Feeling success

The process of learning how to ride horses has been, and continues to be, a very interesting process. Compared to when I did my A Levels at the age of 18 (Oxford was a different kettle of fish), learning by rote or by memorizing facts was actually relatively easy given that I was a fairly dedicated student who had a short term memory of acceptable ability. Without wishing to generalize centuries of equestrianism, I would contend that learning to ride horses is more complex and operates on multiple layers. The first levels of education are all about learning (and then understanding) some guiding principles of riding. The second phase is about understanding both the morphology and the mentality of the horse – just like all humans don’t walk or think in the same way, all horses don’t walk, trot, canter or react to the same stimulus in the same way. Once you’ve got the basics down, then it is all about feeling your way around a horse to understand how you need to readjust the application of the handful of principles to a given animal depending on its own unique way of thinking and moving. After having ridden for a few years now, I can confirm that the part that is the most delicate is the feeling bit. What can make this part of the apprenticeship longer is that at times you don’t initially always know what the right feeling feels like. However once you’ve experienced and recognized the right feeling, then everything after that becomes a search to try and recreate that feeling on the same and different horses. I was reminded of this process of trying to understand what the end game feels like when I read the following article about how to try and psychologically vaccinate soldiers against the trauma of war http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21566612-it-may-be-possible-vaccinate-soldiers-against-trauma-war-battle-ready. I also started to think about what this meant in the context of business. For me it is fairly obvious – it’s all about being able to tell people and teams what eventual success looks and feels like. Whereas the current obsession is always about what are the financial metrics we need to fulfill in the current quarter, I wonder if we wouldn’t be more successful if we could explain to our teams what the office and client sites would look and feel like if we achieved the financial targets we set ourselves – what type of behavior would our eventual success engender in our managing executives, how many new faces would we have in the team, what is the way that we’d expect the team to interact with each other to get to the desired result, what type of client feedback could we imagine receiving… I believe that the knowledge of what success looks and feels like is massively important – maybe that’s the reason why companies pay a premium for people who have come from successful companies. It’s just a shame that so few of our left brain fact memorizing leaders in positions of authority can actually articulate what success feels like rather than just what it looks like in an Excel file.