Wow, it has been about 6 months from my first blog. Funny how time seems to fly by. But how much of it do we remember? In Joshua Foer’s book, “Moonwalking With Einstein”, he referenced William James, author of Principles of Psychology (1980). James writes about the concept that automatic routine, something we hardly notice, fills our days with “contentless units”. And as such, it can feel like our lives seem to speed up as we age because life gets less memorable due to routine. Based on this concept, Foer’s memory coach, Ed Cooke, said to him, “If to remember is to be human, then remembering more means being more human.”

What does this have to relate to my previous blog post? Well, let me connect the dots for you. “Moonwalking With Einstein” is a book written by Joshua Foer, a scientific journalist who stumbled upon the USA Memory Championships and eventually came to win it, after deciding that he would try out some of these techniques. The title of his book is actually based on an image he used to memorize a sequence of playing cards on his way to memorizing the order of the entire deck. Of course, having such memory takes a lot of practice, especially deliberate practice. When you hear the term “deliberate practice”, who often comes to mind? K. Anders Ericsson!

Ericsson published a book fairly recently, “Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise”, which I said I would read in my blog 6 months ago, and I did. Joshua Foer happened to be a test subject, and both books spend a little bit of time talking about the other person, which to me was really cool. I find it amazing how one topic can suddenly grow into something else so remarkably, which is also how I view problem solving. The more I can learn, the better chance of me to find a novel solution to any problem that I might encounter. Most importantly, the process through it all is very interesting and often enjoyable.

Now that I have bridged the gap between now and 6 months ago (I apologize that it took 3 paragraphs to get there), let’s review some of the things I spoke about in my first blog. Unfortunately, there has been little change on how much coaching I can get as a player. Additionally, there is little change on the feedback we get as athletes from our daily monitoring. However, despite these problems, I have been able to either find a solution to the problem, or at worst, simply accept it as something outside of my control. In terms of coaching, I have spent more time observing what other coaches do and how they use different approaches. It is more or less taking what they do best, and learning from what they don’t do very well. Not all the coaches have formal coaching education, and I can appreciate coaching science a lot more as I can see that there are many elements that are non-intuitive. It really is continuous learning that makes one better at their craft, instead of just more experience. Without learning, experience simply becomes routine, and routine over a long time, as I alluded to in the beginning of this post, makes time feel like it’s speeding up. However, reflecting on the shortness of life will be left for another time.

Over the course of the UBC coaching program, I have taken a bit more of an initiative to play around with my own athlete data. Although I may not be getting the feedback I want from the sport organization, I can still make an attempt to analyze my own training data! Here is an example of about 3 months of heart rate data, where I made a simply graph and analyzed it myself. Although I can only make a few observations, I am one step closer to a solution. I can still make moves, although I’m not sure the direction I’m going at times, but at least I don’t have to remain idle and complain that my career is in someone else’s hands. If contemplating on the shortness of life seems like a difficult exercise, contemplating on the shortness of my athletic career definitely brings a bit more urgency. We all know the cliche: better late than never.

“What blocked the path now is the path / What once impeded action advances action / The Obstacle is the Way”

The quote is from Ryan Holiday, author of “The Obstacle is the Way”. Although I wrote about this in more depth in the Critical Thinking reflection, I still think it ties very well with Problem Solving. Using a bit of a logical argument, finding the opportunity in every obstacle is a great exercise in personal power. No more excuses, no more complaints, but simply solutions, action, or in the hardest situations, patience. When problems come to find me, I can practice problem solving to learn new things and create new opportunities, but what happens when everything is… pretty good? Sometimes it’s at a point where it’s “good enough” and then it becomes easy to be content. As an athlete near the end of his career, there is a great difference in trying to see how far I can go, versus trying to see how long I can go for. The first indicates an aspiration to find my “potential”, the maximum ability I can achieve with the resources I’ve been given. Whether that is top 25 or top 10 in the world, I will find out after I retire from sport. I won’t know until my time is up. In contrast, trying to go for length is a different goal altogether. How many times can I win National Championships? How long can I stay on the National Team? I feel the former is being on the offensive and trying to achieve something greater, while the latter is being on the defensive, and trying to hold on as long as I can. To each their own, but I know where I stand.

