This article launches Third Factor’s Story Behind the Story series, in which we unpack the stories behind both iconic and under-the-radar Olympic and Paralympic moments. For our first feature, Third Factor CEO Dane Jensen sat down with Tessa Virtue – two-time Olympic champion and, with her partner Scott Moir, the most decorated Olympic figure skaters of all time. — From the outside, the story of Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir’s career is simple: show up every four years and win. Gold in Vancouver, silver in Sochi, then, after retiring and un-retiring in spectacular fashion, gold in PyeongChang via one of the Winter Olympics’ all-time iconic performances. But the story behind gold in 2018 is strikingly different than gold in 2010. The lead-up to 2010 in Vancouver was marked by overcoming both injury and conflict: “I had surgery to combat an overuse injury in my legs, and throughout the recovery process Scott and I stopped speaking. We just lost trust.” At the Olympics, Tessa was “counting the number of steps it would take to get to the cafeteria because I knew if I walked those 300 paces, I wouldn’t be able to practise or compete. And so, it felt like the ultimate Hail Mary just worrying about making it to the end of a program.” In the end, talent and hard work – on both recovery and the relationship – aligned to produce one shining moment. Tessa and Scott were crowned the youngest ice dance champions in Olympic history. It was an incredible performance – and one that felt like it would be hard to repeat. “Stepping off the podium in 2010 … I’m not sure I really felt like a winner, if I’m honest,” she says. “There were a lot of factors that had to come together for us to win, and I’m not really sure if I knew stepping off the podium in 2010 that I could replicate that.”

“We can BE the best, even when we’re not AT our best.”

At PyeongChang in 2018, on the other hand, “before our music even started, I felt different. I felt like a high performer, and I didn’t feel like I needed the judges’ results to prove that for me.” And contrary to the feeling after the 2010 Games, after 2018, “there was real joy and satisfaction that came from the hard work, from the pressure, from all of the things that I would’ve found totally depleting two, four, eight or 12 years earlier.” So what changed? In our conversation with Tessa, three evolutions stood out: embracing discomfort rather than focusing on the number of hours spent in training; a deliberate shift in mindset from chasing perfection to pursuing excellence; and – above all else – a reclamation of personal power.

01. Creating discomfort vs. over-training

After the over-use injuries and surgeries that characterized 2010, the comeback in 2018 was built on less training time – three hours a day instead of 12 – more recovery time, and using the limited training hours to deliberately create imperfect conditions to sharpen their resilience. Whether it was leaving the ice unflooded and chipped, pumping in crowd noise, or falling on command to practise recovery, each practice built confidence that, as Tessa says, “we can BE the best, even when we’re not AT our best.” Here’s Tessa discussing that process:

02. Pursuing excellence vs. chasing perfection

In Tessa’s words, “We needed to stop chasing perfection and instead pursue excellence … and once we took perfect off the table, we thought excellence was possible.” Their daily goal became showing up at an “8 out of 10”; not in effort, but in execution. Reframing their approach unhooked them from the impossible standard of perfection and freed them to connect with the joy and challenge of consistent excellence. Listen to Tessa talk about this shift:

03. Becoming drivers vs. passengers

At the heart of Tessa and Scott’s story behind the story is reclaiming a sense of agency and self-efficacy. After years of being “good little soldiers,” for their 2018 comeback, they stepped into the driver’s seat: assembling their own team, setting their own standards, and “operating as if we were the CEOs of our own business,” she says. “We had agency and autonomy, we really were steering the ship.” That changed their experience leading up to the Games and, she believes, made the ultimate win more fulfilling. Listen to Tessa talk about this shift:

Of course, the effectiveness of these shifts is not limited to sports. We can all benefit from:

Increasing short-burst intensity and building time for recovery instead of focusing on hours worked or busyness as a proxy for effectiveness.
‘Roughing up the ice’ to build resilience into our projections, targets, pilots, and project plans instead of making plans that rely on perfect conditions.
Embracing ‘8 out of 10’ efforts that will produce more from consistency over the long haul instead of aiming for the impossibility of perfection.
Seeing ourselves as the author of our stories instead of allowing ourselves to fall into the mindset of being characters.

