EDITION 3: THE CHALLENGES EDITION

One topic: Challenges

At the end of the first full week of the Paris Olympics, I thought I'd focus this newsletter on challenges. So far this week we've seen Olympic successes with nail-bightingly close wins from the Women's Quad Rowing Team, a fabulous comeback from Alex Ye in the triathlon and the gracious ending to the legendary Andy Murray's successful career-worth of challenges. The opposite to these successes, of course, when we take on a challenge is failure. Failure can be useful. There is much that can be learned from it, but no one wants to fail all of the time. So, how can we take on a challenge and give ourselves the greatest chance of success AND what can we do if things don't turn out the way we wanted to?

Two Top Tips For Challenges

Do: Break it down. Taking on large challenges can feel overwhelming. Chunking things can help us to see things as more manageable tasks making the bigger challenge seem easier to tackle step-by-step.

Don't: Approach the challenge with blinkers on. Reflect, adapt and draw on the support network you have. Regularly assess your progress and be willing to adapt your approach if you need to. Having a support system can provide you with new perspectives an practical assistance.

Three Things I've Found Out From Peak by Anders Ericsson:

"Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise" offers several valuable lessons. These three aspects of the book are worth bearing in mind when taking on a challenge.

Deliberate Practice: This kind of practice isn't the same as merely repeating something over and over again. It involves breaking a challenge down into smaller parts, turning these into goals and gathering feedback on areas to continue to improve.
Mental models: Mental models are structures that help us to understan d, interpret and respond to information quickly and accurately when we are practicing and taking on the challenge. These models are built in our minds when we practice.
Adaptability: With the right kind of practice, we can expand our potential and achieve things that may have originally seemed impossible.

Four Further Reads:

Accomplishment by Michael Barber

Barber spent many years advising governments, businesses and major sporting teams on how to take on challenges successfully and in a timely fashion. In this book, he shares the wisdom he gained from dealing with large, complex organisations and elite athletes to help anyone tackle their most challenging goals.

Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell

This book explores the world of "outliers" - the best and the brightest, the most famous, and the most successful. It poses the question: What makes high-achievers different? The answer it provides is that we need to spend less time looking at what successful people are like, and more time examining where they are from: their culture, their family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing.

How to Fail: Everything I’ve Ever Learned From Things Going Wrong by Elizabeth Day

This book focuses on what might be considered to be smaller, though often more emotionally charged challenges like dating, work, having babies, coping with families and friendships, it focuses on the simple premise that understanding why we fail can make us stronger. It's a book about learning from our mistakes and about not being afraid.

Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell

This book not only features a challenge, it also explores what life is like when things are challenging and offers us a challenge. Orwell's memoir of his time among the desperately poor and destitute in London and Paris is a tour of parts of society many of us never see. He documents a world of bug-infested hostels, tramps and dishwashers, surviving on scraps and cigarette butts - in a vivid account of what being "down and out" is like.

Friday Five Tunes Linked To Challenges: