Slumps

I am a big baseball fan and the Atlanta Braves are my favorite team. As I write this, Chipper Jones is mired in terrible slump. It seems that the times he hits the ball well, it is right at someone, or when he gets a good pitch to hit he pops it up or hits a weak grounder.

We can get into slumps in our life. All the breaks seem to go against us. It seems that the harder we try, the worse the results. If you are in sales, it means rejection after rejection. The deal that seemed to be a sure thing, fell apart at the last minute. Or maybe you are working on a project, then everything that seemingly could go wrong has gone wrong. You are hopelessly behind schedule and over budget.

Our thoughts and behaviors can lead to slumps. We can lose focus. We can lose sight of our goals or fail to act in a way that is consistent with our goals. Sometimes it takes getting back to basics to get out of a slump. Maybe bad habits have crept into our routine that are causing inconsistency in our actions.

We can lose our ambition. The fire goes out. We lose the drive towards our goals. We become tentative and hesitant to take action.

We can lose our belief in ourselves. We let setbacks turn us into pessimists. Negative thoughts tend to create all the reasons why we can't do something.

Or we can let fears overcome us. The more that we are afraid of striking out, the more likely we are to strike out. Fear of failure is a strong enabler for slumps.

When you look at these sources of slumps, one powerful way to overcome these is through affirmations. Affirmations are positive thoughts that we put into our mind through repeating them regularly to ourselves. If you are in a slump, write down a few positive statements and read them out loud to your self several times a day.

Golf Lesson

Golfers have slumps. Most slumps are caused by the mental part of the game rather than the physical part. One of my favorite movies is Tin Cup. There is a scene in the movie where Roy McAvoy, the character played by Kevin Costner, is on the practice range and develops what every golfer dreads, a case of the shanks. For you non-golfers, a shank is about the worst mis-hit of a golf ball you can make. The ball doesn't hit on the club face, but rather hits on the hosel where the club face meets the shaft. The ball goes weakly to the right.

In the movie, Roy's caddie says he has a solution to the shanks. He then brings out this elaborate contraption that he tells Roy to wear. It looks absolutely ridiculous but it works. The reason it worked is that it took Roy's mind totally off the shanks because trying to hit a golf ball with this contraption on required his focus.

A few days ago I was playing and was one over par going the 8th hole. I hit a big drive and had a short wedge into the green. Then it happened, I shanked the wedge. Now I have a 5o yard shot over a sand trap, and guess what, I shanked that shot too. I ended up making a double bogey. On the next hole, I hit a fair drive, but had a long iron into the green. You guessed it - another shank and I ended up with a bogey.

Now I am facing the back nine with the shanks. A sure slump in the making. Then I got a good break. I hit a poor drive into some deep rough. To get the ball out of the rough, I had to really concentrate on just making contact with the ball and not worrying about where it went. Well, I hit the ball solid, it got on the green, and I made par. I went on to shoot even par of the back nine. Slump over. Sometimes taking your mind off the causes of the slump and focusing on something else overcomes the slump.