business through the eyes of a child

My children are both grown up adults now, which is weird, but when they were very young they would often accompany me to breakfast meetings and coaching sessions before I dropped them off at daycare or school.

Sitting at a table next to me they listened to me conducting many sales meetings and coaching sessions and we always talked after about what was going on. They learned when business was good by the frequency of bank deposits I made and eventually pieced together what a service business was all about:

1. Find someone you like to spend time with.
2. Pay attention to what they are stressed about.
3. When you find a problem they have, think up a way to solve it using your skills and the things you've learned.
4. Make a "pitch" by offering to solve the problem in exchange for a certain amount of money.
5. Make a promise of what you are going to do and by what day and time.
6. Do the thing you said were you going to do by that date and time.
7. Make sure the person is happy with what you gave them.
8. When they are, send them an invoice.
9. When the check comes in the mail, go to the bank machine and deposit it.
10. Go to the bank machine, take some money out and go have some fun somewhere and something fancy to eat.
11. Repeat steps 1 through 10 as necessary.

In explaining how a service business worked to my young children, it actually helped me simplify my own thinking. It's actually pretty simple.

breaking through barriers

When I was seven a close friend of my parents taught me and my younger brother how to golf. "Uncle Leon" had no children of his own, but he loved kids and kids loved him. He was a master golf technician with a great sense of humour and bottomless patience (as well as a bottomless supply of chocolate bars). We spent hundreds of hours at the driving range learning and practicing the fundamentals of a game that is now the passion, or should I say the obsession, of millions of people in Canada. We did countless drills for grip, stance, backswing, foreswing, head down, left arm straight, rotate the hips to the target. My body remembers it all.

I owe a huge debt to Leon Plotkins and his wife Alice. This was the first major time in my life that I mastered something complex other than learning to walk, speak and read. Golf was different because it was as profound as it was unessential. I of course understand now that mastery is a process not an event, but this early experience taught me that if I stuck with something, eventually I would learn to do it reasonably well.

In my late teens I quit the sport because I started cheating and I did not like who I was becoming. Throughout my early twenties, thirties and early forties, when someone asked me if I played golf I always said: "I did as a kid but I'm not mature enought to play it now."

As a coach I have now come to understand that there is a second dimension to mastering something other than technique and that's attitude. And it may be even more important: attitude and technique, mindset and mechanics; consciousness and competence. Mastery over mindset, attitude and consciousness does indeed take some maturity.

I started golfing again last year after my wife Tania and I were in Maui and decided to play a round on a whim. At the end of the ice climbing season last year, after a big chunk of ice came closer to me than I was comfortable with, we thought it might be a safer choice (even though I've had more injuries golfing in two seasons than I did in twenty-five ice climbing).

We went about it with our usual full-on level of intensity: lessons, properly fitted clubs and a commitment to both practice and play a lot. It's become a great couple's activity.

For most of this year and last, my goal was to first break 100 and then 90. Only 10% of golfers break 100 on a regular basis and fewer still break 90 but most of my clients are very good golfers with low handicaps; so when I broke 100 midway into last season for the first time, it ranked as an achievement.

Last year I nearly broke 90 on six different occasions and oddly, on every single round that I came close, I scored a 9 on the 18th hole. I didn't even know what my score was going into the home stretch but I did know intuitively that I was close. I didn't handle the pressure. I choked.

For most of the first half of this season, I struggled to break 90. I got close several times, but got so anxious about my score I collapsed into a very mechanical process of analyzing every mistake and mishit. Everytime I play 6 or 7 holes at or near par, the pressure would build and I'd have a blowout for 6 or 7 holes with double and triple bogeys. Pars good. Bogeys bad.

About a month or so ago, I hired a new golf coach. Michael Bruchet is very skilled mechanically having been a professional tour player for many years, but it's his time in Asia that has distinguished him among golf teachers.

Michael sees golf as a martial art and spends more time on my mind than he does on my body. I can hit all of the shots but for some reason I don't do it consistently or frequently enough.

When I sat down with Michael for the first time, he felt like more of a coaching colleague than any other pro we had taken lessons from (and we have taken a lot).

The first thing he said was that he takes stressed out mid-aged men golfing in the mid-nineties and helps them break 80 in one year. Eighty. Not ninety as I had been hoping to do.

I have had four lessons with Michael. Today I finally broke 90 for the first time and shot 85–my personal best. And I am clear about where I can shave another six to ten strokes off that. Breaking 80 seems doable. No, inevitable.

The primary benefit of using Michael is confidence, not technique. He genuinely believed that I could break 80 quickly and now I am believing it too. I am fortunate to have access to a second great teacher for this phase of my golf career.

I met a golf yogi in Bandon, Oregon this year and came away having developed a simple formula for golf performance and really performance of any kind: performance = potential minus ego. My score is a function of how much talent I have and how much ego I have. I know I have talent because when I get my ego out of the way I can hit beautiful shots. I know I have an ego. That's more than obvious whenever the ball does not go where I want it to.

I then developed a useful acronym to reverse the negative parts of my ego that were leading to performance anxiety and choking. EGO = ease plus gratitude plus optimism.

Ease means loosening up and trying not to kill the ball. Counterintuitively, shots go further with less effort if one understands how to create power. This is where Michael's golf-as-martial art philosophy kicks in.

Gratitude means appreciating and learning from what goes well not just what does not go well. Most of us pick apart our mistakes and failings looking for inspiration and insight and sadly usually just find escalating frustration instead. I have a very good short game and now I thank my wedges after a good shot and kiss the ball after it goes in the hole. I'm starting to compliment my driver more and more.

Optimism means creating an expectation of a positive result. Each of us has a brilliant shot maker and a duffer inside and I can choose either at every swing. If the last thought before taking a shot is positive, I get more positive results. But if I say: "I hope this doesn't go in the water again..." well, I think you know where the ball goes. The duffer comes out.

A positive attitude of ease, gratitude and optimism removes the destructive part of the ego out of the equation, reduces choking and lets the deeper talent shine through.

Contact Michael Bruchet at 403 880 8180 or mbruchet@mbinternational.ca if you want to break 80 or 70 for that matter.