Lessons, by their very nature, are designed to help you play properly and for your average golfer that can be a big problem.Everything you were doing wrong before; opening your stance, having too much bottom hand, or not enough, lining up left and blocking the ball right, manipulating your shoulders so that the ball travels relatively straight . . . it all has to change.Depending on your level of ineptitude, the changes not only feel very strange, they also turn you back into the kind of ‘nine-shots on a par-three, hope you never get stuck behind golfer’ that you thought you had left behind years ago.Take two rounds that I have played recently as a perfect example of this. Before my first lesson I notched up a nice little 87 in the rain at Belmont Hills, which apart from a couple of blow-outs that are the defining characteristics of any hacker’s round, would have been closer to an 81.Three weeks later at the BGA Monthly Medal I shot a 98 at Riddell’s Bay with a schizophrenic display that included a couple of nines, several sevens, 55 on the front nine and a slightly more respectable 43 on the back.My ability to chip the ball had seemingly deserted me completely and Chris Grantier, the professional helping me in this challenge, received the following e-mail as a result: “God damn it Chris, you’ve ruined my short game.”Which obviously isn’t true, but dispatching a snotty e-mail was better than sending my clubs flying into the waters of Riddell’s Bay in frustration.Before Chris went to work I had, apparently, a ‘stack and tilt’ action and a stance that made me look like Quasimodo. This involved leaning over the ball, putting all my weight on my front leg and through the course of the swing moving it all out of the way at various strange angles as my arms came through in an attempt to hit down and make a decent contact with the ball.Ugly, utterly wrong, yet strangely effective on occasion, and, importantly, I trusted it.Trust is the overriding theme in golf. Trusting your swing, trusting your ball flight, and trusting how far you hit the ball with each club. Changing your swing means you lose that trust and that, combined with all the new information swirling around in your head, plays havoc with your game.Lessons give you lots to think about: Ball position, soft hands, distance control, what do I do if the ball is above my feet, or below it. Do I need a club more, or less, to compensate for: wind, elevation, hitting out of the sand, a divot, the rough.You also have to think about the what if? What if I hit a solid shot at what I’m actually aiming for? Does that mean the ball is going to go too far and too straight. Now you’ve got problems because you have to line up like you expect to hit the ball well, which given all the changes your trying to make is by no means a foregone conclusion.However, if you do hit the ball well, and straight, then it goes further because your new swing is more efficient, more powerful, and now it’s gone over the back of the green and into the stagnant smelly pond behind because you used the wrong club for the new and improved you.This though is not as frustrating as it may seem because the mistake came from the result of a good shot. The frustration comes from not being able to trust that you will play a good shot more often than not.One of the main elements of the game that separates the good golfers from the bad ones is the appreciation that golf is not about being perfect, it’s about limiting your mistakes.It is nearly impossible to hit the ball dead straight, and trying to do so will send you mad, but when a good golfer misses they do so by roughly 10 feet, when the hacker misses, the ball tends to sail out of bounds or end up in the water.A couple of weeks of lessons, combined with daily trips to the driving range, can lessen the margin or error, but trust is the key.Taking nine shots on a par-three because you’ve seemingly lost the ability to use your wedges can dent that trust. But I trust that Chris knows what he’s doing, and that eventually, at some point, I will start trusting my ability to hit the ball again.Now all I have to do is learn how to putt, drive the ball, hit draws, fades, keep my temper and manage my way around a golf course.