The Impact of Sports on Personality & Perspective (in the workplace & life)

The Impact of Sports on Personality & Perspective

Growing up, we are all exposed to a competitive team atmosphere at some point. For me, playing sports was that venue. I can’t do it justice through a few words, but it’s interesting how they can alter your perspective and personality long after your glory days (yeah, I peaked in high school). It’s just as applicable for me today; in my job and personal life.

Regardless of the sport or competitive activity you’re involved in (assuming it’s team based), the first thing you notice is the particular skill-sets of your peers and teammates. You can deduct strengths, weaknesses, motivations and often times, pet peeves. To be a successful team you need a handful of athletes with this awareness, and the ability to put teammates in a position to play to their strengths while their weaknesses are avoided (until addressed through training, practice or other development). At work, I find myself analyzing the traits of my team as well as the broader finance community that I encounter. At this stage in my career there are many reasons for this. It is important to know who your resources are for information; level of responsiveness, ability, credibility and their preferred method of interaction (this can impact the first variable). Ideally, if discrepancies in some of the above traits exist in your own team, you can help remedy them through short term development, and play to their other strengths in the meantime. Identifying, addressing and developing weaknesses in the broader community require a more systemic approach.  Big corporations are complex, and while the intellect, ability and emotional intelligence of the employee base is paramount to its success, it’s not easy developing thousands of people.  Competitive athletics is the ‘micro’ experience, while corporate America is the ‘macro’ version. The workplace is made up of subsets or communities where the micro experience is the focus, but if you aspire to be a more senior member of your company, it would be in your best interest to look at things through a macro lens. Macro is synonymous with strategic in this sense – how can we reduce risk, remain compliant, develop our workforce, accommodate our customers, be dynamic/adaptable, enter new markets, remain competitive, etc.  Sports don’t provide the answers for the questions above (in fact the questions are philosophical to an extent – they can be elusive to many companies’ detriment), but competitive athletics have given me the mindset to systemically grind to transform inadequacies into strengths.

I’ve always been competitive, but I’ve also played sports for as long as I can remember (think: chicken or the egg dilemma). Competition: not just for your team to grow, progress, and succeed, but for your own personal development. Your team’s success is contingent upon your ability to perform at your best, address and remedy your weaknesses, and improve your abilities as the competition increases. We’ve all heard the saying ‘your team is only as fast as your slowest teammate’.  In athletics, a drive for personal development could be egotistically or utilitarian/selflessly motivated, and in the end it may not matter the motivation. If your selfishness was evident through your performance, that could adversely impact your team’s ability to win, but if limited to your own personal development, it can be a positive trait. I’ve noticed a transformation going from sports into the corporate setting – the motivation feels almost entirely selfish with regard to my personal development. Identifying my knowledge gap areas and formally or informally developing those weaknesses does not make a material impact to the financial performance, products, or services my company offers. There are controls and checks and balances to minimize or entirely mitigate a few inept employees. As a more effective employee I can help my team meet deadlines, reduce risk, remain compliant, etc., but that does not resonate with me as my main personal incentive. For me, I absolutely crave the challenge of learning and want to position myself to be successful long term with my current employer. The former is likely a result of the varying competitive landscape athletics exposed me to. I’m prone to getting bored easily in roles, and tend to gravitate towards the more intellectually challenging assignments. In athletics, this is the equivalent of seeking greater competition to better sharpen your skill-set, or making it your mission to equalize the best player on the opposing team. My job has become my competitive landscape, and in my current role, complexity is my opponent. When I begin managing people, I’m sure my focus will transform more towards psychological aspects, empowerment and development. I won’t get into the complexity of psychological incentives, but I’m personally driven by intellectual growth. I despise the feeling of prolonged comfortability – it’s stagnating and makes me consider a new line of work that will provide a challenge. I want a career that forces me to learn daily, even after 20+ years in the field. This may be egotistical, but my fear is that finance will not afford me this luxury, and I will be regretful, wishing I chose a more ambitious profession that allowed me to reach a higher intellectual plateau.  I’ll blame it on my competitive nature, because that’s easier to declare than blatant egoism.

We aren’t always so aware of our inadequacies, and even if we are, we aren’t always sure how to address them. I try to methodically determine my gap areas – in the workplace and in life. Unfortunately, the gaps I identify in life aren’t easy or short term fixes, compared to the corporate setting. There are more external variables, it seems, in life outside of the workplace. These uncontrollable variables introduce significant volatility to your ability to accomplish some of your general aspirations in life. In some cases, development in work and life are inversely related – a pendulum I have yet to balance. We crave short term victories – to keep us motivated and from becoming complacent, and the workplace is perfect for short term successes.  However, as the short term wins pile up, it’s easy to keep pouring your energy into work, but longer term success and happiness require balance. I blinked and 10 years have passed since I graduated high school and 90% of my peers are married or have kids. I don’t measure myself against my peers (it can create a ceiling much lower than you’d otherwise be capable of – wow that sounded pompous), but this still causes me some anxiety. As much as I like to say I am intellectually motivated, I will see it as a catastrophic failure if I make it to my mid 30s and haven’t found someone to share my life with. After all, what is life worth if you’re only living it for yourself. To summarize, playing sports have conditioned me to identify and remedy my own inadequacies, those of my team, and given me an unrelenting competitive drive to maximize potential. This can be wonderfully exhausting at times.