Do you remember the last time you made a spur of the moment decision where you were either oblivious to the consequences or had a feeling this might not be the right thing but you did it anyway? 

We’ve all done it and we’ve all said after the fact, “why did I do that, I knew it was folly, but I did it anyway, come on man what are you doing?” 

At every decision moment you are in some stage of the performance loop or you may call it the success loop or even the happiness loop. But no matter what you call it, your mind and more so your emotional mind has the edge on leading the line on what decision you will take.  

For context, you are playing the last hole of a round of golf. It’s a low index hole (difficult hole in layperson speak), you are playing and scoring well but your drive (first shot) was not good leaving a second shot on a slight downslope lie on hard ground with water on right and overhanging tree out on the left, that is not really impacting your shot much but is now on your mind. You will have to hit one of your best shots of the day to reach the green. The reward for a good shot is high as it might put you in contention for a prize but the consequences of a bad shot are bad and you will end up with nothing.  

Each of us will have our view of what type of shot to take as we could be in different places of the performance/Success loop for the same shot. The loop is as per below:

In this golf example let's say we’re in the “Pressure thinking” stage which results in placing higher priority in going for the green, potential of birdie and bigger prize versus laying up with potential to par the hole or high probability to bogey resulting in scoring points for either outcome but not as much as a birdie. The odds of making this shot are stacked against you and you know subconsciously you're in the pressure zone because you’re aware this might be a crazy shot to take on but are going to go for it anyway. The pressure of the situation is getting to you both the potential prize and complexity of the shot. There is only one outcome here, a bad shot and the worst-case scenario. Afterwards, what do we say? “Damn it, I knew I shouldn’t have done that”. It's so obvious after the fact but you did have the signs telling you to pick another option but you didn’t.  

The only way you would have made that shot was if you were “in flow”, so playing well all day with good swing technique and no thoughts about lack of confidence. You were making all the right decisions with no worries popping into your mind. Going from “Success thinking” to “in flow”, taking shots with “no thoughts” and falling back to “success thinking” as needed and by-passing “overthinking” and “pressure thinking”. An example of over thinking in golf would be thinking about what you should be doing with your swing when you are taking your shot i.e. I need to go back slowly, keep my right elbow in and down, keep my head down, move my hips, make sure I finish straight through and so on. These thoughts are more for your practice swing but really for the practice range. On the course it's best to have no thoughts hitting the ball and let muscle memory take over.  

In a work situation you are doing an important task when a red bang email hits your inbox, it immediately grabs your attention, you drop tools and read it. It's not good, an escalation from a major customer, it has your manager cc’d and, in a few seconds, you get the sweats and compelling need to take immediate action. You do and get stuck in but the pressure of keeping the customer happy, your boss happy and your ego and good standing intact, you rush in. Your rushing produces a small mistake that aggregates as you keep going and ultimately you make the same mistake again for the customer when you release the update. Mortification, your heart was in the right place but you operated from the pressure thinking zone. 

The key is to be self-aware of what is going on with you and not the situation. You need to find a trigger that works for you and helps with stepping out and back for viewing the bigger picture, enabling you to ask some good questions of yourself so you begin well or indeed if you need to begin at all.  

In work you need a trigger to stop and ask; have I read and understood everything about this issue? Is taking on this issue and stopping my current work more a priority for me? Is there someone else who needs to look at this issue first? If this issue needs to be tackled, what are all the steps that need to be done, in what order and by whom? Who needs to be involved to look at the plan before next steps are put into action?  

In golf you need a trigger to stop and ask; is taking this shot the best option to guarantee I walk away with scoring points taking into account the shot difficulty, how I am playing and my thoughts (positive/negative) about this shot? 

Each of us needs to find our own trigger for these situations. But being aware that there is a loop and you are always in one of the zones operating at some level of performance whether you like it or think you are or not, is a good first step.  

Be aware that “no thoughts' ' can also mean you are going through the motions with no strategic direction with mediocre performance, anything goes and rarely jumping across to the success thinking zone. If something is worth doing, it's worth doing well and you will learn a lot more besides.