Last night we had our final workshop for Adaptive Leadership – an insightful class that looked at mindfulness with the engage Professor Brett Heyward. In the workshop there were plenty of moments of suitable parallel between my own experience in competitive events and with the snippets that Brett shared from professional sports, coaching and high-performance environments.
As an example, anchoring and the negative impact that being aware you are behind a particular performance target vs the positive influence of believing you are ahead of target (the engaging story of the Australian speed skating team and their qualification for Olympic selection when coaches lied about their pace during events). I had seen similar performance barriers raised in amateur events with people claiming they were unable to run at a certain speed even though, unbeknownst to them, they had only recently achieved such feats.
However, the biggest lesson for me as an individual came during discussion around the Oxfam event and the interest from my class colleagues as I shared my personal insights into nutritional planning, mindfulness and physical preparations for the upcoming walk. Knowledge that I assumed was common to all, was clearly not. In turns out that others had not applied the same logical and structured approach to planning for the event that I had taken – an approach that included analysis of caloric burn, assessment of necessary calorie intake and analysis of the various nutritional options open to teams.
A professional parallel is that when I share knowledge in a healthcare setting I am surprised that my insights are not commonly known across the team. What I am slowly learning, is that being cognisant not to share simple lessons and things “people already know” is significantly hampering my ability to contribute as this knowledge would be very helpful if I had the self-belief and self-confidence to both occasionally be wrong, but more importantly accept occasional embarrassment if my personal insight did in fact end up being a plainly obvious insight (which it rarely is).
This is definitely an area I’d like to investigate and consider further.
These Suits Are Made for Walkin 
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