Discipline, technique, pressure and the many crossovers

I have been reflecting on fifty years in construction and well over fifty years as a fitness and racing junkie. My sport and work have been intricately woven together throughout.

Sport opened doors for me at work. It has helped me stay sane through demanding periods. Sometimes lessons landed years later, when I began to understand what a colleague had been trying to tell me.

I started in construction through sport. I was sixteen and playing golf with a bloke when he asked if I fancied being a trainee civil engineer. My second job, a year later, was similarly landed with a passing reference to my handicap. Golf again.

A few years into that job, I got an award for progress in my studies, presented by the MD. He asked how I got my black eye. I said boxing the night before. He happened to admire the art, and we talked boxing at length over lunch after the formalities. It seemed I was now on his radar.

Looking back, I wonder how young people get into construction now. Is it mainly university followed by pushing CVs out, hundreds at a time? Do informal routes still exist, where someone in a position of influence sees a glint of potential in a kid and grabs them before someone else does?

Could someone still get an apprenticeship, spend time on the tools, become a foreman, then a site agent, project manager and perhaps work all the way to the top through grit, determination and ‘people’ know-how? I don’t know. I hope so.

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Discipline restored

It has been a dangerous period.

In mid-June, I slightly injured my knee. Nothing anyone would notice, but enough to force me to drop the intensity on my bike and stop racing on my rowing erg. My numbers went down. Argh.

I do not get on my bike or rower because I enjoy it. It is what I do. Discipline gets me on the saddle; motivation kicks in later. For as long as I have been aware of it, and probably longer, discipline has been my coping strategy. Break it and I’m in trouble.

Racing on my erg is so flippin hard. During the enforced break, I doubted I would get back to it. I started wondering how I had ever managed those races in the first place. A seven-week gap in a discipline that helps hold me together brought anxiety with it.

Then, with a herculean mental effort, I raced again. I was much slower than my best, though pleased to be back at it: first in my age category, second in the younger one, 250 people all in. Happy with that. Next week would be harder.

Discipline is my coping strategy at work too. I do what I do and can be relied on to do it, come what may. While writing about this, I identified one aspect of it I need to get better at. I’m taking that to my coach.

The discipline of sport has always been woven into my work. It’s been part of how I’ve kept going.

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Work and play

I like Thursdays. It’s my rest day in my fitness regime. No training stress, just a longish walk at night.

I get to spend the day in my office at a slightly more considered pace, apart from an hour or so at midday when I go home for lunch and have a kip. I do businessy things like paying bills, which I like. I can go deeper on planning and preparation, thinking and writing. There’s no need to fret over the agony of an intervals session.

Thursday mornings, I’m usually knackered after the cumulative stress of the previous days’ training and racing. As the day goes on, I can feel myself recovering and rehydrating. It’s an amazing feeling, like I am coming alive again.

This takes me back to when I was a competitive triathlete, weaving two and sometimes three training sessions into my working day. I was a site manager then and an irritable one. Not good.

I used to look at the hours my peers worked and wonder whether my shorter working week was career limiting. I always persuaded myself that my work and ‘play’ made me more balanced.

Who knows?

Though I suspect, without the play, I would not be here now, still at it.

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Thrashing around

Last month I wrote about a fictitious Simon. He was overwhelmed by his work and home situation, thrashing around trying to do everything at once and drowning under the weight of it all. He is fictitious, though based on people I have worked with and indeed myself, many years ago when I was in the project hot seat.

Simon had not been prepared for much beyond the technical side. School was maths, English and science, then civil engineering at university. The training that followed was technical too. It was much the same for me at his stage.

His work has gone wrong, the client is twisting, his boss is on his case, an accident has happened on site, staff have resigned citing team friction, his dad is struggling, his child is in trouble at school, their relationship is strained and his deputy is nowhere to be seen. At 17:15, he catches himself asking, “Is this it?” and says “Come on” out loud.

That kind of thrashing around reminds me of my freestyle swimming for many years. I was self-taught. My approach was to swing my arms and kick my legs as hard as I could so I did not sink. There was huge turbulence. Forward motion was slow and exhausting.

When I was about forty-eight, I started to learn how to swim properly. Now I move through the water with hardly a ripple.

It is all technique.

‘Soft hands’ is one example. Tense hands send stiffness up the arms, into the shoulders and neck. Everything becomes jerky, with friction and turbulence.

On a bike, drop your shoulders. The same on a rowing machine. Keep your arms light and relaxed. Rowing is a pushing sport. On the bike and rower, feel through your big toes; that helps the knees track correctly and brings in the bigger muscles.

