Closure part of victory process
IT’S not just successes on the golf course that Michael Finnigan and his team at i2i have been responsible for.
The Lancastrian has seen i2i clients win Olympic medals, the FA Cup and promotion to the Premier League among plenty of other titles.
And a major part of Finnigan’s process is taking the pressure out of the situations in which high-level athletes perform and instead trying to make winning a more personal experience.
Darren Clarke’s Open triumph in 2011 epitomised that way of looking at the mental approach to winning on the world stage.
Finnigan said: “What you try to do is get them to dream big.
“Winning The Open then becomes just another stepping stone towards that goal.
“It takes a big thing like winning The Open and makes it a little step in their mind, rather than an all-consuming idea. “And that’s fairly key. “Often with people in that situation, it doesn’t have to be related to sport. It could have been that winning The Open was a step to Darren paying his late wife back for all the time she gave him looking after his boys while he was out on Tour chasing his dream.
“That would have been just as powerful a motivator as going back to the Masters.
“So quite often it can be a motivation to boxing something off and closing a chapter in your life.
“We talk about the closure – because that’s what they really want.”
No example of this is more clear than Finnigan’s recounting of his part in securing Bolton’s promotion to the Premier League in 2001.
He said: “I knew each player and what their closure was to get us promoted.
“I knew what Sam Allardyce’s and Phil Brown’s were. I knew all the backroom staff and their closures.
“So we had one goal but 35 different closures, most of which were nothing to do with promotion.
“Dean Holdsworth’s was for his little boy to see him play in the Premier League.
“Dean was 33 at that time and a real leader, so he was striving for that closure and dragging the others along with him.
“But people don’t like going there because there’s usually tears involved.
“I used to talk to Dean about walking out at Highbury and pausing and turning around, looking and seeing his son in the crowd, who’s 10, wearing his Holdsworth shirt.
“That’s tears. That’s pure emotion. People don’t like that.
“Who wants to do that in front of another guy?
“But that’s what I make people do. That’s the key.”