🪵 Stop performing

I shared on LinkedIn this week about a moment on the first tee.

It was early in the morning, the course was quiet, and I was playing with a group of guys who go out every Saturday. I was the fill-in, and I could feel it.

I stepped up, looked down a wide-open fairway, and hit my first shot straight into the lake.

Took a breath, teed up another one, and hooked that into the woods.

Not ideal.

One of the guys walked over, put his arm around me, and handed me another ball. As I went to tee it up, he stopped me for a second and said quietly:

“The only person who cares about your game out here… is you.”

I thought everyone was watching. Judging. Wondering why I was there.

But they weren’t.
They were thinking about their own shot.

I teed it up again, hit it straight down the fairway, and turned around to see who noticed.

No one had, except him.

I’ve been thinking about that moment a lot, and I think we do the same thing in leadership.

We move through conversations, decisions, and everyday moments assuming people are paying closer attention than they are—judging what we say, how we say it, whether we handled something the “right” way.

So we start to perform.

We say what sounds right. We hold back what might land wrong. We try to manage how we’re perceived.

And in the process, we move a little further away from how we’d naturally show up.

✨ Why this matters

When that starts to happen, something subtle shifts.

Conversations get a little less honest.
Decisions take a little longer.
Feedback gets softened or avoided.

It’s not that people don’t care. We all just want to get it right.

Trying to say it the “right” way.
Handle it the “right” way.
Land it the “right” way.

And the more we try to get it right, the harder it is to just be clear.

🔥 Something to share

If you’re supporting managers right now, this might be worth sharing.

Ask them to notice:

Where are you performing?
Where are you trying to get it exactly right, instead of just doing what feels right to you?Where are you holding back because you think people are paying more attention than they are?

That awareness alone tends to shift things.

🔦 What we’re hearing

This doesn’t usually sound like “I’m performing.” It shows up more subtly:

“I want to make sure I say this the right way.”
“I don’t want to mess this up.”
“I’ve been thinking about this more than I probably should.”

There’s a lot of second-guessing. We end up replaying conversations and thinking about how something landed. We work way too hard trying to get it just right the next time.

Those are some of the signals that we need to loosen up a bit, let go of what people think, and just move through the world in a way that feels authentic to us.

Final thought:

I really thought everyone was watching me on that first tee. They weren’t.

They were thinking about their own shot and their own game.

I think that’s true in a lot of places.

People aren’t paying as much attention as we think, which means we don’t have to perform as much as we do.

We can just be clear, say what we mean, and show up the way we actually would.

That tends to work a lot better.

I’d love to hear what you’re seeing in your own organization.

Warmly,
Steve

Sent from Campfire—a hub for developing leaders at scale.