Three Holes, Three Ways
Why this drill
Strategy claims are cheap; this drill runs the experiment. The same three holes played three times — aggressive, conservative, and normal — with cards kept, turns course management from opinion into your own data.
Setup
A quiet stretch of three holes you can loop — ideally with a risky tee shot, a guarded green, and a scoring hole among them. One ball, three loops, a card with three rows.
The drill
Loop one, aggressive: driver everywhere, flags attacked, putts run at the hole. Loop two, conservative: position club off every tee, middle of every green, lag everything. Loop three, your normal game. Card each loop. The spread is the lesson — for most mid-handicaps the conservative loop wins or ties at a fraction of the stress, and the aggressive loop's disasters cluster on one specific hole whose lesson is now personal. Write the winning plan on the card and play it for real next round.
One thought to take with you
Let the cards argue — you just play the three characters honestly.