What ONE thing ALL Great Golfers have?

Is it a great swing? No, some great swings don’t produce the results the golfer desires, and that is frustrating.

Is it a fabulous putting stroke? No, because if you still don’t sink putts, you don’t succeed. If you really want to get on your knees and learn some more technical skills, then fine.

However the real answer lies in having a great mind set – resilient, adaptable and able to block out negative thoughts and negative self-talk.

Sometimes the biggest problem is in your head. You’ve got to believe you can play a shot instead of wondering where your next bad shot is coming from.

Jack Nicklaus

Thanks Jack, but we don’t need you to tell us, we know it! It’s common sense and we tell ourselves all the time. So why does it work sometimes and not others? The simple answer is if you were Mind Fit we guarantee it will improve your golf – great golfers also need to develop the technical part of the game. It is all about focused effort and practice, and so is being in the right mindset when on the course.

It works like this; if you believe that the shot you are about to take is doomed to failure and your focus is on the ball going where it shouldn’t, then that is what is likely to happen. A friend said that he knew that his ball was going to go into a bunker and I could hear him rehearse failure. He was right. It was a perfect shot into the bunker!

Now in addition to imagining failure, many people who play golf focus on the technical side of the game and get annoyed to varying degrees when they are unable to put together in one stroke all the variables that make up a successful action. If that’s you, you’re acting on information overload. You can only focus on one thing, not a hundred things simultaneously.

Be honest, how often do you know exactly what you did that led to a poor shot? Did you blame your stance, your club, the ball, the course, the weather, the ducks …?

We use a process of natural learning to make this clear.

For a moment, can you imagine ( or remember) the amount of focused effort a 4 year old needed just to hit that plastic ball with their first plastic club. Through encouraging them and their unbridled enjoyment, within ½ hour the ball was being hit with every swing. That’s natural learning.

Natural learning is action based and used successfully by the top performers and one of the simplest examples is when we learn to ride a bike. We get on it and do it – sometimes with assistance at first with stabilisers, or a friendly helping hand. Technical knowledge to improve your bike riding comes later. Olympic athletes use this form of learning and spend most of their time practicing one aspect of their sport until they get that part right. Then they put it all together. Most golfers unknowingly, go to play an unsuccessful game. They don’t practice or focus on one input variable at a time so there can be no improvement, and you are setting yourself up to fail. If a shot goes well they put it down to luck – or ‘I’m feeling good today!’

Success depends almost entirely on how effectively you learn to manage the game’s two ultimate adversaries: the course and yourself

Jack Nicklaus

We can’t help you with the course, but we can with help with you. By being Mind Fit, you have a learnt ability to perform to your optimum in different situations, through ‘can do’ attitudes and behaviours. So it will help your golf, your work and in fact all parts of your life. Most of us like to think we are ‘can do’ people (have you ever said I can’t do that?) but there are other options. Despite being unique and complex people, there are only three options relating to how we behave and perform. You’ve met the first. The other two, ‘can’t do’ and ‘won’t do’ attitudes and behaviours demonstrate a mind where effective performance will be curtailed significantly. So be honest with yourself, what state do you operate from and where would you like to be?

You can go from poor, to good, to great so if you want to play a better game start by conducting your own reality check. Identify exactly what you do at the input end that leads to the result you either want or don’t want. If you don’t know what you are actually doing how can you improve? And one thing, if you believe you’ll be shouting ‘Fore!’ a lot, you best take extra liquids as you’ll be delaying your visit to the 19^th.

Mind Fit is about performance and leads to better results.

Get your head right then your game will improve.

If you don’t believe us or Jack Nicklaus, there’s always another bad day on the golf course that might convince you.

Want to be one of the great golfers? Start with you.

To check where you operate from download the Mind Fit Map.

If you are on Linked-In, come and join our group Mind Fit Golfers and find out more. We intend to hold some learning events on ranges and courses, and perhaps hold some tournaments – when you’re ready!

Picture yourself on the Mind Fit Map

Do you thrive on complexity and enjoy the challenge or have a tendency to be overwhelmed by it? We all rely on those that thrive on it to break it down into manageable chunks so the rest of us can make sense of it, and then get on with it.

So when it comes to the most complex of systems, YOU, questions like “what makes you, you?” most of us will switch off, and revert to do what we’ve always done.