“Problem-finding” is my solution to counteract being content. It is not quite ‘nit-picking’, but rather looking for problems that might matter in the future. The purpose of problem finding is so there is something to problem solve! However, in today’s world, we are quick to stop ourselves from offending others (in person generally, we are not so nice on the internet). Self-esteem, self-entitlement, or whatever you might call it often presents a problem in itself. How can you solve a problem if we can’t even identify the problem in the first place?

And such is the new problem for me to solve. At an organizational level, things are not being done. There are people complaining, but they are only complaining instead of problem solving. There are no solutions. Without problem solvers, the problem persists and little change is made. The cycle repeats itself, and on and on it continues. It becomes routine. Without a solution, before we all know it, time will speed up and fly by. In the end, the outcome is death. With the collapse of the organization, the sport also dies.

But let’s rewind the story back to where we are right now, in this present moment. It doesn’t matter what my role is, as an athlete, a coach, or an administrator. It simply matters that I become actively involved as a problem solver. Maybe I don’t have to be the one to solve the problem, but to find more problem solvers to aid the cause. Regardless of what my role is, I know I need to be involved. I cannot give up because far too many people have already.

It’s no different from being a Canadian badminton player. Or a Canadian badminton coach. The duality of both roles is similar to being both a problem finder (athlete), as well as a problem solver (coach). But despite all the problems and obstacles, there is always opportunity. And if you believe that there are always more opportunities than problems…

… you would make a great entrepreneur. Hey, at least it’s a back up plan! 😉

As first an athlete and now a coach, sometimes both at the same time, problem-solving is a constant NCCP core competency required in many aspects of my badminton. For the past 4 years of my competitive career, it has been difficult to find a regular coach to work with. Often times I am left to fend for myself and my partner at international tournaments. Looking at the 2016 Olympic qualification period, out of 22 international tournaments and the Canadian National Championships, I spent only 4 tournaments with coaches. I don’t regularly work with these coaches and none of them specialize in my event (Mixed Doubles).

With this problem, the two extreme choices were to either give up or find a way to deal with it. Despite the outcome of failing to qualify for Rio, I am glad I chose the latter. If I was the most experienced mixed player in Canada at the time, then I need to take the initiative to teach my partner the most important skills. If I did not have a coach with me on court, then I will record the match to analyze later. If I could have the opportunity to ask for feedback, I would ask, although I did not receive much in the end. The coaches were not able to give the quality feedback that I wanted. From Kouzes & Posner’s “The Leadership Challenge”, they found that no feedback is just as bad as criticism. Without feedback, there is no learning. Without learning, it becomes difficult to improve. It then becomes difficult to win.

After finishing “The Leadership Challenge”, it has led me to read additional books, including “Mindset” by Carol Dweck, “Grit” by Angel Duckworth, and “Peak” by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool. I have not yet started “Peak”, but I have finished “Mindset” and I am almost through “Grit”. Interestingly, “Grit” also mentions the work of both Dweck and Ericsson. The importance of these books is because they have helped me learn more about problem solving. It is not so much about how to directly solve my problem, but rather how I can direct my effort, mindset, and approach toward finding solutions.

Dweck’s book is about the difference between a fixed and a growth mindset. If I had a fixed mindset, I would believe that my talents would help me overcome my situation. I would also put in less effort because those with a fixed mindset believes that things should come easy to those who have talent. On the contrary, a growth mindset involves learning from failure and finding new solutions to overcome problems. Duckworth’s book speaks of grit, which includes a combination of passion and perseverance. Developing “grittiness” is a way of seeing something through to the end, and not quitting at the first sign of a problem. Finally, Ericsson is the famous researcher known for developing the “10 000 hour” rule, in which 10 000 hours of practice is the average time it takes to become an expert. Although I have not read the book yet, I am sure the insights into deliberate practice will give me additional problem solving tools in the future. I will return to this in the 2^nd reflection.

