Confidence Isn’t Correctness

Before we get into it, a heads-up. This isn’t my usual golf article. There’s no drill in it and no swing fix, and fair warning, it’s a bit deep and meaningful.

It came out of a single exchange, and it was hard to write. I’ve thought long and hard about it, and I think it might be one of the most important things I can tell you. I don’t think you get to the golf you want without it.

And there’s definitely a golf lesson in it. You’ll see why.

Not long ago, a confident golf coach took issue with me online. His position was simple: the hands only hold the club; the body does the rest. I kept asking one question. If the hands do nothing, how does a club reach 120 miles an hour? He never answered it. He offered “rotation” - which on its own can’t produce that speed. He listed famous players and teachers, most of them on my side. And when the questions kept coming and the answers ran out, he reached for insults. He never did answer the question. What I’d actually watched, in real time, was the single biggest reason most golfers never improve.

That’s the story. It’s the smallest part of this piece.

The golfer who does exactly what he’s told

Here’s why that slogan matters far beyond one argument online. Its cousin, “take your hands out”, gets handed to golfers on practice tees every day. And the moment it’s said, golfers split into two groups.

The first group are the naturals. They nod, go out, and keep doing what their bodies were always going to do. Their hands never actually leave the swing. They can’t - they’re the only thing connecting the golfer to the club. But it all feels quiet and effortless, so the instruction seems to have worked. These golfers improve, or at least don’t get worse. And they become the proof.

The second group are the thinkers. The conscientious ones, who take an instruction seriously and try to do exactly what they’ve been told. So they try to take their hands out. They can’t, because it can’t be done. So they fight it. They struggle. They get worse. And nobody blames the instruction, because it worked for the other bloke. They blame themselves.

And if they don’t, someone will do it for them. Not talented enough. Doesn’t want it enough. Doesn’t practice enough. Every explanation points at the golfer, and not one points at the instruction. Heads, the instruction worked. Tails, the golfer didn’t want it enough.

It’s none of that. It’s poor teaching that’s never been challenged.

So here’s a test worth keeping.

If an instruction only works for the golfers who don’t really follow it, it doesn’t work.

And if you’ve read this far, you’re almost certainly in the second group.

You were never the problem. You were the one who took it seriously.

Get the coaching right - give a golfer something that matches what his body actually does, something that survives the question “how?” - and the sorting disappears. The natural shines, because there’s nothing to fight. And so does the thinker, because for the first time his questions have answers. A mind that gets its answers can finally let go.

Why bad advice never dies

“Take your hands out” is one slogan. Golf is full of them. Keep your head down did the rounds for decades. Swing slowly did too. There is a lot of dogma in this game. Ideas get repeated so often they start to feel like laws. Coaches say them, magazines print them, internet experts reinforce them, and golfers carry them for years without ever testing whether they are actually true for them.

And it costs them. A golfer I coach had been told, years earlier, that his swing was too fast. So he spent years trying to swing slower. He also tried new grips, new drivers, and various swing changes. None of it helped much. The actual problem? He simply wasn’t swinging fast enough to hit the ball with any authority. When he finally gave himself permission to hit it harder, he picked up around 20 yards almost immediately. He had plenty left in the tank the whole time.

He had spent years solving the wrong problem because he never seriously questioned the original advice. Sometimes an idea was useful for someone else. Sometimes it was never useful at all. Either way, unchallenged advice has a long half-life in this game.

These days the advice is more sophisticated. It comes with force plates, graphs and an acronym: GRF, ground reaction forces. To be fair, the forces are real and the measurement is good science. A force plate shows what’s happening under a good player’s feet. But turning that into “use the ground” is a different claim, and it’s the one that never gets tested. Knowing what happens under a great player’s feet doesn’t tell you what to do with yours.

So why does any of it survive? You’ve already met the reason. Golf advice only ever gets tested on the golfers it works for. The naturals play well no matter what they’re told, so every instruction collects success stories. The golfers it fails blame themselves and go quiet, so no instruction ever gets disproven. There’s a name for this - survivorship bias - and golf instruction runs on it.