So here’s a quick way to see who you are. Put yourself on the Mind Fit MAP.

We are a result of our beliefs and experiences and high achievers or low achievers are created in the same way. By finding your default position, you can choose to change.

Why the Mind Fit Map?

We are all very complicated and unique, but despite all the complexity and difference there are only 3 routes our beliefs, attitudes and behaviours take us –

‘can’t do’, ‘won’t do’ or ‘can do’

and that’s the reason for the Mind Fit Map – to help you turn complexity into a simple to use map, so you can achieve what you want to achieve.

So now ask yourself – when someone says something new or something you think you know, do you?

ignore – I’ve heard it before, it’s irrelevant to me
avoid – I’m too busy, can’t be bothered, I’ll wait until I’m told
block – we tried it and it didn’t work , we’ve too much to doing to take that on
be curious – I wonder if we could do that, maybe it will help my colleague
explore – let’s see how it would look, who do we need to evaluate the options

Try it with your friends and your team – it’s a bit of fun but will tell you a lot. Remember, you weren’t born that way and it’s not hard wired, so you can change if you want to. We are mostly a result of what we have created.

Here’s some more of the Mind Fit Map

Are you in a Zombie Organization? How to spot one.

How to Recognize that You May Be Working For a Zombie Organization

Zombies are both comic and tragic in being trapped in forms of destructive behaviour which are self-reinforcing. They are blind to their behavioural trap and can only duplicate their incompetence until they run out of victims to consume, destroy their environment completely or get wiped out by an intelligent predator. Does this sound like any organization you know?

With the proliferation of lean thinking in organizations, it is timely to start considering what the next differentiator in business is likely to be. Just as lean thinking was the product of having to compete with limited resources by focusing on identifying and reducing new forms of waste, the idea of Zombie Organizations has a similar focus on what Mind Fit calls “Behavioural Waste” or forms of behaviour that distract people from connecting positively with the productive purpose of their business (assuming that the purpose of the organization remains beneficial).

Have you a Zombie Organization?

Some of the clues to the nature of Zombie Organizations include the following:

Focus on Efficiency not Effectiveness: what we do and how we do it are not up for discussion. The core focus is upon managing and cutting costs and not upon identifying new forms of effectiveness through innovation, there is very little room to manoeuvre and a limited sense of “Innovation Freedoms” where innovation is needed.
Vampire Problems: these are problems which have officially been resolved, but which keep coming back. They tend to be about performance issues and are often systemic. You redesign the form that work takes and it appears to work for a while and then performance slips back and the old problem reappears.
Needy Subordinates: the more you supervise people in order to build their capability, the more you have to supervise: as they get used to checking out their work with you. At first, this seems flattering, then it becomes wasteful of your time and prevents you collaborating more widely or allowing you to free yourself up to start innovating.

Behavioural Waste

All these issues or forms of Behavioural Waste are the product of the interaction of Learned Helplessness (on the part of subordinates or team members) and Learned Defensiveness (on the part of supervisors or those with expertise).

What happens is that supervisors or expert practitioners start out with good intentions in introducing quality work practices to their colleagues, but their paternalistic approach inadvertently goes beyond the tipping-point of capability development and falls into constructive incompetence through establishing dependency relationships which then demand more paternalism, and ultimately institutionalises Behavioural Waste through a self-reinforcing cycle that Mind Fit calls the “Zombie Cycle”.

This Zombie Cycle of close supervision and dependency then proliferates through an organization like a virus and takes over, general incompetence levels explode and the need for governance and compliance structures become an end in themselves.

What Can You Do?

Personally: consider whether your leadership behaviour is building dependency among key colleagues and team-members. Start coaching dependent colleagues to adopt Can-Do behaviours and gradually distance yourself.
Organisationally: Identify Vampire Problems and apply the concept of “Zombie Cycles” to determine which problems are due to the manufacture of dependency and Learnt Helplessness. Work with those involved, to reduce leaders’ paternalism and grow employees’ ability to manage their own work processes and outputs without direct supervision.
Use resources, time, and energy freed up, to innovate.

Zombie Organization familiar to you?

Have you a zombie organization ? How Mind Fit is your Team – Take the test on behavioural waste