I still remember one of the first times I lost it on the golf course.
I was around 10 years old, using the set of kid’s clubs I’d gotten for Christmas. First, my ball squirted off into the woods. My next swing missed the ball entirely, and the one after that sent it into a tree trunk and back at my feet.
I can still feel the way the frustration surged through me, an emotion I didn’t yet know how to deal with. “I hate golf, I want to go home!” I whined, throwing my club on the ground before a full-on meltdown ensued.
That wasn’t the first time I’d flipped out on the golf course, nor the last. Although I continued playing as I grew up, I struggled to manage the waves of emotion that came with the sport. When my round was going well, I was on top of the world — but when the ball wasn’t going where I wanted it to, I was exasperated.
In time, though, I learned how to regulate my emotions while playing — a valuable skill that eventually carried over to other aspects of my life.
Golf can be a frustrating sport, but I started to work on managing my emotions as I played
When you’re swinging a club in an arc around your body to hit a tiny golf ball toward a hole with a 4.25-inch diameter, there’s no room for error.
It can feel like much of your performance is out of your hands, and that lack of control can be stressful.
But swing by swing, I learned how to regulate my emotions even when the game wasn’t going as I’d hoped. When a bad shot set off a fire in my belly, I would take a deep breath and let it go. I had no choice — I couldn’t indulge my moods in the middle of a round, especially in a competitive setting.
As a tween, I began to recognize patterns, noting how my mind would jump to the worst-case scenario for my score as soon as I messed up one shot.
Identifying those patterns was the first step toward changing them. Now, it takes more than just a bad shot or two to rattle me.
That ability to regulate my emotions has helped me off the course, too
When I dealt with a terrible illness at 14, I relied on the emotion-regulating tools I’d learned on the golf course to steady myself even when in pain.
As I experienced dramatic mood swings in high school, I knew to ground myself in the knowledge that these emotions were fleeting.
Just as a dark cloud of emotion would evaporate on the golf course as soon as I hit a good shot or parred a hole, the same would happen in these everyday situations.
Now as an adult in my mid-20s, I give golf a lot of the credit for getting me where I am — and the valuable skills I’ve developed so far are just one of many reasons I keep stepping back onto the course.
The post I’ve been playing golf my whole life. The game taught me tools I still use to regulate my emotions as an adult. appeared first on Business Insider.
