Practice the ‘Process’ of Golf!
In my work with golfers I find that they are very outcome oriented. I think in my last blog I made a statement something like ‘golfers are all or nothing people’. In my experience with golfers they feel that they either suck are they are playing great (for many of them the latter is fewer than the former). There is not a lot of middle ground.
It seems that this holds true in another form: golfers are very outcome driven. When they play golf they either want a great score or why bother playing.
Outcome versus process
This all or nothing attitude has left a gaping hole in the ability for many golfers to really be great! If this is your attitude you are missing the mark. You can’t just ‘be’ anything! In order to be a great doctor or lawyer you have to go through years of education, learning and practical work. There was a process in your becoming whatever it was you became. It didn’t happen overnight, for some it wasn’t easy and for all of us there were short bursts of growth followed by little dips and long plateaus. Imagine if when you started your process of learning to be a doctor instead of focusing on the day-to-day process you were already planning where you were going to work, how much you were going to make, etc. You would have never gotten through the process and if you don’t think about and go through the process you can’t get to the outcome particularly as you want the outcome to be. This is life!
In any aspect of life, if you are thinking about the outcome you are not thinking about the process but the process what gets you the outcome. Hm seems like a dilemma. If you stay in the mental and physical process and trust the work you’ve done then the outcome will follow.
Processes are like chains
You can think of a process as a chain – a series of steps that people go through to get things done. Processes don’t depend on the intelligence or creativity of the people who run them, so much as their consistency and ability to perform a specialized task. The manager of the process is responsible for the intelligence of the system.
A process is like a recipe. Recipes are fine as long as you want to achieve the same result every time. But recipes are also very brittle when it comes to change and innovation. If you are responsible for a part of a complex process, it’s hard to try something new.
If you get one step wrong, there is a cascading effect, and everything downstream from that change is affected. Small changes at the beginning of a process can have devastating effects elsewhere in the system.
A chain, as the saying goes, is only as strong as its weakest link. Break one link and the whole chain fails.
Photo and paragraph by dgray_xplane
Live in the moment! Be in the process!
Happy Monday!
Dr. Michelle
