Being Challenged

It was my turn to present and I didn't know I was ready.

When I was in my third year of university, everyone in my program took part in a business case competition.

The competition had a regular round, a semi-final round, and a final round. Each round involved giving the same presentation of your team’s proposed solution to the business case problem.

Our team had made it into the semi-final round.

In case you can’t recall what doing a school project was like, we had each divided up parts of the presentation and took turns awkwardly transitioning to each other for our respective parts. The line, “Now I’m going to pass it off to ...” was essentially tattooed on our inner forearms as we gestured to the person we were “passing off” to.

My portion of the presentation involved walking the judges through a proposed organizational chart. As you might imagine, this took up an entire slide.

During our several practice runs and one live presentation leading up to the semi-final, each time I was passed off to, the organizational chart slide displayed perfectly.

During the semi-final, for some unexplainable reason, the slide was blank.

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Challenge is an excellent revealer.

In Timothy Gallwey’s classic The Inner Game of Tennis, he discusses the surfer waiting for the big wave (Top of Page 120):

The surfer waits for the big wave because they value the challenge it presents. They value the obstacles the wave puts between them and their goal of riding the wave to the beach. Why? Because it’s those very obstacles, the size and churning power of the wave, which draw from the surfer their greatest effort.

In episode 2 of The End of an Era documentary about Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, Taylor talks about what her dancers evoke in her (At 26:36):

“It also is interesting to be in a position where, like, you know, this is a team of experts and there’s something about that that keeps me on my game and focused and locked in. It’s one of the elements of, like, where that kind of pressure is a privilege, because they’re not messin’ up, so it better not be me.”

Challenge might be one of the greatest self-awareness tools in existence.

Most of us aren’t surfing big waves or practicing choreography for a history-making tour every day, and yet, we each experience moments of challenge every day.

On our big days, these challenges are obvious. It’s on our smaller days, when the challenges are less obvious, that we have to pay particular attention. It’s easy to let the challenging moments slip by on these days.

By giving effort to the small challenges, we build up the stamina to face the bigger ones.

***

Leading up to the semi-final we had practiced our presentation several times. We did it as a team, and I had done it on my own. Those were all small challenges.

Then the slide came up blank. This was the big challenge.

I suddenly knew two things in this moment: 1. I could recite the slide from memory because I had made it and studied it so many times. 2. The judges had no idea what the slide looked like and to describe it using only words and no visuals would do it no justice at all.

Somehow, I remembered that before we started the semi-final, each judge was handed a copy of the written report that we had to produce in conjunction with the presentation. I also remembered that at the back of our written report, in a specific appendix, was the organizational chart in all its visual glory.

So when the slide came up blank, without skipping too many beats I asked the judges to simply turn to the back of our report and look at the chart while I walked them through it.

I had no idea that I remembered any of this, nor did I know that I had memorized the chart. That’s the beauty of big challenges.

They are excellent revealers.