I used to get on the golf course to take a break from it all—the pressures of work, life, you name it. Now that I’m retired, I find that golf is still giving back in the form of life and leadership lessons.
Take my recent need to change my swing, for example. If you play any sport, you know that changing your technique—especially one you’ve had for a long time—is no small task.
I injured my back playing golf this spring. The pain was a slow accumulation of a swing that, it turned out, was working against my body. My physical therapist (PT) was direct about it: The way I was swinging wasn’t just causing pain; it was also preventing me from ever fully healing. If I wanted my back to get better, I had to change the swing.
I took a break for nearly two-and-a-half months, and when I finally went back, I worked with an instructor on revising the mechanics that I’d carried for years. The new mechanics felt unnatural. And then something unexpected happened: I had three of the best rounds I’ve played in five years.
It dawned on me that the signal of something painful, followed by letting go of what worked, and experiencing surprising results is a common pattern that leaders often find themselves initially resisting. Let me unpack this a bit more for you.
Listen to the signal, not just the symptom
I wasn’t listening to what the pain was actually telling me. It took a good PT to reframe it: You’re not recovering because the thing causing the pain hasn’t changed.
Leaders often do this. They treat the symptom—the missed quarter, the team tension, or the stalled initiative—without asking what’s causing it. The pain isn’t the problem; the pain is the message. And until we’re willing to hear what it’s saying, we’ll keep reaching for the ice pack.
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Give up what worked to get to what works better
Here’s what made changing my swing genuinely hard: My old swing wasn’t broken. For years, I counted on that familiar fade from left to right.
My new swing draws the ball in the opposite direction. I had to unlearn a swing that served me well because it was costing me something I couldn’t see at the time.
Great leaders are willing to do this. They retire strategies that were winning because the environment has shifted or because something better is waiting on the other side of the discomfort. The pivot isn’t always away from failure. Sometimes it’s away from a version of success that’s run its course.
Give the counterintuitive result a chance
I’ll be honest: I didn’t expect to play better. I expected to play worse—at least initially. Changing something as ingrained as a golf swing means fighting your own muscle memory. You look like a beginner and feel like one too.
But the better rounds came—not despite the change but because of it. And I think that’s the part leaders most often get wrong when they’re staring down a necessary change: They assume adaptation means accepting diminished returns—that trading the old way for a new one is, at best, a lateral move.
My back feels better, and I’m returning to a hobby I love. Somewhere between the injury and the recovery, golf taught me that the pivot you resist the longest is usually the one you needed most.
