Swing through the ball

I was never very good at golf.  Several years ago, my son and I signed up for golf lessons at one of the local public golf courses.  After about five or six lessons, I felt like I could at least do the basics.  It was a lot of fun.  But I am still not very good.

One of the things that I remembered most about the lessons is that when hitting the ball, you should swing through the ball (also known as "Ball is in the way of the swing; it's not the target").  In other words, rather than stopping your swing at the moment that the club makes contact with the ball, you should keep swinging and following through as though the club was constantly in contact with the ball.  But does that make sense?  Check out this slow motion video of PGA professional Brooks Koepka.  The ball literally gets launched into the air as soon as the club makes contact with it.

The whole point of a good golf swing is to reach maximum swing velocity at the exact moment that the club makes contact with the ball.  Golf instructors will say that swinging through the ball makes sure that you don't slow down your swing as you approach the ball. "Golfers who see the ball as the ultimate destination will undoubtedly start to decelerate shortly before impact. This happens because your mind has been trained to coordinate – more or less – the end of your swing with the wrongly defined final act – the ball."

As I think about it more, the same concept is true for setting personal and professional goals.  Once you set a goal (and we've talked about the concept of using SMART goals, i.e. setting goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound), you should keep pushing through and even past the target, just as you would keep swinging through the ball in golf.  The point is to maintain maximum effort until the goal is reached, and the best way to do that is to aim past the goal!