When Tessa and Scott made these shifts, the impact was transformative. In Tessa’s words, “I felt like I had the recipe for what it meant to be excellent.” Given the results, it’s a recipe that’s worth testing out for yourself. Want to go deeper? Watch Tessa’s full conversation with Dane here:

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Before every season, Dallas Eakins sits down to think about what kind of “infection” he wants to spread among his players. It’s not the image you expect from a pro hockey coach. But that’s how he puts it. Dallas has coached in some of hockey’s highest-pressure environments. He’s the former coach of the Anaheim Ducks and Edmonton Oilers. Today, he’s GM and Head Coach of Adler Mannheim in Germany. He knows that in locker rooms it’s easy for the germs of fear, panic and “don’t screw up” to get airborne. Early in his career, that sometimes happened.

“They will never care how much you know, until they know how much you care.”

He’d come in armed with systems, standards and structures. His expectations, he thought, were crystal clear. But when the team hit a rough patch, he could feel it: Players were complying with the plan, not owning it. They were doing what was asked, but they weren’t bringing the honesty, grit or collaboration that was needed. Looking back, Dallas is blunt: He was leading from systems and standards first. Care came second. Over time, he switched the order. “They will never care how much you know,” he says now, “until they know how much you care.” He still runs a tight ship. The standards are high. But now he starts with care, gets disciplined about consistency, and lets trust show up as a byproduct. And when that happens, something important shifts: Accountability stops being something he does to the team and becomes something the team does with and for each other. That’s the journey this article is about. And it’s one that’s seen over and over, from NHL locker rooms to university parking lots to a sweaty beep test in a Swedish sports hall.

Coaches West: Jeff Daniels & Dallas Eakins (right), American Hockey League (AHL), 2013 All-Star Skills Competition. American Hockey League (AHL), CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

A Consistent Pattern

In every case, the pattern is the same:

01.

Start with Care. Really know your people and their experience.

02.

Be Disciplined to Stay Consistent. Show up the same way in the highs and lows, while holding high standards.

03.

Let the Team Hold the Line. They naturally hold each other accountable because they feel the care and see it, consistently.

01. Start with Care

Really know your people and their experience. Care is not a motivational speech at the start of the season. It’s not saying, “My door is always open,” and then being permanently unavailable. Care is deeply unglamorous and wonderfully specific. When Dallas talks about caring, he means:

Know players as humans: their families, their histories, the stuff that keeps them up at night.
Notice when someone walks in a little off. Take the time to check in.
Understand that the same message lands differently with a 19-year-old rookie than it does with a veteran on his fourth team.

That’s not “being nice.” It’s gathering data. Because the minute you understand someone’s reality, you can design the way you lead them. I felt this viscerally on a very different stage: move-in day at my daughter’s university. We arrived on campus with our car full of bins and feelings. My inner soundtrack was looping: I hope she’s going to be okay. Is her room okay? Are the people okay? Is she okay? It was chaos – traffic, honking, parents doing the slow drive of mild panic. And then we met the red-shirt crew. A team of student volunteers swarmed our car – waving, smiling, introducing themselves, asking my daughter about her program and residence, unloading everything into carts. Within minutes, our car was empty and her stuff upstairs. More importantly, she was smiling. The energy in her body had changed. So had mine. In 10 minutes, nothing fundamental about her life was different. Same dorm, same unknowns. What changed was this: a group of people had clearly thought about her experience and built around it. That’s care as a verb. Leaders who start with care:

Plan for how people feel on day one, week one, month one.
Name realities in the room (“you’re new”, “this is a lot”, “this stretch is brutal”) so people don’t have to pretend.
Ask questions that make it about the person, not just the task.

It doesn’t mean lowering the bar. It means people don’t have to waste energy hiding where they really are. And that’s what sets you up for the second move.

02. Be Disciplined to Stay Consistent

Show up the same way in the highs and lows, while holding high standards. Care gets people to lean in. Consistency is what convinces them you mean it. This is where Dallas’s “infection” metaphor comes in. Before walking into the room, he’ll ask himself: “What do I want people to breathe in from me today?” If the team has lost five straight, it is easy for a leader to walk in tight, reactive, and unintentionally spread panic. If he lets media chatter or his own inner critic become his story, the team will inhale that anxiety. So Dallas works on his internal hygiene:

Is this thought helping, or just scaring me?
Is this my story, or someone else’s?
What is actually true about how we’re playing?

