Stop overly relying on your strengths
“play to your strengths”, always seemed unnatural to me. Let’s take an example of an injured arm or leg. Now your strength is the other arm/leg. What will doctor advice for rehab? Therapy & exercises to strengthening that limb, or they say just tuck it in hide away permanently.
Therapy, as per doctor’s recommendation, ensures we are re-building in a controlled and planned way and this is very important.
If you are coaching, try to disrupt the comfort zone and recommend stimulation for weak parts with healthy challenges and milestones, so your players can work on them and become more agile than ever.
Healthy challenge can be gauge how far you are taking them from their strengths. It should not create over 30° from current strength because then it will be over burdening, which creates more injuries than becoming strong.
Another familiar and perfect example of carefully stepping away from a comfort zone and not playing with your strengths is learning to ride a bike. As most of us can relate to and know the journey, I’d rather illustrate than write about it:
Technical examples
healthy challenge: “you write unit tests now let’s work together in practicing TDD”.
Unhealthy challenge: “you are very good in backend engineering, been doing it for 5 years from tomorrow you will work on frontend stack”.
Conclusion
Essence is to grow evolutionary, get out of comfort zone work on your weak areas make them your strength but with realistic and incremental steps. Extreme programming ensures that you are getting continuous exposure to new horizons and you are not alone at any step of the way.
Muhammad Tariq who is my cousin, always been more than a brother and mentor to me, helped me learn bike riding. Who taught you ? love to know in comments.
