As marketing director of Attensi, Anthony Wong helps people learn faster and better by making learning more fun and fruitful.
Any tennis fans will have been avidly watching the 2022 season get under way. From Nadal winning his 14th French Open title to all the drama and celebrations of the All England Lawn Tennis Club and the Wimbledon championships, there’s been plenty for us to get our teeth into.
Watching the Nadals and the Świąteks of the world can get you wondering: Where do they get the mental fortitude to win so many titles? Can you learn how to be a champion?
While mental preparation might not have you up there beating Novak Djokovic, maybe these sports people are onto something. As the marketing director of a company that offers gamified simulation training solutions, here’s what I think we in business could take away from the great sports champions of the world.
We all know how long it takes for the body to reach its physical peak. But what about mental toughness?
Mental resilience under enormous pressure can make or break an elite athlete. Any athlete who wants to conquer their competition has to make sure they spend the hours developing the discipline that will keep them laser-focused when it comes to crunch time.
What mental tips and tricks from the great athletes could we be applying to business?
You’ll have heard of SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound) objectives. Even if you’ve heard of them, how often do you actually use them?
Athletes are no different than businesspeople in this way. They can use a series of long- and short-term goals in order to monitor their performance over time.
They can then use these goals to inform their next steps in training and, importantly, identify any skill or knowledge gaps along the way. John Isner likely had to get a lot of first serves wrong before his now infamous 156-mile-per-hour serve started threatening his competition on the tennis court.
It’s one thing to set goals. It’s another thing to make a commitment to those goals. That’s how having a mixture of short- and long-term plans can help you to stay accountable. It’s a lot easier to keep putting the work in when you’re seeing results in bite-sized chunks.
If your teams are only ever slogging away toward that big, long-term goal, they may start to become disheartened when they don’t feel like they’re making progress.
When they win a competition, you’ve probably heard many elite athletes talking about how they’d “already pictured themselves winning” or how “they’ve already played this match ‘x’ times in their head.”
Simply put, they’ve rehearsed the scene in their head weeks or maybe even months ahead of time. By the time they step out onto the court (to keep with the tennis theme), they can already anticipate at least some of what’s to come.
While they can’t predict exactly what their opponent is going to do, the visualization or rehearsal process can be a useful tool for keeping adrenaline and heightened emotions in check.
How can we apply this to business? Well, the next time you have an important interview, pitch or presentation that you’re nervous about, think about picturing how you’d like things to go.
Would you like to feel calm? What will you wear on the day? Will it be comfortable, or will you be fiddling with your shirt? What will the room look like?
While you’ll never be able to anticipate everything that happens on the day, you can certainly go in feeling as confident as possible, and visualization may help with that.
Simulation training can provide athletes with both physical and mental benefits. Physically, they can practice their moves as many times as they need. Training in the gym or having a gentle rally with your coach on a private court is a very different experience to one where thousands of people are cheering your name or, in slightly less ideal circumstances, one where you aren’t the crowd favorite.
The more an athlete repeats these simulations, the more they can focus on what they need to focus on and block out the unnecessary distractions.
The same story goes for that all-important mental fortitude. When you can try out a range of realistic scenarios, you can start to observe how you react under pressure. From there, you can start to learn what you need to do for optimal performance, whether you’re delivering a pitch to the C-suite or serving for the championship on Centre Court.
In order to get the most out of gamified training in the workplace, it is important to understand that gamified training is not just about getting on a leaderboard. Gamified training should be fun, encourage repetition and have the ability to change behavior. This is why you should ensure that your gamified training program incorporates gaming mechanics. Make sure to ask any provider you’re considering how they incorporate principles of gaming, psychology and technology to help people to learn better and ensure the training sticks.
Further, when it comes to applying simulation into business, a lot of the same principles of training apply that do on the court. It’s important to train at regular intervals, exercise different muscles (or in this case, skill sets), and ensure the training is varied and exciting.
If you haven’t already incorporated mental resilience and simulation training into your learning and development program, could your people be missing out on their full potential?
Here are the lessons I’ve taken away from my favorite sports stars:
• Set both long- and short-term goals.
• Use bite-sized simulations to aid knowledge retention and skill development.
• Leverage visualization.
• Know that good training can change hearts, minds and attitudes.
We can’t all be the No. 1 tennis player in the world, but we can all try to be No. 1 in our day-to-day roles. I believe training is just as important for optimal performance in business as it is in sports.
Where will your next L&D program take your teams? Game, set, match.
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