The vocabulary in the clubhouse has changed since the Members Evening last Monday – if someone is asked how they played, the answer may well be ‘no paperclips left’ or ‘ok still got my paperclips.’ Standing on the Ladies tee on the 2nd on Tuesday morning I overheard a group going down the 4th declaring – ‘that’s a paperclip – in fact it’s 2 paperclips’
The reason for this is explained in our Lady Captain, Jac Brownsell’s write up of the evening:
.....‘The other speaker was Michael Caulfield who is a Mind Coach and was excellent. He provided useful tips on how to improve our game by training our thought process and positive thinking. The main things I took away from this was it’s a game of golf so we need to enjoy every time we play as we all love the sport – hence being a member of Wrag Barn. The overthinking we all do before we play a shot doesn’t help and the example was that if Michael picked someone in the audience to throw a golf ball to them the person would catch it. If Michael said he was going to throw the golf ball to that person in approximately 10 minutes, then the person would be thinking about it for those 10 minutes and wouldn’t catch it so well. He also said that if we put 100 paperclips in our left pocket and every time we stood on the course with our hands on our hips, or were overthinking a situation, then to move one of the paperclips into our right pocket. By the end of our round, we could then see how little we had enjoyed our round when things didn’t go right for us.
Another point I know will stick with me is that the word ‘Don’t’ shouldn’t be used but we do use it. An example is ‘don’t go in the water’, ‘don’t go in the trees’ etc as actually what happens is that we don’t hear ‘don’t’ we just hear ‘go in the water’ or ‘go in the trees’. Rather than using the word ‘don’t’ it would be better to say ‘I’m going to hit this straight’ or ‘I’m going to get this onto the green’. Far more positive and that will help our game’.........
Michael was excellent, he told funny stories and gave some interesting insight in to positive thinking and emphasised the importance of removing doubt from our thought prosesses. He has some key insights (in under 60 seconds) on his website which is: https://www.justcaulfield.com/
The other speakers on Monday were; Tim and Head Greenkeeper Neil Carter who gave an overview of work done on the course with a few reminders of some of the golfing activities through out the year. I’ve taken the photographs and notes from the power point presentation which can be found at the end of this blog.
The last speaker was one of our Directors of Wrag Barn Management; Johnathan Callister who gave an overview of the business during the past 12 months including the refurbishment and drainage work. He also mentioned that Wrag Barn won Business of the Year in a local business club; the judges praised the way the team of staff and volunteers managed the return to golf after the lock downs. I would like to take this opportuity to thank the team of volunteers who run the competitions, support our Juniors, organise teams and make Wrag Barn the wonderful community that it is. We are also very lucky to have such a willing team of staff who really know how to pull together when the job needs to be done.
The importance of our membership and community has been recognised by England Golf who spent a day filming at Wrag Barn during Junior Week. They have produced a short film as part of their ‘Membership Campaign’ and can be found on the website via the followning link: https://www.wragbarn.com/membership
It has been a busy year and we’ve enjoyed some amazing weather, had some fun and our Juniors and Ladies A team have done really well which is explained in Tim’s talk below. Here’s to a very Happy Christmas and looking forward to another year of golf and friendship in 2023
Verity
4th December 2022
Wrag Barn Members Evening Report