World Cup, Wimbledon and Technique Under Pressure

This is a fantastic time in the sporting year - World Cup, Wimbledon, US Open Golf, IAAF Athletics. Fantastic. It is also a lively time for me sport-wise as I try to balance running and tennis.

Saturday was interesting in that respect. I had a shoulder op in Jan and have been on a race to get back for this tennis season ever since. Things have been going well, although re-modelling my serve to help my shoulder has been tough - I have twenty years of ingrained technique to overcome, and serving is so fundamental even at my level. 

On Saturday I was playing for my club - Halton Village - against arch rivals Great Missenden. Halton is a fantastic club if you ever get the chance to visit - if Lane4 was a tennis club, it would look and feel much like Halton.

http://www.haltontennis.co.uk/

So - things were tight against our rivals, and my job in the doubles pair was to serve at 4-5. I was fairly confident having played reasonably well most of the day. I was 40-30 up....and it all went wrong. Out of nowhere 2 double faults. I didn't feel nervous or anxious, they just happened. Being frank about it, my new technique just folded under pressure. Something I had done hundreds of times before that day inexplicably went wrong when it really counted. It had to be the pressure...and yet I wasn't conscious of it. We lost the Game, and so the set.

The irony of this was not lost on me when 3 hours later I was watching England vs United States in the World Cup.  I guess I saw exactly the same thing happen to Robert Green on a far bigger stage.

It's not many people who can say this, but Robert Green is now my role model as I pick myself up and dust myself down. I thought his reaction both in the moment and in front of the media was absolutely world class. Effectively he said, ''it happens, I prepare for handling it, I learn from what happened and move on''.

Technique does break down - in particular when it is new. A new serve or a new strategy...it is all the same. It happens, we deal with it, we move on.

That Was the Year That Was - My Learnings from 2009....

It’s been some twelve months. Almost everyone I have talked to over the last two weeks or so has said something like, ‘this year of all years, I need a proper break’. I feel the same.

December 2009 certainly feels a very different place to be than December 2008. Twelve months ago we were in the eye of the storm. Northern Rock, Lehman Brothers and Bank of America were in the very recent past. There was a general view going into Christmas that there was worse to come – although no consensus about what that would actually look like for a business like ours.

Twelve months on, we have lived through a very challenging twelve months in business. This has also been the first recession in Lane4’s lifetime, and we leave 2009 a wiser business than we entered it. The uncertainty still exists of course (are we over the worst, or likely to see another dip?) however we have reasons to remain optimistic but not complacemtn. However, it doesn’t feel anything like as uncertain as this time last year. I was thinking when running this morning about what my top 3 lessons would be from this year. This would be:

• Leading a professional services firm in a bear market is very different to a growing one. Balancing optimism with realism is not always an easy thing to do, but over-playing either is very dangerous. As a running coach told me last week, ‘Your head needs to be far enough up that that your bodyweight is carrying you forward. However it can’t be held so high that you trip on something straight in front of you. Your chin needs to be up and your eyes fixed a few metres forward’. That feels spot on to me.
• I have also needed to challenge the way I manage. This has probably meant less breadth, more depth. I have tried to focus on the elements that we can control, and delivering against them. As Sir Keith Mills said at our conference, ‘’There are hundreds of dials in a cockpit, but you can fly a plan with just six if you know how’’. I’ve been lucky enough to borrow the brains of some fantastically insightful external to Lane4 who have helped me firstly confirm that I am using the right six instruments, and then interpret their readouts correctly.
• Finally – this year was proof that tougher times are an opportunity, not a threat. An opportunity for the talent in your business to stretch themselves quicker than they might otherwise do. An opportunity to gain advantage in a market which will be changing faster than before. An opportunity to catch the wave of the upturn. An opportunity to learn which of your own team will dig in and fight when the going gets tough. I never learnt a thing about the collective character of my football team when 3-0 up at home against the bottom of the league.

It’s always tiring learning a new skill – whether trying to learn to run with just a little bit of technique, flying a plane or leading and managing a business. No athlete trains without down-time to let the muscles recover, and a break is definitely a good thing.

It’s been the first three months of this blog. I hope you’ve occasionally found something interesting or thought provoking. I’d certainly welcome any feedback. Have a great Christmas and New Year.

Cheers

Matt