- Obstacle course racing as team building gives team members the chance to grow physically and mentally, bringing what they learned on the field to their work and everyday lives.
- Confidence, responsibility, and teamwork are just a few of the values that you can learn from OCR.
- OCR is a learning experience, not just with regard to physical fitness, but in your own personal development and of your whole team.
Team building is character building
Team building sessions are a great opportunity for coworkers to relax and enjoy each other’s company outside their professional boundaries. It’s also an opportunity for everyone to cultivate their own personal growth. When you decide on an obstacle race for team building, you gain much more than just bonding and some time away from office responsibilities.
Anyone who has tried obstacle course racing can tell you that it truly pushes your limits - on a physical and mental level. When you’re out there running, jumping, climbing, and sometimes crawling your way to the finish line, you’ll find strength that you didn’t even know you had. There will be moments when you think all of your energy has been used up, but when you give yourself one big mental push, you’d be surprised at how much more you’re capable of doing.
That endurance is something that you can use not only in OCR, but in other aspects of your life, as well. There is so much mental fortitude you can get from training and finishing an OCR event, and you can carry that over to your career, your social life, and your overall physical and mental wellbeing. Even seemingly mundane day-to-day tasks can become easier because of how you apply what you learned from OCR. And if everyone on the team takes advantage of this learning, imagine the big leaps the team can make as one unit.
What you can learn on the grind
A well-planned team building can teach co-workers how they best work together. It can also instill greater confidence in them, and the ability to fully rely on each other, both of which are vital when it comes to handling tricky projects or any kind of new challenge in the workplace.
OCR is a fantastic example of team building with a purpose. There are so many values you can take away from your OCR experience, whether it’s your first time or your fifth or sixth. Getting from the start to the end of the course is no small feat. Every step along the way will test your skills and your willpower, and the resolve and discipline of the well-oiled machine that is your team.
Team work
This is a big one. No matter how fit and ready the members of the team are, the only way to make it all the way through is for everybody to work together. It’s good to have a healthy competitive spirit, but don’t forget that this is a situation that calls for collaboration. Tackling the obstacles might be extremely tiring and painful in the moment, but the shared experience will give you a sense of bonding. It’s a lot like what our ancestors felt when they would explore and hunt together, working together to help the tribe survive. The shared suffering will also make celebrating at the end even sweeter.
One of the most vital parts of teamwork is communication. Team building can develop good communication skills among members and give them a sharper idea of how to communicate with each other. This makes everything a little bit easier from high-stakes, high-pressure presentations to getting everyone over a 12-foot wall. It also fosters respect in the team, because it helps them appreciate the unique contributions each member brings to the table.
Confidence
Everyone loves a hard-earned reward. Whether it’s a medal, a shirt, a certificate, or just the cheers and congratulations from those who witnessed your success, it’s always nice to feel that your accomplishments are being acknowledged. That’s why after a day (or a week or month) of hard work, it’s so awesome to cross the finish line and finally be able to claim that you conquered a race that once seemed impossible. The post-OCR-event high can give you a huge jolt of confidence in your physical fitness and also in other areas of your life.
While reaching the end of the race feels like the biggest achievement, you’re actually building confidence all throughout the OCR and any training that you do leading up to it. Compared to a work-related scenario, doing OCR is less threatening and therefore puts less pressure on you to perform. So instead of worrying about the consequences of messing up, you and your teammates can just focus on steadily improving.
Responsibility
Taking on more responsibility is part of your growth process, like how you learned back in childhood when you got your first pet or joined your first club. In the workplace, we have clear-cut roles and specific tasks that we need to take care of. When everyone has an understanding and appreciation of this - that is, not just their own responsibility but other team members’ as well - they become more inclined to take their respective responsibilities seriously. This is because they are all on the same page about the importance of putting in the work to make projects run smoothly.
In the context of OCR, it’s necessary for teammates to take responsibility for themselves, and sometimes for each other. OCR is a good venue to develop leadership skills. When physical and mental barriers get in the way of achieving your team’s goal, you don’t have to be in a literal position of leadership in order to practice leadership. You just have to own that responsibility and do what you can to help your team overcome their difficulties.
Humility
Confidence is definitely important in OCR, but don’t overdo it until it turns into arrogance. Even weathered OCR buffs who are in great shape feel humbled by the course, and for good reason. It’s easy to overestimate your abilities after mastering certain techniques while training, but that mastery doesn’t automatically translate to nailing the obstacle when it’s time for the real thing. The best that any of us can do is try our hardest and learn from our slip-ups.