I sometimes wonder about technique at work. What helps someone under pressure move forward with less turbulence?

Count to ten when triggered. Appreciate your own progress every day. Check and adjust what you are delegating and how.

These are not grand answers. They are things to practise. They may help someone show up fine every day, from inside outward.

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Feeling the water

For years, while I was racing triathlons, the swimming coach would shout at me from the poolside: “DAVE, FEEL THE WATER!”

In my head, I would be screaming back: “F*** off, I’m dying here.”

I thrashed on regardless, none the wiser. Feel the water? What does that even mean?

Then, many years later, in masters swimming sessions, we did intervals: harder, harder, harder. Week after week after week. I was more skilled but still thrashing and kicking in these sessions – I was not getting better.

About two years ago, I checked out. I stopped going. Since then, I have slowed everything down and I am loving it. Forty years on, I can now feel the water. I catch a whole Swiss ball of it and lever over the top, smoothly propelling myself forward with every stroke.

Forty years on, I am a much better swimmer. Happier too, without someone shouting at me from the poolside.

There is something in that for work. The pressure, tick boxes, politics, bureaucracy and all the crap people have to put up with can be wearing. It takes its toll and diminishes us.

At times, I wonder what would happen if a person slowed things right down, got a feel for the work they were doing and took time to care for it properly. I suspect most people do care. The conditions often make it hard to remember that.

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Position matters

I’d already been cycling hard for over thirty years when I had my first bike fit. I’d reached the age where I was looking for every gain to get faster. Brute force seemed to have had its day.

Some basic research told me Retül 3D motion bike fit was the one for me. Three hours later, and many £pounds lighter, I was set up right. Set up so that brute force translated into forward motion rather than bending my body the wrong way.

It came with a new saddle; the previous one was all wrong for me. My new seated position was seven centimetres forward. I’d been much too far back for all those years. Woah. My poor back.

A few years later, my office setup got similar treatment. Michael White from Nurture Workspace by Posture Team put me right. I probably sit at my desk longer than I sit on my bike. The sit-stand desk and ergonomic chair put me in the right position for my creative days in the office. Within days, my back was feeling better. It’s better still some years later.

More recently, I’ve taken to hanging from my chin-up bar. That is amazing. My back is in the best shape ever.

Position matters. On the bike, at the desk, on the rower and in a leadership team.

Before a rowing stroke, you get into the catch position. Feet flat. Hinge forward. Shins vertical. Back long and straight. Shoulders down. Arms relaxed. Then you push.

In a leadership team, position is different but equally important. How clear are people on where they are going? And purpose? How well are they set up to work together? What has been left unresolved between them? What happens when pressure arrives?

Most people are trained in the technical side of their job. Far fewer learn the technique of working with other people, especially when they are under pressure.

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The inner game

I picked up a golf putter when I was eleven. I then spent a year whacking a golf ball with it on the school fields outside my house. By twelve, without tuition, I was quite accomplished. If I teed it up, I could hit the ball fairly straight, the length of two football pitches.

That year I managed to join a golf club. I was the last kid to get in without one of my parents needing to be a member, which neither were. I scrambled together a half set of clubs; some had hickory shafts. My first handicap was fifteen. My second was nine. I was still only thirteen.

I just did it.

A few years later, I was a Category 1 golfer. Then the rot set in. I started to think about it. There is a lot of time to think between golf shots.

Tim Gallwey, of The Inner Game books on tennis, golf and work, talks about Inner Self One and Inner Self Two: our natural self and our critical self. My critical self took control of my golf when I was about fifteen. The pressure got to me.

At seventeen, I was dropped in the deep end at work. I tried really hard, though my inner critic was rampant and has been since. I’ve developed amazing coping strategies, however, and here I am.

The inner critic exacts a heavy toll in the workplace. It can make people hesitate, question themselves, prevaricate, put things off entirely and play small. It slows work down and undermines trust, performance and productivity.

For some people, it produces the opposite response: they try even harder, to prove themselves to themselves and others. I’m one of them. Give me a job and I’ll never let you down. It’s personal. It’s identity.

In my mid-teens, I found boxing, then triathlons a decade later. Both were better suited to my mentality.

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Coaching: work and play

My first coach used to sigh, “Oh, you engineers.”

As I said, my first swimming coach shouted, “DAVE, FEEL THE WATER!”

I did not know what either was talking about. Now I do.

“Oh, you engineers” was about the primacy of logic, rationale, cause and effect. It has to be right, measurable, objective, tangible, proven scientifically, backed by evidence, testing and certified.

“Feel the water” is harder to explain, though I can feel it now.