Having to play the role of coach and athlete at times is incredibly difficult. I am also aware of the expression, “He who is his own coach has a fool for a client.” I think it is a derivative from, “He who is his own lawyer has a fool for a client”, but both expressions have a similar meaning. However, I would much rather be a fool than a quitter. After the residential component, I was very intrigued about sport analytics from Dr. Van Neutegem’s course. For the past 2 years, Badminton Canada required the tracking of certain metrics for the national team, mostly consisting of physiological measures that the exercise physiologist looks after. However, I personally feel that these measures are incredibly subjective and based on the knowledge of the athlete. For example, to measure how well I think I am eating, I need to know how to eat well first. I think the same goes toward sleep, hydration, and other recovery strategies. In fitness, many people believe that they need to feel tired and sore for a good workout. The scientific literature has indicated otherwise, but many athletes (and even some coaches) may not understand this principle. To make matters worse, we have STILL not received any feedback about our daily athlete monitoring since the beginning of the program.

As we are forced to continue daily athlete monitoring (or else we risk losing funding), I have taken additional measurements which I feel are important. I currently input data into an Excel spreadsheet, and I hope to figure out how to graph the data once I have enough data points. Instead of considering how well I thought I slept, I would track the number of hours that I sleep per night. Instead of rating how I felt about nutrition and hydration, I would track how much water I drank, how much protein I ate, and how often I had vegetables with meals. Now the data is more meaningful, because it is not just based on my “feeling”. I have asked fellow teammates about their thoughts on the daily monitoring and they have similar feelings: why bother measuring things if we are not going to receive any feedback?

Relating this to KIN 515: Gap Analysis, there clearly is a gap in athlete monitoring of Canadian national team badminton players. If I were to simply port this system to monitor BC’s targeted badminton players, I would not have meaningful data to make meaningful changes. From the course, I learned that it is important to track data, but it is more important to track data that is relevant for future interventions. Instead of simply tracking what athletes are doing in training, I hope to add an additional question: why? I feel it is important for athletes to understand why they are doing things in training, because it should increase the amount of deliberate practice and reduce the amount of “going through the motions”. By tracking the purpose of various exercises in each training session, the athlete can see how much practice is allotted to various aspects of their game and it may help explain strengths and weaknesses a bit better. For example, if an athlete is only doing multi-shuttle training (i.e. coach feeds multiple shuttles in the drill), shot quality may be compromised if the athlete is too focused on hitting the shuttles. Since multiple shuttles are used, there is no feedback on shot quality as the player can hit a bad shot or make an unforced error, but the coach will continue to feed another shuttle in play as if the athlete’s shot was still in play.

To illustrate this concept, consider the following video from YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmQV8oD7ZXc

Within 12 shuttles, the player has already made 4 mistakes (interestingly, all on the player’s left side of the court). There are always strengths and weaknesses to different exercises, and when the purpose of the exercise is constantly identified and recognized by the athletes, better interventions can be made to adjust the drill to benefit the athlete.

I have attached a copy of my own log which I started after the residential component of the graduate certificate program. I hope to review the data after about 3 months, and I am considering adding some additional metrics to track, including fiber intake, omega-3 intake, and heart rate data during training sessions, once I get a better wrist-based HR device (I CANNOT use the chest strap because it negatively affects my performance on court). Despite trying to pilot changes on myself first, I still try to gather feedback from other athletes and coaches by asking them what they think is important. There are times when people have said, “Badminton is 90% mental”, which is frustrating because I know they don’t have a way to measure it. I personally do not agree with their statement, because I believe every athlete has their own unique profile. But that’s another problem to solve…

KIN 598 – Journal 1 Example (please do not share this file)