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Making a permanent change in the way a person leads is no different from making a permanent change in any behavior pattern. It’s like mastering a sport skill. For example, Annika Sorenstam and Tiger Woods have dominated their respective pro tours for almost a decade. Have you ever wondered why they’ve been able to achieve and sustain such high levels of performance? It’s true that both Annika and Tiger are physically gifted and spend a lot of time working on physical fitness. In addition, and they’re serious students of the game. They study club, ball and course technology. They study grass. They study the effects of heat, wind and rain on ball performance. They study every golf course they play on. They study every kind of shot in every kind of situation. They study other players. But this isn’t the real reason they perform at such a high level. The real reason is practice, practice, practice. Golf involves several skills, and these two dominant golfers constantly seek ways to improve their skills, which they apply and reinforce all the time. Every day. On the course and on the practice tee. Before the round, during the round and after the round. In-season and off-season. Hitting thousands of golf balls, they pay dues in practice that we have difficulty imagining. And to make the most of this constant reinforcement, they get lots of feedback and coaching. They want to know how they’re doing and whether they should be doing anything differently; so when their caddy or another player mentions something, they listen. They pay a swing coach handsomely to hold up a mirror to their game and provide insights for improvement. They swing clubs in front of video cameras for hours and analyze the playback endlessly. In short, once they know what they should be doing, they repeat the behavior over and over until the improvement becomes second nature, until it feels so natural and comfortable that they don’t have to think about it to execute it perfectly. They practice it until they ingrain it. All the best players do this. It takes an amazing amount of repeated application, reinforcement and coaching over a long period of time to ingrain a skill. If you’re one of the millions of fans who follow the career of Tiger Woods, you may remember that 2004 wasn’t one of his best years. At the beginning of the season Tiger made a number of alterations in his swing. The changes were designed to make the world’s best golf swing even better. Even with a world-class swing coach, Tiger struggled all year, winning only one tournament and finishing fourth in total winnings. But at the end of 2004, his game started to come together for him, and he won two post-season tournaments back-to-back. In 2005 he won his fourth Masters. He placed second in the U.S. Open and won the British Open, leading the field from start to finish. He finished the season with six tournament victories and nearly $10 million in winnings, ranked number one in the world. Here’s the point: Tiger Woods is one of the all-time great professional golfers, and he hits hundreds of golf balls in practice every day. But even Tiger had to stick with his new swing for the better part of a year before the new patterns became ingrained and he achieved noticeable improvements in his game.
Article Source: http://www.articledestination.com
Dennis E. Coates is CEO of Performance Support Systems, author of MindFrames, a brain-based personality assessment system (www.initforlife.com) and co-founder of the Train-to-Ingrain alliance (www.train-to-ingrain.com, info@train-to-ingrain.com, 800-488-6463), which delivers a reinforcement-centered approach to learning and development that achieves permanent, measurable improvements in workplace behavior and positive impacts on business results.
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