Enjoy this short video overview of our recent Courageous Conversations workshop at Jurong Country Club in Singapore.

The Official Site of the U.S. Open Golf Championship.

Time to get preparing – Qualifying rounds start 25th May

EQUIP – John C Mazwell

Home – Atlanta Golf 2009.

I would love to have you join me and the EQUIP team on June 2, 2009 as we go to the renowned East Lake Golf Course!  Not only will you be able to play a very historic course, you will also hear about EQUIP and the dream that is being fulfilled.

By attending this event, you will be joining in our mission of training Biblical servant leaders internationally. In addition to an amazing day of golf, you will have the opportunity to hear a short presentation from me and the EQUIP team about the exciting movement of God worldwide and how you can join the dream team. And of course, a great southern meal!

Thanks to my good friend Scot Duke for this http://golftwitt.com/9kgm

It was a sunny morning, a little before 8:00 AM, on the first hole of a
busy course, and I was beginning my pre-shot routine, visualizing
my upcoming shot when a piercing voice came over the clubhouse
loudspeaker:
“Would the gentleman on the women’s tee please
back up to the men’s tee?”
I could feel every eye on the course looking at me.  I was still
deep in my routine, seemingly impervious to the interruption.
Again the announcement:

“Would the man on the women’s tee please back up
to the men’s tee!”

I simply ignored the guy and kept concentrating, when once more the man
yelled,

“Would the man on the women’s tee please back up to the men’s
tee!”

I finally stopped, turned, cupped my hands and shouted back….

“Would the butthead with the microphone kindly keep quiet and let me play
my second shot?!”

What helps distinguish leaders and managers is about control and, quite literally, how “hands-on” you are.

When you first learn the game of golf, the chances are that you grip thew club tightly. After all this is basically holding onto a stick that you will swing through the air and hit a ball. Allowing the club to “follow-through’ – if you don’t hold on tight, the club might just go as far as the ball.

(I appreciate that many of you reading this may not have ever played golf, for you some alternatives, perhaps liken the tight grip of a golf club to:

New golfers have to learn how to ‘let go’ – to relax their grip. If a tight grip is a 10 on a scale, we want a 4 out of 10.

The same is true of leadership and the way we hold on to our people. Hold on too tight (micro manage) and people have little freedom to use their own skills and strength. Hold on too tight to the club, and it is the golfer doing all the work.

So the question is: “who should be doing the work?” The manager or leader or the member of staff? The golf club is weighted for a reason. If you allow the club to do the work, the swing and striking of the ball, becomes almost effortless. Relax your grip on your team and allow them to excel at what they do, and the work becomes almost effortless.

Once you know, as a golfer, that the club is designed to do the job of striking the ball and your job is simply to swing and allow physics do to its job, you can relax. Maintain just enough control to ensure alignment, direction and distance and the ball will fly according to the club used, and the size of the swing. If you want a long distance, you use a long club and a full swing. A short distance off the fairway onto the green requires a shorter distance club and a smaller swing. The power to achieve the distance lies in the tool being employed and the chosen swing – the rest is pure physics.

So what can we learn as a leader? Isn’t it the same. Make sure that you are using the right tool – the person needs the right skill set (and/or mindset) to do the required job. The leader’s job is to have a little control to ensure that the skills are employed in the right direction for the right distance – that’s about judging how far it is to the goal and translating that into the swing itself – in the case of people, the swing is influence and motivation… let the staff do the rest.

And just like that golf ball landing exactly where you both planned and wanted it to be for the next shot. You celebrate. Unlike golf though, praise your club and thank them for their effort. After all, they did all the work!

When we use this metaphor on our golf leadership workshops, the feedback is instant. Hold tight onto the club and the golfer has to use a great deal of effort and the ball often ends up being pulled, pushed, sliced or hooked – going two thirds of the required distance. Relax the grip maintaining directional control and the ball flies straight to the full distance of the club and swing used.

(For non-golfers… try this with a horse, hold tight, the horse will slow down even when you whip it! You dog on a short leash stays by your side whilst pulling your arm out of its socket! Your child dangles from your hand as you cross the road.)

Yet, new golfers on particular, find their grip tightening in more difficult situations. The very moment when they need to be most at ease, most truly controlling, fear envelops them, pressure builds, the grip tightens and the ball goes astray.

The same is true of business leaders under pressure. Listen to the media hype about the doom and gloom of the current economic situation and fear can easily creep in to the mind. Many leaders respond by tightening their grip on their people and their business, believing that the tighter they hold, the more control they have and the more likely they are to survive and pull through. Albeit, they expend huge amounts of effort, feel incredibly stressed, and more likely to explode a blood vessel!

Tough times in business are better served by leaders keeping a clear head, a loose grip, maintain direction and let your people do what they do best. Let’s face the truth here, even a behemoth the size of AIG can’t control the market, what makes you think that you can? My advice, ignore the noise (media doom and gloom), look for the opportunities and focus on the goal and it’s direction, choose the right club, loosen your grip and let your club do the work.

Loosen your grip and you’ll have more control.

Having a Tiger Woods in your team can reduce the performance of other etam members?!?

What Golf Can Teach Managers About Competition | BNET1 | BNET.

Article and video from BBC NEWS | UK | Scotland | Edinburgh, East and Fife

BBC NEWS | UK | Scotland | Edinburgh, East and Fife | Overthinking ‘disrupts golf putt’.

Interesting little experiment.

What is not clear though is exactly what they were thinking (and talking!) about. If they were thinking (and talking!) about fluffed shots – then it is hardly surprising that that they got worse.

