Joseba del Carmen, Vitoria (1967), was a bomb squad member of the Ertzaintza, professional golf player and basketball player in Baskonia, and since 2014, Jon Rahm’s coach. As a sports, executive and team coach, Joseba will close the XI Congress of the Association of Golf Managers – La Rioja 2021 (November 8-10) with his presentation “Management and strategies for change”.
“I apply three concepts with Jon: feeling, living in the present and accepting what is happening and making sense of what is happening,” explains Joseba, who works all his concepts from his own experience. “The basis is to know oneself and from there, to perform to one’s maximum potential so that one can give the best of oneself”.
It all started in 2008 when Joseba suffered a traumatic experience and could barely walk, “and I withdrew into myself. I isolated myself in a lost mountain. I didn’t know what was wrong with me, I suffered a very tough hip operation and I was half sunk. My emotional intelligence was at its lowest point,” recalls Joseba, who began to reflect and rebuild the foundations of his life: “To know why things happen and what it feels like, what for and what sense it makes. And so, by experimenting with myself, I became a coach”.
Joseba del Carmen started working with Jon Rahm in 2014, when he was still an amateur player and was in his first year at University in the USA. Jon was then number 30 in the World Amateur Ranking, and that same year (2014) Rahm won the Spanish Absolute Championship at the RCG Las Palmas (Canary Islands) in July (he would repeat in 2015 in Laukariz (Basque Country)); in September, the Spanish team, made up of Jon Rahm, Mario Galiano and Daniel Berná, won the bronze medal at the 2014 World Amateur Men’s Team Golf Championship, held at the Japanese Iriyama course of Kuruizawa Golf Club, near Nagano. And individual winner of the Eisenhower Trophy and number 1 in the World Amateur Ranking for 50 weeks.
“Jon has been evolving, combining new techniques always with the aim of improving performance. I always work with him to put him in situations that can help him improve; and that is a medium-term work that is now paying off: managing emotions.”
Joseba doesn’t like the term, “controlling emotions”, because well managed emotions are part of Jon’s temperament and what makes him a great player and a great person.
“Character, emotions, feelings cannot be controlled. It’s like wanting to control the course of a river, in the end, they will explode somewhere. But if you channel them well and give meaning to emotions, and how, when and where to use them, that can be very positive,” explains Joseba, who does not separate his personal life from his professional life.
“My job is to make you see that everything happens for a reason; to make sense of the things that happen to you. Things happen for a reason, and that’s what I call the “What For.” When your mind knows that there is a “why and a what for” you learn to anticipate situations. Of course, to get to this point you have to know yourself very well. It is the only way to transform something that can hurt or harm you into something good and positive,” he adds.
Joseba will try to expose in 45 minutes two irrefutable concepts on which he works: the present and constant change: “We must know that we have to change: Change from the fear of change. Studying fear and understanding it. We all find it difficult to change and my goal is to provide the tools to face that change”.
His presentation will bring to a close this intense Congress, packed with prestigious institutions and speakers.
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