I played baseball as a peewee kid giving me my first exposure to team sports. In junior high I had further experiences and fell in love with just about any game I could play that involved participating with others toward an end goal. Junior high opened my possibilities to volleyball, basketball and baseball. I couldn’t wait to get to high school and play with the big kids. Especially football. We didn’t have football in junior high and it was my grand passion. I had hoped to play football in the fall, basketball in the winter and baseball in the spring.
Throughout the year I would shoot buckets, play catch with both footballs and baseballs and spend countless hours on my own in make shift fantasy games. My first year in high school went well and I fell in love with football and continued to play football throughout high school and into college. Basketball was another story. All my junior high basketball experience worked well as long as I could dribble the ball with my right hand, my dominant hand. In high school I didn’t make the grade because I could not dribble as well with my left as I could with my right. All my previous experience was acquired by staying in my comfort zone of my natural preferred right hand. I spent all my practice and game time playing with my natural skill. By high school I wasn’t good enough.
What might have been if I had spent many of those countless hours practicing with my less preferred left hand? Maybe basketball would have been my game instead of football. I also have more recent experience on the squash court. Now this is a game where you only need to use your dominant hand to swing away at the ball. When I would jump into the court with the pro he would pity my level of play and challenge me by playing with his left hand. I am sure he spent countless hours working on a full repertoire of skill development making him a more rounded squash player and eventually skilled enough to play at the world professional level.
As a final example, I coached my daughter in soccer over an 18-year period. Watching not only my daughter, but also many of her friends grow and develop as soccer players and human beings was as much a gift to me as was my gift of time I gave them. With the girls playing at a competitive level the coaches looked for strategies that would give us the edge against any of our opponents. As players grew and developed the really good ones were able to use both feet with equal skill. They were the ones that made defending them a real chore. The girls that were good and only with their dominant foot were easier to defend. These girls were never able to progress to the most competitive ranks of soccer.
As an executive coach with over 25 years of experience I realize I would not have made it to a level of the coaching elite without constantly working both my natural and my less preferred skill sets. As a natural introvert, I have made a great living working one on one with leaders and executives. And I would have been a strictly one-dimensional coach if I stayed only within my natural comfort zone. A stretch for me is working with teams, facilitating learning to groups in a classroom and most of all, speaking professionally to large groups. With ongoing work in all of these challenge areas I have not only grown as a coach, I continue to have abundant energy about this work that keeps me excited after 25 years in the profession. There are many days that I count myself lucky to just now be fully hitting my stride. I look forward to the second half of my career as an executive coach.
Some of the leadership gurus espouse the virtues of playing to our strengths. I agree in theory. Let us recognize and continue to develop our natural gifts. And give us the fortitude to discover the stretch zones and work at them so we can stand tall in the heat of battle when we need to dribble around that defender and it calls for us to use our less natural foot to execute with success. The old adage of what got you here won’t keep you here looms large for leaders and executives alike. Without finding a way to grow both your natural strengths and your less preferred skill sets, you will languish in the ranks of leadership mediocrity at a minimum. More likely, you will find yourself looking for a new job or career. Only the strong survive may need to be replaced with – the lifelong learner that constantly stretches themselves outside their comfort zones will excel. If leaving a legacy ever enters you minds eye, embrace stretching yourself and you have a greater chance of entering the ranks of the leaders others tell stories about when we ask them to tell stories about the leaders that had a significant impact on their lives. I aspire to be one of those some day!
