Reflections
Last week was full of new experiences for me and some opportunities to put old demons to bed! The project I'm leading involves rolling out a culture change program across our organisation to 21K people, a challenge.
So last week I found myself working with a few people who have been less than helpful in the past and some who I had preconceived ideas about. However, with a fresh challenge put to them I have to say they all took onboard the task ahead very well.
It made me think about how we approach new challenges in dog agility; at training or in competition. We often go with the preconceived ideas of what the trainers going teach us tonight, or what the courses are going to be like at today's competition. Sometimes we're right. If the experience turns out to be one we like we'll probably keep going back. What if we're wrong, the evening turns out to be a disaster or the competition we enjoyed last year turns out to be a unpleasant experience, how do we react?
In many ways sport is different to business. We can have regular knock-backs in dog agility, elimination after elimination, and yet we still come back for more. We only need one clear run and we're back on track, motivation levels topped up and ready for the next competition.
In business we cannot afford to let 'issues' get in the way, we need to work through them quickly, and move on. We do this through thinking through the issue, what caused it, what was the result, how do we prevent it from happening again and what have we learnt.
If we apply these thought processes to improving our sporting performance, would we learn more about how we react to these situations (training and competition). And would we prepare our selves with a much more open mind ready to learn and enjoy...
So last week I found myself working with a few people who have been less than helpful in the past and some who I had preconceived ideas about. However, with a fresh challenge put to them I have to say they all took onboard the task ahead very well.
It made me think about how we approach new challenges in dog agility; at training or in competition. We often go with the preconceived ideas of what the trainers going teach us tonight, or what the courses are going to be like at today's competition. Sometimes we're right. If the experience turns out to be one we like we'll probably keep going back. What if we're wrong, the evening turns out to be a disaster or the competition we enjoyed last year turns out to be a unpleasant experience, how do we react?
In many ways sport is different to business. We can have regular knock-backs in dog agility, elimination after elimination, and yet we still come back for more. We only need one clear run and we're back on track, motivation levels topped up and ready for the next competition.
In business we cannot afford to let 'issues' get in the way, we need to work through them quickly, and move on. We do this through thinking through the issue, what caused it, what was the result, how do we prevent it from happening again and what have we learnt.
If we apply these thought processes to improving our sporting performance, would we learn more about how we react to these situations (training and competition). And would we prepare our selves with a much more open mind ready to learn and enjoy...
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