Awareness Before Fixes
Most of the time, we know something is wrong.
There’s an illness.
There’s a swing fault.
There’s a mistake that keeps showing up.
We see the result clearly.
What we don’t see is the cause.
Not because it’s hidden.
But because seeing it requires honesty.
And honesty is uncomfortable.
In golf, this shows up fast.
A player knows he’s shanking the ball.
He feels embarrassed.
He wants a drill.
He wants a fix.
What he doesn’t want is to slow down long enough to notice the pattern.
Where is the contact really happening?
What changed before the shank appeared?
What is he doing the same every time?
Being truthful to yourself on the golf course is one of the hardest things there is.
I learned this lesson clearly about fifteen years ago, while coaching a Japanese LPGA player in Taiwan.
At the start of our work together, I asked her two simple questions.
What are your strengths?
What are your weaknesses?
She answered confidently.
Her strength was her short game.
Her weakness was her long game.
She was tall, about 175 centimeters, but not a long hitter.
Around 240 yards off the tee, carry and roll.
Her reasoning made sense to her.
She wasn’t long, so she thought her long game was weak.
Because she wasn’t long, she assumed her short game must be her strength.
Before touching her swing, I asked her for twenty scorecards and her shot statistics.
The pattern told a different story.
She made birdies on long par 3s.
Par 3s over 200 yards, where she had to hit a 3-wood or 5-wood.
She made bogeys on short par 4s and par 5s.
What she felt and what was actually happening were opposites.
She wasn’t playing poorly because her long game was weak.
She was playing poorly because her short game wasn’t as good as she believed.
Once we saw that clearly, the work was simple.
We focused on her short game.
Her tournament results improved.
The important part wasn’t the drills.
It was the diagnosis.
She knew the effect.
She didn’t know the cause.
That’s true far beyond golf.
In life, we often rush to fix what we can see.
We adjust symptoms.
We work harder.
We try more.
But we skip the hardest step.
Awareness.
Awareness takes time, patience, and humility.
Most people skip that step because it’s uncomfortable.
Once you truly understand the cause,
finding the solution is usually straightforward.
Executing it is work.
But it’s clear work.
Golf trained me to respect this process.
The ball doesn’t care what you meant to do.
It responds to what you actually did.
That lesson stayed with me.
In work.
In relationships.
In leadership.
Fixes without awareness don’t last.
Effort without understanding burns people out.
This is the thread that connects everything I’ve written here.
Before love becomes action,
before responsibility becomes choice,
before fairness becomes care,
there has to be awareness.
That might be the most important lesson I’ve collected.
Off the course.