Years later, my second swimming coach was a proper coach, similar to a professional coach in the work arena. He asked how I would like to start. I said, “Swim a few lengths and you share what you notice.”

Having watched, he asked, “Dave, where is your right hand entering the water?” I pointed. He said, “No, it’s wider, out to the right. What about your left hand?” I said, “Central, ahead.” He confirmed “yes”.

“What’s that doing for you?” he asked.

“Am I veering up and down the pool?”

“Yes.”

I could not see it. He could.

I said it was not very efficient, especially in open water, where there are no lane ropes or black lines to follow. He asked how I could check my efficiency. I offered number of strokes per length. He asked me to swim a few lengths and count. I did: thirty-one, thirty-two. Less than a metre per stroke.

“What do you think about that?” he asked.

“Not good.”

“Okay, what can you do about that?”

You get the hang of it. He was noticing, reflecting back and asking me. I was doing the work.

That is closely related to how I work as a leadership team coach. I create a safe environment, share what I notice, ask questions. I listen for what matters. I support and challenge the team into the conversations they need to have. I ask whether we are on track, even when the track shifts.

I do not shout, judge or dis.

The engineer in me back then liked logic, rationale, cause and effect. I wanted things to be measurable, tangible, proven scientifically and backed by evidence. That served me well back then. Though my perspective has broadened.

I now see people are more than logic. They have feelings, instincts, memories, fears, beliefs, values and all sorts going on beneath the surface. Much of it cannot be measured, though it still influences how they think, behave and work with each other.

Viewed from a more spiritual perspective, where ‘we surrender to the Universe and move forward aligned in love and positive light’, I can see where my first coach was coming from when ribbing us engineers back then.

Swimming has become my spiritual space, now that no one is shouting at me from the poolside.

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Cooperation and the difficult stuff

Earlier this month, I remembered hearing someone say, “Cooperation is more stressful than competition.” I was writing about the NEC requirement that parties ‘work in the spirit of mutual trust and cooperation’ and thought, woah, that is relevant. It may reinforce my argument.

But who said it? When? What was the context? What about evidence?

I remembered referring to it in a collaboration session I ran for the Association for Project Management in the North West before COVID. Then I remembered hearing it on the radio a few months before that. Where was I? Driving back on the A66 after an open-water swimming event, the Derwent Epic Swim, five kilometres, I think.

I looked in my diary and found the APM conference: 8 October 2019. I tracked back and found the swim: 7 July. I thought it would have been around 13:00 on Radio 4, as is my wont. I put all that into Perplexity AI and, bang, forty-five seconds later, I had it: the exact radio programme, segment, time, names of the people talking and BBC Sounds reference.

That is detective work. Sport had helped me locate the work memory.

It also brought me back to cooperation being more stressful than competition. Anyone who has ever worked in a project team will recognise that. Competition has clear rules and separate lanes. Cooperation asks people with different interests, pressures and identities to work together. It requires effort of a different kind.

The same applies when we talk about ‘difficult people’.

Going hard at it for well over fifty years, I’ve had plenty of sports injuries, mostly soft tissue: calf strain and the like. My physio loosens off the whole of me rather than going directly to the injured muscle. When everything else is in order, the injury usually sorts itself quickly enough, sometimes with ice. We catch it early, at the first signs of trouble, and it eases and heals.

That is a good example of what John Kay writes about in Obliquity: Why Our Goals Are Best Achieved Indirectly. I would add: the same can apply to problems and to so-called difficult people.

Occasionally, you have to be direct. I hit a sheep while bombing down a steep slope on my bike and broke my collarbone. No good loosening off my quads and hamstrings then. The surgeon had to go straight to it: two four-inch steel pins to keep things in place while it set and cured, anaesthetic and the whole works.

Sometimes you need direct intervention.

So, what has that got to do with tough conversations with difficult people?

Go figure.

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Work, play and what keeps us going

Across my sport and work, the same things show up: discipline, technique, position, recovery, coaching, care, pressure, inner criticism and the value of paying attention.

I’ve spent much of my life working hard, training hard and trying hard. Sometimes that has been useful. Sometimes I’ve been thrashing around, creating turbulence and wondering why I was exhausted.

Fifty years since leaving school, I’m still learning. I’m getting better at feeling the water, at recognising when brute force has had its day. I’m learning to look at position, technique and recovery. I’m benefitting from what someone else can see that I cannot.

Sport has enabled me to work. Work has given me a place to test much of what sport has taught me. I suspect the balance between the two has helped keep me here, now, still at it.

There are other threads running through those years that I am still thinking about. Confidence. Belonging. The habit of trying hard.

More on those, perhaps, another time.