Tag Archives: motivation

Character development in sports

Continuing my series of musings about the nexus of sports and life. Something more important than winning in the sports arena is that your character is being built. How do you measure the extent of character development? What am I thinking about exactly? And why does it matter?

You can’t measure character. It doesn’t mean it is not important but you just cannot measure it. In the film Les Choristes, the Maths teacher, Mr Mattieu, formed a choir believing it would help reform the badly behaving boys. And it did! But how do you measure it? What changed? Maybe the school grades, maybe the noisyness of the classroom, perhaps even their sense of aspirations. In sports, the players’ performance can be seen in their behaviour on the pitch or courts, as well as their scores, but perhaps also in their lives, the way they treat the people around the sport, and so on. Even how they treat their competitors and how they talk about them. Max Maeder, the Singaporean kite-foiling Olympic medalist, impressed everyone by giving kudos to his competitors after finishing third in his final race when asked to comment on the race.

So that’s what I’m thinking about. There’s something unmeasurable that we can achieve in sports and sporting culture. Are we going to invest into that as a nation? Do we care enough about our people’s lives and their mental fortitude, resilience in face of struggles, competition, and need to perform? Those are precisely what sports offers us an opportunity to train and build up. And so investing in sports is not just about shiny stadiums, sport science degree programmes but also providing athletes with sport psychologists, equipping athletes with the science involved in training, practice, self-care and so on.

An excerpt from Roger Federer’s commencement speech for the graduating class of 2024 at Darthmouth this summer:

In tennis, perfection is impossible… In the 1,526 singles matches I played in my career, I won almost 80% of those matches… Now, I have a question for all of you… what percentage of the POINTS do you think I won in those matches?

Only 54%.

In other words, even top-ranked tennis players win barely more than half of the points they play.

When you lose every second point, on average, you learn not to dwell on every shot.

He could be considered perhaps the most long-running, persistently successful individual athlete of our times, and the lessons he can draw from his experience are timeless. If we could have more of such models and examples to train, motivate, and encourage our next generation of Singaporeans – for their lives not just in sports but other aspects, won’t it be great?

Judging yourself

For some reason, despite not being particularly sporty or athletic, I’ve had the benefit of knowing good athletes and learning a lot from them about psychology, personal development, and mindsets. While not being involved in the sporting scene, I’ve come to recognise the many ways our attitudes or behaviours during sports can mirror some other aspects of our lives.

One of them shared a really good practice introduced by her coach in Australia. After each training, he would get the athletes to go down the line to describe how they thought they performed for the training and why. And he’d listen to them, and then tell them whether they are judging themselves accurately regarding the performance and reasons provided. Often, people could judge their own performance correctly, but they come up with the wrong explanation, which means they are not going to correct it properly. And the coach would then offer his thoughts. Compared to Asian coaches who typically just drops his feedback directly, this Australian coach was challenging because he required his athletes to develop their judgment of themselves.

I thought this practice is great because over time, the athletes are building up a stronger ability to judge their own performance and pinpoint why. That creates a strong ability to coach oneself and also develop the right approach towards improvement. Many aspects of sports is about psychology and even getting oneself to put in the effort to practice can be something psychological. By coaching this way, athletes can come to see sports as more than just about performance but learning about oneself and one’s body even more intimately.

This is important. In Asian societies, especially with strong examination cultures, we never learn to judge or discern our own performance in things nor develop that independent sense about our abilities. This is a shame because once you’re at work, you will need to form judgment about the quality of your own work before you make submissions, you’ll have to determine if coworkers are doing what you need them to do, and of course, you’ll need to do so on many different dimensions including the social performance aspect of things. We strengthen our mental resilience and fortitude when we can judge ourselves more objectively.

Paying for outcomes

As a consultant, we sometimes encounter clients who only want to pay for the outcome but not the inputs or the efforts. It is probably true that a client takes on the cost of the work and all of the risks when they are just paying someone for the efforts, but they do also get most if not all of the upside pertaining from the subsequent business success. Of course, the consultants get a track record or credential but that’s probably a win-win situation, not something you’d expect the consultant to be paying the client for.

But paying for effort, monitoring it and managing the risk continuously can sometimes be the only way to achieve success, rather than striking an agreement with someone whom you would only pay for success. You see, outcomes are often not a function of incentives, they are a function of effort, timing, chance and many things outside the agent’s control. By paying for success, you might not even be optimising the effort for success.

And that brings me to the payouts for Olympic medalists. A gold medalist for Singapore gets a payout of a million SGD, whereas an Australian gets a payout of $20k AUD, which is about $17.5k SGD at current market exchange rates. The point isn’t about whether that is a lot or little; and in any case, the Singapore government might say there are so many Aussie gold medalists that it would not be worthwhile paying them too much. The point is that Australia probably already spend a lot more money upfront in terms of public infrastructure for sports, supporting local sport teams, supporting talented coaches, and promoting a culture of sportsmanship. The ‘outcome’ of Olympic success is already ‘bought’ when they make those investments.