The goal isn’t to be robotic. It’s to be predictable in the right ways: Players may not know what the next drill is, but they know he’s not going to humiliate them, disappear emotionally, or swing wildly from praise to blame based on one result. That kind of consistency is a form of care. And it unlocks something important: People start to take more risks, tell more truth, and tolerate higher standards because they’re not bracing for who’s going to walk through the door today. I saw a similar pattern with the women’s floorball team I worked with at Pixbo in Sweden. Every season, we ran the dreaded beep test. At first, it was all the usual things: tight shoulders, nervous jokes, the temptation to disappear. Everyone knew it mattered, but it felt like a test to survive. So we focused on being boringly consistent in between:

Clear expectations about effort.
The same type of debrief after good days and bad.
The same message: You matter on your best day and your worst day.

By year two, beep-test day felt different. Players were still nervous, but they walked in ready. No mysterious “sick days.” Less avoiding eye contact. A quiet pride in even showing up for it. Consistency didn’t make it easy. It made it safe enough to go hard.

03. Let the Team Hold the Line

They naturally hold each other accountable because they feel the care and see it, consistently. When care and consistency have been there long enough, something lovely happens: Accountability stops being a solo act. Back to that beep test. As players started to drop out, they didn’t head for the showers or go look at their phones. They started cheering for whoever was still running. I remember one player who carried a lot of anxiety. When she finally hit her limit and stepped out, you could see the disappointment in her whole body – hands on knees, head dropped. Within seconds, two teammates were at her side. One put a hand on her back. The other said something like: “You were further than last time. You’ll get past it next time. We’re right here.” That’s not, “Oh well, who cares about the test?” It’s, We care about you too much to pretend this doesn’t matter. And we care about you too much to let this moment define you. That’s what it looks like when a group starts to hold the line together:

They protect each other’s dignity and the standard.
They challenge each other from a place of belief, not frustration.
They don’t let someone quietly slide below what they’re capable of.

In Dallas’s language, they’ve “caught” the culture. Players are now the ones asking, “Is this who we are?” after a bad period. Veteran guys are the ones pulling a rookie aside to say, “We don’t do it that way here, and here’s why.” The leader hasn’t stepped back from standards. If anything, the bar is higher. But the weight of holding it no longer sits on one pair of shoulders.

Bringing It Back to Your Team

So if you’re a coach, manager, captain or the unofficial “glue” on your team, here are three simple questions to sit with:

Where, specifically, do people first experience your care? If someone new walked in tomorrow, what would show them, “You matter here. You’re not just another body on the roster”?
If we followed you around for a month, what patterns would we see? Not just on your good days, but on the tired, stressed, messy ones too. Would people say, “I may not love every decision, but I always know which version of them is going to show up”?
Where have you already seen the team hold the line together? Think of one moment where teammates raised the standard with each other, so no leader was required. What groundwork did you already lay to make that possible?

At the end of the day, if we want people to tell the truth, hold high standards, and stay in it when it’s hard, they must feel we’re in it with them, not just watching from the bench. Care is what signals that. Consistency is what proves it. And trust – the kind that leads to real, shared accountability – is what grows from there.

Meet our expert: Karyn Garossino, Associate Trainer

Karyn Garossino is an expert in performance under pressure and leadership development. A former Olympic figure skater and five-time World Championship competitor, Karyn holds a Master’s Degree in Psychology and Adult Education and has spent 40+ years being coached and coaching others. She works with leaders across business and government, teaches with Queen’s Smith School of Business, and helps individuals and teams transform pressure into growth.

“How do you collaborate with someone who is different from you in personality, style, or approach?”

