss your line in the middle of the woods and catch something.” 

This week, with the water rising, further adaptation was required, as the path at that spot was no longer passable.  This meant biking back to the main road, and heading through some neighborhoods to stay out of traffic.

I biked through our local park, checking out improvements made over the past two years (since my last visit).  Changing the routine this way sent me pedaling deeper towards the lake park, marveling at the number of houses I never knew existed.

Emerging from the houses, I rode down to where the water pushed into the parking lots for the soccer fields.  A coyote prowled off to the left.  Further on, I startled a beaver.  It flopped into the water right in front of me, where the lake shore had merged into the bushes near the bike path.

Whether it’s a new place for the fisherman to drop a line, observing nature, or prowling your local streets to discover different neighborhoods and parks, I was confronted by something new on all fronts. I thought about encroaching habitats, how we exercise, taking up fishing, walking down to the park to play basketball, recommending a house to a friend that I saw for sale.

All those thoughts occurred because we moved from drought to flood.  Sometimes it just takes a lot of rain to get you thinking new things.

We all live in our own little worlds. Sometimes we exist in isolation.  Much more frequently, we’re thrown together with others, with good and bad consequences.

A classic example is this guy who lifts weights where I frequently work out in the mornings.  He’s a squat guy, focused on repetitions in his routine and putting a lot of poundage on the bars he lifts.

I’m cool with that.  Everyone else in the gym would be, too.  If only he would be quiet about it.

And that doesn’t mean he’s walking around bragging about how strong he is or the number of times he bench presses 400 pounds.

No, what shows he’s unaware of his surroundings and in his own world are the sounds he makes.  He grunts, he screams, he slams the weights down to the mat and claps his hands loudly.   He sounds and acts like a gorilla in the forest – smashing, mauling, foraging.

The noises he makes would be okay if no one was around.  But there are probably 50-70 other people to think about, and their personal space to consider.  This guy is not the slightest concerned about his noises.

The first time I noticed his behavior was while swimming in the adjacent room, behind a closed door.  His high-pitched scream and the slamming down sound of the weights jarred me.  “What the heck was that?” 

The next week, he started yelling after finishing his sets on each machine.  I was across the gym stretching, and hearing it, went to myself, “Who is doing that?”  Looking across the facility, I saw him, “Oh, it’s that guy.”

He didn’t really bother me because he was so far away and he was only at the fitness center for a short period of time that dovetailed with my workout.  Still, I casually mentioned his grunting to the front desk, and she said they had gotten complaints about him. 

Someone spoke with him.  In recent weeks, he’s been silent.  He’s still in his own world, his earbuds firmly planted, but now he doesn’t infringe on others’ hearing space.

We hide in our personal worlds in many ways.  Sometimes it’s just that you aren’t awake yet, other times we purposefully isolate ourselves by putting on personal music, and at still others is may just be that we aren’t paying attention.

You notice this when people respond to your greetings.  The fitness center is a great place to witness their reactions.  Go up to someone you’ve seen around for a year or more but have never said a word to.    Look that person in the eye and say, “Good morning.”  See how s/he reacts.

Does s/he walk by, oblivious?  Does s/he act stunned and flabbergasted?  Does s/he immediately smile and say “hello” back to you?

If you do this, you’ll find that most people walk on by before they respond.  They don’t expect you to talk, smile or offer a hand, so they stay dialed into their own little world

Sometimes you need to call people out of their shells.  Wake them up. 

After my workout, I sometimes go into the steam room for a few minutes to increase the sweat factor.  There’s a grunter inside on some days.  He stretches and grunts.  He practices dance moves and grunts.  He puzzles me.

He’s not bugging me just yet.  But if I see him a few more times, I may just have to say hi, shake his hand, and ask about the significance of his grunting.  Hopefully that’ll be enough to increase his awareness.

A cheapskate lurks inside all of us. I’m a penny miser in many ways, but one that stands out is choosing to hit beat-up golf balls over and over.

This started last year.  There were so many balls left in my bag that it seemed like I lifted an extra ten pounds in the short walk from the car trunk to the golf cart.  Picking up my playing partners’ golf bags made me wonder why mine was so heavy.  We all have similar numbers of clubs.  My bag, though slightly bigger than some, wasn’t hefty enough to make a colossal difference weight-wise.

Analyzing this complicated data, it seemed clear that the bag was overloaded with golf balls.  It became time to use them, lose them, or beat them to pieces.

This was a conscious and strategic decision, one that golf pros never make.  Pros hit perfect balls, literally and figuratively.  I’m pretty sure they bring a crisp, fresh one out of the package every three holes or so.  That’s for show.  Maybe they feel they’ve beat up the ball enough after 12 shots and it’s time for a change.  Who knows?  Regardless, they keep the golf ball manufacturers working.

