I have read and talked about the great book Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod. I am believing more in it as I practice what it says more consistently. One area that feeds me so much that I have been neglecting is writing or scribing if you follow the SAVERS model in Miracle Morning. This is a first effort in righting the ship.
I am now reading The 12 Week Year by Brian P. Moran and Michael Lennington. It has been really good so far. It strikes me in the the analytical side of my brain but is helping to make a path from the visual to the analytical. I get off track on doing what I know I should be doing because I struggle with the very thing that I coach on. Having a strong visualization of what I want my future to look like and time blocking. What I have found is there is nothing like getting up a little earlier in the morning while others are either asleep or rushing around the house getting ready for another day in the rat race and starting my day with some reading and some intentional thought.
It’s interesting as I am reading it as the same time I am reading The Inner Game of Golf (IGOG) by Tim Gallwey. I have couple that I am giving golf lessons to that we recently did a playing lesson with. It’s uncanny the similarities of teaching someone golf and coaching them as a business coach. On the golf course I offer very limited advice on how to swing the club, actually I rarely give any at all. Instead I help them focus on visualization and letting what IGOG calls Self 2 to captain the ship. The book introduces 2 versions of self that the author identified when trying to improve at Tennis and then applied the same principles to golf.
Self 1 is “the coach” and the critical analytical self that is telling Self 2 who is the one that actually executes the shot what to do. Self 2 can do fine by himself so long as he has great visualization of what he wants to ball to do but does dramatically worse when Self 2 tries to coach him as what to do when he is actually executing the shot. Self 1 also is attached to the ego and is fast to point out when Self 1 is performing like a blithering idiot.
The interesting thing that I observed during my playing round was 2 part. One, the need of the husband to take over the Self 1 role for his wife and tell her ever thing she was doing wrong as well as playing the role of Self 1 for his Self 2. Even after countless times telling him that there was nothing he could do to impart any positive results the day we were playing by tinkering with his swing. Time and time again I told him to picture the shot and walk about to the ball and hit it. Over and over again he would get over the ball and go through 7 or 9 gyrations of grip fiddling, club waggling, obviously playing over and over again in his head what Self 1 was telling Self 2 about how to execute the shot. On the few occasions where I prevailed and got him to step up to the ball and swing without thinking, the results were markedly better.
She, on the other had was would ask for advice on what club to use and I would tell her what the correct club and shot would be to play the percentages. She would inevitably pick what she determined she was most comfortable with and would hit 2 or 3 balls executing it poorly only to come back to the suggestion and play the percentage shot that produced a much better result. This pattern repeated leading me to see how folks get stuck in patterns of staying in their comfort zones even when the results they are getting are much less effective that if they changed. Their lies the similarity.
Why is it we stay where we are comfortable even though there is a better place to be? The 12 Week Year says it’s because when we set business goals, we fail to connect them to a vision of what personal life would look like when we reach those goals and I tend to agree. I think that is why I was struggling to make the time to follow what I know was a better routine for me to win by getting up earlier and reading, writing , exercising and following the Miracle Morning routine.
