Top athletes and singers have coaches. Should you?

September 26, 2011

The New Yorker October/2011 article by Atul Gawande, “PERSONAL BEST: Top athletes and singers have coaches. Should you?” explores the value of continuously challenging your culture towards performance excellence.

Atul Gawande’s most recent article explores the value of coaching seasoned professionals to avoid falling into a culture of "performance plateau." This article is a great read for anyone in the consulting arena that has to manage learning ‘fadeout.’

As with Complications (2002), Better (2007), and Checklist Manifesto (2009), Gawande explores innovative ways to avoid drifting into a culture of complacency, especially in seasoned, highly professional fields like surgery. As always, he counts the value of strengthening the "human side" of complex professions (personal judgment, humility, and a willingness to have your skills exposed) as vital as any technical aspects. He writes with same humility as previous publications, using his profession as a surgeon as one of many examples explored.

A small excerpt:

“Élite performers, researchers say, must engage in “deliberate practice”—sustained, mindful efforts to develop the full range of abilities that success requires. You have to work at whatyou’re not good at. In theory, people can do this themselves. But most people do not know where to start or how to proceed. Expertise, as the formula goes, requires going from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence to conscious competence and finally to unconscious competence. The coach provides the outside eyes and ears, and makes you aware of where you’re falling short. This is tricky. Human beings resist exposure and critique; our brains are well defended. So coaches use a variety of approaches—showing what other, respected colleagues do, for instance, or reviewing videos of the subject’s performance. The most common, however, is just conversation.”

LINK http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/10/03/111003fa_fact_gawande#ixzz1Z5vo9Bm4

For more information about the author and his other publications: http://gawande.com/