Leadership Lessons from Golf
The Coach’s Role in Golf and Leadership
While working out last week, I watched two professional golfers talk about the success of this year’s number one rated golfer, Dustin Johnson and his coach Butch Harmon. When asked the most memorable lesson he got from his coach, Dustin Johnson said, “He told me, ‘I’m not going to change your swing, I’m going to teach you to think.” The commentators went on to say that Dustin Johnson’s ‘golf IQ’ is the best in the game, and that he has his golf emotions under control.
Butch Harmon is a very successful golf coach, and has coached other greats such as Greg Norman, Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson, and Adam Scott. Butch Harmon and I have at least four things in common:
- We both like golf. (he’s a pro and I’m not).
- We both graduated from the University of Houston.
- We both are U.S. Army Viet Nam Era Veterans. (He went to Viet Nam, I didn’t)
- We both are coaches.
I’ve always believed that golf can be considered an analogy for life, and that attitude has everything to do with being successful in sports and in life. In fact, in their book Extraordinary Golf, Fred and Pete Shoemaker discuss and reveal the necessity of getting the mental game in order so that the physical game and results will benefit.
The same goes for us in the business of helping businesses grow and prosper. My most successful clients have been those who realized that their mental reservations and negative mindset was their biggest obstacle to success. My least successful clients usually failed to see their own attitude as their largest obstacle.
What I learned from my coaching was that attitude was more about my values and beliefs, than it was about my actions. It took me three different coaches before I realized that changing activity and process was not going to make me successful. What had to change was my mental approach to the business. I had to become a product of the process of a mental change.
My Coaching Progression
My first coach was trying to show me how I should do things. Didn’t work.
My second coach was trying to show why I was doing it wrong. Didn’t work.
My third coach, George Richardson, and current mentor is helping me understand how I think. I now use the same scientific tools from Success Insights, that George uses with me. He helps me understand the strengths and limitations of my behaviors; the values that do and do not motivate me; and how my habits of thinking were limiting my growth and my success. With that knowledge, I have learned to improve myself and to coach others.
In 1987, as a young hospital executive, I was privileged to attend American Medical International’s Corporate College in Beverly Hills, California. We stayed at the Riviera Golf and Country Club. One of our instructors was Timothy Galwey, the author of The Inner Game of Tennis and The Inner Game of Golf. I had never really played tennis, but in 5 minutes on the Riviera tennis courts, he had me hitting a backhand consistently, not by telling what I was doing right or wrong, but by asking me questions about the feeling I was having as the ball was hitting on the racket and by asking me physical sensations I was having while hitting the ball and by asking me to focus on the ball. Timothy Galwey says that coaching is more about creating an environment for learning than teaching information. Every hospital administrator in that AMI system went through the College. The only one that didn’t was the President and CEO. Consequently, the College closed later that year. Change starts at the top doesn’t it?
Enhancing Your Inner Game
If you want to be coached by an “Inner Game” leadership coach, contact me for a complimentary coaching session.
