I have been a keen sportsman all my life rowing at school and university and playing tennis which I still do. I have often been struck when participating in a sporting activity by the crossover between the lessons sport teaches and our working lives.
 
You have to be prepared and fit for both especially if you are competing at the higher levels of sport or have a senior role in business. All those hours doing circuit training or running during the winter months pay off when you are in the summer months competing. Equally at work continuous learning and training at your professional task and networking, not just doing the day job, ultimately pays off.
 
Sport teaches so much. For example, you inevitably get nervous before a big game playing in a club competition or in a rowing final just before the start. Managing that nervousness and turning it into a positive attitude (rather than a debilitating inability to perform) helps to do the same before a major professional activity like a presentation to three hundred people or a major face to face negotiation (remember those!)
 
If you lose a point or a match in sport at any level then the cardinal rule is that you must put that loss behind you and move one. The same is true if you suffer a setback in your professional work like losing a contract or worse your job. What sport teaches you is there is absolutely no purpose in dwelling on the point you lost or the goal you conceded, even if it was entirely your fault, or occurred through some event beyond your control like a referee or umpire’s decision. You must forget it and go onto the next point or score a goal or win the next contract or get a better job.
 
Ultimately with a positive forward looking attitude you may eventually do better as a result, despite the apparent immediate setback. At school we kept reaching the final in rowing regattas only to lose narrowly. But we kept trying with some help from a teacher who had been an Olympic standard weightlifter. Not much to do with the water you might say but he taught us to have a winning attitude. We duly triumphed at the last regatta of the season and in fact of my school rowing career.
 
Leadership is another characteristic that translates from the playing fields into business. I spent 5 years coaching my son’s football team and I found that it was a two way street. Some of the experience I had as a partner in a law firm helped with the training sessions, not least how to be organised. Equally coping with the ups and downs of the winning and the losing – and the parents! - helped me in my legal practice.
 
Here is a good article from the CEO Magazine What business leaders can learn from sports coaches which suggests There is arguably no more pure form of leadership than coaching a sports team, and business leaders can take many lessons from the world of sports team management. It suggests nine lessons business leaders can learn from sports coaches and has some great quotes from sporting leaders including 

• Vince Lombardi the great 1960’s American football coach who said “Individual commitment to a group effort – that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilisation work.”
• John Calipari, a US university basketball coach “Leadership is about serving everyone under you, asking yourself, ‘How do I give you the tools you need to succeed and proceed?’”

 
Sir Alex Ferguson the great football manager for Manchester United has written a book Lessons on Leading which builds on his successful football management career – see this interview with him from Harvard Business School. Although he was famous for keeping top millionaire football players unequivocally in place – using what became known as the “hair dryer” treatment – he also wisely said “Too many managers talk too much. The two most important words for a player, or for any human being, there is nothing better than hearing “Well done.” And few reprimands are as powerful as silence.”
 
We all use sporting analogies in our working lives anyway often without really realising it. We talk about “upping our game”, “let’s have a level playing field”, “slam dunk” and “taking one for the team” – see this blog 25 Sports Phrases You Might Hear as Workplace Jargon.
 
I suggest that whether or not you actually play any sport, lessons learned from leaders in the sporting world transpose into the professional business world and enable you to “up your game”.
 
As Bill Bradley the former pro basketball player and United States senator commented “Sports is a metaphor for overcoming obstacles and achieving against great odds. Athletes, in times of difficulty, can be important role models.”

As you come up to a busy junction or roundabout in a car it’s very easy to just glance at the oncoming traffic and miss a car coming quickly or a bicycle. A driving school in Torquay Devon recommends Look right and left on approach to the junction to see if it is open or closed. Once at the junction, you always look right first and then look twice each way before you go.
 
Checking and double checking is also essential practice in the professional world. I am using a standalone whiteboard in my home office to capture tasks and as an aid to presenting complex issues diagrammatically. At the top I have written three question marks in red circled three times as a reminder to keep checking agreements and advice for mistakes or errors or anything that might be overlooked.
 
It’s a very simple concept – the Cambridge English Dictionary defines “double-checking” as If you double-check something, you make certain it is correct or safe, usually by examining it again. And yet it is so easy to send out a document with mistakes or errors in or even attach the wrong document to an email.
 
This is quite a serious professional issue. See this interesting article in the UK Law Society Gazette How to: make fewer mistakes which cites a paper on ‘Why do clever lawyers do foolish things?’ by Robert Hunter at the city law firm Herbert Smith Freehills. Interestingly he suggests that intuition is as important as heavy reliance on a rational analytical system in avoiding errors.
 
 Looking at research completed into firefighters and the military, Hunter notes that better decisions were made when ‘sequential logic’ (considering all the options by totting up the pros and cons) was replaced with ‘hyper-vigilant’ decision-making (decisions made under extreme stress when not all alternatives were considered).
 
Hyper-vigilant decisions involved ‘pattern recognition’,  which is what we mean by ‘intuition’.
 
The article also observes that that we are not necessarily training junior lawyers effectively because we associate legal skills with the acquisition of conscious knowledge of the latest cases and statutes rather than passing on experience through coaching and training.
 
There are also many examples in military history of simple failures leading to terrible defeats. In June 217 BC the Roman commander Gaius Flaminius was pursuing the Carthaginian commander Hannibal along the shores of Lake Trasimene in Italy when his advance guard caught up with Hannibal’s rear guard  – this was a trap set up by Hannibal in order to ambush Flaminius. Flaminius ordered his entire army to race forwards to join the fighting. It would have taken only a few minutes to send horsemen to scout the wooded hills, but Flaminius did not do so. As his army raced forward they lost formation, at which point Hannibal led his main army down from the hills where they had been hiding to crash into the disordered Roman flank. It was a massacre.
 
The same is very much true in engineering. In 1928 self-taught engineer William Mulholland built a Los Angeles dam on a defective foundation and ignored the geology of the surrounding canyon. He also dismissed cracks that formed as soon as the reservoir behind it was filled. Five days later, it ruptured, killing 450 people and destroying entire towns (along with Mulholland’s career).
 
And ultimately if after checking once, twice or three times the mistake still happens then we can at least learn from it. As Jules Verne said in Journey to the Centre of the Earth “Science, my lad, has been built upon many errors; but they are errors which it was good to fall into, for they led to the truth.”