When someone thinks, communicates, or behaves differently than you do, collaboration can feel difficult, frustrating, or even impossible. If handled correctly, however, you can flip these differences into opportunities that benefit both parties. Doing this effectively starts with understanding what collaboration is and is not. Collaboration is not compromise. Collaboration is the act of working with someone to produce or create something. Compromise often means splitting differences and giving up something you value so that each side “meets in the middle.” That’s give-and-take, but it’s often at the cost of optimal outcomes. Collaboration is something quite different. It’s a win-win mindset that grows the pie instead of dividing it. In genuine collaboration, both individuals bring their strengths, expertise, and perspectives to the table in a way that creates a better solution than either person could have produced alone. Collaboration requires:

Assertiveness: the ability to contribute and communicate your own perspective with conviction.
Co-operation: an equal willingness to understand and integrate the other person’s view.

That willingness is essential. Research tells us that the most important factor in leveraging differences is Psychological Safety – meaning people need to believe they can share ideas, ask questions, raise concerns or admit mistakes. So an openness on your part to practice genuine inquiry, rather than defend or persuade, will pay huge dividends. When collaboration works, both parties feel heard, and the result is broader, more innovative and more effective than a simple compromise.

Diversity: The Advantage and the Risk

Differences in personality, style, and perspective are not obstacles; they are assets. Research shows that diverse teams often outperform homogeneous ones because they bring varied perspectives, unique knowledge, and deeper problem-solving capacity. However, diversity only leads to better performance when it’s managed properly. Without effective interactions, differences can amplify conflict, miscommunication, and breakdowns in cohesion. That’s the risk McKinsey and others have highlighted: diverse teams can either perform brilliantly or fail spectacularly depending on how they engage with one another. So the first step in collaborating with someone different is not to wish away those differences; it’s to welcome them, and reframe them as advantages. See differences not as barriers, but as opportunities to expand what’s possible. When someone’s style or perspective differs from yours, that’s not a threat; it’s new data. It’s an invitation to learn something new and explore another approach. To do this, you must be intentional about:

Setting aside your default approach long enough to understand how their thinking works.
Asking questions to truly explore the other person’s priorities, assumptions, and logic.
Active listening, where your goal is to nurture a trusting environment.
Holding both stories as true – yours, theirs – and then creating a shared story together.

One way to think about this is that it is about sitting on the same side of the table as the other person – instead of across the table. This can be either literal (in the case of in-person collaboration), or metaphorical when we are on the phone or virtual. When we try to collaborate while facing off against each other by defending our turf, comparing our solutions, or debating who’s right, we create an us-versus-them dynamic. That’s not collaboration, it’s negotiation. Instead:

Position yourself with the other person, not opposite them.
Focus together on the problem, not on each other.
Use a shared surface (whiteboard, document, screen) where both contributions and perspectives are captured and visible.

Sitting side by side helps shift your brain out of opposition and into shared exploration. It also signals a partnership orientation: “We’re in this together.” Pair this with curiosity-based questions like:

“How do you see this unfolding?”
“What matters most to you here?”
“What’s your biggest concern?”
“Where might we be missing something?”

These shifts – mindset first, then practical behaviour – are how collaboration becomes real. And yes, this takes time and self-management on your part. However, productive results and improved relationships will be your reward.

Key Takeaways:

Collaboration ≠ Compromise. It’s Expansion. If you’re “meeting in the middle,” you’re probably shrinking the outcome. Real collaboration grows the pie by combining strengths, not trading them off. The goal isn’t to protect your idea, it’s to create a better one together.
Differences Are Data, Not Disruptions. When someone’s style or thinking throws you off, that’s not friction, it’s information. High-performing teams treat difference as an input to improve the solution, not a hurdle to overcome.
Psychological Safety Is the Multiplier. Diversity only pays off when people feel safe to speak, question, and challenge. If you’re defending or persuading, you’re shutting down performance. If you’re curious and inquiring, you’re unlocking it.
Get on the Same Side of the Table, Literally and Mentally. Opposite sides create opposition. Side-by-side creates partnership. Shift your posture, share the surface (whiteboard, doc, screen), and aim your energy at the problem, not the person. It’s a simple move that changes the whole dynamic.

When people picture elite sport, they usually imagine the glory: the medals, the anthem, the moment everything comes together. What they don’t often see is the psychological turbulence underneath those performances – the doubt, fear, shame, and self-recrimination that show up when things don’t go according to plan.

Years ago, Third Factor founder Peter Jensen was working with a Canadian national team that was, by all measures, one of the best in the world. They were perennial contenders, a program with history and swagger. And yet, in the first days of a world championship, everything came undone. They lost to their arch-rivals badly, and the shock was devastating.

