Practice is all about success. Learning is all about failure. That is why the learning process is so hard on most golfers...failing is not fun!
My Grandfather taught me that anything worth doing is worth doing poorly. Yes I know that is opposite of what you always hear. Just think about it for a little bit. By today's standard the Wright brothers airplane would be a giant failure. By today's standard your abilities with a fork and spoon when you were just two years old would be considered sloppy failures at best.
When we were first learning to walk, every failure was celebrated with joy and encouragement. We would take a shaky step fall to the ground and our parents would clap! Somehow over the years we have learned to get no joy from failing.
For golfers the learning process is all to often a time of frustration, dissapointment and failure followed by quiting. Learning to hit that important soft lob shot gets put off to another day, maybe forever.
Setting some realistic goals for the learning process can help. Let's say you are going to learn the "hinge and hold" pitch that you see Phil Mickelson do so effortlessly. A reasonable goal might be to succeed at the hinge and hold swing 2 out of 10 attempts. So failing 8 times is success. To accomplish the learning process requires that the only thing you focus on is the swing. Not the ball. Not the target. Just the swing. If you focus on what the ball does you will never truly know how to execute the swing. Even a blind squirrel finds an acorn.
It might take several 10 swing sessions to get to the point where you can confidently say you know how to hinge and hold. The learning process means you must be willing and even eager to fail first. Study the failure. What is causing the wrists to flip the club? What is causing the balance or tempo or jerking problems. What must I do to learn to execute this swing like Phil?
Now that you have learned the shot you can practice the shot to become proficient and successful at execution. Practice means being success oriented, target oriented. Now the goal might be to get 8 out of 10 balls inside a 6 foot circle. Learning is becoming able, practice is becoming skilled.
The concert pianist began by learning rudimentary scales and probably executing them poorly. For golfers its not scales its drills. Boring slow motion tedious drills. Hinge... hold... turn... repeat. Focus on the movement. It is the movement after all that you are struggling to learn.
