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5 golf tips that apply to success in business

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Playing golf at Chequessett Golf Club in Wellfleet on Cape Cod.

If you’ve ever played golf, you know how frustrating it can be. I wanted to play more this summer to improve my game, so I joined a women’s league and took a few group lessons at Big Oak.

Then I broke my right thumb and index finger in a car accident. Just when my game was starting to improve!

But that hasn’t stopped me from trying to pick up tips by watching the LPGA and PGA on TV, and thinking about returning to the game.

I realized that what I learn on the course can apply to being more successful in business. So here are five tips I’ve picked up:

Know how to focus.

One  thing I love about golf is that if you are going to hit a good shot, you have to focus intently on what you are doing. There’s no room in your brain to be distracted by 1,000 other things. I find when I stare hard at the ball, I hit it soundly. Just like in business, you have to focus intently on the project or problem at hand. If you allow yourself to be distracted and take your eye off the ball, you’re going to land in the rough.

Know the rules of the game intimately.

We all get in the rough once in a while, even Jordan Spieth on the 13th hole at The Open recently. Because he knew the rules of golf so well, he used them to his advantage and got out of a real pickle with just a bogey. He went on to win the Claret Jug.  (Click here to read about what happened.) In business, we have to know and understand all the potential options and pitfalls. That means doing research and calling trusted advisers, not winging it.

Know the clubs in your bag.

Just like in business, succeeding at golf involves being good with your tools. When you’re 100 yards from the pin and in the rough, what club will you use? I bet it’s a different club than if you have a nice fairway lie. In business, your tools could be your staff or associates or software programs. Know their talents and utilize them appropriately depending on the situation.

Know a good teacher.

When I started playing nine holes of golf twice a week rather than once, I thought my game would start to improve. Wrong! I was just feeling doubly frustrated as I continued to play erratically. I hadn’t taken a lesson in years. I realized I needed a pro to analyze my grip and swing. After each lesson, I wrote in a notebook what the pro had said. Then I re-read my notes before I went to the driving range or played a round.  What a difference. I began hitting the ball more accurately and making fewer poor shots. My husband noticed my improvement when he played with me. There’s a lot of emphasis these days on finding a good mentor, but taking a class (online or in person) or a webinar can be just as valuable.

I got very frustrated in the rough on this hole at the Highlands course in Truro on Cape Cod.

Know that you need to move on after a bad shot.

At one of my golf lessons, the pro saw me hit a slice. “What did I do wrong?” I asked. He said, “I know what you did wrong, but I’m not going to tell you. Instead, just focus on hitting the ball the way I showed you.” I followed the checklist, and my next shot was perfect. When we make mistakes, we can’t belabor them. The pros know they can’t wallow after a poor shot. They have to hit the next one really well and the next and the next if they want to win.

Sometimes our golf games, and our business deals, come together and we hit a great drive “right down the middle,” as my dad used to cry out in delight. Other times we’re in the rough and we have to skillfully navigate our way out.

What business lessons have you picked up from playing golf or another sport? 

 

5 Takeaways from State of Blogging Industry 2017

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State of the Blogging Industry 2017
State of the Blogging Industry 2017 report reveals that social media is a key source of web traffic.

Are you blogging and wondering how your efforts and results compare with other bloggers? ConvertKit recently released its comprehensive State of Blogging Industry 2017 report based on surveys with more than 850 bloggers.

Here are my five takeaways from that report:

Unique subject matter is king.

The most popular blog topics are these seven: personal development, entrepreneurship, small business, online business, productivity, marketing and lifestyle design. If you’re writing in those arenas, it’s time to think about how can you make your content truly unique.

Have a strategy to meet your publishing goals. 

There’s a gap between intent to publish and actually publishing. That should come as no surprise to us bloggers. The State of Blogging Industry 2017 report shows that for the most part, no matter how the bloggers stated they intended to publish, they actually published fewer posts. That held true for bloggers intending to publish one post per day; three posts per week; two posts per week; and one post per week. Bloggers who intended to publish just one post every other week or one post each month tended to match their intentions with their output.

If you have a strategy, you are more likely to succeed in your goals.

Related post: 5 Ways to Make Money From Blogging

Increasing the time lag between when you write a post and when you intend to publish it can help.

When I teach blogging at Writers and Books, I encourage students to create a blogging calendar that lists the topics and dates for upcoming posts.   But I’ve only touched briefly on how writing a post days in advance can help with consistency, too. The State of Blogging Industry 2017 report showed that 52% of bloggers write either the day before or the same day as they plan to publish. I’m guilty of doing that too often, too.

As the report states, if you write a post one month in advance, it gives you the opportunity to fine-tune it even more; to share it with a trusted person for feedback; to add media to make it more engaging, and so on.

If something urgent comes up the day you want to post, if you have the blog already written, you won’t have to delay posting it.

If you’re not collecting email addresses, you lose a measurement of success.

