I don’t know how much time you spend thinking about succession planning but I think about it a lot. In just a few days, as it does every September, our judo club will be welcoming
The university club where I teach judo to young adults is a great lab where I get to observe human behavior from up close and draw lessons and insight that have proved extremely instructive in other aspects of my life.
I got slightly injured yesterday doing randori with one of my students after the regular class. We’d been sparring for a few minutes when something went wrong, and I suffered a pulled muscle. I’ll be limping a bit for the next few days.
I started practicing judo as a teenager and right from the start, I was training with girls. Not just in their presence. With them. As a result, I learned at a very young age and from direct experience that girls, as judokas, were every bit as deserving as the boys and were not to be underestimated.
I’m a part-time, volunteer educator. I say “educator” rather than “instructor” or “trainer” because my mission is not to simply impart athletic abilities or to help my students win tournaments (that’s quite secondary to me), but rather to help them become the best all-around people that they can be. Another appropriate word to describe my role, I think, would be “teacher”. I’m incredibly fortunate to have been given this opportunity, which is also a great responsibility.
I work mostly with very seasoned professionals. We like to laugh and have some fun but we also tend to be a focused bunch and I’m not sure that “wide-eyed with wonder” are the top words that anyone would pick to describe us; not jaded in any way for sure, but imbued for the most part with the sober demeanor of people who have seen a lot and are not that easily moved or impressed.
I had an interesting experience a few days ago. I had just responded to somebody’s online comment regarding one of my articles right here on LinkedIn when I received the following message
We’ve all heard it said: “Good is good enough”, or “Leave well enough alone”. Those sayings convey a form of popular wisdom — the idea that there are times in life when aiming for a higher level of perfection can be counterproductive and that things should just be left the way they are. My native French has a very similar saying (“Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien”) loosely adapted from something that philosopher Montesquieu famously wrote three hundred years ago.
Transferable skills, as people usually think of them, are abilities developed in one context that can be readily applied in a different setting. You may, for instance, learn how to manage interpersonal conflicts as a camp counselor and leverage that skill later in life as a team leader.
I am extremely fortunate that life has put so many good role models on my path over the years. Whether professionally or otherwise, I clearly wouldn’t be where I am today if it wasn’t for the people who have, throughout my life, guided me along in one way or another.
