Recently, I found myself having a little bit of a health scare. OK let’s be honest, I was hospitalized for five days. I had internal organs failing, my vital signs were a mess, I had put on weight and then lost it again all in a week. I was, quite frankly, a shell of myself.

I was also, as the medical profession describes it, a zebra. Look at a field full of horses and you find the one that sticks out and doesn’t look like the rest, that was me. Medicine that normally helped 95% of people and rarely had side effects was reacting poorly in my system. Treatments that never caused problems for most patients left me shaking uncontrollably for days on end. I found myself stuck in the woods and didn’t know how to get out.

After spending that much time in the hospital, I knew it would be a long recovery, but I was not ready for the things I would have to do to truly fully recover. Walking up the stairs was a problem. Going from the kitchen to the living room left me winded. Trying to do the things that I used to do on a daily basis was just not possible.

Golf was quite frankly the last thing on my mind until one day my youngest daughter approached me and asked if I wanted to go to the driving range. I hadn’t been outside in a number of days and it was nice outside, so I thought, “Yeah that’s a good idea.”

Off we went to our neighborhood golf course where she got a bucket of balls while I hung out at the practice green. Immediately, I knew something was not right. I couldn’t hold my balance, my stance felt weird and every putting grip I tried didn’t feel quite right. Even something as simple and basic as putting became something far more complex.

After a few minutes on the putting green, I decided to head down to the range and see if I could hit a few full swings with a wedge. That did not go so well. The equipment company I currently work for has the lightest golf equipment on the planet and even those were still too heavy for me. On top of that, my daughter, whom I used to coach, saw that my posture was horrible. I realized that day that not only would I have to gain my strength back, but I would also have to relearn how to swing a golf club.

After years of being an instructor and giving hundreds of thousands of lessons, you would think it would be quite easy for me to get back into it. After all I’ve taught all those people, surely, I could teach myself. If you listen to my millennial daughter, all I have to do is hop onto the Internet and it’ll point me in the right direction anyway.

So, for a couple of weeks, I tried that approach: watching old videos of myself or watching old videos of instruction that I gave others.

Didn’t help.

I found myself in the same mess most amateurs find themselves in. Not only did I have too many thoughts rolling around in my head, none of them were actually what I really needed to get better. I realized at that moment, I needed instruction. I needed someone to look at my swing from the outside, then that person and I could go over some of the things that we saw and make a plan to fix it.

Only one small problem, since I picked up a club at age 4, I’ve only let two people ever really look at my swing. One is dead and the other lives in Brainerd and is retired so I wasn’t going to bother him.

I realized I needed to find a coach, somebody to help guide me. You see it was at that moment I started to realize exactly what many of my students had been facing all those years, trying to trust somebody to help you get better. I was doing it with all my medical problems, why shouldn’t I do it in golf?

Now admittedly, I’ve not chosen a coach yet, but this revelation was just bestowed on me so it may take a bit of time to come to fruition… but it will happen.

It has to.

I need to go back and start from the beginning. I need to recognize that I lost a good deal of strength as well as body mass. Things just are not the same as before. But like everything worth doing, I need to follow the process.

After all, I used to tell my students all the time, “You can’t repeat results, you can only repeat the process.”

Time for me to listen to my own advice.