So, if you are at choice, which frequency do you listen, cause or effect?

How you influence others is somewhat obvious, but how you influence yourself is perhaps a little more obscure. We will take the obvious route first and then apply it to self. Leadership development and golf development work best when we are very strongly focussing on your self-leadership - how you lead yourself to greatness in golf, in business, in life. Leadership, unlike golf though, should pay much more attention - because leadership is pretty much all about influencing others.

Influence is a two-way street. Everything you do and say has some influence on others - you are part of their external environment. You even exert a small degree of gravitational force on others, indeed, you exert gravitational force on the planet! Not a lot admittedly, but your mass does attract other mass. You knew that you should have paid attention in science class now. Just as an aside, it's quite a useful factoid for use when you have gained a few pounds of weight - you do so in order to become more attractive! That's put paid to the glamour magazines!

The same is trues for other people exerting their influence over you. Your external environment is, in part, made up of everything that other people say or do, and this exerts an influence on your behaviour.

The external environment beyond other human beings, also has some influence over you. The weather for example - when it is raining, it is quite likely that you would alter your 'normal' behaviour by carrying an umbrella, or wearing a rain-proof coat. You know for sure that the weather can have a major influence over your golf. When there is lightning, you would wisely move away from the fairways under the trees or into the clubhouse. Being struck by lightning is one influence that everyone can do without.

The problem with influence is that human beings have a tendency to assume that there is little you can do to change the way something influences you. Well, let me put this straight. You can and you do!

Let us take an example of something that influences us and we do something about it - almost fight its influence on our lives. One that affects us all and that is our friend gravity. You see, gravity is ever present in our lives - there are a few exceptions but since that involves travelling into space I think I can safely assume that does not include you. If, by chance you have travelled into space - my question is - how far can you hit a drive out there? Must be awesome.

Back to earth. Our bodies are constantly under the influence of gravity. We consume food to produce the energy to run the muscles that spend most of each day pushing back. Only when we are physically damaged - break a leg, twist an ankle, suffer paralysis and so on, do we truly appreciate how much effort is involved in keeping our body upright and moving. When we are reasonably fit and well, we think little or nothing of getting up from a chair and walking, and most of the time, we do all this unconsciously. We have programmed our brain to take care of operating the correct muscles, keeping balance, walking, and all the while supplying those muscles and cells with energy through breathing and circulating our blood. Now, if you had to consciously work out how to do all this stuff that we simply take for granted, you'd not have a great deal of time to think about much else - at least, not consciously.

What's the point of this? Well, it's simple really - there are many many things occurring in your life, including when you practice and play golf, that influence your behaviour. Some things we cannot change - gravity, weather, daylight, animals etc. and to what extent we allow such to affect us and our behaviour is our own choice. We can choose to be at cause for ourselves or at the effect of the environment and others. In other words, I'm disabling your potential for 'excuses'.

In my next article I'll share how you can change the way that you influence yourself and choose to be at cause.

Copyright (c) 2008 John Kenworthy

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