I’m a firm believe that email marketing is the best way to grow an audience. The State of Blogging Industry 2017  showed that bloggers judge success more by total site visitors and social shares. I’m with ConvertKit on this one, as their report states: “To turn a blog reader into a customer, you have to have a way to get back in touch, and that almost always means turning them into an email subscriber first.”

Social media is the best source of website traffic for blogs.

I want to preface that statement by saying that’s true for “non-pro” bloggers.

The ConvertKit staff used U.S. Census data on median household income to categorize bloggers as either “pros” or “non-pros.” Pro bloggers are defined as people who are earning what can be considered a full-time living from their blog, at least $72, 165 annually in households with children or at least $33,805 annually in a household without children. Non-pro bloggers are people earning less than those income amounts.

The top source of blog traffic for the pros was organic search. The No. 2 source of traffic for both pros and non-pros was direct traffic, such as when someone types your website URL into a search engine to reach your site.

Will you make any changes to your blog practices based on these findings?

To read the full report, click here. 

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Upcoming event: Rochester Women’s Network June Networking Event. 

5 career lessons from book “Hidden Figures”

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The book “Hidden Figures” offers an in-depth character sketch of the African-American women who worked behind the scenes in aeronautical research.

I haven’t seen the movie yet, but I found the book Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly filled with inspiring lessons for women, still relevant in these days that are long past the 1940s-1970s.

Hidden Figures is the story of a group of highly intelligent, even brilliant, African-American women who worked as “computers” at the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in Hampton, Va. They started their jobs during the still segregated times of the 1940s, when the country was united in defeating the Axis powers of World War II. These women persevered to help the country eventually catch up and beat the Soviets in the space race.

Here are five lessons that struck me as I read about Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Goble Johnson and Christine Darden.

The ability to defend your work gets you noticed.

Lee writes that the best women mathematicians were known for accuracy, speed and insight. “But having the independence of mind and the strength of the personality to defend your work in front of the most incisive aeronautical minds in the world — that’s what got you noticed…That’s what marked you as someone who should move ahead.” 

To advance in your career, you have to get close to where ideas are created. 

Not easy to execute, but essential to moving up the career ladder, was mounting a different plan of attack than just holding on to your job. Lee writes about the changes taking place in the late 1950s  — the beginning of the space race and the end of segregation at Langley — and the need for the African-American female employees to evolve, too. “If a woman wanted to get promoted, she had to leave the computing pool and attach herself to the elbow of an engineer, figure out how to sit at the controls of a wind tunnel, fight for the credit on a research report. To move up, she had to get as close as she could to the room where the ideas were being created.” 

Related post: 5 Lessons from ‘Dream, Girl’ entrepreneurs 

Keep asking until you get the answer you want. 

Persistence pays off. Lee gives the example of Katherine Goble Johnson putting aside any personal insecurities to ask her superiors repeatedly to let her attend the important editorial meetings, where research findings were picked apart and had to be defended. Johnson figured she had as much right as her male engineer colleagues to be there, and so she kept up her inquiries, “gentle but persistent,” until she basically wore down the engineers who got tired of saying no.  Lee writes: “Who were they, they must have figured, to stand in the way of someone so committed to making a contribution, so convinced of the quality of her contributions that she was willing to stand up to the men whose success — or failure — might tip the balance of the outcome of the Cold War?” 

Serendipity, not luck, plays a part in your career.

With modesty and years later, Johnson would claim it was luck that she of all the female “computers” was sent to work in an engineering group that eventually focused on putting a man in space and then on the moon. But Lee dismisses that, writing that “simple luck is the random birthright of the hapless. When seasoned by the subtleties of accident, harmony, favor, wisdom, and inevitability, luck takes on the cast of serendipity. Serendipity happens when a well-trained mind looking for one thing encounters something else: the unexpected. It comes from being in a position to seize opportunity from the happy marriage of time, place, and chance. It was serendipity that called her in the countdown of John Glenn’s flight.”

Help the young women and men coming behind you. 

The fact that these “women computers” gave countless hours to talking to African-American high school students about careers in math and engineering, inspiring them, and mentoring them one-on-one, is not insignificant. In the 21st Century, it’s pretty much a given that if you are a successful person in whatever field, you should be a mentor. But back when good jobs were so scarce for women, especially black women, it would have been easy to just focus on their own careers. But Lee devotes a significant amount of space to chronicling how the women in her book spent nights and weekends speaking on career panels, raising money for scholarships, and so on.

Writing about Mary Jackson, Lee notes “Mary, however, was determined to clamor over every fence she encountered and pull everyone she knew behind her.” And later in the book, talking about women, both black and white: “Each one had cracked the hole in the wall a little wider, allowing the next talent to come through. And now that Mary had walked through, she was going to open the wall as wide as possible for the people coming behind her.”

I finished reading Hidden Figures carrying each of these women inside my head and my heart, inspired by how they overcame so many challenges. I’m thankful to Margot Lee Shetterly for uncovering this unseen story.

What books have you read lately that have offered you inspiring lessons?

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A don’t-miss podcast: Interview with Susan Wojcicki: CEO of YouTube 

Event of the week: Rochester Philharmonic “Women Rock” concert June 3-4