Anyone who’s taken our Mind Advantage program would know that you do NOT repeat and go on and on about fluffed shots, and you especially don’t talk about it.

The power to create (and kill) is in the tongue.

Many successful players are motivated by their own dissatisfaction with their performance. It can be a very powerful motivator. You would expect someone who is thus motivated to improve their game to be similarly motivated in other aspects of their life.

Do you see a golf course as a series of obstacles to be avoided, or do you see the fairways and greens as the thing to hit. There are a few people who actually aim for the obstacles because they excel at the tricky shots – something discussed in the session on character and nature.

For most people, the self-directed anger resulting from dissatisfaction is not a positive state to be in. If you condemn yourself for playing poorly and use self-talk phrase such as “I should have…”, or yelling (at yourself or outwardly) your self-disgust such as “useless idiot” and perhaps more colourful phrasing – you are doomed to repeat it. Not only will you repeat the ‘error’, you are physically hurting yourself – self-condemnation causes self-directed anger causes stress causes physical distress causes physical sickness and, for many, heart failure. It’s a little as if your heart decides that’s it’s had enough of your inward abuse and is desperately trying to communicate your need to stop doing it. If you’ve had a heart attack or stroke you’ve probably completely reassessed how you live your life – and sought more tranquility, less stressful behaviours – in some cases avoiding the major contributors to your previously high stress levels – work and/or golf.

Some people don’t realise that this is what they are like. The way you drive your car is often a good indicator of your style. How angry do you get when someone cuts in to the queue in front of you? When you pull up to the red traffic light, do you swerve over to the other lane to be at the front of the queue? When motoring along are you more concerned about getting somewhere quickly, or more concerned with the traffic around you?

Back to golf. When you stand at the tee, what do you focus your attention on? Your target? Avoiding the trees/bunkers/water/rough? I hope the former by now if you’ve been with me all this time. What you focus on is what you’ll get.

Motivation is a multi-faceted phenomenon. In large part, motivation is about the satisfaction of values held. It is the result of using particular personal resources towards a specific goal that satisfies a value or value held by that individual. Connecting any of these three in any order, resources, values and outcome creates the feeling of motivation. In smaller part, though often the critical component, is encouragement to achieve a goal.

It is worth spending some time here on what we mean by encouragement. The word has ‘courage’ at it’s root. Thus, to encourage is to develop, enhance or build courage. Courage, you’ll remember, is not the absence of fear but the continuation to do something of which you are fearful. It follows therefore, that if we ‘encourage’ ourselves – we are building the strength to overcome our fears and commit to an action. Encouragement itself, is often mistaken for motivation – or exchanged for it. In order to get someone to accomplish something – they will need to be motivated and/or encouraged to do so. it is possible to get someone – or even yourself – to do something which does not satisfy a value – but such actions are not repeated if no personal value is realised.

For example, many beginner golfers give up playing after being encouraged (usually by a relative or close friend) to take up the game. They continue to ‘try’ to play until they find that they do not realise something of value for themselves. Yes, there are people who don’t like or enjoy golf. Shocking but true. Encouragement is good, but it is not a substitute for genuine motivation.

There are some fundamental needs that we as human beings find motivational. There’s plenty of books and papers on the subject for the interested individual and I don’t intend to argue every combination here. However, there are some generally accepted ‘big’ motivators that the academics agree on – even if they want to put different labels to each term and put them in a different order.

Jurong Country Club: Effective Change Leadership

Jurong Country Club provides recreational and social amenities for the high-profile professionals and executives working or conducting businesses in Jurong, the industrial hub of Singapore. Since its birth in 1975, it has blossomed into one of the finest and most reputable golf clubs in Singapore, luring members and clientele from all over the island.

The brief

Continuous change and improvement is the norm at JCC, like other country club, innovation and continued excellence in customer service is key to continued growth. With the development of the Integrated Resorts, competitive pressure mounts and demand for high quality staff provides club management with additional pressure to lead change more and more effectively.

The intervention

One of the most highly acclaimed leadership development programs underpinned by this model is GAINMORE^TM Golf – developed by Dr. john Kenworthy and world famous PGA golf teaching professionals, we use the game of golf as classroom and metaphor.

In this customised half-day program, participants learn and develop their own leadership and management capabilities through a unique, powerful and enjoyable golfing challenge. Participants do not need to be a golfer to fully participate in these events, even if they have never lifted a club before – if they know who Tiger Woods is, that is enough. Most groups participating have a mixture of some golfers with mostly non-golfers. Whatever the make-up of the group, we have fully accredited and certified PGA golf professionals to teach you the basics or improve your technical ability, so that you can fully participate and enjoy this unique and enjoyable learning experience.In this programme, the focus is on Communication and Influence as a key process of leadership.

Before the non-golfers amongst you panic!
We know! Some of you are golfers, many are not. We’ve designed this program so that you can all fully participate and enjoy this unique learning experience. Our golf professionals will be teaching you the basics or helping you improve your current golfing ability and all of you will be developing your leadership capabilities through the facilitation of Dr. John Kenworthy, the author and creator of GAINMORE^TM Golf.

The outcome

After this training program, participants:
• Understand the affect and effect of continuous change
• Realise ways of handling change for yourself
• Are proficient in helping and leading others to change
• Know the importance of effectively communicating outcomes and goals
• Are able to motivate yourself and others to change behaviours and work patterns
• Value the importance of continuous improvement to achieve goals

The outline of the half-day: