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By Alan Fine
Define Your Reality
When you're on the golf course, you rely on your senses to gather information about your surroundings so you can make your next move. You see the ball at your feet. You observe the shape of the hole, the position of the bunkers, and the proximity of the trees. You feel the way your body moves before, during, and after a shot. You feel the wind and wonder how it will affect your stroke. At the same time, you hear the swish of the club as it swings through the air, and you hear the voices of other people. All these external stimuli give you important information about the current play.
In addition, you have an internal world that you see, hear, and feel. You have a set of beliefs based on your expectations of future events and on memories of past events when you were in a similar situation. And just as the external stimuli you experience affects your interpretation of any given situation, the internal stimuli also shape your perception and therefore your reaction.
In business, you have external and internal stimuli that shape your reality and determine your success. External factors include your customers' needs, the market conditions, economic factors, and your employees' effort. Your internal stimuli are your own beliefs regarding your skill level and your past experiences. To define your business reality adequately, you need to take all the factors into consideration and then determine how they affect one another. Too many business people focus only on one or two stimuli and never completely define their business' reality, resulting in missed opportunities for growth. Generally speaking, the better you analyze all the factors and define your reality, the more effective your company's performance will be.
Don't Try Too Hard
No one has ever mastered golf in a single season. And you'll find the game particularly frustrating if you approach it with stiff and inflexible expectations. In fact, the harder you try to meet unrealistic expectations, the worse you usually do. For example, consider what happens when you're on the practice range with a driver, trying to hit the ball as far as you can - let's say 250 yards. Although you try very hard to hit the ball a long way, your best effort barely crosses the 200-yard marker. With only 6 balls left, you give up. You decide to relax and just enjoy hitting them. You're not trying to hit them a long way - you're simply having fun. What happens? Your muscles relax, you coordinate your swing, and your ball sails past the 250-yard marker.
"That's it!" you say. "I've got it. I'll do that again." As soon as you say that, you're right back where you started. Your mental state is back in the "trying too hard" mode, your muscles tighten, and your ability to create clubhead speed is lost.
When working on a tough business issue, trying too hard to solve the problem will cause you to falter. In your effort of trying, you lose focus on the true issue and get off track. Rather than try harder, you need to keep your mind focused on the elements of the issue you can control. When you maintain such focused attention, you relax your mental state and can see the issue more clearly, resulting in your ability to devise effective solutions.
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