"Move with the rhythm of any situation and adapt spontaneously". Movement, rhythm, and the ability to adapt; the essence of impact distilled into this concise phrase from Miyamoto Musashi's The Book of Five Rings.
I got some great advice once from a truly talented martial artist, a world-class European Shihan. He watched me spar for a while, then came over, stopping us to say "don't stay waiting to hit him, you have to keep on moving, constantly flowing to hit, then just continue the movement to strike when there's an opportunity. You don't have to think when to go - it will just happen". This simple advice vastly improved my ability to fight and win, realizing that even if the movement is imperceptible, continual motion allows natural speed and flow, adapting spontaneously to the situation.
It's good advice off the mat too, creating an impact by:
Keeping light on your feet: staying happy and aware, waiting for the moment
Continual movement: learning, trying different things, different ways of solving a problem, finding new perspectives
Generating an awareness of the rhythm of situations: how to influence, control and adapt to this rhythm
Relaxation to seize opportunity without effort
The great Muhammad Ali demonstrates this perfectly in this short clip of his 1966 fight against Cleveland Williams:
Engaging effectively to win requires, amongst other qualities, supreme confidence. As Robert Greene states in his book co-written with 50 Cent "The 50th Law": "A bold act requires a high degree of confidence. People who are the targets of an audacious act, or who witness it, cannot help but believe that such confidence is real and justified. They respond instinctively by backing up, by getting out of the way, or by following the confident person. A bold act can put people on their heels and eliminate obstacles. In this way it creates its own favorable circumstances".
Karate tournaments are a good practice ground for developing confidence as a means of success. To win a bout requires unwavering conviction that you can win. If you get on the mat with this certitude, there's a good chance that victory will be yours. Conversely, the slightest doubt represents a gap, a weakness for your opponent to exploit, and almost certain defeat.
In engaging with projects and people, confidence is paramount to effectiveness. It doesn't mean that we stubbornly persist in imposing our ideas at any price, but rather that we remain calm, confident in our abilities, ready to seize opportunity or find the creative solution under any circumstances.
Making an impact requires understanding the simple concept of tension and release. Building and holding tension as a component of success has been illustrated several times, not least by Walter Mischel's famous Stanford experiment on delayed gratification. In this study kids were sequestered with a marshmallow and told that if they did not eat the treat straight away--if they were capable of self control and could handle the discomfort of waiting with the tasty 'mallow tempting them--they would eventually get two marshmallows. Mischel followed-up several years later and found that the 30% of children who succeeded were significantly more successful than those that those who succumbed. The study illustrates that the ability to hold tension, not to give into the temptation of comfort, is a psychological determinant of the ability to make an impact.
The same concept is used in music and sport. Tension in music is built by placing notes over a steady rhythmic foundation. How the melody is placed over the rhythm can build an enjoyable tension - think of the moments before Phil Collins' famous drum roll in "In the air tonight" or the build to your favorite chorus, or the drop in dub step for those as hip as me :)
In sport, my earlier post on Tiger Woods illustrates how he builds tension between hips and shoulders, allowing this to accelerate the club toward the ball. This effortless acceleration is what we get from building and holding tension. It's the ability to seize an opportunity quickly after waiting for the right moment, having built knowledge and understanding. It's quality - making sure that we don't release the product before we have built the process, or the ability to generate relaxed tension through setting strategy and objectives. Ultimately tension can be powerful and pleasurable, the delicious pain of waiting, capable of making people across the world play the air drums as the chorus kicks in.
The reality of the situation is that life is a fight. Whichever way you look at it, it still comes down to this, it's a fight through all of the obstacles, events both good and bad, twists and turns, unexpected events.
So if it's a fight, what do we do? We have to enjoy it, relish the challenge. We have to prepare ourselves, physically, mentally and spiritually. We have to train and enjoy getting stronger, increasingly able to take on our adversaries.
This is a very positive way to visualize life and its challenges. It's a way to avoid being too disheartened by the inevitable problems and hurdles. Making an impact in this fight, like any other, is a never-ending quest and requires preparation, attitude and strategy. We must learn to always fight with what we have, no matter the situation and our condition, making the very best of what is at our disposition. We must understand that to win requires unwavering conviction that we will win, striving to eliminate all doubt. Of course, the aim is not to fight if at all possible, using strength and strategy to obtain a good outcome without injury.
To quote Tyler Durden: "I say never be complete, I say stop being perfect, I say let's evolve, let the chips fall where they may".
The art of impact is the art of conserving energy so that there is more to unleash in a focused way when the moment arises. It's important then to realize where we waste our effort, looking carefully at our personal energy footprint, reducing it to a minimum.
A big drain is our tendency to go against, instead of going with. Whenever there's change, or a new situation, our instincts cause us to resist, to complain, to be anxious. All this takes energy and suppresses our ability to think creatively about the new challenge.