We’re always navigating the gap between what is and what ought to be. That gap hurts. But the hurt is meaningful. And if we can help people explore that meaning, we unlock the very thing that allows them to grow.

By the next morning, the athletes stood in the hotel lobby looking hollowed-out. Angry. Embarrassed. Anxious. They knew the tournament was short. They knew another loss could knock them out. And they knew they were at risk of spiraling.

This is the territory we work in every day – not just in sport, but in business, education, and leadership. People experiencing disappointment, failure, or the deep discomfort of not living up to their own expectations. As psychologist Kazimierz Dabrowski wrote, we’re always navigating the gap between what is and what ought to be. That gap hurts. But the hurt is meaningful. And if we can help people explore that meaning, we unlock the very thing that allows them to grow.

What follows is how Peter helped that team turn a moment of psychological crisis into the fuel that carried them to a gold medal, not despite their negative emotions, but because of them.

01.

Acknowledge the pain and help people observe it

02.

Move toward compassion, not criticism

03.

Help them find the meaning inside the pain

1. Acknowledge the pain and help people observe it

When Peter asked the players how they were feeling that morning, they didn’t hold back: awful, embarrassed, sad, angry. A typical response might have been reassurance: You’ll be fine, shake it off, don’t worry about it. But reassurance rarely helps; it often makes people feel more alone in their emotions. Instead, Peter simply said: “Yeah. You look awful.”

It may sound blunt, but it wasn’t judgmental. It was observational. It told the players: I see you. What you’re feeling makes sense. Let’s look at it together.

When the strength coach announced they’d be doing lunges at practice, Peter asked: “How are you going to look doing lunges? How will your teammates know you’re back?” These were reflective questions not about the loss, but about how they were showing up in response to it. They invited the players to step outside themselves and observe what was happening internally. This is the first job of a coach in hard moments: Help people dis-identify from the emotion without dismissing it and let them see the feeling rather than become the feeling.

2. Move toward compassion, not criticism

Negative emotions become destructive not because they exist, but because we weaponize them against ourselves. We interpret them as proof: I’m not good enough. I’ll never perform. I don’t belong here. A coach must interrupt that spiral. Peter did this in an unexpected way. That morning, a staff member had told a long, mundane story about buying a T-shirt on sale. The players had zero patience for it. Peter asked the staff member to tell the story again to the entire team. Afterwards, he asked: “Why did he buy that T-shirt?”. Eventually someone answered: “Because he got a good deal.” Peter replied: “Right. He wasn’t going to overpay. He knows what shirts are worth. You guys are overpaying right now.” No judgment. Just compassion and perspective. The point was simple: Don’t pay more than the moment is worth. You lost a game. It hurts. But don’t add interest by beating yourselves up. A coach helps people see the whole truth, not the narrow, distorted version they’re stuck inside.

3. Help them find the meaning inside the pain

That afternoon, the team played a weaker opponent and won only 2–0. Instead of relief, they felt further proof that they were failing. So Peter gathered them and asked each player to share what it meant to represent their country. What surfaced were stories of parents driving endless hours to practices, communities fundraising to support them, comebacks from injury, and dreams that had taken years to build. It was emotional. And it was clarifying. The problem wasn’t that they had lost a game. The problem was that they weren’t living up to what the opportunity meant to them. And when people reconnect with meaning, they reconnect with agency. They can choose how to move forward. From that point on, Peter reinforced that meaning daily: At practice: “An American player woke up today preparing to face you in the gold medal game. How are you preparing?” In the weight room: “Can you improve 1% today? What will you do to show you’re getting better?” By naming their pain and understanding its purpose the team turned the emotional energy inward, toward growth instead of self-attack. They never lost another game. They won the gold medal.

When negative feelings become a weapon

Negative emotions are not the problem. What hurts performance is when people interpret those emotions as evidence of inadequacy: “I failed, therefore I’m a failure.” This is the voice of the critic – a destructive internal narrator that convinces us we’re incapable of growth or unworthy of success. A coach’s role is to challenge that voice by asking better questions:

What is this feeling signaling?
What is the conflict between what is and what ought to be?
And what does this moment make possible?

