How Playing a Sport Helps You to Grow your Business and Nurture your Family?

My caddy said you are hitting the ball too hard, that is why it is not going far. The funny thing is that I couldn't get a sense of that in my body. I was merely swinging the club. I couldn't do any other way because I had no awareness of it. I had to keep looking at the caddy for feedback till I got a sense how it felt different when he said I was hitting the ball vs when he said I was swinging without applying force. Not only was the feeling different, the outcome was totally different. In the first case, I felt pressure and stress in the body and the ball just carried through a short distance. In the second case, the body flowed rhythmically for an effortless swing followed by a deeply satisfying sound of the club connecting with the ball and the ball going the distance as never before.

Isn't that exactly how business is and every other area of our life? If we are working too hard, chances are we are using the wrong approach and we would not have results in alignment with our intention. Chances are also that we wouldn't even know our approach is not effective till somebody mirrors it back to us. Therefore, the critical importance of having mentors, coaches, advisors to not only show the mirror to us for us to know how we are unknowingly messing up but also for us to learn the right technique for maximum output with minimum effort.

The other day on the golf course during our weekly family game, my 9-year old son told me candidly after a rather insipid shot from me - "You are not serious about your game. You don't even have a coach." I was amused in that moment, though the truth of what he said hit me hard that immediately after the game, I set myself up with a golf coach :-) The investment in golf coaching is a stretch beyond my budget at the moment when more basic needs have to be met, I am still going for it because I realised I wasn't going to progress much without it. I will keep spending hours in the range practising and yet see no improvement on the course because I would be practising the wrong swing without even knowing it.

Golf is a priority, just as business and family is. For me, the progress in each is inter-related. I am a container and that container with the same content moves from golf to business to family relationships. If I give myself the permission for mediocrity in golf, I would not only lose interest after a point but I would also carry the mediocrity consciousness to other areas of my life. Therefore, golf is not only where I get to spend amazing time with my family in the greenest and freshest part of the city but also is a way for me to practise being a container for mastery consciousness. That is why excellence in my game is important for me. I may not be there as yet, but that is what keeps me going; otherwise I would have quit long back.

That is why one of my strongest recommendations to my clients is to pick up a sport to play for excellence because it is a wonderful practise ground for essential leadership skills needed to grow the business which cannot be learnt even in the world's best universities - mastery consciousness, unlearning and relearning, being coachable, failing and yet getting up to play again with retired hurt not being an option, focus, agility of mind, practising and practising to master a new skill, learning to have fun, learning to have relationship of equals with fellow players, integrity, greater self-awareness of the mind, body, emotions and the spirit leading to greater intellectual, physical, emotional and spiritual intelligence. Since each one of us is a container, what we learn on the playground we carry to our businesses. Watch your business grow as you bring these leadership skills to your workplace.

The inefficiency that most people create when they pick up a sport is that they pick up a sport in which their family is not engaged. Doing that ensures that playing adds to your list of stress-creators as your spouse becomes resentful of yet another activity that keeps you away from home. And if your spouse is not resentful, you will play with a sense of guilt that anyway adds to your stress.

A sport is a beautiful way to hold the family together and coach your kids on leadership skills that cannot be effectively taught in schools nor in any afterschool program because it is the responsibility of parents and is not available for outsourcing. You wouldn't want to wait for them to go the best Universities to learn leadership skills either because it is too late by then. We humans learn best from our parents as we are growing and learning what it means to be a human being. In the age of shrinking time; eating food together as a family without the distraction of the device, praying together as a family, playing together as a family has to be consciously created by the leaders at home (parents). In eating, praying, playing together; kids learn to be centred in who they are as human beings and grounded in values which is what will ensure that they are leaders and lead themselves and people around them to joyous, deeply fulfilling success in the expression of their inner genius.

Though easier said than done. To get the family together to play, pray, eat together without the device takes real leadership depth :-) It took me 5 years to finally get the four of us to play golf twice a week as a family ritual. On the course, the challenge of being a parent (a leader at home) is most evident because you cannot distract yourself away from what is not working. Each one of us has come a long way. Earlier, it would be me losing my centre and my temper at the kids for being so competitive with each other that instead of focussing on their own game, each would wilfully disrupt the other's game. I remember one of the kids remembering to hum only when the other kid was trying to focus on their swing. It sounds funny now but it was downright frustrating and irritating then. The anger and the upset that the kids displayed most visibly when their shots didn't go the way they wanted them to. My spouse threatening to stop playing the family games if the kids didn't start behaving on the course. He confessed later how many times he stopped himself from slapping them. Well, the truth is, at those angry moments, I would have loved to do that too though I always held back like him and true to my container self, showed up exactly how I was in life then - withdraw all communication seething with anger within. That was how our weekly games were. 

I was grateful for our weekly golf games even then because when I got my centre back, I recognised what a tremendously powerful training ground for leadership the weekly games were for all of us. Over the years, kids learnt that getting upset and angry only ruins their game, that it is more effective to focus on their own self than worry about what's happening with somebody else, that throwing the club on the ground after a bad swing only breaks the club and takes away the game from them, that there is a technique that they need to master, that it is better to sweat on the practise ground than bleed on the battle ground, that fitness is critical to play a great game, that eating healthy food besides regularly exercising was the way to be fit. Where else could I have coached them on these leadership skills?

I am learning to enjoy the game instead of playing with deadpan seriousness, learning to accept kids the way they are and not expect them to behave a certain way, recognising the need to be coached ongoingly, learning to forgive myself and not make myself wrong for not playing well, understanding that I cannot progress without building my own fitness & stamina and putting in structures for that, learning to not bring my upsets with the family to the golf course, learning to not get upset and angry :-) And, most importantly, learning that if you hold on to your intention for long enough through thick and thin, it gets fulfilled. 

As for my spouse, he has learnt to love the kids unconditionally just as I have and comes back to play week on week at the cost of his games with his golf buddies. As a family, we have moved forward emotionally, physically, intellectually, spiritually over the last 5 years. And, yes, as a family we are going to graduate ourselves to 18-hole from 9-hole games :-)

Wishing you, your family and your business the joy of the game and the growth that it brings for you in each area of your life.

Love, Jyoti.