For the biggest part of the week I work as a technology consultant at a big firm, and another chunk of the week I spend at the gym training fitness or kung fu. Once in a while I also teach fitness classes. I very much enjoy both worlds and the balance I have between the two.
On the surface, there doesn’t seem to be much resemblance between sports and white collar work. For one, location: sports take place in a gym or on a field while a desk job is performed behind the computer and often in an office building. Attire is another big difference, going to the office in athletic wear will turn heads, as will showing up at the gym in a suit (which does happen every now and then, when I go to the gym on my way home from work). Then there is the activity itself: you're more likely to break a sweat in the gym than at the office but less likely to have to do deep, complex thought work.
Digging deeper, I uncovered transferrable skills between both worlds. Important caveat: the parallels between sports and a corporate career appeared to me when I started doing kung fu and fitness on a higher, more serious level. I noticed that the more I developed as an athlete, the better I got at my “day job”. If one exercises on a recreational level, the similarities might be less apparent. Nonetheless, having a sports mentality can still positively affect your career.
Well then, besides the obvious "sports is healthy and healthy is productive" benefit, in what other ways can sports help your career?
To start off, mindset is an influential factor in both worlds (and life in general, for that matter). I used to have a fixed mindset, which I realized while doing sports, and am still in the process of evolving that into a growth mindset. For example, when my coach prescribes an exercise that I am not familiar with and I don’t get it right on the first try, I would conclude that I am not good at it and will never be able to execute the movement. This line of thought is unhelpful and simply untrue, because on the fourth and fifth try I did manage to get the movement down. It’s only natural to need several attempts at something new. This translates to my office job as well, where I am exposed to doing new things all the time. Being comfortable with not doing things perfectly the first time has allowed me to accept and persevere in new challenges, instead of declining upfront or giving up after a “failed” first attempt.
Another aspect of mindset is comparison to others. In, for example, a fitness group class it can be tempting to peek at the weights that others load onto their bar and try to match them. However, there are so many variables at play that it is nearly impossible to make a comparison. How many years has the other person been training and at what intensity? Does their anatomy and body proportions give them a slight edge? Maybe their nutrition has been adjusted for optimal results in the weight room. The only real comparison you can make is against yourself an X amount of time ago. Have you improved since you first picked up weight? Maybe you didn't progress on the squats but you expanded your repertoire with deadlifts, now being able to do two different powerlifts. That’s really the only thing that matters. In my corporate job I see that people have a need for a benchmark. They need to know how they are doing relative to their peers. If a colleague receives a promotion and they are performing as well as the promoted colleague, they should get a promotion too. But the same principle applies here: compare yourself to yourself 2 months ago / 6 months ago / 1 year ago, not to what others are doing.
Thirdly, I learned about constructive goal setting through participating in kung fu competitions. It’s important to note that kung fu is a jury sport and therefore the outcome is completely out of your control. On paper you can execute a form absolutely perfectly, yet end up in last place due to subjective standards that you can’t control or are even aware of. For this reason, it is futile to set outcome goals. Rather, set process goals because you can control the steps you take. In case of the kung fu competition, I deliberately did not set the goal to win a gold medal because I cannot control the jury. Instead, I set the following goals:
Develop a warm-up routine that gets me in the right flow to execute the form;
Stick to my warm-up routine and do not get distracted by how other contenders warm up;
Perform exactly how I trained and do not mimic other styles or flashy tricks. I just want to show what I am capable of.
I also apply this strategy in my work as a consultant. Yes, I do have to make it explicit when I aim for a promotion but mentally the promotion is not my primary goal. The final call is not mine anyway and so I choose to focus on the process: the various ways I can demonstrate my capabilities. If at the end of the year I have followed the plan but don’t get the promotion, then at least I still achieved my goal. I’ll still be disappointed of course, don’t get me wrong, but it’s less the-end-of-the-world compared to when the promotion was the only thing that mattered.
Sometimes other people have a better view on your potential than you have. My kung fu coaches certainly do, and I have really had to learn to trust their judgment. I am not always allowed to pick the weight I want to work with, sometimes my coaches will prescribe a weight and when they do, it often is a weight that I’ve never worked with before. My first thought is always “Are you kidding, what makes you think that I can do this?” and yet every time I manage to complete the workout, which is a surprise to me but completely in line with their expectations. They know better than me what weights I am able to handle, and instead of being too afraid to try I just trust the process and their judgment and prove my own instincts wrong.
One day at work, a more senior colleague - and, coincidentally, also my career coach - asked me to co-facilitate a training that I had never seen before. I admit, it was a bit scary to say yes, but two thoughts helped me through the moments of doubt:
a) It’s okay if it doesn’t go perfectly the first time (recognize this from earlier in the article?);
b) My colleague wouldn’t ask me if he didn’t think I could do it.
Sometimes you don’t know you’re able to do something until you try it. When someone is in your corner and sees potential in you, trust their instinct.
These are the four major insights that I apply in both my athletic development as well as my corporate career. Experiencing first-hand that it’s possible to transfer lessons learned in one area to a whole different area - in this case knowledge work and fitness - strengthens my belief that the mind and body are tightly connected. I cultivated these insights over a span of several years, mostly learning the lessons with my body and recognizing the possibility of applying those lessons in my other career which mostly involves the mind. I am sure that there are more connections and I look forward to discovering them!