What learning to snowboard and drive stick really taught me
There are two things I launched myself into learning as an adult that most people would recommend avoiding: driving stick and snowboarding. These are things I didn’t HAVE to learn. After all I can drive automatic and ski quite well, so what’s the point?
Well, the point came to me this week at a talk by Jeanne Liedtka (http://tinyurl.com/cxebnd) at the Rotman School of Management in Toronto. She spoke excellently on the importance of managers having a broad repretoire of skills and knowledge (among other things) to become “extraordinary growth leaders” so that they can “draw on this collection as they confront every new situation…” Check out her book, The Catalyst, http://tinyurl.com/c3x8rn.
My insight occured when I recognized that it’s the extra-curricular skills I learned as an adult that have helped me to succeed in addition to job-related skills.
Driving stick and snowboarding share a common pattern of learning: abandoning yourself to a child-like state of being. To acheive this state, you must free your mind by unlearning what has been drilled into your head over time and allow yourself to fail often and learn quickly. You actually have to do the opposite of what most leaders do and abandon past experience, forgetting what you know (and what your body knows), to learn this new thing. Driving stick and snowboarding are easier for young people to learn because they have less past experiences to get in the way.
A willingness to enter this state of being teaches you to be comfortable with uncertainty, which is another trait Liedtka explains as essential for successful leaders. I believe that launching yourself into experiences like this exercises your brain for success.
Leaders with a broad repretoire are valuable because they draw on past experiences and knowledge. Leaders who can, when appropriate, abandon all that experience and knowledge, free their minds to take new directions and approaches that may find them soaring down a mountain or getting into 6th gear.