It's better to go with whenever possible, saving our energy for the inevitable opportunity to make an impact. Use this as a tool; make a conscious choice to stop resisting as a default. Let the situation carry you and focus your resources on finding the opportunity, instead of fighting. This is how to harness serendipity, keeping aware of the possibilities instead of blinding ourselves by struggling against.
Of course, we can't go along with everything - like Jim Carey in Yes Man - but we can certainly go with more and see where we end up.
Grip - a grip on yourself and your environment - is fundamental to impact, without this it becomes difficult to build anything meaningful.
My local gym runs boxing classes which are the ideal forum for studying the art of impact. The concept is simple - hang a bunch of heavy bags and guide the participants through a series of punching combinations while playing Ne-Yo. Taking a look round during the session it's clear that impact is not proportional to size or gender; some of the smallest women punch harder than the bigger guys. So why is this? One root cause is the lack of grip. Very few have a grip on the floor at any point during their punch; their mind is in their arms, those weak appendages attached to our shoulders. To improve requires getting a grip, establishing a solid foundation, finding balance, developing awareness and control of our body. By gripping the floor with our feet and legs, combining a downward push from the head and shoulders with upwards pressure from our feet and knees, we start to feel a dynamic tension that can power a whiplash strike from the upper body.
Impact will progressively improve by being aware of the power of grip and investing time to achieve it. Energy can be saved if foundations are in place, balance is maintained and awareness is enhanced. We can move out of the "sweat" zone (see prior entry "Swimming, Splashing or Sweating") by reducing the amount of resource invested fixing problems that arise due lack of grip. Similarly on the heavy bag, a solid grip gives a base to launch punches that accelerate and penetrate, generating effortless power instead of powerless effort.
Following on from my last post, once we get proficient at swimming in calm waters, the real challenge lies in finding flow under more turbulent conditions. Viewing our professional (and personal) lives as an ocean where we are confronted by waves—opportunities and problems, challenges that we must overcome—presents us with choices. We can choose to splash around in the shallow water, hoping that no waves come our way; we can struggle with the swell, fighting against the waves; or we can learn how to surf, using the energy of the wave to propel us on a more exhilarating ride. Even in the current economic downturn there are plenty of opportunities—by definition, a trough always comes with an accompanying crest—waiting to be sought out and surfed, provided we have the requisite discipline, balance and strong foundation to endure the ride.
To
experience the rush of surfing we have to actively look for the waves and
enlist others to help us find the bigger ones. Unfortunately most of us do not get to experience the thrill of this ride because of one of the following factors:
·Fear
·Lack of awareness of possibilities
·Getting trapped in the shallows by desires,
emotions, possessions, or petty problems
·Distraction, continually aiming for the little waves
·Not prepared to invest the effort required (prefer
comfort)
As Laird Hamilton demonstrates, to really surf requires:
·Waves, the bigger the better (an big, ambitious, bold goal or project)
·Balance - from a good foundation
·Going with (not against)
·Developing strength, especially a strong foundation and core
·Beating fear
·Being bold
·The support of a good team
There
will never be a point when we feel we are ready to take on the biggest waves, it will always be a process of searching them out and trying our best to stay on, getting back on the board when we are knocked off, and having the
determination to continue developing our skills. We have to meet our fears and
weaknesses head-on, then curtail and transcend them so that we can
find the calmness of mind to retain our balance under all circumstances and feel the thrill of flow.
In these changing times there are many opportunities to find a bigger wave. As companies cut resource and require employees to take on more, this can send some good surf our way if only we recognize it as such. This type of surfing is a transferable skill—finding such flow in one area allows us to develop it in others and consistently create the effortless power associated with true impact.
We can learn much from studying
high caliber athletes like Michael Phelps and comparing their technique to that
of weaker swimmers. The novice swimmer uses a lot of energy, generating a lot
of splash but not moving very quickly, whereas experts seem to move through the
water effortlessly, finding a smooth, splash-free, alignment and flow.
With
this in mind, a plot of effort versus results produces the following 4-quadrant
diagram:
EFFORT
2.
Splash
3.
Sweat
1.
Sink
4.
Swim
RESULTS
These quadrants can be summarized
as:
Quadrant 1 ‘sinking’: no effort put in and no results obtained.
Quadrant 2 ‘splashing’: energy is used to push water into the air
(splash) instead of directing it into propulsion, giving the impression of
plenty of action without producing results.
Quadrant 3 ‘sweating’: much effort is used to make progress, giving
short-term results that are difficult to sustain.
Quadrant 4 ‘swimming’: energy is focused into obtaining the desired
outcome; there is little wasted effort and a sustainable flow is developed.
There is abundant ‘splashing’ in today’s
workplace, examples abound of large amounts of energy directed at activities
that do not contribute to attaining goals. A continual focus on the urgent (including activities that are not important) is one root cause; the accompanying neglect of communication and
training, with reduced time to build relationships and trust [1] causes splash
through re-work, poor quality, unclear priorities and discontentment. Not to
mention email, a large proportion of which is ‘falsely urgent’, driving many
executives to spend hours splashing at work and wherever they can access their
‘splash-machine’, the ubiquitous Blackberry.
