It was obvious within the first five minutes.

Balls weren’t bouncing where they should.

No one could volley, or rally, or serve.

This tennis lesson was a disaster.

Everyone looked dejected. What was going on?

Our coach found it funny at first, but quickly lost his temper. He’d stop us, wave his arms about, gesturing wildly. “Guys. Gentle. We want to keep the ball in, yes?” We’d listen and nod solemnly and then go right back to what we were doing, which was, playing terribly.

I know what it feels like to lose your mojo, but I guess this is what it feels like when a group loses it. Even I was getting worse and there was nothing I could do about it. I started to blame the other players, but that only worked for a while. I was missing easy shots. I couldn’t hide. I had no excuses.

I looked around. I felt like I could notice the level deteriorate in real-time. There was something different that night. There was a new player who had joined the lesson. We can call him R. R hadn’t been playing tennis at the club for all of winter, and I suppose with the first hint of a balmy night he had decided to get back into the swing of things.

R was rusty from the get go. He was impatient. Irritable. He hit the ball with venom, but had no control. Once you get to a certain level of tennis, you can’t help but try and sniff out other players’ weak spots. If someone’s backhand is leaking free points, it’s like there’s a giant neon arrow hovering over that side of the court. The worse he hit, the more we hit to him.

That explains why he was playing badly, but why the rest of the group?

I wonder if any group of people (children in a classroom, firefighters, airline attendants) quickly build up an implicit understanding of each other. Even if there’s not much of a relationship or even friendship, you just start to know each other.

With tennis, you’re picking up stroke style, movement, strengths, weaknesses, but also personality, temperament and probably a 100 other little things. Over time, even the loosest groups build familiarity, ease and cohesion just by knocking around the same 4 or 5 square meters.

When someone like R enters the mix, playing really bad tennis, the group can’t help but get disrupted. It’s like a large rock getting chucked into a quietly flowing stream. It takes a second for the group to realize there’s a new element, re-route and build up an invisible bond again.

Something as insignificant and fleeting as a grumpy mood can end up have a bigger influence than you think. And although we all like to think we are in control of our own behavior, when we are part of a group, we are often behaving as one unit – for better or worse.

“Make friends with pain, and you’ll never be alone,”

Ken Chlouber, creator of the Leadville Trail 100

When you first start cycling, the pain you feel in your body appears to be binary. Lungs or legs. On your first proper climb, both clamour for attention. Eventually, one will speak a bit louder or persuasively, and you’ll give up. Although “it doesn’t get any easier”, your body deals with pain much differently when your fitness improves. Less weaker links. A unified front. Your body starts resembling a factory, with every organ stepping up to the assembly line and contributing to the effort.

But aside from improving your fitness, is there a way to gain a hint of control over the suffering?

Pain face

There is a point in every race when a rider encounters the real opponent and realizes that it’s…himself

Lance Armstrong

A tell for when things are getting tough, even for the best cyclists in the world, is a tightening of facial muscles, nicknamed ‘pain face’. We can’t get in their heads, but it’s clear there is some serious shouting going on in there. Jens Voigt, famous hard man explains the dialogue in third person:

Body: “I can’t do it anymore.“

Brain: “Shut up body, do what I tell you!”

Body: “I can’t do it.. I want to pull over now.“

Brain: “Keep going. I want you to do what I tell you!“

It sounds like a joke, but “Shut up legs” likely went viral because of how familiar (and painful) this inner battle is to most cyclists.

The Smiling Horse

“Everybody tells me that I never look as if I’m suffering.”

Miguel Induráin

Maybe some pro cyclists possess prenatural mental skills that allow them to more easily relax under a huge workload. One example of such a rider is Miguel ‘Big Mig’ Induráin. He still endured a lot of pain, but he believed his “strength was that I am more balanced and calmer than most other riders.” Miguel had a tremendously strong physique, but maybe his mind was like a giant hay bale, and he’s essentially a galloping horse (with a horse sized heart) until the finish line. Another example of ‘relaxed effort’ is the marathon runner Eliud Kipchoge, famous for smiling while smashing records. “When you smile and you’re happy, you can trigger the mind to not feel your legs.”

Two birds, one stone

“It means quieting the endless jabbering of thoughts so your body can do instinctively what it’s been trained to do without the mind getting in the way.

Phil (six rings) Jackson

Since most of us aren’t as calm or strong as Induráin, are we stuck shouting at our own legs? I’ve definitely begged and pleaded my body to do things differently, but to be honest, I’ve always felt a bit ashamed doing so. Can’t my mind and body get along? Can’t we get up the hill together?

When I’m able to fully clear my mind of distractions and pedal freely, I can hear my legs and they are usually quite happy. The legs are working: they are pistons in the engine room of the Titanic, but they are not weeping and wailing. The mind is doing the weeping and wailing for them. In fact, they are pleased with the warmth of the sun and as long as I promise them some carbs, water, and a rest in the evening, they could think of nothing else they’d rather be doing.

Mindful exercise: It’s common advice to have ‘light hands’ while climbing. A death grip can make you tense up, and use unnecessary muscles and energy. Try visualizing two baby ‘chicks’, one in each of your palms, where the hoods would be. Don’t let them go (you’ve got to return them to the mother hen at the summit), but don’t squeeze them too hard. You’ll notice your attention quickly drift off. Return to the chicks, and hopefully they are still alive when you bring them back into your attention. Repeat until you make it to the top.

In 2023, it’s a bit passé to label an activity, person or job with ‘left-brain’ or ‘right-brain’. But most of us intuitively understand the difference. Left-brainers appear to be more organised and good with details and right-brainers thrive in creativity and innovation.

Designers lean on their right brain to empathise with people problems – “how products and services fit within people’s everyday lives as well as where they fall short, and who’s left out.”

Since the rise of consumer-friendly technology, designers have settled into the left-brain world of software, complementing the disciplines of product management (analytical and often with technical background) and engineers who ensure the systems are stable, performant, correct and maintainable.

Luckily, it’s really not so binary. Although designers are on the hook for how the product looks, we are largely concerned with making it enjoyable, learnable and effective for the user. From the tools we use like Figjam (right) and Google Sheets (left) to the skills we need like designing for emotion (right) and information architecture (left), designers need both sides of their brain firing. Xero sums it up perfectly: “You’ll have an analytical side and a knack for crafting beautiful user experiences.”

What makes product design so interesting is that there’s never a one size fits all approach to problem solving. There’s no right or wrong here. How you approach design problems will be shaped by your customers and their goals. At Xero, our payroll customers and the compliance rules they must follow are detail-oriented by definition.

All this might sound obvious, but I think friction can arise if designers don’t take the time to recognise the influence of their own thinking styles and patterns. For example, it’s not uncommon to hear a designer frustrated by “documentation slowing us down” or want to “lock down a solution asap”. These are two sides of the same coin, and might be avoided with some reflection.

Here’s a few simple questions to ask yourself:

• Do I bias more towards right or left?
• Am I uncomfortable with uncertainty (sometimes at the cost of creativity)?
• Am I avoiding (potentially useful) design methods because they are unfamiliar?
• Could I approach this problem more objectively?
• Am I thinking about this problem the same way as my cross-functional partners?

Effective designers should feel empowered to leverage either side of their brain, from beginners mind to the latest and greatest prioritisation framework. With our personal development it might help to purposefully focus some of our time on skills where we do not excel, to balance out our strengths.

By taking a step back and being intentional, we can focus on being more creative or systematic where needed.