The Data on Breaking Barriers & Parallels of Self-Awareness in Golf and Business

How do I break 100, 90, 80, 70, 60?  By going through understanding progressions mentally and physically.  Breaking barriers is basically all mental once you understand what is physically needed to do so.  Please look forward to posts and videos about our mental state and strategies on the golf course!  What I want to talk about is the actual data behind breaking barriers, why they get broken.  Now I have a lot to learn and a lot of knowledge and understanding to gain, but through learning from smarter individuals than myself, I have come to an understanding of the numbers of how and why certain barriers are broken.

The key to breaking scoring barriers or thresholds is very simple.  Improve your bad shots.  As Ben Hogan says, "golf is a game of misses, you are only as good as your misses."

No matter your skill in the game all players who shoot a good round for their skill level all have one thing in common; their bad shots are better than normal.  What do I mean by that? For a tour player who shoots a round of 64 or 65, their bad shot hits the green 25-30 feet from the pin and they two-putt par. On the flip-side, a tour player who shoots a round of 74 or 75,  rather than hitting the green to 25-30 feet, their miss ends up in a bunker or in a tricky spot.

Why is this true? Let's take look at some simple stats and scenarios of a tour player and a bogey golfer.

The 100th ranked player on tour from will 2 putt or better 91% of the time on average from >25 feet and the 100th ranked player will make about 7% from 25-30 feet.  Quick mental math means that tour players only 3 putt 2% of the time from >25 feet.  So simply if a tour player can get on THE GREEN his chances of making par or better are high.  IF the player misses the green for his bad shot rather than hitting it to 25-30 feet, his chances of making par or better go down and his bogey percentage goes up.  A quick stat shows that the 100th ranked player on tour has a 60% scrambling percentage or they will get up and down 60% of the time.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, let's think of a bogey golfer.  This is the player who on a good round may shoot 85 but during a bad round on a tougher golf course than they may be used to, will struggle to break 100.  For a bogey golfer it can bit more volatile because golfers struggle in different areas, HOWEVER, most bogey golfers who play the correct tee boxes for their driver distance give away strokes within 125 yards.  Although many bogey golfers struggle in this area, they may struggle with slicing the ball, inconsistent contact, lack of distance, etc.

This is where understanding your game comes into play.  It takes self-awareness of your game to know what your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats are.  Just like an entrepreneur who is building a business, they must be self-aware and perform a SWOT analysis.  Please, be honest with yourself.  Maybe you absolutely suck at bunker shots (Look for my video on bunker shots soon!). If that is the case, the way I see it you have two choices: either avoid that weakness as much as possible or adapt and learn to play from the beach.  Maybe you have a great idea for an app, but you don't know to develop and build it.  Again, the way I see it is that you have two choices: learn how to build an app or find a product developer who can do it for you. If you can't do it internally yourself, you may need to go external and hire or partner with someone who can.

Either way it takes self-awareness and an honest understanding of where we need to improve in order to break scoring barriers. 100% the point I am trying to make is that the bad needs to be better in order to break scoring barriers whether you are a tour player, a bogey golfer, an aspiring entrepreneur, or a successful business.

Please, please, PLEASE if you want to learn how to break scoring barriers, please contact me. 😊

Take a look at this data. This table shows the importance of better bad shots because simply getting on the green or fringe improves scoring for all players regardless of scoring ability.