Rod Ellingworth is a coach with team Sky, formerly for British cycling. Ellingworth has an exemplary record with both British cycling and team Sky and is a cycling man through and through.
In 2013 the cycling journalist (and profession skeptic) David Walsh was invited to live with team Sky for a year, and he did on and off all the way through the tour. He wrote a book about it called Inside Team Sky
It would be hard to believe if team Sky were cheating David Walsh would not have seen it or written about it or reported it.
In the book Inside Team Sky David Brailsford explains the benefits of Rod Ellingworth to the organisation and it’s perhaps something that all of us could learn a little bit from.
Brailsford explains that a clock has 3 hands, an hour hand a minute hand and a second hand. This represents either living life in the second in the minute or in the hour or the short term, medium term or long term. Ellingworth is one of the only people that Brailsford has ever met who has the ability to live in all three at once.
Walsh then references a conversation with Ellingworth during the tour when team Sky are in extreme difficulty because their team is falling apart, which Ellingworth absolutely sees, but at the same time Ellingworth talks about the protection of one of the riders and making sure that things are not too hard for him for the rest of the season so that he comes into next season in better form.
How many of us have the ability to do that? In the mist of a crisis be able to identify the fact that the crisis will not affect the long term. To be able to assess our actions our decisions and our interactions with people. Not just on the now but on the later than now.
Perhaps this is a skill you can learn if you are aware of it and if so we should all try to learn it; whether we work in Business or not. If it’s not a skill you can learn then find someone who has it because they would be invaluable and they would enhance your life incredibly.
Blog post number: 1384
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