Skill Transfers Through Power

Have the right energy throughout your organization, or you're just wasting time

Force blocks skill transfer from occurring.

Power is the conduit.

The beginning of Power vs. Force reads:

“The skillful are not obvious. They appear to be simple-minded. Those who know this know the patterns of the Absolute. To know the patterns is the Subtle Power. The Subtle Power moves all things and has no name.”

To grow in any domain of life, you need the right environment with the right energy. It has to be above 200 for anything ‘generative’ to happen:

Hint: Player development needs generative energy.

There will be many people and organizations in the coming months and years as the ecological approach continues to show positive results in the organizations that believe in the theory, who will not get the skill transfer and results they were told about when they chose to copy the thing that interent started talking about.

Why will the organizations that choose to copy and apply what is trending not get the same results as those who believe?

Intention matters.

Belief matters. The word belief itself comes from the Greek word pisteuo, which means so much more than just believing something in your head. It means “believe in, to entrust, to rely on, to cling to.”

To become one with. To align.

Being energetically aligned as an organization matters.

You can copy the thing, you can’t copy the energy.

You can copy the startup’s idea, but you can’t copy the aligned energy that 4 people have about the thing they are starting in an attempt to change the world.

You can try to copy what Walmart does, but you can’t copy their energy and intention, from Power vs. Force:

The retail chain Walmart offers a convenient example. During Sam Walton’s tenure as CEO, sales associates at Walmart were trained to be of service to their customers by being genuinely attentive and helpful. The company’s alignment to “truth,” which in this case corresponded to a genuine desire to aid its customers, resulted in an excellent profit margin. Other large retailers, eager to increase their profit margins, attempted to copy Walmart’s success by introducing changes in how they trained their sales associates. However, these other large retailers lacked Walmart’s fundamental alignment with its mission to offer genuine help to consumers; their sales associates mimicked the actions of Walmart’s employees without understanding the underlying motivation. They were driven by a desire for sales and profits, not a desire for the well being of their customers. As a result, Walmart remained the industry leader.

Here’s how Adam Nicholas thinks about it:

If you’re allowed to practice and fail in the practice environment Monday to Thursday and are encouraged to continue to try and find new and better solutions…

But at 7 pm on Friday, when the bright lights of gameday shine, when you turn a puck over on your first shift and are benched, that’s non-integrious energy in your environment.

The messaging is confusing and conflicting, which will lead to parts of the solution space being shut off. This flies in due opposition to player development.

Force messaging puts you into survival, in survival, you see fewer options.

Power messaging keeps your vision open, allowing you to see and express more of yourself through the game.

By analogy, instead of a menu of options to order from to make a play being 10, you can only order off the kids’ menu, which has 3 options. Or worse, because you were ‘bad’, you don’t get to order and eat anymore. You just have to sit there quietly and watch your friends eat.

There’s a reason the ecological approach doesn’t exist everywhere. If there are only 15 people in hockey who believe in it and they are spread out all over the world, good luck getting them all into one room.

Montreal has accomplished that feat in the NHL.

OKC has done it in the NBA.

There are a few other places where the entire staff is ‘all-in’.

In many places, the player development ‘department’ is above 200, but the coaching staff is below 200.

Things don’t transfer because there is conflicting energy.

The only reason it works in MTL and OKC is that they probably got rid of ‘departments’ and everyone is aligned.

Because those places know, feel, and believe the same thing Nicholas wrote about in his post.

What do they know?

What’s the secret?

It’s this…

Who you are must match what you do.

Skill transfer is energy transfer. Skill transfer is ensuring your environment has people who are aligned. Alignment creates signal and coherence.

It’s physics. The organizations that are all-in create a signal. The copiers who think they should adopt this trendy thing or only 2/10 people on staff believe, create noise; the energy is incoherent:

Noise is low energy. Lower energy decreases the intrisic Power of your organiztion. It takes away from your ability to inspire and influence your athletes towards better. A staff that calibrates lower on the scale will have players who will grow and improve at a lesser rate over time.

High-energy environments are the only ones that allow for growth due to aligned, coherent energy. Power is the conduit.

Your players will connect practice to game when they feel connected to you.

No Power, no transfer.

"Failure, suffering and eventual sickness result from the influence of weak patterns; success, happiness and health proceed from powerful attractor patterns."

-Hawkins