Leading Athletes in uncertainty - The Apex Provider

Light up Nowhere

Light up Now here

A little space can change everything.

In my previous article I spoke about the foundation of successful management and leadership as a team ventures onward welcoming uncertainty. Uncertainty is the only certainty in life. Death is yet to be confirmed by the dead and taxes are evaded. Let’s face it if you knew how everything was going to play out from the shallows how long would it be before a hankering for surprise took over, an urge for a twist in the plot. The world would be a dull and stagnant place without uncertainties namesake, change. Be that exponential or gradual it is an unstoppable force. The options remain futile resistance on the road to nowhere or a wide open mind on the road back to ‘now here’, where exponential change is inevitable from an immovable foundation. 

Sat in my car about to go for an evening run in the overcast hills of the Ribble Valley. I ask myself some big questions akin to the questions Aldershot manager Mark Molesly asked in that now infamous pre-game interview. With a glint in his eye he shed a bit of fun on the monotonous routine and crystal ball questioning that circulates the professional sports industry. Will you win was replaced by does a penguin get cold, will you get the sack switched for which way does the water go down the plug hole. Instead of the standard who will play, what happened last time, will the world end if you get relegated, will the world rejoice if you win the title, will the next generation attempt to replicate your every move if you are successful repeatedly, there was a bit of fun had. A subtle reminder this is football…..this is life. One you might miss if you spend the day speculating. What it shared beautifully is the proportion of words that are meaningless when the sentiment behind is free flowing. The sentiment an uncertain athlete smells when you walk in the room. 

 In the overtly serious world of professional sport where the frenzy of attention has been whipped to atmospheric levels the most under-utilised element is not specialist knowledge, tactical complexity or capacity to regurgitate more information cloned from Pep and Jurgen or further a field to Da’mato, Toto, Harmon, Jobs or Gates. It is the opportunity to operate as a boundless unit. To share fascination, zest, fear, fire. To pass on a love for the game and life itself. This can be sought artificially, by sacking managers, squinting for hours a day at targets or denouncing the opposing outcome as a possibility. An increasingly fashionable strategy in the psychological thesis of today on which the qualifications and resulting practices are built upon. An idea of artificial, forced rehearsals for life which leverage positive change. Yet, deep down every professional, every square hatted psychologist knows this isn’t quite the answer, it lacks life, genuine wonder, intrigue, it lacks freedom. It speaks of gutting a shark to figure it out instead of marvelling at its design, it talks of cultivation processes proposed by city slickers that have neither seen or tasted the glory of a successful harvest. Who wants to spend their life thinking mechanically about success when you can live it now here. As we sit with the book the compass always pulls away from the words on the page, the tactics on the board and the seasonal target, a little closer to home. After all how sustainable is it to bury your head like an ostrich in the sand of your own fantasy, to blinker yourself, while the game goes on unrelenting. Life remains an ever changing participation sport where awareness trumps assumption. Trial and error from your position, a humility to learn, an accountability, disrupting industry leaders mixed with an authentic commitment to ride on raw instinct above all else.

In the motor and aeronautic industry designers regularly replicate aspects of predators to break barriers. The jet shaped like a diving peregrine falcon here, the counter balance of a cheetahs tail there, an observation and adaptation of what already works but just like any project the goalposts can move or even disappear all together from a narrow perspective. The bigger picture doesn’t wait for you to step away from the telescope it continually changes at a rapid pace.

If you take a modern muscular, genetically modified race horse you can see microscopic focus without a wider awareness. You get to see in real time a stable securing market domination without real success for all involved. The pedigree can be near faultless yet the interest in racing out of sync, a thorough bred race horse in name but a disinterest in racing in reality, he doesn’t revel in the chase for the prize, maybe too aware he’ll be executed on the spot if he falls at the next hurdle while the world looks away. So rather than digress and see the human design error doesn’t compliment the horse we resort to getting out the blinkers to convince punters and the horse. Containment, concealing the outside world, the horse isn’t congruent to being flogged so instead of pastures anew we attempt to create a system of conformity, a tent to cover up. Why not understand the objectives differ, the horse proceeded horse racing, understand the horse, his fear, the objections to comply to his trainers wishes. Nope, instead we decide to coerce him by pretending what he fears is not there, we train. we manage, we lead but fail to provide a universal win. From our position his freedom seems to sit in our possession, appears to be altered for betterment through our actions, our words of comfort or woe betide our best selling horse whisperer book. Yet all is built on crude knowledge of what leadership is, what success is. 

This is an example of solace, rather than a shortcut to the source, they hover around alleviating, suppressing, denouncing fear. Why? Because they know no better alternative. The shoddy ground they are stood upon is an oversight or worse still ignored. They see only the microscopic target. The FOMO appears to stem from the target, professional failure, personal mediocrity looking up as the high fliers jet off into a blinding sunset. The list continues until you dig a bit deeper toward the catalyst. Without that recognition you don’t even see you are in fear of fear. A simple introspection reveals the layered construction of deception within a mind. First fear then the assumption it requires management, that management is the market leader. That the student is in need of expert advice.

