How Rugby Changed My Career

I am an HR learning and development professional by day and a semi-pro rugby player by night. During the day, I’m tackling the learning needs of corporate professionals and during the night I’m pounding the turf.

After spending many years of playing recreational rugby, I was presented with an invitation to train with a high level team. This became a golden opportunity to develop my skills, up my fitness level and improve my capacity for mental as well as physical toughness. In my first season with New York Knights, Coach Guil Cieutat instituted certain training principles. As I learned profound new lessons about playing rugby at the semi-pro level, I began to incorporate these lessons into my professional role as a learning and development manager. I’ve broken these into three main points.

#1: Fitness Wins Matches

A rugby match lasts 80 minutes. A lot of rugby teams can’t sustain 80 minutes of peak playing — both mentally and physically. In order to not lose steam halfway through the match, your body has to be conditioned. As our coach used to say “Fitness wins matches.”

In the corporate world, you’re not just playing an 80 minute match. You want your work to be as strong at the end of your tenure as it is in the beginning.

Corporate training is the ultimate boot camp workout that gets you to professional fitness. Replace sprints with guest speakers. Replace push-ups with mentorship opportunities. Replace a post-workout stretch with a relevant Ted Talk video. These fundamentals keep professionals limber and mentally sharp.

Your competition is always looking for ways to get the upper hand. Keeping professional “fit” means you can outlast your competition.

#2: Train Harder Than You Play

Coach Guil’s approach is that if you play at the highest level of intensity for training, then winning the match is that much more achievable. You never know at what level the competition is going to play at, so you need to make sure you’ve trained for the greatest possible challenge.

Following this principle, employees need to train to face whatever challenges come across their desk. My motto in training is “Your most accomplished professional side starts outside your comfort zone.” Professionally, I often create an ongoing dialogue with people to understand skill gaps and find training solutions to close those gaps.

For example, a high level executive was tasked with public speaking engagements and creating a series of podcasts; however, public speaking was not her strong suit. I was entrusted to work with her to develop her public speaking abilities. We identified key targets to improve her ability through consistent exercises and drills in a one-on-one setting. Through persistence and effort, she made great strides in improving not only her speaking ability but her confidence level as well. By training harder than when you play, it becomes much easier to execute when the opportunity presents itself.

#3: Stay Hungry

My team had a practice session where certain players were asked to do additional sprint intervals to develop their speed. I volunteered to join them because I wanted to support my teammates and I wanted the additional development opportunity to improve on fitness. This hunger was rewarded with game time — not only because it showed an eagerness for the game but because it improved my overall performance.

In a corporate environment, it’s easy to be satisfied with your existing skill set. However, employees that are complacent in their position quickly become pigeon-holed in their work roles. They are taken advantage of by managers and teammates because they miss out on more interesting and challenging opportunities. They stagnate in their career and need to seek employment elsewhere to pull themselves out of their rut.

I’d love to be able to train people to stay hungry; however, it’s a skill that you need to find within yourself. Instead, I’ve created materials and opportunities in a learning environment so that people that are hungry can increase their skills significantly more than their complacent coworkers.

Such opportunities include lunch-and-learn sessions, periodically offered trainings, and mentorship relationships. Not only do these opportunities build an employee’s confidence, capability and knowledge base, they make that employee a more valuable member of the team. These opportunities create a relationship with a company that is arguably stronger than simply adding foosball tables or cold brew on tap, resulting in greater retention.