Corporate Sports(Wo)men

 

You know how my dad would describe me? It’s not about my education or awards or the good corporate job I hold today, or just anything else which I presume he should be proud of more. He will always recall “Well my daughter is someone who would ride on a bicycle to school at the age of 6, bravely crossing the traffic chocked lanes and the main roads and carrying her loaded school bag on her feeble shoulders!”

Today it makes all the sense to me and hence the reasons to pen this down, more for myself to never forget the important lessons/ experiences. I am not a great achiever yet, against all possible ‘scales of success’ built by mankind. But more importantly, I feel happy, content and joyful as the day ends every day.

One simple reason why I feel lucky to be part of Generation X in India, and in a middle class ambitious family, is to get to play on the streets with zeal to win almost every time! And I think it continued till the major part of my student life – irrespective of the heat, time of the day, and the nature of sport – yes I have done everything –  be it cricket, kite flying on the terrace in Indian Summers, football, kho-kho, kabaddi , you name it and I would have enjoyed every bit of it. Let me not forget to mention that the teams were gender diverse! Not that I paid any heed at that point of time, but it seems it is a big hype these days – on improving gender diversity at work place.

It’s been almost a decade since sports disappeared from my life almost gradually with higher education, then my first job and then the quest to ‘settle down’. ‘Settle down’ because everyone has to, but now both my husband and I have begun to realise – why do we really need to ‘settle down’ when all we learnt during our formative years was to just craze around. And now we choose not to settle down ever!

And I want to link this thought to our daily jobs too. I wonder why despite the absence of appraisals, bell curves, increments – we end up feeling less joyful than getting screwed or hurt while losing in a particular sport. Why is it that despite all the stress on team building, OD interventions – we end up feeling more isolated than we feel when we have to just run to the ground, together, and make that goal happen!

What changes? What changes between a sports’ field and an office that we actually end up feeling more drained, less excited and perhaps less energetic too when otherwise the materialistic gains are much higher in the later? This is not to say that we should all just hang our coats and run towards the fields but is there anything that can be brought in from the fields to work place/ in our smaller work groups?

I could think of riding on a joyful “CART”. May be you would have read about the same in different writings, but linking it to sports perhaps explains the prefix joyful!

·         Joyful “C”ompetitiveness:  I don’t remember I ever had the feeling of jealousy/insecurity while competing on the ground, yet I had the maximum zeal to win it there! I do notice a brief moment of such competitiveness at workplace too and I have always come back winning in it, leaving the surroundings also so positive

·         Joyful “A”cceptance: Acceptance of failures with equal grace or the sportsmanship as they say. Have you ever fallen on the field and not got up because you are hurt? Pretty Self Explanatory

·         Joyful “R”esilience: When I would get OUT with a ZERO in cricket, the only thought that would cross me – see you when I bowl mate! I just looked forward to how I can turn around the game. I never felt too proud or too grim with the results, but I always ended up feeling joyful and with the zeal to do ever better!

·         Joyful “T”ogetherness: I personally feel it’s a myth that one can create togetherness from team building exercises and building artificial scales of relative performance. Quoting from the recent study referred to in HBR – Neither you, nor any of your peers are reliable raters of anything. I feel I end up doing my best when there are no associated awards for performing well

I am aware that above can be critiqued well with heavy data points on premise of business connectedness, but I feel that at the ground level – it’s how you end up feeling for your job and reward yourself first before someone else puts you on a scale of relativity!

My dad never rewarded me with chocolates or anything for my bicycle stint at 6, he just marvelled and felt elated watching me enjoy my speeding bike! and therefore one of my favourite quotes:

 “Somewhere behind the athlete you've become and the hours of practice and the coaches who have pushed you is a little girl who fell in love with the game and never looked back... play for her. - Mia Hamm