Money or Certification should be the last two qualifications for taking a lesson with anyone. The first should be who the golfer is?  Who are you taking lessons from? Have they ever achieved anything while playing golf? Most likely when taking a lesson from someone who hasn’t they will get mediocre results.  I want to take lessons from a winner not some guy who just wanted to play golf.

Then what is their background in teaching?   What is their college degree in?  I find most of the golfers I played golf with who were any good were poor students. Why? Because they spent more time on the course than in the classroom.

Who is my perfect client?

I have several criteria for loving my clients.

1. Complete Beginners:   The Complete beginners do not know anything about golf and are clay in my hands.  When they trust me completely I want to give more of my self and knowledge for their trust.  I love these people.  The people that I love the most are beginner women.  They do not usually come with egos. They come in with open minds and because they universally learn from general to specific unless of course they are sporting a mustache they are great listeners and learners.  The more they open up the more I want to give.

2. The Advanced Golfer: The Advanced Golfer already knows how to play golf so there really isn’t much I have to do on a technical realm.  What I love to do is to make use of my training and NLP and have them learn how to access the state of confidence or better have them learn to tap into flow on the golf course and in life.  This can be a little esoterric for most people but again when someone is willing to accept help to get to the next level I give them what they want.

I have an older brother who bowls that wanted to become a scratch bowler. His average was about 180 and within two sessions and over a years time his average up at 205. That was pretty impressive considering where we’d come from  All I did was watch him in my living room pretend to bowl as he would show me what he did when he was successful and when he was not.  Of course he didn’t know how to reproduce either until I showed him what exactly what he was doing with each. There was nothing to show but having him come aware of his habituation in both failure and success.

Once he was aware of what he did before bowling a strike we just practiced it until he unconsciously could reproduce it and then we just checked up on it every so often to make sure it was still in place.  What I had noticed was when he bowled a strike he looked down and to the right just before he took a breath into his first step to bowl.

See, it doesn’t matter if it’s golf, bowling or tennis. It’s all the same when it comes to moving past the mechanical elements.

You can have the greatest mechanics in the world but have a haphazard pre-shot routine and not be able to reproduce your excellence.  All that time and practice and then such a little thing as looking down and to the right before pulling the trigger…no wonder why so manny golfers are frustrated!

3. The Basket Case: Third and last and the most rewarding is the guy/gal who completely suck at golf and no one seems to be able to help them.  There was this guy Al that came to me last year.  He had gone to one of my old golf instructors, no name necessary.   He was told that because of his baseball background there was nothing he could do for him and to quit the game because it would only frustrate himself.

When he’d come to me he was dispondent.  He was completely frustrated because all his buddies played golf and he wanted to join them but he couldn’t make contact with the ball. He’d tried several other pros but then heard about what I did with NLP and my experience as a player.

The first thing I told him was his baseball background was going to help him.   He looked at me like I had two heads.  He was told by the first three guys he would have to give up his baseball swing in order to play golf.   He didn’t believe me, but then within ten minutes had him smacking a seven iron to left field without thoughts or strikes or balls.  He knew how to hit a ball with a stick toward a target and that is exactly what our first session was about.

I haven’t seen him in a year since but ran into him the other day.  He told me he shot 91 at a very challenging golf course.  He had a very big smile on his face and handed me a cigar.   I love guys like that because I used what he had to teach him how to hit a ball with a stick toward a target and…I got a cigar out of it a year later.   Whooa!

My goal for Al wasn’t to teach him what I know about golf.  That would be a recipe for a complete and utter failure, but that is the approach most would have taken.   Instead of that I approached him as someone who just wanted to go out on the course with his buddies to smack the ball around and not hold anyone up so he could enjoy himself.

That’s my favorite kind of guy. They are the most appreciative of all the types and I often get hugged by large, sweaty, burly guys.

The worse kind of student are:

The guy who bases his taking a lesson on PRICE.  That’s it.  No more to say.

1. The Novice Golfer: The Novice Golfer has already been inundated with so much BS he has to be deprogrammed before he could be taught.  They are a pain but are the most grateful when they realize how they have been approaching golf has been working against them.   They are the guys who need to “Keep their heads down”, “eye on the ball”, and left arm straight”.

What I love about these people is they are the one’s I get the most referrals from so in the end it is worth it.

The guy who asks how much is the worse kind of guy because they never get to know how good they can be with what they’ve got.  They base taking a lesson on price and not results. Meanwhile they can go to someone who teaches them how to be less themselves.

That is why I have a hundred percent money back guarantee in results.  What do you want to achieve within that hour session? If I do not achieve that results with you then you do not pay.  Much of the time that isn’t even good enough.

I have never ever heard of anyone in the golf profession to give such a guarantee.   I doubt I ever will either.   Why not? Because most golf professionals put the onus on your having to practice forty-hours of what they deem most important.

I get results immediately, I get you to have immediate results because you already know how to hit a ball with a stick toward a target but the language or approach you are using just isn’t working.

What approach are you using that isn’t working?   You are trying to hit the ball with your mind instead of your body.

The first step is to be able to feel whatever it is you are doing.  All you have to do is experience hitting the ball correctly once and you’ve got it because although you might forget to do something on a to do list of mechanical movements feeling something and thinking something are two completely different animals.

One word: ORGASM

I am the author of Golf for Baseball Players, Beyond the (Golf) Ball, and Virtual Golf. You can see my books at: www.lulu.com/blacktailpress. I am in the process of negotiating with New Chapter Press to author a seven book series of Golf for Athletes, which includes; Golf for…baseball, hockey, soccer, lacrosse, tennis, basketball, and football. It is my goal to get any athlete to make the transition from their sport to “Golf Competence”.

Professional Athletes take unconventional golf lessons. How is it that skilled athletes – who possess natural athletic ability – are continually humbled by the game of golf? It is because traditional golf instruction dismisses, for the most part, the athletes existing knowledge base and skill set of their sport to focus instead on the mechanics of the golf swing. The result is little improvement …much frustration.

Skilled athletes are the most frustrated because they have difficulty understanding why their talent, athleticism, drive and focus in their sport is not playing out on the golf course. An athletic person possess all the skills they need to improve, yet they’ll never reach their potential because no one is properly guiding them with the information framed in a common language that allows them to discover how well they can play while using what they already know on an athletic intuitive level.

Concept: A professional athlete takes a golf lesson where I show them howtheir personal knowledge of their sport translates into golf basics. We begin each show with the profile of the athlete, their experience as a golfer, and then what they think of golf compared to their sport. We show the emotion of their experience. They talk about their “problems”. They hit a couple shots to show where they are in their experience as a golfer. We all relate with their experience. We feel for them.. they can even play a few holes. Then I come in and just talk to them about what is similar from their sport in to golf. Think of it as a kind of “The Dog Whisperer” for famous athletes and regular people having difficulty making the transition to “golf competence”.

The name of the program can be something like: Golf for Professional Athletes, or The Golf Whisperer, or The Wow Experience!

Enclosed is a video taken of a golf lesson with one of my baseball player/gofers.

I hope you find this video as interesting to watch as it was to participate in…Dan is a complete beginner and in the time it would take to fly from New Jersey to Orlando he became a “Competent Golfer”. He broke ninety his first time out!

Please, understand it wouldn’t make a difference which sport or activity or background the learner would come from because it is a matter of taking established information and translating it into a language they understand. Baseball appears to be the obvious sport to make that transfer but some other sports which are just as easy: Hockey, Soccer, Lacrosse, Soccer, Boxing and Cricket.