That’s how people reclaim their will – what we call the third factor: the inner capacity to direct your own development.

The takeaway for leaders and coaches

Whether you’re leading a national team or a project team, the principles are the same:

Acknowledge negative feelings without trying to eliminate them.
Help people step back and observe their internal state.
Guide them toward understanding what the discomfort is pointing to.

When we do this, people stop treating hard moments as evidence of failure and start treating them as invitations to rise. Crisis becomes a catalyst. Pain becomes fuel. And performance becomes possible.

Meet our expert: Garry Watanabe, Principal Trainer & Sport Lead

Garry Watanabe is an expert on coaching and performance under pressure. A former corporate lawyer, Garry spent eight years as an elite swimming coach in Southern California, has a Master’s Degree in Sports Psychology, and has worked with thousands of executives in organizations like Deloitte, RBC, and Acuity Brands. As Third Factor’s sport lead, Garry supports the performance of Olympic and Paralympic athletes, and teaches at UNC Chapel Hill and Queen’s University.

“What is the difference between leadership and coaching?”

This is such a great question. These two terms are thrown around a lot and often used interchangeably. Here’s how I think about it. Leadership is what you do and say to help a group of two or more people stay focused and motivated as they move toward a common goal. You play a role in choosing that goal and providing the direction and energy to get there. Coaching, on the other hand, is different. The word “coach” comes from Kocs, a town in Hungary famous for making horse-drawn carriages – vehicles built to carry people from where they are to where they want to go. That’s what a coach does too: helps someone travel from their current state to their desired destination. Here’s an example to illustrate the difference. Suppose you believe whitewater rafting is a transformative experience — one that tests personal limits, builds trust, and sparks pure joy. You think everyone should experience it at least once. So, this summer, you decide to make it happen for the community of people around you. You share your vision: why it matters, how exhilarating it will be. You enlist people in your adventure, pull together teams to plan and execute. You keep the idea alive when energy dips, refocus the group when distractions arise and keep the momentum moving forward That’s leadership. Now imagine a different scenario. Someone comes to you. They’ve always wanted to go whitewater rafting but never made it happen. Maybe they’re hesitant — unsure where to start, or even intimidated. You help them explore why this matters. You work with them to identify realistic next steps. You talk through what’s holding them back — fear, time, uncertainty — and how they might move past it. You offer encouragement, check in, and hold them accountable as they move toward the goal. That’s coaching.

The insight: It’s about who chooses the destination

Leadership is about having a vision, enlisting others, keeping the group on course and sustaining motivation on the journey. Coaching is about helping someone clarify their destination, navigate their obstacles, and keep going when the waters get rough. Is there overlap? Of course. Am I missing something? Almost certainly. Both leadership and coaching are about movement – helping people go from here to there. The question is: who chooses the destination?

Key Takeaways:

Leadership is about setting a vision, mobilizing people, and sustaining group motivation toward a shared goal.
Coaching focuses on helping an individual move from where they are to where they want to go: clarifying goals, removing barriers, and offering support.
Leadership involves choosing direction and rallying others; coaching helps someone articulate their own destination and progress toward it.
Both involve movement and growth, but differ primarily in who defines the goal.

John Wooden is often called the greatest coach of all time. He won ten National Championships in twelve years during his tenure as head coach of the UCLA Bruins men’s basketball team. At one point, he won seven championships in a row. The next longest streak is two. With his college roster substantially turning over every year, Wooden’s secret weapon was adaptability: when he had two 7-footers in Lew Alcindor and Bill Walton, he focused on parking these ‘bigs’ near the basket and feeding them the ball. When he had a shorter roster, he adapted to focus more on shooting from the high post. Hundreds of very good coaches have not fared as well: their system ‘clicks’ with a star player and they have great success, and then the star moves on and they continue to try to run the same playbook – while their success, career, and reputations diminish. As Wooden succinctly put it: “failure is not fatal, but failure to change can be.”

