Business Muscle Memory
In competitive athletics, it is important to practice skills, situations and moves over and over until they’re imprinted into muscle memory. Wrestlers train themselves by practicing the right moves hundreds of times to ensure they can automatically react correctly to perilous situations. This is the muscle memory equivalent of business muscle memory. Committing these moves to muscle memory allows:
- Pattern Recognition – the ability to quickly recognize a pattern – oh, this again, I’ve been in this situation before
- Reflex – immediately react – and when an opponent does this, this move gets me out of trouble and puts my opponent on the defensive
- Think – that’s when the brain catches up to the action and says nice job. Thanks for bailing me out and figuring that out before me.
Without that kind of muscle memory, if the wrestler needed to slow down and wait for his conscious brain to react… he’d be pinned by the time he weighed all those options. He’d react more slowly, with less confidence and a lower probability of a successful outcome.
A more experienced, well-trained wrestler will beat a slightly stronger, smarter wrestler who is handicapped with inexperience.
Airline Pilots practice stressful situations for hours in a simulator for the same reason. The simulator allows them to recognize and react safely to an engine burnout, so if it occurs with passengers on board, the situation is safely handled.
The same thing can be said in business. You can be the smartest graduate from the best school in the top-rate-best universe in the world. You may be Summa Cum Laude from Stanford. But until you have been in, seen, and witnessed enough business crises, until you’ve recovered from enough business meltdowns, until you can react like a well-trained pilot or wrestler with well-tuned perfect muscle memory and before your brain recognizes and understand your situation, the risks and what it takes to recover… wisdom is going to trump IQ.
Get yourself a business wrestling coach, and put yourself in a business airplane simulator. Accumulate experiences. Join a peer advisory group. Don’t ever undervalue wisdom and experience over intelligence.
I’m a business coach, I drag executives out of the weeds, out of the “in” of the business, and onto the “on” of the business. I ask for plans, monitor progress, and hold executives accountable so they wake up on where they plan to be. Want to know what it feels like to be dragged out of the weeds and to actually work on the business? Schedule a complimentary online one-on-one coaching session by pressing that little green thing-a-ma-jiggy down there.
