Photo © stock.com/Jacob Ammentorp Lund (and no, it’s not me!)

Regular readers can’t have helped notice my big personal goal for the year is to do a triathlon. As I mentioned last month my swimming came on leaps and bounds – my distance going from 250m to 600m in a couple of weeks. But I knew there was a problem with my stroke as my legs were too low in the water. “I know,” I thought, brightly “I’ll check out YouTube for some tips.”

Oh dear.

It turned out I wasn’t really doing front crawl at all, more of an overarm doggy-paddle. No problem I thought, I just need to adjust my timing to stretch out before each pull. So I tried it and could hardly do 50m without gasping for breath.

My problem is that doing the stroke properly engages the large back muscles. In theory this should give me much more power, but of course those muscles have been sitting idle for years (ever?) while I’ve trained up my shoulders, so I’m pretty much starting over again. Plus, my breathing rhythm needs to change and that hasn’t proven easy.

Mrs K tells me my swimming looks 1000% better than before, but I feel awkward, clumsy and slow. Towards the end of each length I find myself heading back into old bad habits and have to correct myself again.

This is exactly why change management in organisations is so difficult. We’re all creatures of habit and breaking that habit not only requires ‘awareness’ but building the new routine into normal behaviour while staying away from the temptation of the old habits. A Sustainability awareness presentation is like the YouTube videos I watched – the hard work comes afterwards to make the new routine stick.

Six weeks of discipline to change a habit is the rule of thumb according to some behavioural experts. Does your Sustainability engagement take this into consideration? I don’t find many that do.

In the meantime, I’m going to keep reaching out – literally and metaphorically!