From the Dojo to the day job
How our hobbies help us be more skilful in our professional lives.
I have been kickboxing for 3 years. On my way home from a particularly challenging session, I was thinking about the skills I have learnt from my sport that support me in my day job. Like any sport, there is more to kickboxing than just executing a good roundhouse kick or avoiding an opponent’s punch. Technical excellence is clearly important but even more critical is mindset. These are the 3 mindsets I have trained to adopt in my dojo that have been enormously helpful in my day job:
1. Resilience
In kickboxing, we need resilience to keep going when there’s a new technique that’s providing hard to master, or when a sparring session doesn’t go our way. According to Dr. Leann Lapp and Laura Davidson resilience helps us navigate setbacks and enhances motivation and determination. It is the ability to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and come back to the mat to try again that determines how sustainable and successful our kickboxing will be.
Similarly, our day jobs require resilience. We regularly face challenges such as building stakeholder relationships, self-motivation, taking on feedback, and adapting our work style to meet the needs of a client or manager. Setbacks are a natural part of trying to overcome these challenges. Developing resilience is key to overcoming setbacks and thriving both in sport and at work.
2. Adaptability
I chose to join a friendly Dojo, with a strong team spirit, where we try to leave our egos at the door. No one is trying to destroy each when we spar. However, this also means we are rarely separated by weight, gender, or experience. As a result, you may only have a 15 second break between sparring someone your own size with half your experience and sparring someone with 6 inches, 40+kgs, and 10 years’ experience on you. Learning to adapt is essential.
According to EY, “there is one skill that we all need in a world where we don’t know the challenges of tomorrow: adaptability.” Just as a particular fighting style does not work against every opponent, one way of working will not land with every stakeholder. We need to adapt to external cues to thrive.
3. Patience
Who doesn’t want to be an overnight success? For me this would be being awarded my blackbelt after my first training session, and suddenly having a diary packed with exciting and engaging work. That doesn’t just happen, it takes planning and patience. A study by Sarah A Schnitker and Robert Emmons highlights that, as well as leading to greater chances of achieving our goals, patience had the added benefit of increasing our ability to cope in stressful situations.
In kickboxing there are certain techniques one must master to progress through the belts. Without the patience to learn these properly, I don’t have a hope of being able to conquer the more challenging techniques of senior belts such as, jumping, spinning, and even combining both! Similarly, there are steps we all must take at work to be successful. Each of us needs the patience to define and cultivate the ways in which we bring value, and then gain relevant experience to achieve expertise.
Next time you are engaging in your favourite hobby, be that football, knitting, or cooking, stop to think about the skills that you’re learning. Pick one, and spend time thinking how best to apply it to your work.
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