Sheri Byrne-Haben

My rediscovered love for Paralympic archery has made me realize that there is a lot of overlapping meaning between these two very different worlds.

As part of the pandemic, I needed to find a safe way to get exercise. I am a wheelchair user, with fused ankles, a leg length discrepancy, a spinal curvature, and very bad osteoporosis. I am also in the category with a very high COVID death rate, a combination of my age plus several acquired autoimmune issues. The combination of those issues left anything aerobic or in public out of the question for safe exercise. Just before the pandemic started, I rediscovered my childhood passion for archery. Fortunately, I live in an area where I can do archery effectively in my backyard.

Shooting for an hour, for me, is better than meditation. I can easily get into a mental state where I lose track of the arrow count — many times I will reach into my quiver, a sack for holding archery bows, for the next arrow, find it empty, and think to myself, “wait, I just started this round!” Practicing daily around the same time has also provided some much-needed structure to my work-from-home day, the way commuting used to. Beginning my daily practice sends my brain the signal “I am done with work.”

Archery is a sport that people who use wheelchairs can do on an even basis with non-disabled individuals. Most wheelchair archers shoot using a compound bow, because the longer recurve bows are difficult to shoot from a seated position due to their length. Additionally, shooting a compound bow requires less upper body strength because the “cams” (the gears at the top and bottom of the compound bow) offset some of the weight it takes to hold the string back once it is fully drawn.

Safety is paramount

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Need is at play in both archery and business. It’s very difficult to be successful at either of these subjects while feeling unsafe. Playing either game equally if you have safety issues is next to impossible. Once my coach was late to a lesson because she was treating someone (not her student) who had shot themselves in the leg. In archery, safety is essential because you can seriously hurt yourself or others with wavering attention or a misplaced shot.

Safety is also important in business, but in the tech world, this mostly comes in the form of psychological safety. Employees who feel unsafe are not fully engaged. Lack of engagement costs American employers $450 Billion to $550 Billion per year in lost productivity. Teams that feel unsafe just aren’t going to be as productive. Innovation and high performance are also strongly linked to psychological safety.

Getting outside independent advice is sometimes necessary

Many people who get serious about archery have a coach. Even if you don’t have a coach, when you are shooting at a public range, especially if you are disabled, you get a lot of unsolicited advice from people there who “just want to help.” Good archery coaches can use their experience to provide a critical eye to errors in your form that might be contributing to “flyers”—the one arrow in an otherwise good bunch that is really far away, and you, the archer, can’t figure out how it got there.

In business, coaching is also common, but comes in many varieties. There are executive coaches, life coaches, communications coaches, organizational development coaches. Closely related to coaching is mentorship and sponsorship. Each of these have their own part to play in a successful career. These are the people who can point out errors in your business form, which will result in improvement in your task execution – the business equivalent of the “shot”).

Always have a goal, even when you aren’t aiming for a bullseye

When training in archery, you don’t always aim for the bullseye. Sometimes you are shooting targets where you are aiming for the corners or the edge of something. Sometimes you are aiming at tin cans (hopefully with arrows that are already kind of trashed). Some people practice “field shooting” where they are shooting at targets the shapes of bears, deer, or whatever they plan on hunting.

When an employee sets goals, they are making their priorities clear for their co-workers, management, and cross-functional product team in the organization.

If the individual’s goals don’t align with the business goals, something’s got to give. That is an arrow that will miss the target entirely. When goals align, the employee knows exactly what they need to focus on the most which helps them prioritize tasks more easily and efficiently. That is an arrow that will hit the target

When the goals align, and everyone is firing on all cylinders, that is a bullseye.

There will be problems completely out of your control

Wind, rain, equipment, mosquitos, heat — all of these will likely degrade your archery experience. You can even plan for them, and take steps to avoid or reduce the impact, but in the end, they are all completely outside your control. Bug spray and practicing early will only get you so far.

