Book Commentary: The Right Call by Sally Jenkins
I’ve thought of writing a book: Everything I know about Coaching, I learned on the Peloton.
Of course, this isn’t true! I credit the Hudson Institute, mentor coaches, and my clients for helping me learn and grow as a coach.
Yet there’s a lot to be said for the applicability of lessons learned on the playing field or on the bike to how we set and achieve developmental goals in the rest of our lives.
When I hear my favorite Peloton instructor admonish us to set process goals so that the outcomes will follow, or when he reminds me that we can expect performance to have peaks and valleys, I wonder why should there be any difference between development at work and on the bike?
With this curiosity in mind, I recently picked up Sally Jenkins book The Right Call: What Sports Teach us about Work and Life. Ms. Jenkins brings together stories of athletes and coaches to illustrate their keys to success and inspire everyone to find applicability to their own lives.
One theme throughout the book is: excellence doesn’t just happen. Great teams do not just “come together,” and Olympic winners are not on the podium because they were “born that way.” The differences that matter come down to intentional, consistent and rigorous work. Ms. Jenkins quotes the surfer Laird Hamilton who says “We love to disguise imperfection with complication. There is a formulaic process that is very simple, and how you do the little things is how you do the big ones.”
Here are the elements to this simple, formulaic process:
✅ Conditioning: Be able to perform well even when you are tried or under stress.
✅ Practice: Rehearsal leads to confidence in the result when under pressure.
✅ Discipline: “The elites establish what constitutes good form in any action and work at maintaining it.”
✅ Candor: How do you find your blind spots and areas for improvement without candid input from others?
✅ Culture: No one succeeds alone but instead is supported by a winning culture which must be grown and maintained.
✅ Failure: “Only through their failures – if they assess them candidly – do they acquire the self-understanding and intentionality that leads to eventual victories and, more importantly, the acceptance of those outcomes they can’t control.”
✅ Intention: “When you know your why, it dramatically affects the definition of success, and your tolerance for setback.”
Each of these items gets its own chapter in the book, with plenty of explanation and anecdotes that kept even this sports-agnostic reader interested and following along.
When you think about your development goals you set for yourself and your team at work, can you see how each of these components of successful athletic achievement apply to you? If you find one or two that your approach is missing, consider how to incorporate and test for effectiveness.
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