2611 Connecting Past Experience into a Line: What Coaching Taught Me Through Golf

 

The Trigger

I recently started golf lessons again after a long break.

The last time I played was in 2014, in Cairo, Egypt. After that, I stepped away from golf entirely. This time, as I prepare to go independent and run my own business, a friend suggested that taking up golf again would be worthwhile — and that's what brought me back to the club.

My Self-Taught Years

Looking back, for about 12 years I never once took a lesson — I played entirely on my own instinct. During the years I lived abroad, I was out on the course at least once a week, sometimes two or three times, and my scores held together reasonably well as a result.

But after I moved back to Japan for good in 2006, I could never quite get my game together again. Between the demands of work and less practice time, I eventually put a period on it after that last round in Cairo in 2014, telling myself I was done with golf.

How Coaching Turns Dots Into a Line

This time, I started going to an indoor golf lesson, working with a pro and reviewing my swing on video. It's been two months now.

What struck me through this coaching was how the questions and issues that used to feel scattered — like disconnected dots — started linking together into a single line. As a result, I'm now swinging more consistently, and enjoying it more than I expected.

What I realized firsthand is that coaching isn't only powerful for someone starting from zero. It can be even more powerful for someone who already has real experience behind them — the hard failures as well as the successes — and comes back to be coached with all of that in hand.

Past experience, even past failure, isn't wasted. If anything, it's a valuable asset. Coaching, I think, is what reconnects that asset into something usable again.

A Perspective That Carries Over Into Project Management Consulting

This realization connects deeply with something I care about in my own work as a project management consultant.

I recently updated my own website, and at the heart of it is this same idea of coaching. My clients already carry their own experience — what's worked, what hasn't — and I want to take that experience, not leave it scattered, and reconnect it into a line through the right kind of coaching, then use that as the basis for moving them forward.

A golf swing and the way a project is run may, at their core, be the same kind of thing. The real value of coaching isn't teaching from scratch — it's taking the asset of experience someone already has and reconnecting it in the right way.