In mental training you cover over the actuality you desire with an impersonation of that outcome. You look at life through a theoretical target not realising it’s too narrow to offer sustainable success on its own. You strive with symbolic intrigue, acting, pretence to forcibly filter any experience (feeling and thoughts in motion) which appears to stem the uncertain tide. If I ask you to forcibly fear someone, a profession, a place you cannot do it, the energy isn't genuine in it's role, it's limited, luke warm. If I ask you to forcibly do it you can easily deduce it’s a family member with a sheet on their head, it isn’t existential and remains somewhat unconvincingly aspirational. Your heart is not in it. Simple.

The only way out is realising you are sat in confusion, so unclear that you have been ordering coals to Newcastle. You were taught success emanates from targets. Disney marriages, high society schools, Bluechip jobs, common applause, bloated pensions and holiday castles yet you got all or some and still that consumption doesn’t halt the hunger for more. So you drink, take drugs, let off a little steam however you like, you unwind, forget the target and finally raise a laugh, an embrace and dance like it’s 1999 again. 

Imagine I know what the majority don’t, I can make an entire industry, under the radar, based upon this premise but I would be late to the political party. A feeling and thought altering industry, I would call this in basic words the fish lost at sea. It is the husband to the wife of there is something wrong with this position, this moment, this person, this team, this organisation. I then inflate that platform through constant streams of that narrative, even when you achieve all of the goals you sit and wonder what it was all for, was that what I broke my back for all these years, maybe the platform just need to be higher. Finally when that bubble bursts you realise acquisition wasn’t it. Flowing out of you like a river was everything you ever aspired to be. You could forego everything but it would remain unrelenting. No longer a replica in the pursuit for success you are success personified. This energy is uncapped, timeless, tireless, yet so often unknowingly tapped. In fact fear could be described as a siren of a tapping taking place. 

In one of my favourite films ‘along came Polly’ Reuben the doting husband runs across a Caribbean beach to surprise his newlywed wife with champagne after her private diving lesson. He hears the rhythmic tapping of metal as he pops his head above the galley of the boat to find his cheating wife enjoying her honeymoon, legs akimbo, flippers rapping the metal pole beside the bed, in the clutches of the diving instructor Claude. The ripped, long haired diving instructor caught red handed later stands powerfully in his speedos on the tropical beach explaining his actions by telling Reuben ‘she makes like ze fire in my trouser’ before sharing the story of ze Hippo (he is french). Ze hippo paints stripes to be like the zebra but he fooled no one, ze hippo paints spots to be like a leopard but he still fooled no one. Finally he accepted he is a hippo. Finally he is happy…happy as a hippo. Reuben loses it at this point and attempts to exert revenge before being tied up easily by Claude. What’s his next step, (other than to crash his car and be forced to get a backy on Claude’s moped to St Bart’s airport). Is Ruben to make his life’s work to mould his wife into a doting spouse and beat Claude into a man who respects a legal document over his raging libido or does he let them do their thing and reconsider what marriage is, where it started and If it is of any importance to him. 

In here sits the deception of a entire species. A core weakness but a very human one at this position in evolution. A disinterest in looking at the ground society is built on, often unseen, accepted assumptions, each complying to a framework which funnels energy productively in the eyes of the designers, someone has to put it all together right. Be that through the construction of the political, educational, legal, aspirational entertainment industry, they are all put in place for a purpose to serve their designers but not always in the best interest of the participants. It’s not a problem to solve but definitely a domain to explore, an adventure you can’t help but set out on when you get a taste for it. Since day one the horse just like the hippo ran wild in ze pack or whatever we call a group of them, free to express without the systematic rule book stifling the exponential playbook. Both fascination with life and an innate quality of life. The wild horse has no need for blinkers when it isn’t sat within the confines of someone else’s experiment, as humans we often live imprisoned by someone else’s outdated ideas which we never stop to question. The next generation are more than ever calling out the stagnant. It seems the next generation can be seen as age related or perspective related.

As you sit as a investor, manager, coach, parent do you see your team through your leadership lense of podiums, hierarchy, comparison, control, ceremonial pomp or clear on the need to show you are an apex provider, you want to know how they operate, how they fit best into a role what makes them tick but most of all you welcome change, you welcome the next generation of ideas aware that what you once knew is gone and the new idea is part of evolution. Is it possible in this period of change that fear remains widely misunderstood, that fear is the blinker, love in disguise inviting you to retreat from the targeted mirage be that in the rear view or forward facing. If fear was an invitation to explore rather than something to bolt from would the conversation be different. 

Would you and your industry evolve exponentially to the next level integrating with the next generation or stagnate, quietly clinging to the perceived safety net of outdated consistency.

Embrace the apex provider let go of the fat controller, it is the least risky strategy on earth.