You and your teammates can help each other stay grounded during your OCR experience. With a humble attitude, never take your training and other preparations for granted, which is a plus for all of you in the long run. Additionally, you won’t be affected by your rank or prize at the end of the race. Having a strong, realistic sense of self means you don’t have room for a delicate ego. And on the course or in the workroom, a bruised ego is not a good look on anyone.
Trust
Doing obstacle course racing together is an intense, in-your-face, but very effective way of building trust among teammates. After all, if you can trust someone to pull you up over a slanting wall, surely you can trust them to deliver a presentation that you both worked on, right? Getting to know each other’s strengths, weaknesses, fears, and capabilities through team building brings teammates closer together and fosters trust among them as coworkers and as friends.
OCR also teaches you to have trust in yourself. You know better than anyone else how hard you’re pushing to make it all the way to the end. Although it’s nice to get reassurance from other people, what really makes a difference is the reassurance you give yourself. This is vital when you face big, intimidating obstacles. If your gut tells you you can do it, however scary it might look, the chances are that you can indeed do it.
Optimism
When you’re sweaty, bruised, completely exhausted, and still have a long way to go to reach the finish line, putting on a smile can be the hardest obstacle you’re up against at that very moment. Getting yourself into a good mental space (and staying there) requires a lot of practice, but once you have it down, you’ll be unstoppable.
OCR can be overwhelming. There’s so much you have to do, one struggle after another, with only little time to rest and catch your breath. On top of that, if you aren’t able to do an obstacle, you might have to do a penalty set of burpees before moving on to the next one. There may also be times that you doubt yourself or question why you’re there in the first place. In these moments, just give yourself a little time to frame your difficulty in a positive way. Instead of focusing on the pain, ask yourself what you’re learning, and how it’s going to help you in the future - maybe even on the very next obstacle.
It also helps not to let yourself get too caught up in the competition. At the end of the day, you’re supposed to be having fun. That will be the thing that you and your teammates look back on when you reminisce about your OCR team building in the future. It’s much easier said than done, but just try to enjoy yourself, even when your suffer fest feels like a lot more “suffer” than “fest”.
Self-awareness
For many fans of OCR, the sport has not just given them loads of fun memories and new friends. It has made them reconsider their whole lifestyle, too. Having a “never say die” attitude when faced with walls, ropes, and barbed wires is something that translates well with other challenges in life. For example, stressful times in the office become more manageable when you know how to hype yourself up and use your mental strength to see them through.
OCR training puts you on the fast track to feeling better and looking better. Pair it with more conscientious eating habits and suddenly you’re living a healthier lifestyle than ever before. Aside from your improved physical strength, you’ll also have greater mental strength. This will give you an edge both in your professional life and your personal life.
All of these big changes that require perseverance and time need to start somewhere. The starting point often seems small but they’re actually significant changes that slowly accumulate to big improvements. Allow them to build up, stay consistent with your good habits, and you’ll see a real change in your lifestyle.
Perseverance
When it comes down to it, the only thing that’s going to get you from the start to the end of an OCR event is your own grit. Because of how huge the course is, for most of the time that you’re there, you won’t know for sure how much longer you have to go until the finish line. But rather than getting discouraged by this uncertainty, it’s better to embrace it and to reel in your hidden tenacity.
Stocking up on motivation without the need for external help is a talent that you can hone. Whenever you get tired, remind yourself that you are capable of more. You might need to rest, but that doesn’t mean that you need to stop. In the same vein, sometimes you will feel that your body wants to give up, but that doesn’t mean that it needs to give up.
While your teammates can certainly give you a hand every now and then, for the most part, you will have to fuel yourself physically and mentally to keep going. Use all the encouragement you get from other people and everything you learned in training, but be ready to become your own cheerleader and coach when those eventually run out. The mental strength you develop to overcome obstacles like the monkey bars and mud pits can also be used in other challenges. Demanding work projects, dead ends in your personal life, or even mundane but aggravating situations like sitting in traffic are easier to deal with when you’ve trained yourself to persevere against the odds.
Do it for your team and yourself
Oftentimes when we picture the process of getting involved in OCR, we tend to focus on getting physically fit, battling your way through the obstacles, and celebrating when you finally make it to the end. We don’t always appreciate the other side of it, which is the growth that a person or team goes through while they’re doing all the grunt work.
You might not realize it right away, OCR has the ability to highlight your strong suits and expose your weaknesses. It’s a learning experience that serves to remind you of your own greatness, and on the flip side, exploit your weak points and force you to confront them. Self-improvement is a long and difficult journey, but incorporating activities like OCR can make it more enjoyable, and pursuing self-improvement with your coworkers makes team building all the more meaningful.