Nothing in the system ever retires a bad idea.

It’s why the same two answers get trotted out on every practice tee. “I’ve got a drill for that.” A drill makes you better at the drill. Whether it carries into your swing is a question nobody checks, so when it doesn’t, you get the blame. And “Rory does it, so you should too.” That’s survivorship bias with a famous face. A tour player is about as natural as golfers come - he’d have found a way whatever he was told. Copying how his body dresses the swing tells you nothing about whether it’ll work in yours.

None of it is malice. It’s just the easiest thing to say, and nobody has ever made anyone stop saying it.

That’s why we have to challenge this stuff. Nobody else is going to.

Confidence isn’t correctness

Here’s what stays with me from that exchange. He was confident. He made some good arguments and he sounded convincing. He hinted at coaching major winners. He challenged my playing and my coaching. I remained calm and asked him a simple question. But he couldn’t do it.

No hard feelings. But in the world of coaching, that’s a big red light. A warning. A fail.

And I don’t think he was being dishonest. He’s seen his way work, over and over. He’s just never counted the ones it broke, because they didn’t come back to complain. That’s where so much of the confidence in golf comes from. A highlight reel with no out-takes.

There was something else, too. He’d never read what he was arguing against. He assumed. So for all that certainty, he was guessing.

That’s what confidence without knowledge is: a guess with good posture.

Before we’re too hard on him, most of us have done it. Argued hard about something we’d never actually looked into. A learner looks first. A defender argues first.

But confidence is a feeling, not evidence. Plenty of people are completely certain and completely wrong. The certainty doesn’t make them any less wrong. It just makes them louder.

And certainty does something worse than fail to be correct. It stops learning dead. You can’t learn what you’re certain you already know. Learning needs a crack of doubt - maybe I’ve got this wrong - and a certain man can’t afford one. So nothing gets in. His certainty isn’t a strength. It’s a locked door.

Which is why the playing field is far more level than it looks. A question doesn’t care about anyone’s CV. It doesn’t care how many good players someone has stood next to, or how many letters sit after their name. It only cares whether there’s an answer.

You don’t need to be an expert to see through an expert. You just need to ask.

A learner, not a defender

So we challenge. But there’s a right way to do it and a wrong way, and the wrong way is tempting.

The wrong way is the cynic. Golf’s all rubbish, every coach is a fraud, trust no one. It feels like independence, but it’s just certainty pointed the other way. The cynic has stopped asking too.

The right way is to be a learner. A defender’s goal is to protect what he already believes. A learner’s goal is to find out what’s true. When you’re defending, every question is a threat. When you’re learning, every question is a gift. You can usually tell which one you’re dealing with by watching where the questions go.

A learner asks about the idea. A defender asks about you.

Here’s the uncomfortable bit. The stuck golfer and the unteachable expert are the same person. One is defending a dogma. The other is defending his swing thoughts and his years of effort. Neither can let go long enough to actually improve. It was never about intelligence, or talent, or credentials. It’s the posture.

And it isn’t stupidity. It’s self-protection. Learning means admitting that the thing you’ve invested in - your years, your money, your identity - might be wrong. The golfer who’s spent forty years on his swing can’t let go, because letting go means those forty years went into defending the wrong thing. The expert can’t sit with one simple question for the same reason. So we guard the investment by refusing to learn. Fear of being wrong is what stops us. And it wears the mask of confidence.

How you hold an idea is how you hold the club

Here’s where it comes full circle. The lesson about learning is the golf lesson. Same lock, same key.

The posture that wins an argument is the posture that learns a skill. Curious. Open. Happy to look a bit foolish for a while. And the posture that loses an argument - gripping a position, protecting it, letting nothing in - is exactly the posture that keeps a swing stuck.

How you hold an idea is how you hold the club.

Most golfers have been turned into defenders of complexity. Positions to hit, checkpoints to protect, a list running over the ball. We call it overthinking, as if it’s a thinking problem. It isn’t. It’s a learning problem. It’s the conscious mind defending control instead of letting the body learn the way bodies have always learned: try something, see what happens, adjust. You don’t assemble a throw. You just throw.