On the contrary, Singapore still thinks that sporting excellence and investing in sports is out of a desire to win. I think that’s a shame, because there are so many other great outcomes that comes from a strong sports culture. And I think the many years of ‘investing’ into Olympics thus far had been out of that desire to ‘buy outcomes’, which is probably why we are offering such a big payouts to the Olympic medalists for Singapore. It allows us not to spend taxpayers money if we don’t get the medal – but at what costs to our sporting culture?

If we are prepared to secure a gold medal, why not take 90% of that million dollars and spend it on something like paying coaches better so they can focus on coaching a one or two teams rather than two handfuls? And why not alter the education system so that civic values are also taught through sporting interactions? There are so many possibilities only if we are willing to put our minds to it, and think about the effort we want to pay for, rather than trying to buy an outcome.

Temptation to be an expert

For most of my life, I had wanted to be an expert. I wanted to be looked up upon for specific knowledge or intelligence, or smarts in some area. There were of course, some areas I was more keen on than others. And as I read more, and gravitate towards specific topics, I wanted more and more to be known as an expert in those subject matters. The problem is that I was curious about many other things as well; in things I would not consider myself expert in (yet).

So then my knowledge starts to broaden, and I get to know a lot more about a variety of things. And I begin to see patterns across the domains. And I begin to think of expertise less like a deep hole, and more like a network of connections across disparate bits of knowledge that others might not recognise as fitting together but you, as the expert, can see it. Precisely because of the lots of learning you had to get there – not by hoarding knowledge but by eventually seeing patterns in the knowledge you acquire.

And then you begin to belittle dense knowledge in any single field or narrow buckets of knowledge that serve specific and narrow purposes. You no longer think that an expert is worth becoming; if you were an expert in just one or a few areas, you are losing out so much more of reality worth exploring. Maybe I just need to be reminded that I never was keen on being an expert, just pursuing wisdom more than mere knowledge. And wisdom is truly a more worthwhile pursuit.

Guidance & belief

A good coach puts some pressure on you to do better and demonstrates his belief that you can do better in you. But more than that, the coach makes sure that what is expected of you is clearly communicated so that you have a clear vision of yourself accomplishing it. The ‘video’ that can be played in your head is important. If the resolution of this video is poor, then it is harder for the coachee to perform. And putting pressure on the person by reminding him or her of the deadline or final prize is pointless.

A coach doesn’t review a race with the runner telling that him or her that at different point of the race, how far or near he/she is still from the finish line. He tells the runner about his or her gait to improve, the rhythm of breathes. The how is more important than the what; but the why even more so. The good coach then reminds the runner of why he or she is running.

It is not possible for managers to help a team thrive without these coaching capabilities. Most managers would just be churning output without developing the team or sustaining the right motivation for the team to go on. Often this could lead to burn-out and poor morale. This is where a strong individual contributor needs to learn new skills to move into manager position and not thinking that he or she can just keep doing what they are good at.

Tailpipe emissions

We moved to Sydney earlier this year and one of the main highways that the buses move on to get to our place in the suburbs is Parramatta Road. It was a highway leading into the western suburbs but now it is just a road – a relatively narrow one for the heavy traffic that goes through it.

I recall one morning when I walked along the road to get to the bus stop that gets me a bus to the city. There were heavy trucks going down the road, with large SUVs and smaller passenger vehicles as well. I didn’t recall tailpipe emissions bothering me that much back in Singapore – perhaps only the heat that the cars were emitting then. But I noticed how much the tailpipe emissions were stinking up the air even in Sydney where it was less humid than in Singapore and smells tend not to linger or stay strong in the air.

It did make me wonder what the roads would be like without those tailpipe emissions. And that’s probably the dream of those EV companies and the policymakers who are trying to push for more EVs on the roads. Singapore could have done that way earlier; given our ability to manage the vehicle population through COE. Moreover, Singapore already has one of the highest taxes on vehicles in the world. This means the population was ready to shell out the kind of money that an EV would cost.

It is a fine balance to strike given that there’s a lot more consideration around the readiness of our electricity network infrastructure to develop the charging capacities needed. There’s a lot of thinking around whether our vehicle refueling infrastructure is going to be disrupted – and how we can manage those disruptions. Sometimes we just want the transition to happen immediately and for all of us to gain access to the latest technology at reasonable costs. Singapore has done a good job juggling these difficulties and we can do more to explain the linkages between systems to allow us to pinpoint and put pressure on the bottlenecks.

