Most people who play golf find that they want or need to improve their golf game. Even the top pros need to keep working on their game in order to keep progressing. I guess the only people that don’t want or need to improve their golf game are those occasional players who just like to walk the course with their friends for a bit of fun.

Assuming that you fall into the category of the vast majority of golfers who want to improve their game how do you go about it? For most people the answer lies in spending some time with a golf professional at their local club. But for this investment of time and money to be most valuable you have to know what aspect of your game you want to improve. For example, you might be looking for tips on how to improve your swing, your putting, your chipping, your putting, your driving, your iron shots or your fairway woods.

As you can see just from these examples, there are many aspects to a golfer’s game and you simply can’t hope to improve them all at once. Therefore, it is imperative that you narrow it done so that your golf pro can give specific attention to the part of your game you most want to improve. In some cases this might be obvious. For example, if you keep slicing your irons off the fairway or taking three putts when you know you should be taking two, these become fairly obvious elements that you can ask your golf coach to work on.

But what if your game is suffering from a multitude of minor problems? Perhaps there is nothing obvious but it just doesn’t feel like you are playing at the top of your game or perhaps, you have some good holes and some bad ones and your aim is to improve your consistency. How do you go about narrowing down what you need to work on?

I’d like to share a tip with you that I stumbled across by accident. This only came about because I had four pre-paid golf lessons that were about to expire and I used them to play nine holes with the golf pro at my local club. We just played and chatted and he didn’t coach me once. At the end of the nine holes we went to the clubhouse for some lunch and went through his notes. He had identified four areas of my game that I should work on including my swing, my chipping, my pitching and my stance. He suggested that we should have a lesson on each of these aspects of my golf game followed by me practicing at the driving range and on the course.

As it was the end of the season I decided to wait until the following year and I took him up on his suggestion at the beginning of the following season. We started with stance and swing, then a few weeks later we worked on the pitching and finally, the pitching. By the end of the season my handicap had come down by six shots which of course, I was delighted by.

We then had another nine holes at the end of the season and worked out a coaching plan for the new season. And that’s where I am at now, waiting for the new season to start so that I can improve my golf game and my handicap further still.

So my advice is this, get a golf pro to analyze your game and identify what you need to work on before you have any lessons.