“The follow through is the most important part of the swing. How you finish will inform you on your balance…”
These words of wisdom came from my golf coach this past weekend. I’ve been working with Eric for several years, normally with a full lesson at the beginning of the golf season, and ad hoc help through the summer.
His words caught my attention.
“The follow through is the most important part of the swing. How you finish will inform you on your balance…”
This statement is true for a golf swing and equally as true for your business. In the golf swing, we can measure success based on both a qualitative and quantitative basis.
On a qualitative basis, if you can hold the finish in a balanced position – not teetering over in any direction – then you have followed through properly. If you hit the ball straighter and longer, then you can quantitatively measure results.
How do you measure “follow through” in your business and career? How about a few qualitative and quantitative metrics to consider:
- Do you return phone calls, texts, and emails promptly? (In my voicemail, I promise a 90-minute call back – quantitative metric)
- Are you prepared for meetings? If it’s your meeting, have you distributed information in advance to make sure others are prepared?
- Do you plan your days, weeks, and months to make sure you don’t overbook yourself?
- Do you schedule alerts to make sure you don’t miss important meetings or calls?
- Do you do what you say you’re going to do?
We all make mistakes. Stuff happens. However with a system, when mistakes do happen, we know how to respond and recover. Just as I found in my golf lesson, I can better identify what went wrong on a bad swing and fix it for the next one.
In reality, we all desire to be good at following through. It’s critical to our business success and life balance.
Where we most seem to come unbalanced is when there is no system in place to manage time and priority. Time isn’t a resource issue as we all have the same amount of it. It’s a priority issue, and the biggest challenge we humans have is that we allow ourselves to get out of balance by not identifying priorities and scheduling them to follow through.
I fail at times in my golf swing and my follow through process in business and life. My goal is not 100% accuracy because that’s just not possible. Managing expectations is an important factor in the process. I shoot for 90% in golf and life. For me, that’s manageable and keeps me balanced.
What about you? How will you measure your own “follow through?”
In a recent newsletter poll, time management was the number one discipline that readers wanted to improve.
I’m holding a FREE Unleashed® Leadership Series on Unleashing Time and Balance. It will be a 45-minute Zoom webinar that will become part of a course being developed.
Registration is open. April 7th at 12:05 pm Pacific Time. Your only investment is your time. You must register online to attend. If you register and can’t attend in person, you will be sent the recording at no cost.
Quote of the Week:
“Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance, order, rhythm, and harmony.”
~ Thomas merton
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