Grazed knees and why I love (hate) them
I hate grazing my knees. Like, really hate it. It makes my eyes water, draws a very specific set of words from me, and stings in the shower. And it means I’ve tripped up somewhere. It turns out, though, that none of my many grazed knees have ever been fatal. They haven’t even stopped me getting out of bed, going for another run, or taking out the garbage. It’s just that they hurt (spoiler alert – they’re never as bad as they first feel).
When my son started school, he came home one day with a grazed knee for the ages. He was grumpy. And I remember having a conversation with him about the significance of a grazed knee. “It almost always means you’ve been running.” I so enthusiastically told him (thinking, of course, I never want a grazed knee like that in my life again). Running, if you watch kids, is highly correlated with smiling and high pitched yelling-with-excitement. “It also means you were probably trying something you hadn’t tried very often, and you made a mistake somewhere in the process. But the thing to be most proud of,” I said in my most motivating affectation, wincing at the sight of that scraped skin, “is that it shows you were out there living. It’s unlikely you’ll graze your knee if you’re doing nothing, playing it safe and refusing to try stuff that makes you uncomfortable. So wear it proud and tell people about the adventure you had.”
I often use the grazed knee metaphor in my leadership programmes. It’s inevitable, right? If you’re going to try things that stretch, challenge and develop you as a leader, you’ll graze your knee along the way. As Carol Dweck has researched, and then made so accessible for us all to think about in her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, some of us tap out at an early grazed knee (“told you it was too hard, never trying that again”), while others of us pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, work out where we went wrong and go again. We’ll probably trip up again at some point, but there’s an Event Finisher’s t-shirt on the other side of the challenge and the knowledge we’ve made progress on the adventure that is leadership.
To me, it’s all about having an experiment approach. Trying things out that you hope will work, might not work, and will – either way – help you become a better leader. Importantly, an experiment approach includes reflecting on what happened and learning from the outcome. It’s not for everyone, all of the time, and that’s cool. All of us have times where we need to rest and regenerate. But more often than not, I reckon there should be something in our world that’s threatening a grazed knee. That’s living.
“If your knees aren’t green by the end of the day, you ought to seriously re-examine your life.”
If you’re up for pushing your leadership capability and can still get up after grazing your knee, check out my Simplify Leadership programme. It’s for leaders who are up for trying things differently in the quest to become potent in their roles.