John Wooden with Lew Alcindor, Lynn Shackelford, Kenny Heitz, and Lucius Allen; Los Angeles Times, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Wooden was coaching basketball, but he was also dispensing essential career advice. What he understood was that if you want to be future-proof, the steady refinement of one set of skills isn’t enough. As Kelly Bradley, the CHRO of RBC, Canada’s largest bank, recently shared: “we talk about [acquiring new skills] as building range. Expanding skills and experiences gives individuals more options and the organization more flexibility. In a world where change is constant, range becomes a strategic advantage.”

“In a world where change is constant, range becomes a strategic advantage.”

Now more than ever, a future-proof career hinges on the ability to acquire new skills that allow you to adapt to a new reality. So, can you get better at building range? Well, that’s where meta-skills come into play.

Skills and Meta-Skills in Action: The Pharmacist

Consider someone who has been a pharmacist for the past 20 years. They came out of University with a Chemistry degree and started working in a job that required two primary skills: chemistry to compound the medication and math to count pills and work the cash register. As technology advanced, the compounding and dispensing part of the role became more automated, and the role of pharmacists expanded greatly to include services like medicine reviews for Seniors, diabetic counseling, celiac counseling, flu shots, diagnosing and prescribing, and more. Suddenly, being a pharmacist also required customer service (or even sales) skills, and the process savvy to manage an automated dispensing process. Fast forward, and we can easily imagine the role evolving to require mental health counseling skills, tech savvy to perform diagnostics to deliver personalized medicine, and more.

Figure 1 – A Pharmacist’s Journey: Skills vs. Meta-Skills

Chart displaying meta-skills at various points in learning growth cycle

These different sets of skills anchor execution at different points in time – but what enables our pharmacist to evolve from one set of skills to another and remain successful over time are meta-skills. These are the capabilities that allow someone to consistently and repeatedly let go of old skills that have anchored their success and acquire and learn new ones.

Getting Better at Building Range: Three Imperatives

The discipline of evolving and building range can be broken down into three imperatives: see clearly, move quickly, and stay the course.

01.

See clearly Build self-awareness and empathy.

02.

Move quickly Strengthen flexibility, creativity, and learning capacity.

03.

Stay the course Cultivate resilience

01. See Clearly

Acquiring new skills starts with developing a great radar: Where am I strong? Where am I falling behind? What do I need to work on developing? Self-awareness is half of the battle, but an under-appreciated meta-skill is honing the ability to listen to critique with empathy rather than resistance. When someone points out a gap or limitation in your skill-set – instead of pushing back, consider “what are they seeing that I’m not? How could that help me identify a skill I need to build?”

02. Move Quickly

Strengthening learning capacity is at the heart of moving more quickly to build range. The faster you can move up learning curves, the easier it is to acquire new skills. There are many great resources that can help you get better at learning – but one of my favourites (which also happens to be free) is the Learning How to Learn course taught by the wonderful Dr. Barbara Oakley.

03. Stay the Course

Finally, the journey of evolution is not a straight line. Adults hate being at the bottom of learning curves, and the journey up those curves is fraught with pressure, discomfort and setbacks. It is much more comfortable to refine one skill set over time than it is to build range. One of the most effective ways to build resilience is to focus on relationships: who else is working towards the same goals as you? Who can you learn alongside? Who will push you, support you, and absolve you of the guilt we all feel from not being enough? Identifying 2-3 people who can be in your ‘training group’ can be a well-spring of resilience.

Meta-Skills: Crystal Ball Optional

Jeff Bezos famously said that he built Amazon around the belief that at no point would people want to pay higher prices or have worse product selection. As he stated at the time: “I very frequently get the question: ‘What’s going to change in the next 10 years?’… I almost never get the question: ‘What’s not going to change in the next 10 years?’ And I submit to you that that second question is the more important of the two.” Meta-skills are that rare example of something that will not change. There is no crystal ball required to see that the future will be different than the present, success in that future will require new and different skills, and an ability to spot critical skills, rapidly learn, and stay the course through the learning curve will be an advantage.

“Individuals who invest in strengthening their awareness, learning capacity and resilience can become irreplaceable”

Investing in meta-skills will pay a guaranteed return for both organizations and individuals. Organizations that invest in building meta-skills at scale will be rewarded with a talent pool that can adapt to new requirements and deploy new capabilities with greater ease and speed. Individuals who invest in strengthening their awareness, learning capacity and resilience can become irreplaceable.