What Hockey Can Teach Us About Developing Mastery
This is a repost of a blog I wrote in 2016 when I was with the Tamarack Institute. I have been thinking about it a lot these days so i thought I would repost it.
A question that has captivated me recently is: how do you bring a mastery mindset to social change work? By mastery mindset I mean an intentional focus on perfecting your craft or trade to be the best you can be.
My understanding of a mastery mindset stems from my childhood as an athlete. Athletes are driven by a mastery mindset that they learn at an early age. In this blog I want to explore four lessons I have learned about mastery from hockey and reflect on how they could be applied to social change work.
Lesson 1: Perfect the fundamentals
In hockey there are certain fundamental skills that the game is based on (e.g. skating, stick-handling, passing and shooting). The first step is to learn the proper techniques for each skill that allows for the most efficient and effective use of energy, while decreasing risk of injury. Once you learn the proper technique, you practice and practice and practice. The goal is to make the actions so ingrained that you can do them from muscle memory alone. It does not matter how many years you have been playing, or how good you are, you still practice the fundamentals on a daily basis.
What are the fundamental skills for social innovators*? What are the proper techniques for these skills? What are the practices that allow us to hone them to muscle memory?
*At the end of this article I have included a list of potential core skills for social innovators.
Lesson 2: Take care of your instrument
In hockey your most important instrument is your body and therefore you are taught to take very good care of it. This means eating right, exercising hard, getting lots of sleep and stretching often to ensure flexibility. By doing this you are able to push your body to its limits and perform at a high level on a regular basis. It also allows you to recover and heal more quickly.
More recently this mindset has extended to include mental and spiritual health as well. Most professional sports teams now have a team psychologist who develops regimes to help players stay mentally healthy on a regular basis. A term I really like for this is called mental hygiene and can include things like meditation and gratitude journaling. Developing mastery is about taking really good care of your instrument (your body) by developing good daily habits and hygiene practices.
I would argue that as social change agents, our body is also our most important instrument but I do not think we spend enough time talking about how to best take care of it. We do talk about the dangers of burnout, but we do not take it seriously like they do in professional sports. Often times we sacrifice our body to put more energy into our work, staying up late, eating on the go and skipping our visit to the gym to squeeze in an extra meeting.
Lesson 3: The science and art of strategy
The next step of mastery is learning how to tie all the fundamentals together and develop a recognition for the patterns of how the game is played. It is important to understand that though there is an individual level to hockey, it is ultimately a team game and it is at this scale that the majority of strategy sits.
I use the term science and art to highlight the two stages of developing strategy:
Stage I — Science, is where you learn all the rules, the patterns and how they fit together. This stage is all about mechanics.
Stage II — Art, is where you learn when and how to break and bend the rules you acquired in stage I. It is at this stage that you bring creativity and imagination into strategy.
The true masters of hockey are incredibly curious, constantly studying each other’s strategy and then experimenting and trying new things out. As a result, at the higher levels strategy is incredibly dynamic.
I actually think that strategy is something we do well as social innovators. The difference is that in hockey, there is a direct line from fundamentals and instruments to strategy. I think in social innovation we have lost that, as a result our strategy is ungrounded. We have fine tuned the art but have forgotten the science. As a result many learnings are discovered by accident and developing mastery takes much longer (developed through years of experience, curiosity and accidental discovery instead of intentionally built through the basics.)
Lesson 4: It is all about hard work
One of the most consistent things a coach will say to his players is you must work hard, day in and day out. Basically, mastery takes a lot of work and you must put in your time. Hard work also helps you through the tough times, ensure consistency and continual learning. Therefore you are taught from a young age to have a strong work ethic. The true masters of a sport have intentionally made sacrifices, said no to other experiences to create the space (time and energy) to hone their craft. The majority of this time is spent in practicing the fundamentals, ensuring they take care of their instrument and studying strategy, in other words preparation. In fact if you take everything into account, for every hour of game time, there is a dozen hours spent on preparation. This is what builds mastery and what keeps it. This ratio doesn’t change when a player makes it to the NHL. In fact, the oldest player in the league (Jaromir Jagr as of 2016) has ensured his longevity by having one of the best work ethics in game.
Mastery implies a lifelong journey of preparation and learning.
Though there is no doubt that social change agents pour their heart and soul into their work, most of this is spent on action and very little on preparation. As a result, the action is chaotic; we make lots of mistakes, and often the same mistakes. How can we build more time for preparation? I think a big part of it is a shift towards a mastery mindset. Recognising that working smarter creates greater impact than working more. But I think there also needs to be larger cultural shifts. A key shift for hockey was when players started to get more compensation to allow them to set aside the time for preparation. I think most social change agents are undervalued and therefore under compensated. If we want them to bring a mastery mindset to their work we must give them the money that allows for it.
