The Upside of Grit, or How We Care for Our Skills
This week is my last week in the northern climes. After a long summer of hiking, riding horses, and shouting at many dogs to stop swimming in the irrigation canal, I’ll begin the long drive back to Texas on Saturday.
Montana is a state in which livestock outnumber people. For every person, there are two cattle roaming dry-land pastures and forest leases. People don’t just have one dog because that pickup will easily hold four. The outer rims of parking lots are festooned with trucks and horse trailers as people stop in for a quick errand on their way to a horse show or a rodeo or even just to help a neighbor move cattle. Ranching, which is what this area of the country does, teaches many things, but chief among them is this: care of the land and the animals entrusted to your care. If you take care of the land and the animals, they will care for you. Good stewardship is a way of life for most every rancher I know. It is a point of pride to have healthy, thriving animals. Anything less will earn you derision and scorn.
Ruminating on land, livestock, and stewardship brings me to this week’s topic: how do we care for our skills? How do we take care of those skills that keep us at the top of our game?
The Stewardship of Skills
Like many people, I’m using the availability of virtual training in the time of Covid to update some certifications, learn new skills, improve in areas that I feel that I need strengthening. Prior to this year, many classes, courses, and workshops that I wanted and in many cases needed to take were only available as in-person options. In-person education is wonderful, but by the time I paid the fees and associated travel expenses, much of the work was not affordable. Covid has been downright awful for so many things, but in making some training options a bit more palatable, it has been a godsend.
As a coach, I tend to know….a lot of other coaches. And almost more than any other group that I’ve seen, coaches are looking for training and practice to continue on the upward trajectory. (Either that, or we really like having initials after our name.) On that continuous improvement front, I’m now in a virtual class to improve my facilitation skills. It’s important to me to be able to help others have great conversations, to connect, to foster a deeper sense of we. I’m stewarding, fostering my own betterment, trying to move that skill set forward.
In our last virtual session, the leaders asked for a volunteer, someone willing to facilitate a small-group discussion in front of the class. I took a deep breath and forced my hand up. For twenty-five long minutes, I facilitated a conversation between six people. Did I want to do this? Not so much. Did I need to do this? Absolutely. If I want to make a skill shiny, removing all the tarnish and gunk and debris, then I need to get up and do the hard work of practicing.
Do you know what is hard? Facilitating a group of trained facilitators. It’s almost as much fun as coaching a group of coaches.
Some time ago, I did an exercise to find four words that most describe me. I was in a darkened room (in full transparency, I was in spin class), and the instructor lit four candles, one at a time. As each candle was lit, we were to think of a word that embodied us. These are the four words that came up for me: ethical, daring, gritty, and authentic. All four have their place, but only one, gritty, is what I lean into when I make myself practice awkwardly and publicly.
Perfect Practice Makes Perfect
Why do I do cohorts so often? Two reasons: practice and feedback. Here is the process that I follow when I want to stumble towards mastery:
-
Practice. Practice practice practice practice practice.
-
Ask for feedback, preferably from someone that is an expert in that field.
-
Repeat steps 1 and 2, implementing that feedback.
-
Get myself into situations where I have not yet been. Find new ways to practice my skill, obtaining new experiences and new insight.
-
Practice with people who are better at my chosen skill than I am.
In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell wrote about the 10,000 hours of practice needed to become a world-class expert in any one thing (a claim that has had some sturm und drang, namely with regards to Anders Ericsson’s Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise). Some years ago, Angela Duckworth wrote Grit: The Power and Passion of Perseverance, and she did an excellent TED talk on that topic as well. From all of this, the readings and the cohorts and feedback and the practice, what I’ve learned is this: practice and grit. Practice doesn’t make perfect, but perfect practice will get me a lot closer. None of this is easy, but I’m not expecting that it would be. The only way for me to improve my skills, to keep them at their highest level of performance and service, is to continue practicing, to continue receiving feedback on how to improve.
And that is where grit comes in. Raise my hand, get up and do the thing that scares me. I depend on my grit to get me through, and it does. I’ll return to Texas this weekend, and one thing I’ll make certain to pack is my grit. I’d be nowhere without it. In fact, grit is the trait that helps me to be a good steward for my skills.
Image courtesy of Linda Nickell. Connect with her on Instagram as @coznlinda.