Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Moving forward by looking ahead

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Greetings and salutations my fitness loving friends! I realize I've been gone for quite some time...I'm not even going to waste your time by giving excuses. I simply haven't given my blog the time it deserves. My apologies.

As you may see, today's blog is going to have a bit of a golf-themed feel to it as I've been traveling the road with my husband who is a Tour caddy (most recently returning from the U.S. Open in Bethesda, MD). Being on the road in a 35' RV with 3 dogs could provide me with weeks and weeks of blog worthy material. However, my point today isn't to entertain you with the details of leaking RV roofs, black water tank dumping, or walking into the campsite every night from the locked front gate, 1/2 mile, in a raging electrical storm. Today's point is about looking ahead at the possibilities rather than dwelling in the past.

For those of you know know golf, Rory isn't a stranger to the top of the leaderboard. He's been there before. What was so great about Rory's win at the U.S. Open this week, though, is how he handled the stress of coming up dismally short at his last major, The Masters, and how he handled the constant criticism and doubt that he'd play well on day 4. After the Masters tournament, I'm sure that Rory replayed his Sunday round over and over and over. If he didn't, the world's media did it for him. It was shoved in his face day in and day out. When he was atop the leaderboard at the U.S. Open last week, the world's media didn't stand idly by wondering to themselves whether Rory would play well...they questioned it hour by hour, day by day, as did all of the 'armchair quarterbacks' that follow golf around the world.

Instead of looking back and focusing on what he didn't do in his last major, Rory kept his eye on the prize and his focus on what needed to be done. He was there to play golf, not rehash what didn't happen two months prior in Augusta. There's no reason to constantly keep looking back...it's another tournament, another golf course, and another day. Period. Simple as that.

If we think about our own lives, there are far too many of us who rehash, over and over, the ways that we came up short in our own lives. We may get to the end of the day and question why we ate as poorly as we did, or why we didn't push harder in a workout, or why we made the decisions we did for whatever reason. I'm not saying not to analyze those things, but at some point in time, you simply HAVE to move on from it. It's not going to do me any good three days from now to be beating myself up for eating cheesecake on Sunday or not working out for three days in a row, is it?

So if at the end of today, you're not happy with the way things went, vow to make tomorrow a better day. Don't beat yourself up over what happened 24 hours or even 24 minutes ago...MOVE ON and be better because of your experiences.

In my humble opinion, it's okay to make a mistake as long as you don't allow it to compound on itself. Make the mistake and get on with it. In golf, it's far better to go bogey, birdie than to go bogey, bogey. You just never know, with the right attitude and foresight, there might even be an ace in your future.