Angular release delayed 2 months? Massive AWS outage at the worst possible moment? Someone in the mailroom clicked on the wrong PDF and all your computers are infected with the latest virus? Welcome to the latest episode of “Business — outside your control” You can’t let these chaotic events get to you; you need to figure out a way to work around them. Disaster planning definitely helps in this department. The organizations that are doing the best in the pandemic are the ones that planned ahead of time for “what if we couldn’t go into the office for an extended period of time.” If you don’t have a dedicated disaster planning group, talk to some lawyers, especially ones who specialize in contracts. Law school finely honed my “worst case scenario” generator.

Wobbling is not a good idea. Course correction is.

In archery, consistency is crucial. You want to release the same shot at the identical point using the same arm angle at the same point in time in your breathing cycle. When you wobble in archery, you have no idea where the arrow is going to go. The same is true in business. But if your arrows are clustered, just not around where you are shooting, you can “course correct” to get closer to your intended target. That is much easier to do than to figure out what is going on when half of your arrows are in the gold, and the rest are scattered across the target.

In tech, fail fast methodology is your friend. It provides a mechanism for easier course correction for work projects by identifying the highest risk points for failure and then investigating those first. That way if the failure does occur, it has happened quickly, and you can implement the recovery steps faster. You need to prepare your fail fast approach and then execute it.

Growth requires going outside of your comfort zone

When you get good at something but are not yet the best, you won’t become the best unless you make it harder. By making something harder in archery, you are inherently accepting that you might get worse, but then hopefully slowly improve.

When shooting at 10 meters I could get 5 out of 10 in the center of the target. But competitive distance for a compound bow is 50 meters, not 10. If I just wanted to feel good about getting a bunch of arrows in the center, I could have stayed at 10 meters. But to grow, I needed to shoot from a further distance. A year ago, I moved to 20 meters. It was 2 weeks before I hit a single shot in the bull’s-eye again. Now I am at 40 meters, and I regularly get half of my shots in the bull’s-eye again, even though I am shooting 400 % longer distance. I also increase my draw weight a ½ pound every 3 weeks. That has gotten me from 20 pounds of draw weight when I started to more than 40 pounds of draw weight in less than 2 years. When I make it to 50 pounds weight, I may get a more elite bow and will move to heavier arrows with finer tolerances which will allow me to shoot further with less interference from wind. Adjustments to weight and arrows always alters my release point. The additional weight makes things harder at first, but it is a much better shot in the long run. Then I make it harder again, and again, and again.

Growth in business also requires going out of your comfort zone. Want to become a manager? You need to be able to resolve conflict, run projects, assign resources, and possibly most importantly, learn how to say no. By intentionally focusing on personal and business growth, employees become more invested in themselves and the success of the company. People engaged in personal growth are often more productive, have lower stress levels and produce better and more consistent results.

Celebrate small wins

Every time I move further back in distance, I celebrate. Not because I will be any good at that new distance, but because being able to shoot accurately at 50 meters is the price of the admission ticket to be in public competition. The celebration will be that I MADE IT to that level, as compared to the first arrow I shot which went less than 10 % of the competitive distance.

Celebrating small wins gives you building blocks and confidence to get to the next level. If I didn’t allow myself to be pleased with my work until I got to the first competition, I might have given up part way through because I didn’t feel like I was making progress.

Not every arrow has to be shot

The most important thing my coach said to me in my first lesson was “Not every arrow has to be shot.” I had one shot at the end of the session when I was getting tired and as soon as I let go, I knew it wasn’t going anywhere near the target. Business is similar in that frequently you have “feelings” about how things are going to turn out. It’s called your gut. You have to learn to listen to your gut and let it advise you. Even if you aren’t going with your gut, make it a conscious decision and know why you made that decision. If your gut goes wrong, learn from it.

Sometimes you know from just how a meeting e-mail invite is phrased — who it came from, the fact that it is agenda-less, that the meeting is going to be a complete disaster. Don’t shoot that arrow. Think about how you can mitigate the disaster ahead of the three-car business pileup that you know is coming by having a pre-meeting communication with either the organizer or the attendees to be more prepared for the meeting.

