Your Success is inevitable
Last week Athletic writer, Brody Miller, wrote an incredibly compelling profile on the career changing season of golfer Stephen Jaeger. Jaeger is a 34 year old player who has spent most of his career fighting to keep his PGA tour card. This is his second season on the PGA tour after being relegated in 2019. He finally made it back again in 2022 and is having the season of his career. To put that in context, his earnings this season match the earnings he’s made across his entire career up until this point.
In the first tournament of this season’s playoffs, the St.Jude Championship, Jaeger was just on the cusp of cracking the top 50 and securing himself a spot in all eight of next year’s designated events (the newly created events with bigger purses and smaller fields). To show just how much Jaeger was playing for, Miller writes:
“Playing in all eight events essentially guarantees around $400,000 in earnings with the potential for millions. And the final two FedEx events also carry larger purses. In a tour setup that increasingly separates the haves and the have-nots, this is how you make yourself part of the former group.”
Jaeger played really well at St.Jude but not quite well enough to crack the top 50. I was struck by the mantra that Jaeger kept saying all day even when he desperately needed a few putts to fall and they weren’t quite making it. “We’ll make one, eventually.” Jaeger didn’t make that elusive top 50 but he knew that he’d already defied his own expectations and become the kind of player that could.
Jaeger’s mentality reminded me of a topic one of my clients and I have been talking about a lot lately. That is, what it means to operate from a place of believing that your success is inevitable. Try it out and whisper those words out loud, “My success is inevitable.” Every time I say it, I can feel my posture straighten up with confidence. It’s like there’s a light switch in my brain that turns on my belief and turns off the avalanche of worries that has me doubting myself and what I’m building. It’s so subtle you could almost miss it.
It reminds me of a quote from renowned golf psychologist, Bob Rotella’s book, “How Champions Think.” When a golfer is having a particularly hard time, Dr.Bob tells them this:
“...I suggest to them that they imagine God appeared to them and said, ‘You’re going to have a great career. You’re going to win dozens of tournaments. You’re going to win several major championships. Don’t worry about it. You just keep working hard on your game. I’ve taken care of the results.’ And then imagine that the vision ended before the golfer could ask which tournaments he would win and when he would win them.”
What if you took a page from Dr.Bob and Jaeger’s mental playbooks? What if you operated from a place of believing that your success had already been preordained and you just didn’t know when it would happen or what it would look like? What if your only job was to keep putting in the work and not worry about the results? It wouldn’t change any of the hard work, resilience, or consistency needed but it might help you shift into a mentality that will help you persevere before those results appear.
The next time you feel steeped in the doubt and the worry and the fear try this on: “Your success is inevitable.” It might just be the reminder and shift you need.
