Big Ideas: Hit your second shot first | Travel Research Online

Image
Image

Big Ideas: Hit your second shot first

Here are a few sage reminders that can easily change your life for the better. They are taken from the second greatest game* known to man—golf!  On a good day, my game could be a notch above “audaciously taxing.” But to my very core, I know I have “potential” when hitting the links—now if I could only master hitting that bitterly challenging small ball.

Dr. Bob Rotella is a sports psychologist who wrote two fantastic books about golf, and I have read them both. Golf Is Not a Game of Perfect along with Putting Out of Your Mind are two pieces of literature worth reading if you have any desire at all to break one hundred.

When I read, I always try to make a connection between whatever subject and sales and marketing—hey, that’s what I do! This book was a gold mine of meaningful messages and is now defaces with underlines and inside flap reminders.

Here are a few that resonated with me:

” … not to question what I was doing.”  Hey! Some of your marketing is going to work while much of it isn’t. Practice well and pull the trigger. Watch. Think. Learn. Adjust. Swing away and move along.

“Great putters keep it simple.”  Throughout your life you are only going to bump into two types of individuals–those you can help and the other kind. I don’t know how to make this any more simple. When you find a person you can help, do everything in your power not to shoot yourself in the foot. And tattoo this to your forearm: “Never up … never in.”

” … we worked that first time with routine, attitude and confidence.”  Develop a system you can live with. Then, work the system knowing you are doing all you can for all the right reasons. Trust in the fact that you are one of the good guys, and that good things happen to good guys.

“It’s a long term challenge that you have to work on every day.”  Sales and marketing is not an on-again/off-again business strategy. Diets may have proven to be, but sales and marketing is an every day thing.

And one of my favorites:

“Gradually, I learned to care less abort whether the putt went in and more about whether I had done everything I could to give it a chance to go in.”

I love this one. Stop trying to sell and just work on enjoying and perfecting the game. Be a coach and work on positioning your team in a place where they have a chance to win. If you don’t work on making more people aware of the fact that you are alive, and that you have all the goodies to help them, you have minimal chance to cash their checks.

The older I get, the more logical it becomes. Dress two-under. Head to the course. Take some warm up swings. Pick a target. Keep your eye on the ball. Bring it back slowly. Let it rip. Find your ball, and do it over and over and over until you get to the 19th hole.

While Dr. Rotella has some sage advice, I do need to defer to one that was passed along to me by my father. “Hit your second shot first and never get mad on a golf course. You are not good enough to get mad.”

*Oh, and by the way, baseball is the greatest game.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Share your thoughts on “Big Ideas: Hit your second shot first”

You must be a registered user and be logged in to post a comment.