Well I’m reading a new book and turning a new page in my career. The book is called Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod. It recommends some things that a lot of great achievers do to separate themselves from the pack. One of the things is getting up at abnormally early hours. I am talking about before 6am. Most of the followers start at 5 and then soon go to 4 or earlier. There are several reasons for that but among them are allowing for personal time to do things like exercise, meditate, hydrate and plan your day and as you are reading now, journaling. Now as a relatively new father of 2 under 5 year old children, this makes a lot of sense to me. You tend to lose a lot of your “me” time once kids come along.
As work from home father, that can mean that your business can suffer because some of my “me” time was spent on recovery time that made me more productive when I was working by giving me time to do things that I enjoy that help recharge the batteries like golf or fly fishing and some was spent on business and day planning. I think one of the most missed parts of business productivity is time blocking and being intentional in your daily activities instead of being reactionary.
Today I want to focus today on the journaling part. Why would I want to journal? Well as a late in life ADD diagnosed person, it can help to clear the mind from all of that pent up mental energy that often feels like a ping pong ball bouncing around in my head randomly changing my thoughts to whatever synapse or brain tissue it excites next. It is a creative outlet that serves the same purpose as list making, and carrying around a small notebook or using Keep or Evernote to write down those little things that jump in your mind while you are going about your daily routine. Those things can be great ideas you have or just a reminder to go get milk before you go home. Most importantly though, this allows you to keep the RAM in your brain clear to run the operating system more efficiently much like an transferring your OS in your computer to and SSD and leaving a nice fat hard drive for all of the junk you need to store.
I came across some writings of a well respected author in the golf space who unfortunately passed a few years ago in 2013. His name is Carey Mumford. He was a Wake Forest and Colgate School of Divinty graduate, a chaplain and a golf consultant to top level players and teachers. He wrote an article that caught my attention a few years ago that has just come back up called “How Learning Happens”
In it he describes the progress toward the ideal execution of a motor skill that he calls subconscious competence. That is the state in which we can perform an activity with ease and precisely without thinking about it like driving a car or riding a bicycle. I have spent some time studying this myself as I was a golf instructor as a profession in the past and I still work a little with some of my past students on their golf game. I have heard countless times when a great shot was pulled off by one of the masters of the game under unbelievable pressure when asked what they were thinking about and the typical answer was either “nothing” or “I can’t remember.” I don’t think that is a coincidence either. In today’s highly competitive golf world, things like this are not left to chance among the golfing elite on the PGA tour and they employ sports psychologists to help them reach this stage of subconscious competence often referred to of being in “the zone”.
More to come on this later, I’ve been up since 4:30 and it is 6:30 and I hear the kids on the baby monitor starting to wake up. Time to go play my favorite role of Daddy.