Self-learning and ending industrial learning

There was an age when we needed mass education to get everyone up to speed on some basic things. Civics, some basic sense of rules, laws as well as literacy to be able to perform functions as a citizen, be it to serve in the community, read public notices or just the wisdom to spot a scam. Mass education helps when the parents at home don’t have that education background or ability to inculcate all that into their children. It enable very quick uplift of a generation of people. And of course, we designed credentials, qualifications and all that to go with the mass education to certify the skills and abilities, and to use educational qualities as a means to filter people.

More importantly, those were times when knowledge and information was scarce. And schools became essentially the distribution centers of such products. Teachers were facilitators of this transfer and distribution of both explicit knowledge as well as tacit knowledge about civic behaviour, values and character. This is why the problems and tests in exams are more about what and why; less about the how though there’s attempts at getting students to ‘solve problems’. But the application of knowledge was something taken to be done later in life through work and other contexts, not really at school – unless it is a vocational institute. In any case, most of the problems defined are pretty closed ended – with right answers or model answers.

Today, learning can be done through very different channels. Self-learning through the internet is pretty straight-forward. The core skills that is required in school becomes more about developing wisdom and discernment in the information received; the taxonomy around what constitutes more close-end problems vs open-ended problems where solutions can be more multi-faceted. And because this is the case, we need to reconsider how we value the old school certs and qualifications and find new ways to test and identify the talents in our midst, as well as the fit for various different work.

Gone are the days where we can easily get people to fit into the work and job roles designed within a company. We may have to start finding the right talents to deal with the crucial problems we want to solve and then leave the rest to be outsourced or dealt with by technology. At the same time, the ability to self-learn becomes so much more important. Not only should we start giving employees time to self-learn, we need to invest into structures, environment and coaching that enables that.

Good professional versus good employee

Sometimes I wonder if being a good professional can be different from being a good employee. After all, what is being a good employee when you’re over-delivering or serving your customers better than your employer expects? Is that “stealing” from your company? How about when you are over-worked by trying to be a good employee – does that set a bad example as a professional?

There seem to be some tension between doing good work and being a good employee. And it has to do perhaps with the actual business culture and character of the firm that you’re in. Or it comes through from the self-interested capitalist identity of what a firm stands for. It is strange though, that the firms that would persist tend to be the ones who have been able to uphold their values and commit to them.

So all the short run success factors and metrics turn out to be pretty poor indicator of long-run success. Yet people feel like they have no choice but to stick to these short term metrics because people can’t patiently wait for results or their fruits.

Specific thinking

I wrote about the holistic thinking that was characterised by western researchers of Asian’s approach towards persuasion as contextualised by Erin Meyer. I had the chance to reflect a bit more on specific thinking as I begin to observe it more and more at work in western workplaces and cultures. There are no right or wrong and the good and bads can only be appreciated from particular perspectives or lenses.

Specific thinking parcels out bits of work and various tasks, having more of a tendency to operate in silos even when coordination is excellent. This can make things difficult to change and also individuals becomes less sensitive to the overall workings of the system they are part of. It can be good in that it reduces the anxiety around being unable to bring about the intended collective outcome because one can just focus on delivering one’s part and leaving the rest to others. Being specific in thinking also encourages focus on the smaller specific outcome that is within one’s control.

However, specific thinking may mean that there’s less ability to navigate situations that are far more complex where clarity does not come instantly. For example, during a business development meeting, one may not yet figure out if there’s chance of collaborating or working with the prospect when we are still in discovery phase. Specific thinking can lead one to try and force a result and be counterproductive, or to give up too early.

Specific thinking may also render us unable to genuinely celebrate collective wins as one becomes overly focused on the parts they are ascribing to themselves to the extent they ignore other parts of the system they are part of.

Just some observations and muses on my part.

Expert vs advisors

I’ve been reading the ‘Strategy and the Fat Smoker’ by David Maister. I think very highly of David’s crisp thinking in the manner he approach strategy and the manner in which he cuts through issues and topics. He simplifies the concepts to the core of the subject matter without ignoring the human elements in them.

One of the interesting ideas he introduced is the idea of expert vs advisors when it comes to serving in professional services. A lot of consultants claim to desire to serve customers as advisors, as trusted partners but in reality they want to be treated as the expert, to have control and defend their expertise rather than to build strong trusting relationships with their clients.

In essence, from my perspective, the expert cares about the topic and the subject matter more than the client’s problem. And as a result, the client can benefit from the expertise but more as flat information or knowledge than actionable insights.

The advisor may not be the expert but he gains his authority to consult with the client through his deep understanding of the client’s problem. And that allows his synthesis of insights gathered from other parties, especially those who consider themselves experts.

A client can decide what he needs is an expert but he can never expect the bespoke synthesis to come from the expert. He or she will have to take responsibility for that.