Clarity and Focus

I believe that success in any endeavor comes down to two things - clarity and focus. Clarity means to have a clear sense of what you want to accomplish. It means creating a vision of the future. Every great accomplishment begins with vision.

Goal setting creates clarity. People with written personal and professional goals achieve much greater success than those who do not have them. While most people agree that goal setting is important, very few actually put it into practice.

The reason that most people don't have written personal goals comes down to one word - fear. Our inherent fear of failure prevents us from making a commitment to ourselves to achieve something worthwhile. If we don't make a commitment, then we can't fail.

The ability to focus comes from clarity. Focus is the ability to do the important things that lead to achievement of our goals, and not to be distracted by unimportant or trivial activities. When I work with clients on time management, they quickly realize that time management is really not the issue. It usually comes down to lack of clarity or lack of focus. We always have the time to do what we perceive as most important at the time.

For more on my Peaking For Success© model for creating clarity and focus, click on this link:
http://www.lead-strat-assoc.com/peaking_for_success.pdf

Golf Lesson

When it comes to clarity and focus in golf, two names come to mind - Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods. Both had a single minded vision of what they wanted to accomplish in competitive golf. It is to win major championships.

In some ways, Tiger has had it easier in creating clarity of his goals. Nicklaus was there as a target. Clearly his vision is to be the greatest golfer of all time, and his measuring stick is the accomplishments of Jack Nicklaus.

What I find interesting is that Tiger established this as a goal, and publicly said so, prior to winning his first major. Talk about setting yourself up for failure. I can't remember any other golfer before or after Tiger talking about becoming the greatest golfer ever. I'm sure other good players have goals, but none have set such a lofty one as Tiger. And maybe this is why he is dominating like no one else. He has greater clarity.

So how do we amateur golfers achieve clarity and focus. I'll suggest we take it down to the micro level meaning that we apply it to each shot. Clarity is visualizing the shot before you hit it. I fully realize that the reason that we are amateurs is because the ball rarely goes where we aim it. But, I believe you'll hit a higher percentage of good shots with better clarity.

Focus is blocking out everything else, the just focusing on hitting the shot as we visualize it. It means forgetting about the previous hole, or worrying about what score we are going to shoot. Over the past couple of months, I have been working on this and the results show. I've dropped my handicap by three strokes.