46. What TA can learn from professional sports

Talent Savvy

In this episode Bas van de Haterd, Kelly Robinson and Michael Delaney talk about what TA can learn from professional sports. For once there isn't an article to share as we discuss this based on talks we saw at conferences. Bas saw the Sport scientist of Soccer team PSV at Digitaal-Werven this year and Kelly remembered an inspiring talk by coach K from Duke university and the American Olympic Team on a Career builder event a few years ago.

Kelly says he was fascinated by the fact that this coach had people learning to tie their show laces. The best in the world, learning the most basic of things and he wonders, do we in TA still coach enough about the most basic elements of recruitment: the job intake? Shouldn't we spend more time and effort on coaching basics next to innovating?

Michael's daughter was a college level distance runner and what he took from seeing her train is that they train her the same thing every time. This way it becomes muscle memory, doing something right 1000 times, makes you not use any cognitive load doing it. And as a team player himself, rugby league, he is always taking the team strengths and weaknesses into the equation when making a hiring decision.

We talk about accepting being average or even below average on something if you excel at other things.

We also talk about training the basics, coaching the basics, helping our TA team to become better. Although we might not frame it as improving the basics, as that might sound boring and framing it different. And we should probably also focus much more in small improvement.

If you love sports, different spots, you'll love this episode and see the things we can learn from sports as TA professionals.