In his book You Already Know How to Be Great, former tennis coach turned coach to executives, Alan Fine identifies three performance gaps that prevent us from living up to our potential. These are:
The Awareness Gap – Fine says: “While some of my students had been swinging the racket exactly the way I told them to, others seemed to be unable to follow my instructions and would persistently swing the racket differently than I had taught. In other words, there was a gap between what they thought they were doing and what they were actually doing.”
The Pressure Gap – Fine says: “Watching my students who were on the national training team practice, it was difficult to tell them apart from professional players. But these students never made it past the semifinal rounds in tournaments. When the pressure was on, they choked and couldn’t do what I had seen them do in practice. And I didn’t seem to be able to help. Clearly, here was another gap—a gap between how people performed in practice and how they performed under pressure.”
The Expertise Gap – Fine says: “Like every other serious coach, I dreamed of being able to train some of the best players in the world. I believed that in order to coach someone you had to be more expert than that person—otherwise what advice could you give him/her? But since at my best, I could only play at county level (which is equivalent of a state-ranked player in the United States), that meant I would never be able to coach anyone who played better than county level.”
What does this mean? Fine says: “These same gaps show up in almost every area of our lives, including organizations. People communicate differently than they think they do. They perform well in practice but poorly under pressure. They’re often called upon to supervise others who are far more expert than they are. As a result, performance rarely even approaches what’s possible.”
What Fine discovered is that these gaps happen because of interference. In other words, we let something get in the way of us performing at our best levels. He developed a coaching method called GROW which allows a coach to be able to help anyone overcome their interference and eliminate these gaps so they can achieve more. He says:
“Basically [GROW] is a map of human decision making. It provides a simple way to create Focus, reduce interference, and improve performance in any area of life….This is how GROW works. Whenever we make a decision we eventually go through four phases. We think about the following:
Goal: What we want to do
Reality: The circumstances we’re dealing with (or how we perceive them)
Options: How we might move from our Reality to our Goal
Way Forward: What action we want to take
He continues:
“But typically, we don’t approach these elements sequentially…Our thinking goes all over the place. It’s like trying to score runs in baseball by running all over the field between stepping on the bases. It’s not impossible; it’s just a whole lot more difficult. And that difficulty significantly dampen our Faith and our Fire. However, by giving order, discipline and Focus to these phases we go through, we can significantly reduce interference, increase the speed and accuracy of our decisions, and improve performance.” –You Already Know How to Be Great, pp. 52-55.
I’ve used this system for years to help make decisions in my businesses. One of my personal coaches, Jay Henderson, worked for Alan Fine for years and he shared this philosophy with me several years before I even got into my first business. This book is great because it outlines the thinking process to help you focus on the short-term and the long-term challenges you face as an entrepreneur. I would highly recommend that you get and study this book. It has been very helpful to me even though I am already familiar with the methodology. One part of the book I’ll highlight here shares the following questions that you can use to eliminate interference and help you to clarify your thinking. These questions are:
Goal:
• What issue do I want to work through?
• What do I want from this GROW ‘session’ (meaning time devoted to resolving the issue)?
• What are the consequences if I do not take action?
Reality:
• Briefly, what’s been happening?
• What have I tried so far? What were the results?
• What’s my sense of the obstacles for me? For others (if others are involved)?
• In what different way might others describe this situation?
• Is my goal still realistic?
Options:
• Describe fantasyland. If I could do anything to make progress on this issue, what might I do?
• If others are involved, what would they need to see or hear to get their attention?
• If I were watching myself work through this issue, what would I recommend?
• Do any of these options interest me enough to explore further?
• If I were to act on this/these chosen option(s), how might I go about it?
Way Forward:
• Do any of these options interest me enough to take action?
• How will I go about it?
• What might get in my way?
• How might I overcome that?
• What and when is my next step?
Get and study this book. The “inside-out” approach this book discusses will help you improve your performance, help you eliminate interference and focus on what really matters now in your business.
