I’ve just returned from a week in Florida attending a mastermind I belong to. It’s a group of 25 business owners who come together three times a year to talk business, brainstorm ideas and collaborate.
Our two-day meetings usually include guest speakers, goal setting, marketing conversations, hot seats, and objective looks at what’s happening in our business.
The night before each meeting, we typically participate in a fun (or scary or challenging) team activity.
We’ve made rafts on the beach in Miami (and then raced each other to a buoy in the water and back to the shore), ridden tandem bikes across the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, driven go-carts, done a food tour and a scavenger hunt in Toronto, recorded a song in Nashville, hiked a mountain in La Jolla…
It’s always fun and a great way to ease into the two days of deep thinking and masterminding.
This time our group activity was at Top Golf – a massive sports entertainment complex with a high-tech golf game that everyone can enjoy regardless of their level of experience, which was perfect since so few of us had ever played golf.
After a little bit (a few minutes) of coaching and instruction from the Top Golf staff, we all got to play. We lined up a ball on a tee, swung the club of our choice and hoped to hit the ball into a target for points.
Two things you may not know about me:
- I do not golf. This is the 2nd time I’ve held a golf club.
- I don’t intend to golf.
But I gave it ‘a go’.
There was very little at stake, so I swung the golf club and hoped for the best.
I missed the ball. A lot.
My golf club mostly cleared the ball totally, swinging me around in circles, or I hit the club firmly on the ground hard (again, missing the ball).
I hit a few balls (hello, Lady Luck), and at those times, it LOOKED like I knew what I was doing.
But, there were MULTIPLE, very sad, attempts that left the ball dribbling off the end of the green mat to the ground below.
The score for those shots: ZERO!
But it was all for fun, so I took a shot. And another shot.
Someone captured the rare moment of me hitting a good shot on their phone, which I wanted to post on Instagram.
“Look at me. I did it. I can hit a freakin’ golf ball..”
But, things are not always what they seem in business OR at Top Golf.
Sometimes we see the curated version of someone’s achievement.
We don’t see what it took to get to that achievement and the times they failed on the way to that victorious shot.
So, when we see that younger, sexier, more intelligent, richer, “way-more-confident and competent than us” person …
- Successfully launching a course
- Writing a winning headline that gets their emails opened
- Looking hot on Instagram reels
- Building a winning team that supports them
- Confidently making offers that sell
… what we don’t see is the times they’ve smacked that golf club so hard into the ground (and totally missed the ball) that the club reverberated for minutes.
We don’t see the coach that may have helped put them and the ball in a position to make that winning shot.
Or how many hours/days/months/years they’ve been practising for that moment.
Or how they published only the winning “shot” on Instagram and deleted every other failed attempt – never brought that to light, never shared that story, only shared the Instagram-able version.
So, the next time you compare your results to someone else’s, you might not be seeing things as they truly are.
PAUSE.
Get a clear picture of the target YOU are aiming for.
Ask for SUPPORT. Make CORRECTIONS. Take another swing.
Take the shot. And take the shot again.
Get TRUSTED FEEDBACK when you’re stuck and unsure what to do next.
You might come off short more often than not.
You might score.
But every time you take a shot, make corrections and swing again, you’ll be honing your skills and moving closer to hitting YOUR TARGETS every time.
You are more capable than you think.
And, I want to see you win.
Suzi
PS Here’s a link to my “miss, miss, score” reel on Instagram. If you’re not following us on Instagram, I’d love to see you there.