We’ve also been sold the idea that learning means adding. More lessons, more systems, more swing thoughts. But real learning is usually subtraction. Unlearning. Letting go. Being willing to look crude and foolish instead of neat and dead. The industry sells addition because addition feels like progress, and it can be sold forever. Subtraction is the hardest sell in golf, because it doesn’t feel like you’re buying anything. I’d know.

The learning system does not respond to slogans. It responds to clear intention and efficient organization.

How to question anything

Golfers don’t have a shortage of advice. They’re drowning in it, and nobody ever handed them a way to judge any of it. So here’s the tool. It works on golf advice, and it works on almost anything anyone tells you with a straight face.

Question everything you hear in golf. Three things are worth noticing.

Slogans are not models.

“The hands only hold the club” might be useful in some limited context. It is not a complete description of how force reaches the club. If a statement cannot survive a basic follow-up question, it is incomplete.

Credentials are not coherence.

Experience and proximity to good players do not automatically make a mechanical claim true. The claim still has to make sense on its own terms.

The reaction to questions matters.

Strong ideas tend to get clearer when examined. Weak ones often retreat to authority or personal attack. And almost always, when the insults come out, there’s not much fight left in the dog.

Then carry a few questions with you. Ask them of your coach, your playing partner, the bloke on YouTube, and the voice in your own head.

And keep two tests in your back pocket.

• For any instruction: does it work for the golfer who follows it exactly?
• For anyone who coaches you: ask how it actually works.

If what comes back is a slogan, a name, a credential or a drill instead of an answer, that’s your red light.

None of this needs a qualification. That’s the whole point.

Including me

That is the standard worth using on every idea in golf, including mine. Does it remain coherent when you press on it? Does it match how humans actually move and learn? Or does it rely on repetition and status?

So run the questions on me. Who profits if you believe me? I do. I sell a book. Which is exactly why you shouldn’t take my word for it either.

I have spent years trying to break my own model. I welcome hard questions because that is how you find out whether something is robust or just well-defended. I do not claim to have every answer. I only claim that the throwing intention has so far survived every serious attempt I’ve made to falsify it - including the ones I run on myself. And it has to pass the same test as everything else: does it work for the golfer who does exactly what I say?

I’ve been both people in this piece, too. I was the golfer who did everything right. Every drill, every book, hours on the range. Easy to coach. It didn’t make me good. And early in my career, a head pro I worked for threw a teaching manual at me and told me to teach it. Not long after, I quit.

That was my fork in the road, and it could easily have gone the other way. Take the manual. Teach the manual. Defend the manual for thirty years. That could have been me on the other end of that exchange.

Coaching is just helping someone else learn, and a terrible learner can’t be a good coach. So the job was never to be the one with all the answers. It’s to stay the one still asking.

Leave the best card on the table

I could have reached for the heavy stuff in that exchange. The research. The biomechanics. Twenty-five years of watching golfers learn. I didn’t need any of it. One question did the work.

Clarity doesn’t need to destroy. There’s a world of difference between winning and needing to win, and needing to win is just defending in better clothes.

Golfers already know this one, even if they don’t always do it. You don’t hit driver on every hole. The smart shot beats the hero shot more often than most of us care to admit. Leave the big play in the bag and take your par.

It works in an argument too. You don’t have to play your kill shot. You know what’s true. You don’t need to prove it to them.

And it works in life. You don’t have to win by force. Peace comes from not needing the applause.

The moment you stop defending and start learning, everything gets lighter. You stop needing to be right. You stop needing the last word. You stop needing to hit driver. Defending is a prison. Learning is the way out. The best golfers, the best thinkers and the best people I’ve known are simply the best learners. They stayed curious, kept asking and stayed willing to be wrong, and so they kept getting better while the certain ones set like concrete.

So here’s the only homework. Pick one piece of golf advice you’ve carried for years and ask it one question.

How does that actually work?

Then leave your best card on the table. And be happy.