Successful athletes in many sports follow a process of overload and recovery.  Training produces microscopic tears to muscles, this is the overload part.  Recovery time allows those microscopic tears to heal. Muscles heal a little stronger and that’s when the increase in performance happens.  Training causes fatigue and stresses the system whereas recovery allows an athlete to improve and benefit from the investment in training.

What lesson can the rest of us learn from athletes?  Sprinting to be brilliant at work, racing to be a hero at home and pushing to be great at the times in between are as stressful as any training session.  Most of us recognize the physical and emotional fatigue that accompany a typical day.

However, we may be missing the overall cumulative effect of our day to day activities. A flogging for 11 months straight with a few weeks off at the end would not be anyone’s recipe for success in sport.  There is value in thinking about recovery on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.  This approach leads to sustained performance.

Athletes take the recovery process seriously.  They appreciate that improvement only comes from an opportunity to rest.  So much so that many athletes schedule the rest part of their training program before they plan the work.

Athlete or not, the key to high performance is in recovery not overload.  Success does not come from skipped meals, 80 hour work weeks and little sleep.

SDG

Today I have received advice on how to manage my inbox, the best ways to run effective meetings, who to hire and who to fire, what to eat and how to compress a workout into three minutes.  You may receive some of the same advice from your networks.

A few months ago I received some advice from a colleague that has made a profound difference in how I structure my days.  The short story, according to Andrew, is that we can manage our days in two distinct ways, marathons and sprints.  In the marathon approach we are efficient and regulated in what we do – economy of effort. Conversely, the sprint is much more deliberate.  Just as purposeful as the marathon, but with a heightened sense of urgency.

With nothing to lose I tried each approach for a few weeks.  The marathon style of managing my energy and efforts worked really well and seemed a natural fit with how I had always done things.  The sprint method was not so successful.  It seems my buddy left out some details about recovery time between the sprints.  Yes, in hindsight it seems pretty obvious.

It took a week to get the hang of the sprinter style.  The discipline required to operate at pace took a little getting used to, but I found my creativity spiked and more importantly, my ability to identify opportunities.  The thing that pushed me into adopting the sprinter style is the speed to action. Where paralysis by analysis might have been an inhibitor in the past, the sprinter approach is about action.

I am a month into my “long term test” and no real fall out.  Final results of my experiment to follow…

SDG

After reading a few hundred tweets, blogs, text messages and emails about 2012 and how I should embrace the coming year, I thought I might as well throw my ramblings into the mix.  I am somewhat against the idea of waiting until late December to think about making changes.  Maybe I just realize that I have so much to work on that it really needs to be an ongoing process.

I regret to inform you that I don’t have any magical advice that will help you connect with your kids, start your own business, find that special someone or look great in a bikini. Based on that reading I mentioned earlier, I must be the only person that does not have the key to the wisdom of the ages. Perhaps I didnt buy the correct iThing or Android widget to understand all this stuff. That is okay. Someone (I guess that’s me) has to keep the bar low so everyone else can make it over without resorting to the Fosbury flop. We have had plenty of flops lately and can live without another (denial).

As New Years Eve loomed large on the horizon I thought about the things I would do differently in 2012. The initial list was pretty long and it got me down. So much to work on and so little time. For sure my 2011 featured some clangers, but so had the years before. Surely things would be different as 2012 would bring new opportunities to follow the yellow brick road. Surely.

A friend of mine often tells me that life is predetermined and that we cant do a lot to change how things are meant to be.  Individual philosophies aside, I dont know that it really makes much of a difference because its the trying that matters.  Chasing those resolutions we set in December is the fun part.  If we accept the premise that what will be will be, would we still try so hard to make positive changes?

I like the curage factor required in all this resolution business.  Medicated or not, standing up in front of friends, family and random strangers to proclaim a commitment to pursue a career as a circus performer takes some bravado.  People remember and will certainly inquire as to the status of the lion taming act.  Having done this many times (ridiculously lofty resolutions, not lion taming) I still have not learned to temper my resolutions.

Surrounded by new friends, old friends and family on New Years Eve, we laughed about past resolutions and held one another accountable for the marathons we did not run, the businesses we did not launch and the physical prowess that we did not achieve (the list was much longer).  We talked a lot about what went wrong for the world in 2011 (this was a long list too).

When we finally made the move to disclose our resolutions for 2012 the usuals topped the list.  We have all been down the utopian road of getting fit, becoming wealthy and finding true happiness a few times.  At the very least we have done so vicariously.

The preverbal talking stick was making its way in my direction and I had nothing.  As I did a mental sprint to grasp something that would allow me to escape scorn, I recognized that the answer was in how not what.  I distilled my resolution down to one word.  I chose “purpose” as my 2012 rally cry.  In my case, purpose is the application of effort to the things that matter most.  Purpose in how  I spend time with my family and friends and purpose in how I pursue adventure with these same people.  Purpose in how I grow my business and purpose in making the most of opportunities.

A day and a bit have gone by since my resolution and I still feel like I made the right call.  My next purposeful adventure is building lunch for a group of friends coming by in an hour.  I can only hope they have a collective resolution of extreme tardiness…

A few days ago a friend called to talk about an exercise she read about that was being used to teach children about the effects of bullying.  I found the concept to be refreshingly simple, yet very profound in outcome.  I am going to test a modified version of this to help demonstrate the customer experience.

The activity is described below.  This is what innovation is about.  It doesn’t always need to be driven by technology, but it does need to be driven by creativity.  Regretfully the original source is unknow.

“A teacher in New York was teaching her class about bullying and gave them the following exercise to perform. She had the children take a piece of paper and told them to crumple it up, stamp on it and really mess it up but do not rip it. Then she had them unfold the paper, smooth it out and look at how scarred and dirty is was. She then told them to tell it they’re sorry. Now even though they said they were sorry and tried to fix the paper, she pointed out all the scars they left behind. And that those scars will never go away no matter how hard they tried to fix it. That is what happens when a child bully’s another child, they may say they’re sorry but the scars are there forever. The looks on the faces of the children in the classroom told her the message hit home. Pass it on or better yet, if you’re a parent or a teacher, do it with your child/children.”

The more I think about this exercise, the more applications I can imagine.  No doubt you will have your own ideas…

SDG