For me, having order in my life has been very important for my golf career. When I started working with my coach Annchristine Lundstrom, there were several areas in my life that I did not feel that I was in control of. So we decided to focus on those areas with the intent to come to a level where I felt secure and happy.

The work we did made a huge difference to the way I looked at myself as a player and as a person. I could feel that those were big keys that assisted me in starting to free up myself. Today I feel and know that I am in charge of my life. I believe that’s been a key to the improvements in my golf since then. Below I will share some tips on how you can work on getting order in your life.

About getting life back in order

It is quite amazing how the game, the results, and my life improved when I started taking personal leadership. By personal leadership, I mean choosing to take responsibility for and manage how I think, feel and react about happenings.

By really seeing that I can take responsibility for my thoughts, actions and reactions and understanding that I am the one creating how I feel depending on my choices., things shifted. When I realized that I could gain control over how I was thinking, acting and reacting my life became so much easier both on and off the golf course.

One of the most frustrating things before I started to work together with Annchristine Lundstrom was that I knew that I had so much more potential to access. I just didn’t know how. I had tried everything to get there. And by then I had given up believing that I could get there. But as we worked on changing my focus from results to focus on the things I can control within myself, lots of things shifted.

We also worked a lot on changing the way I historically had felt towards both poor and good results. Also I had developed ways to react out from what I thought others expected from me. For instance I thought that if I did not show a lot of disappointment and frustration after a "bad" round they would think that I did not care.

Another old pattern was how much time I spent on beating myself up. This of course most often led to more missed shots and more self-punishment. It was a case of silently telling myself off or silently telling myself how bad I was or how bad I played. So one of the first things to work on was to stop this silent internal bullying of myself. In the beginning I judged my rounds on how good my internal dialog was. Working on minimizing focus on results was the key to turn around the inner dialog.

During all this time of growth, my coach Annchristine Lundstrom has been enormously skilled at reminding me that I have a lot of other things I'm good at. She has also challenged me and pushed me to take on things I historically did not like. One example is that I no longer am afraid of talking in front of people. One thing that made this possible is that I worked on letting go of fear for what others would think of me. Another is how important it is to be well prepared.

Today I feel so much more secure within myself and my feeling is that I am much more prepared for whatever happens in life.

What I choose and why

Life is like a round of golf. When I hit it in the water, I can choose how I react. I can choose to be a person that swears, perhaps throw the club and let the bad shot destroy the rest of the day - or I can choose to accept the fact that I can´t change what happened and instead see it as an opportunity to practice to let go of it and make sure I take the next shot as a new opportunity.

I'm now choosing to work hard to keep myself in the second category…

What kind of person do you choose to be?