I think the majority of us are
prone to spend much of our time in Quadrant 3, sweating, working hard to get
the results we desire, while not having time or resource to invest in
higher-value activities. Again, this can be a symptom of pressure to attend to
short-term priorities at the expense of longer-term benefit. To ‘swim’, moving into the fourth Quadrant, requires focusing
energy into activities that will produce the greatest benefit, a concept that
has been expressed many times in varying ways, famously in the ‘Pareto
Principle’ [2]. As Michael Phelps demonstrates so gracefully, sometimes we
have to use less effort to get more results, to go faster we first have to slow
down to review where our time and energy will be most valuable.
References
Covey SR, The Speed of Trust: The One Thing that
Changes Everything, 2006, Simon & Schuster.
Learning the art of impact requires studying the masters, and Tiger Woods will be the first for this blog. While Tiger's eye has been temporarily off the ball, there's no doubt that his swing is phenomenal. He is among the ranks of those who truly have impact, proving his abilities again and again.
So how does he do it?
Tiger is a great illustration of the model proposed in an earlier post (Just like an Arrow), clearly showing the three phases of impact:
GRIP: establishing a grip on the ground, on the club; maintaining perfect balance; being aware of conditions and his performance; aiming
BUILD: building a healthy tension between shoulders and hips by pulling the club back in the opposite direction to the intended target; holding this tension until the moment of release
ENGAGE: explosive release of tension, using the big muscles to drive, aligning the whole body to hit with impact; following through to a complete finish
Development of superb technique creates results that are simple, graceful and powerful.
One simple model for producing maximum impact with minimum effort is provided by the act of firing a bow and arrow. To fire the arrow and hit the target requires
good grip on the bow and the ground, allowing
good balance and posture. The archer has to build tension, pulling back on the cord and pushing forward on the bow
while aiming, before finally engaging by
releasing the arrow. Success or failure depends on how well each stage has been
performed, with maximum effectiveness achieved through focus on the “gripping”
and “building” activities; engagement—finally releasing the arrow—should be
effortless and assured.
Applying this model more generally, the three phases can be thought of as follows:
1. Grip:
continually reinforcing a strong grip through establishing good foundations
(story, standards, structure); developing awareness, monitoring and control;
attaining balance.
2. Build:
building healthy tension through “pulling back” (actions that are not
clearly aimed in the direction of a particular goal, they may be
counter-intuitive and opposite) and “pushing forward” (bold steps).
3. Engage:
employing timing to achieve maximum impact; relentlessly eliminating waste.
Engaging should be as effortless as possible if sufficient investment has been made
in the other two phases.
The more impact we wish to generate in a particular area, the more we have to focus on the stages listed under "grip" and "build" above. Foundational elements, awareness, balance and building activities hold the key to engagement with impact. Future posts will illustrate the practical application of these ideas.
Last word this time goes to Magnum performing the title of this post, complete with hair and ripped jeans:
Time and energy are really the only factors we have at our disposition; how do we use these to make a powerful impact? One core skill to develop is that of model-building, as Lord Kelvin said: "If ye canna mak’ a model, ye dinna understan’ it" Translating from his strong Welsh :) dialect, this means that unless we have a mental model we have little chance of really comprehending what's going on. Models provide a way to:
Have fun! They can be played with and adapted
Predict outcomes from actions, simulating and playing "what if" games
Organize the plethora of information that we receive
Explore and understand patterns and trends
Improve our grasp of reality
Encourage systems thinking
Simplify!
The use of mental models allows us to retain and use information at an intuitive level, improving speed and quality of decision making, guiding all our interactions with the external world. They are a key tool in improving impact and many of the forthcoming posts will describe simple models that can be used. Of course, many have written about the power of models, including Confucius who noted that it
is better to have a common theme, a mental thread that we can always follow:
The
master said “Ssu, do you take me for one who studies much and remembers it
all?”
“Yes”
was the reply.
“Is it not so?”
“No.I link all
upon a single thread.” [1]
More contemporary references are found in Peter Senge's book The Fifth Discipline [2] and, musically, the last word has to go to Kraftwerk and "Das Model", four unlikely looking Germans who made a huge impact on music [3].
References
Confucius. Analects (15.3)
Senge, Peter. The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of the Learning
Organization.
To improve our impact we can attempt to increase the amount of energy or time invested. Trouble is, while we're doing that other areas are not getting attention which then lead to problems that sap resources. And, hey, we're not getting any younger - as we progress through life energy levels will naturally decrease and time becomes increasingly at a premium.
True, sustainable, impact is achieved by trying less - improving effectiveness by concentrating our effort on those activities that will produce the results we desire; focusing on generating more energy/time; improving efficiency and minimizing resistance. The components of true impact - simplicity, space, power and grace - are illustrated perfectly by Bob Marley and the Wailers in their performance of Stir It Up on the Old Grey Whistle Test [1]:
Enjoy! Future chapters will explore these themes further to illustrate how we can create such seemingly effortless power.