Mindfulness never hurts

Have you ever heard of being “in the zone?” Of course you have! It’s when everything seems to be going your way effortlessly. This is true in both sports and business. But being “in the zone” seemed to be largely a serendipitous event until someone drew a link between being in the zone and mindfulness.

In the context of archery and other sports, psychologists use something called “dispositional mindfulness” to teach sports participants to become aware of personal thoughts, feelings, and other internal stimuli. After awareness is achieved, the participants are urged to use that information to focus on skills and game strategies, instead of focusing on performance outcomes.

Mindfulness also applies to the business setting. Applying mindfulness practices to work improves productivity, creativity, and decision making.

Cross-training is crucial

In archery, the two primary forms of cross-training are anything that improves upper body strength and mindfulness training. Without some combination of all three, you will never be Katniss Everdeen.

In the business world, and especially in tech, cross-training comes in the form of agile, program management, conflict resolution, and communication skills. Anything you can do to make yourself more valuable in the position you are in, but that isn’t directly related to your main tasks? That is business cross-training.

Practice, practice, practice

Muscle memory is important in both archery and business. Archery is about coordinating your hand and elbow position, bow movement, breathing, and release and doing it again and again. When your first arrow hits the gold, you want to do eleven more just like it. The only way to get consistency at that level is to practice a ridiculous number of hours. When I started, I shot 25-40 arrows a day. Now most days, I shoot 100. In the 17 months since I started daily archery practice, I have shot over 28,000 arrows. To be a serious contender, I will need to shoot 240 arrows every, single day. In addition, I will need to spend time on competitions, cross-training, and researching and trying new equipment and techniques. Reaching the Paralympics will literally be like having a part time job that is restricted to being performed only in the daylight.

Finding and establishing best business practices also requires repetition and research. You need to find and utilize the optimal operationalization methods to reach your business objectives. This requires staying on top of the newest trends of, comparing them to your ways of handling those same operations, and making alterations when needed. Using established standards and measuring where your business falls short will help identify the gaps.

At the end of the day, the person you are competing against is you
Looking at yourself as your primary opponent gives you a better yardstick by which to measure your success in both archery and business. When I went to my first competition, I got trounced by a former USA Archery team member. My scoring goal was 550, and I shot 549. I could either look at it like the glass was half full (“It was your first competition, and you finished within a point of your goal”) or the glass being half empty (“You lost by almost 100 points.”) People who chose the former live to shoot another day, they don’t get mired in negativity and frustration. Looking at what other people do also limits your thoughts about what you are capable of. Effectively you are looking through THEIR lens rather than your own.

Measuring your business success by looking at what you accomplished versus what peers accomplished is not productive. You never know what hardships you faced that the other individual didn’t, or what help the other individual received to be successful that you were lacking. Compete against yourself.

With adaptations, all things are possible

I shoot seated, which inherently requires adaptations that other archers don’t have to make. Pulling my arrows is harder, I can’t wear a hip quiver to hold my arrows, and I have a chunk of non-moving vertebrae at my T4 vertebrae. But, through trial and error, I’ve been able to figure out adaptations for all of these quirky issues. I shoot on lower targets at home that I can reach from my chair, and only shoot at public ranges with friends. I use a traffic cone to hold my arrows. My anchor point for my shot is quite high in order to work around the spinal curvature.

At work, I have accommodations to make my workday equal to everyone else’s. A desk that goes up and down, conference rooms marked for wheelchair accessibility, an email outage notice list if an elevator breaks, lower places in the break room for coffee, and we are slowly working to make all of the software we use internally completely accessible to people with disabilities.

Trying something, whether in business or archery, means you have to be prepared for it to fail, and have a plan for what you will do (Plan B) if what you try doesn’t work. But the worst adaptation or accommodation is the one that you don’t try. Because then you will never know if it will help.