What do basketball and career change at 50+ have in common?
Let me explain …
At 62, I joined some Back to Basketball sessions run by my local club for women of any age. Technically I was not going back to anything, having never so much as bounced a basketball before. Instead, this was an entirely new adventure, prompted by my passion for watching the game.
It was one of the most challenging things I’ve ever willingly undertaken, and one of the best. Here’s how and why, and what it made me think about career change and challenge later in working life.
I have never been a natural sportswoman or even well-coordinated. I was therefore ill-equipped for this new venture. My extensive experience of watching basketball was of very limited value: I couldn’t even dribble the ball properly.
But the challenges went well beyond that. Ahead of my first session, I was apprehensive about what I didn’t know, including the venue, the people, how the sessions were run, what I would be doing and with whom, and whether I’d be able to do it.
When I went to subsequent sessions, I feared what I did know: that I would be unable to do things and would therefore feel stupid, unfit, old and a liability. Five minutes into each of the first few sessions, I wanted to cry and walk out. But I stuck with it. Sometimes my playing was ok; often it was terrible. The only way was up.
Basketball is a fast, physical game and I got knocked about as much as the next person. I was the oldest participant by some way – most were in their 20s to 40s – but (as far as I could tell) no one made any concessions for my age even if they did sometimes allow for my lack of experience.
Although it can be tough to take, this treatment made me realise that I cannot complain about ageism (which I do) and at the same time wish concessions to be made when I choose to participate in something that is inclusive of but not specifically designed for my age group. If I want to be fully involved in the world, I must be prepared to be ‘in the arena’ and take the knocks.
I could have opted for a more comfortable time by joining a ‘senior’ sports group. But then I would have missed out on, say, 90% of what I gained from attending those sessions. Because here’s the thing: if any concession to age, ability and experience were made, the nature of the whole thing would change and in a way that wouldn’t work for everyone or possibly anyone, including me.
Instead, I was fully involved in a challenging collective activity in which I was just one of a crowd of women of different ages, ethnicities, nationalities, backgrounds, and skill levels. I had to find my way through, be prepared to fail and relinquish control, but never give up. My self-image as a competent person with years of valuable experience and wisdom had no place there: I was the senior member of the group only in age.
So, what’s the link between all of this and career challenge and change at 50+?
Firstly, it’s about revisiting the experience of doing and learning, things which we can become ill-used to in the maturity of our careers. In a specialist role, having developed our expertise over many years, our work may have become second nature, with a focus on continuous incremental improvement rather than learning anew. If we have moved into a management role, we may have become far removed from the substance of what we’re managing. We instruct, guide and coach others to do the work for which we’re responsible. We look on, analyse, strategise and direct. Management becomes our expertise, and our work can make us feel somewhat deskilled in other respects, and sometimes lonely, too. Management can set us apart from technical skill and from people.
In a basketball session, on the other hand, I was constantly having to learn by doing – or failing to do – even the simplest things. I had to listen, pay close attention to instructions, understand what I was being asked to do, convert that into a related action and then do it, all at fast pace and without holding back others who were more experienced, knowledgeable and able. Doing is the very essence of this activity and the only way of learning, and therefore far removed from the world of ‘knowledge work’. As Matthew Crawford argues, ‘the task of getting an adequate grasp on the world, intellectually, depends on our doing stuff in it.’[1] When I was shown how to do a ‘layup’ – a basic basketball move – not only did I get a great sense of achievement, but I also finally understood what it was!
Likewise, the hard physical contact was one of the most rewarding qualities of the sessions and I began to understand the power and pleasures of sport in a way that I would never have done if I’d just stayed on the side lines, spectating.
Next, it’s about opening up the possibility of new opportunities for growth, stimulation and achievement by letting go of the comfort of ‘knowing’ and being comfortable with not knowing.
Swapping competence for incompetence may sound like a perverse pleasure but bear with me. In an episode of Gabby Logan’s excellent podcast, The Mid Point, John Bishop (himself a mid-career changer from pharmaceutical rep to stand-up comedian) explains how he gave up football, which he was getting worse at with age, and took up tennis. By starting something new from scratch, he could revisit the experience of getting better.[2] His attitude certainly has resonance for career moves in later life which seek challenge rather than status or ease.
When we are tired and jaded in our work, when it offers no scope for improvement or opportunities for challenge – or we can’t be bothered to seek, create or accept them – our performance may plateau or decline. That is not a happy place to be and compounds a situation that becomes devoid of pleasure and interest.
But if we are open enough to take on a new challenge, we may be reenergised by our achievements, even if these are small compared to our previous accomplishments. In the process, we can also revisit the valuable experience of getting things wrong, asking for help and learning from others. We can recalibrate success.
It’s also about moving away from equating older age either with experience and seniority, or with inability. My basketball experience completely reversed my managerial and professional experience, and I had to be comfortable with that abrupt transfer from near the top to the bottom of the knowledge and competency pile. At the same time, the reason I was so bad at basketball had nothing to do with my age: I’m physically fit, but I have little natural ability and I’d had no training and little practice. The same would have been true in my 30s.
My capacity to improve my basketball skills likewise has nothing to do with my age, only my mindset. If I can’t accept and acclimatise to the terms of engaging with something new, then I need to rethink what I’m after.
Lastly, some of what was asked of me at basketball had earlier been required in training for and setting up my coaching practice after leaving a long, successful organisational career. The significant difference was that I brought to my coaching training a wealth of relevant, transferable experience from my work to date: my ‘career capital’.[3] I took that capital forward, enhanced by my new professional expertise, into my coaching practice. Although some things were new, much of what I was now required to do related to things I had previously done, had done well and enjoyed. I was building on areas of interest and competence, so while it was a new world it was not a wholly strange one and I felt well equipped.
That said, it was certainly tough, particularly over the period where my old and new worlds overlapped, in the shift of identity from senior manager in a major organisation to independent operator, and from working within an established structure to having to create my own. If I had known what I know now, I would have gone to basketball first. My career change would have felt like child’s play after that, not just because of the relative difficulty and unfamiliarity of the respective challenges, but also because I would have developed a ‘beginner’s mindset’[4] which would have made me less fearful of not knowing and well placed to learn by doing.
Self Determination Theory (SDT)[5], as applied to work, proposes that we need three elements in order to thrive: Autonomy, Competence and Relatedness (or the sense of being connected). But I would argue that there is also a value of sorts in lack of competence, both in the experience itself and in having the capacity for tolerating that experience in our armoury. If we’re going to be moving around more later in our careers, whether by choice or not, comfort with lack of competence may be a key survival skill as much as an opportunity for stimulation and growth. A transferable skill indeed.
I’m not going to conclude this piece by telling you that I was selected to play for the local basketball team; that’s not the punchline. It really was the taking part that counted. I didn’t need to ‘arrive’ anywhere to feel like I’d succeeded.
References:
[1] Matthew Crawford. The Case for Working with Your Hands or Why Office is Work is Bad for Us and Fixing Things Feels Good(London, Viking, 2010), p. 164.
[2] The Mid Point, Episode 1, 26 August 2020
[3] Brown, C., Hooley, T. and Wond, T. (2020). Building career capital: developing business leaders’ career mobility. Career Development International, 25(5), 445-459.
[4] See, for example: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/oct/30/learning-new-skills-can-be-daunting-here-are-four-ways-to-embrace-being-a-beginner; https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/dec/31/beginners-by-tom-vanderbilt-review-its-never-too-late-to-learn; https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20210222-how-a-beginners-mindset-can-help-you-learn-anything
[5] For more about SDT, its applications and evidence base, see https://selfdeterminationtheory.org/the-theory/