The guys I play with shoot for 18 holes at least before they get rid of a ball, though we usually knock one out-of-bounds, into a pond, or across a highway within the first three holes, so we must pull a new one out.  I remember playing with a guy 10 years ago in a scramble and he brought out a package of 12, and another 6 for good measure.  I asked why he brought 18 new balls.  “One to lose on every hole,” he laughed.  And danged if he didn’t just about lose all 18 in the course of the afternoon.

Beyond wanting to empty the bag, one of my goals in getting rid of all the golf balls was to see how long it took to lose or demolish them so thoroughly that even I wouldn’t hit them.  Honestly, for those of us who hack around courses, does it really matter if your ball is kind of scuffed up?  Probably not.

Another goal was the challenge of seeing how long a ball would last.  Once it was designated as the “one,” how long before it got lost?  Would it launch into the knee high prairie grass where a dog couldn’t sniff it out?  Would it ricochet off three trees after you shanked it right into the next fairway, with no idea where it bounced?

The interesting answer to these questions was that once you decide you’re not going to use a new ball, the old one seems to stay around forever.  You hit it straight. It lands in your fairway, not somebody else’s.

This is in direct contradiction to what happens when you pull a brand new ball out, as I demonstrated last week when I finally broke down and purchased a box of a dozen because my supply had dwindled so low.  On the first hole of the day, I cracked open the package, let the shiny sphere roll around in my palm, as I thought, “Better not pull it into those trees on the left, or I’ll lose it on the very first hole.”

You, of course, know the rest.  I yanked it left, some guy in front of us said he saw it bounce off the cart path and into the fairway, but we never found it.  Lost it on the first shot with the new ball.  That’s why bad golfers should keep hitting the old ones. 

Unless you go bald first, most humans encounter a day when the white hair coming in over-populates the hair color of your youth.  Rather than brown or black hair, the mixing in of white hair makes your mane look gray. 

This happens slowly over time for most of us.  Some guys are prematurely gray at 35, others see their first white hair poking up from the middle of their cowlick when they’re 40, and others stay dark-haired well into their later years, like former U.S. President Ronald Reagan.

If your change has been gradual, relatively speaking, as mine has, there are these odd moments where you look in the mirror and think about how you’ve passed some marker of time based on your new features.  That happened to me last week during a haircut, when a man who remarkably resembled former Dallas Cowboys’ coach and former NFL television announcer Jimmy Johnson.

Known for his thick white mop, Johnson, if you’ve seen him in the media, is easily recognizable.  This guy who came into the hair salon could have passed for his brother.  He had the nose, the body build, the carriage, the eyes, and seemingly the hair.

He preceded me into the chair, so when I sat down with my stylist, his follicles were already clipped and laying on the ground.  The exposure of his roots showed a lot more dark and changed the shape of his face.  As his stylist swiveled him around, he no longer looked like Jimmy’s brother, but instead like someone from another family.

All the white hair deposited on the floor caused me to look down at the growing pile around my chair.  Over the past few years, it’s been clear that more and more white falling hair tips littered the chair next to me as the scissors clipped away.  Fifteen years ago those clippings were mostly black.  Five years ago, they changed to a mixed look of dark and light.

This time, the white took over.  It’s an odd revelation when see this, and say to yourself internally, “Hmmmm, my hair keeps thinning, and now it’s more white than black.”  It’s recognition of aging, knowing you won’t turn back the clock.  Instead, the clock keeps running in the same direction.

We implicitly know this, but there are times in life that markers (graying hair, thinning hairlines, expanding waistlines) get thrown our way, and cause us to pause a bit longer than usual and ponder where we’ve been and where we’re headed.  It took a specific moment (that haircut) to drive home the message that, “Yeah, you are gray, dude.” 

I’m not sure this means anything specifically, other than the recognition that life continues to change. There will be some things I probably shouldn’t or can’t do any more at my age, like trying to run a marathon, and some others that hopefully I’ll keep getting better at, like writing and understanding people and their unique perspectives. 

Paying attention to moments like this also focus you on what’s ahead.  You don’t worry so much about what’s behind.  It’s in the past.  The question becomes, “What comes next?  What can I do better?  What will I learn to help me grow, and give something back to others?”

Staying focused on the positives and the expansion of your personal learning curve keeps you centered on the more important things in life.  Based on personal experience, that’s difficult.  You fight inertia all the time.  Dark hair goes gray, then white.  But the white hair also teaches you new things, and that’s a lesson most of us will get at some point in life.