Hi, for those who intend to learn in the near future.
Long ago, my friend thought it was cool to play golf, rub shoulders with the wealthy!
I paid $60 for 1 hour lesson. Coach said I had natural swing - used to play hockey in school you see.
2nd lesson, I couldn't connect with the ball, period. Coach abused me & I abused him back with a black face.
I decided bugger you, I'll hit that little white ball if it's the last thing I did. I bought a bucket of balls and lined up at the driving range.
I swung out at the ***** ball and you guessed it - hit empty air and almost fell flat on my face. I looked around - luckily there was no one to witness my mortification.
I still had $7 worth of balls in the bucket & as I got more and more exasperated, a voice in my head said slow down and think how come you hit the ball every time that first day.
I retraced the instructions and lo and behold, hit the ball in the perfect trajectory.
You know what, the coach stopped giving me verbal instructions on the 2nd lesson and I had crooked my elbow. He used his club to correct me but without the verbal instruction, I didn't "know' what I was doing wrong.
Now, I can hit a perfect trajectory with an iron any time I want! Still don't know how to play golf though.
KY
I am very surprised to hear a (good) coach would abuse a pupil, and certainly not after only 2 lessons.
So guys, if you want to teach a woman to play golf, don't give up the verbal instruction.
First of all - most husbands cannot teach their wives very well (should not try, but should use very little words if they do); and here's why -
Teaching women (as a generalisation) is often very different than teaching a man. It took me several years to learn this, and apply it to my teaching.
Everyone learns differently - Visual, Auditory and Kinesthetic (VAK) are the 3 main ways, and each of us uses a varying percentage of all 3.
The other factor is which part of the brain is doing the most listening - men are often very left-hemisphere thinkers, while many women are often right-hemisphere thinkers.
Therefore, the words we need to use to teach each person can be vastly different to convey the same message.
I used to be able to single out how a person received their information (VAK) by asking them questions about their golf game when I first meet them on the practice tee.
This would then determine which types of words I used to teach the drills I wanted them to use, and even which types of drills to use.
For example; some folks needed drills in front of mirrors or video - to see themselves, while some needed only a description of a "feeling", while others needed only to watch me swing and copy it.
Depending on the pupil, and how much time we had; I would use all 3 to convey the same message - hopefully one of the 3 would click with them.
Of course; over the years it was easy to narrow down which "string in the bow" to use to get to the point fast for the pupil.
