Rod Davis
The long game
Pressure is not good for a top performance. In fact, the pressure of expectations, whether yours or someone else’s, degrades performance and severely restricts any chance of constant improvement. Bear with me for a moment: I have been having a ‘clean sheet’ think about how to get the best
out of my teams next season. How the team goes to the next level and dominates the competition. This can be applied to sports teams, even business teams, if they want to get better. Winter is the perfect time to step back and then get your ducks in a row for going to the ‘next level’. The good news is I’m pretty sure it’s right, as I have enacted this
concept in my own dinghy sailing during our worldwide Covid stand down time, and the results have been better. And the fun factor is way, way better! Basically, it’s very hard to make big improvements when you are
supposed to be performing. For sailors performing is racing. It’s as if learning and performance are on the opposite sides of a circle. You use your learnings to increase your performance. Your perfor- mance will show you where you need to learn. But you can’t be in both places at once. In an Olympic or America’s Cup programme you have time to
work on just learnings, ideas and techniques. Then you get to jump to performance or regattas. Effectively be on both sides of the circle but never at the same time. When the season starts in the RC44 and TP52 we are in a ‘point
and shoot’ race world, like most of us in racing our sailboats. We are on the performance side, racing 90 per cent of the time. Whereas an Olympic programme is racing (performing) 50 per cent of the time and 50 per cent development, and an America’s Cup is 90 per cent learning and 10 per cent racing (at most). If you try to race and learn at the same time your results will
suffer and learning will be slowed. Because learning is about trying new things and ideas you often get it wrong the first time. New ideas are rarely plug and play, they take time to develop. Most new
32 SEAHORSE
ideas are a step backwards before they become leaps forward. Most sailors also have limited time, so racing, and thus results,
is the focus. Always on the right-hand side of the circle, with no real plan of how to get better. Meanwhile, the left-hand side, the learning side, is not as exciting for most (except I love it) and it chews up the time. It’s like homework, or background research vs game time. They need to work together. There are four key parts to learning. And, look, they all apply to
a bowman, trimmer, owner driver, sales clerk or CEO. 1)Believe and understand we can improve and get to another level. 2) Want to improve (purpose). 3) Know where and how you are going to improve. 4) Lower the stakes by creating the situation or environment in which mistakes can be made without consequences (unlike racing).
Make that five key parts… 5) Make the time and plan to understand, educate and capture your learnings. Not every idea will work out, but knowing the ‘why’ it did, or didn’t,
will lead you to the lightbulb moment. Then you can go to the next step and eventually the next level. If you think about it as a school, daily classes are the learning
zone (or should be) and the exams are the performance zone. In the learning zone you ask questions, get answers wrong, try again and understand what went wrong the first time. Exam time is all about right answers and only right answers. In our sailing we spend almost all our time in the performance zone, exam time… not a great environment for improving or stepping up a level. I would like to think we could all spend less time in the must-
have performance zone, and more time explaining, asking, listening, experimenting and sharing ideas. I am a big believer that within every team most of the answers are probably there, within the indi- viduals. Part of the job as a coach or a team leader is to get the collective knowledge out onto the table. To open the filing cabinets! The more you know, the more you see. So the quicker you learn. We might never get to an Olympic balance of 50/50, but we could
MAX RANCHI
COLORSPORT/SHUTTERSTOCK 1972
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