Slow down to speed up

Image courtesy of https://www.pexels.com

You’ll have to stick with me on this one, it’s a bit of a rant but there are some takeaways at the end I promise.

Ever since I can remember I have loved swimming. I swam competitively when I was younger, then recreationally to keep fit and now my focus is long distance. The water is definitely my happy place.

I have just signed up to swim the Windermere One Way which is an 11-mile swim in the beautiful lake district.

So what’s the problem I hear you ask. You’ve been swimming all your life, surely you’re ready for this, right? Well, my problem is that I am extremely competitive and have only ever cared about speed. When I’m in the pool, the only thing I care about is being the fastest. In my head, I’m racing everyone, whether they know it or not (I think it comes from swimming competitively when I was younger and never winning anything).

This pure focus on speed has caused me to develop some extremely inefficient and potentially detrimental habits. AND it is definitely not sustainable over such a long distance.

How do you fix bad habits?

Stop and ask for help (even when you think everything is going well).

A few months prior to writing this I joined an absolutely amazing Triathlon training Club called Savage Tri. Being Mr confident when it comes to swimming, I purely joined for endurance purposes (thinking that my stroke was perfect).

Since joining I have had to go right back to the beginning with my stroke. I’ve had to start the journey to unlearn all the bad habits my pure focus and obsession with speed has caused me. The amount of energy (and potential speed) I’ve been wasting and losing with a poorly formed stroke has really been an eye-opener for me. Not to mention the potential long-term detrimental issues with my shoulders.

It’s SO frustrating being told you’re doing something wrong! But sometimes, it’s for the best.

I’ve even had private 1–1 sessions with one of our coaches Matt Wright (Matt is an Age Group Triathlete and Masters swimmer, and is hands down the fastest swimmer I have ever seen (much to my annoyance)). These 1–1 sessions involve a small amount of swimming and a lot of tweaking based on video recordings of me in the pool. Each small tweak feels completely foreign and my muscle memory is screaming at me to fall back into my old bad habits. Slowly but surely I am realising the benefits of these tweaks.

Slow down.

I’ve just come fresh from one of my slowest training sessions ever. Even the old dude with the weirdest unidentifiable stroke was gliding past me (I had to fight the urge to kick as hard as I can and turn it into a race).

I kept the session slow, I repeated the same movements over and over again. I went over all the small tweaks I’ve been told to do to improve. As annoying as it was, I know that my muscle memory will replace the bad habits with my new improved tweaks and eventually I will end up a better swimmer for it.

It’s going to take time, it’s going to be painful, it’s going to feel foreign, it’s going to be annoying but eventually, it will become the new norm.

Where’s my takeaway…

Believe it or not, all of the above can be directly relatable to your employees, teams and even your company.

Just because you, your team or your company are delivering and moving at speed doesn’t mean that there aren’t things going wrong, or that these short bursts of speed aren’t causing longer-term detrimental impacts.

Pause. Take some time out to review and ask others to come in and review how you’re operating. Learn from experts and take advice from the people around you.

Inspect. Go into the detail of what and how you’re operating at the moment. What is the data telling you, what are your employees telling you, what other feedback can you acquire?

Adapt. Be willing to take on feedback, even when it’s aimed at something you’re precious about. Listen carefully to feedback and understand the changes being asked. Document and verbalise the changes and understand what needs to stop.

Implement. Put these changes to work. Don’t do everything at once, break the changes into small chunks and roll them out slowly. Repeat them, stick to them and eventually your muscle memory will take over and the changes won’t feel foreign.

Eventually, the changes will become the norm.
When that happens, repeat the above all over again.

So there you have it, my late night ramblings after an incredibly slow swim. I hope you enjoy. Any comments, then please leave them below.