What Can We Learn From Sport?
Here’s a sad truth about sport. Most athletes who enter a sporting pathway don’t make it all the way to the top. Even those who make it to the top don’t necessarily achieve the outcomes they were chasing. Those top end performers - the household names you all know and love - are actually astonishingly rare.
Let’s look at some numbers. At time or writing, in the history of the modern Olympics - which dates back over a hundred years - just 6,165* people have ever represented Great Britain at 52 Summer and Winter Olympic Games, returning 883 medals. For a little perspective, current UK population is nearly 68 million. It’s nearly impossible to know how many of this 68 million are taking part in grassroots sport, but you get my point. Even if you assume that a huge proportion of those participating have no desire in achieving sporting success, the percentages of those who ‘make it’ are tiny.
But does that mean that their time in sport has not enriched their lives? There are the obvious, and well-documented, physical and psycho-social benefits but an often under-reported area - and one that has changed my life - is that of skills learned from sport transferring into other environments.
I must confess I’m a little biased - given that my current employment relies almost entirely on knowledge and skills gained through sport - but I do think it’s a hugely powerful message that performance sport should be making more of. Because my time in sport made me better, and none of it had anything to do with succeeding.
I’ll give some examples.
I’ve been pretty open about my introversion in the past but to be clear, I find social situations exhausting. I manage okay in small groups, with people I know well (though I often feel drained later) but strangers and larger crowds make me deeply uncomfortable. The thought of having to make small talk with people I don’t know makes me sick to my stomach and the word ‘networking’ literally brings me out in a cold sweat. But good people skills are important for me to be effective in my workplace.
Fortunately, I’m able to draw on athletic experiences in order to manage that discomfort. Ironically, it’s not the media exposure or the public speaking training that I find most useful - though I am hugely privileged to have experience of both, and rely on them frequently - but communication skills developed working with my wider support team. Sometimes in sport, particularly in performance sport, you need to have some fairly uncomfortable conversations. Neither growth nor progress happen when we stay in our comfort zone, so as an athlete I became accustomed to communicating while I was uncomfortable. Now I’m uncomfortable for different reasons, but the need for clear and honest communication remains the same. Plus, having been on the receiving end of such conversations makes me better able to conduct them with the empathy and compassion that is sometimes lacking in the performance environment.
Here’s another one. Receptivity to feedback - or constructive criticism, if you prefer (which I don’t). This one has been exceptionally useful as I work to remove the aspiring from aspiring author, but it’s helped me across all walks of life. Like most people, I don’t enjoy being told when I’m doing something wrong and I really don’t like it when people try to correct me. I remember one particularly traumatic encounter with my high school art teacher where she felt that one of my paintings lacked a certain… je ne sais quoi… so she took her paintbrush to it and ‘fixed’ it herself. It still makes my blood boil just thinking about it. I can see where she was coming from, even if I didn’t agree at the time, but maybe let me fix my own damn mistakes? I digress…
The point is that I’m proud, I’m stubborn and I’m painfully insecure. Not a good mix for receiving criticism, constructive or otherwise. Anyone who worked with me between the ages of 12 and 21 (probably even later to be fair) can attest that getting me to stop, listen and change was an exercise it futility. The slightest hint of criticism had me immediately on the defensive, either clamming up or lashing out and if it hadn’t been for my sporting career, I don’t think I would have ever got over it. It was through sport that I came to understand the concept of learning from mistakes. Because if we don’t understand where we’re going wrong, how can we expect to get better? Sure, it’s not always enjoyable to hear and good delivery goes a long way to making feedback more palatable, but Einstein’s definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result. Change is a vital part of progress, and learning from our failures is one of the fastest ways to improve. The ability to view everything I do through that lens has been an invaluable skill throughout this transition from sport into working life.
And transference goes both ways. Lessons learned outside of the sporting environment can be just as useful within it as the examples above. My sister credits her experience playing the drums in the school pipe band with where she first learned performance under pressure. I was already competing by the time I started studying drama at school, but the experience of performing on stage to a crowd (especially factoring the aforementioned introversion) was still beneficial to my competitive career. Even just understanding the concept of transferring skill-sets from one environment to another is a valuable skill to have and it’s something I’d like to see sports put more emphasis on.
Because thousands, if not millions, of people come through sporting pathways and only a tiny fraction will achieve the outcomes for which the governing bodies are funded. But they could still be providing the opportunity for every single one of them to develop key life skills. If you look big picture, there’s even a wider benefit to the economy - good people skills, time management and strong work ethic (all things that can be learned in the sporting environment) make for a more productive workforce. UK Sport are starting to promote this concept of ‘medals and more’ and, personally, I think this is an area with a lot of mileage. It feeds into that athlete welfare piece too, ensuring that athletes are leaving sport with the skills they need to thrive in the real world!
What are some important skills you’ve learned that you’ve been able to transfer from one environment to another? Let me know in the comments below!
*Number calculated from athletes listed on Team GB website, available here.