5 ways Muay Thai helped me survive Management Consulting.
I turn up to my first client engagement thousands of miles away from home wearing a crisp new suit; it’s also my birthday. It’s 7pm and we’re wrapping up a 60 hour work-week; I ask if I can get off early to go have a virtual birthday party with my family from my hotel room, the team looks bewildered… I spend my birthday in some sandwich bar at 10pm wishing I was anywhere other than here.
I’ve also been doing Muay Thai for 3 years at this point, and there are lessons from fighting I wouldn’t have survived management consulting without.
- “The more you sweat in peacetime, the less you bleed in war.”
“KNEE, ELBOW, JAB JAB CROSS, KICK, KICK, KICK” …. A typical Muay Thai technical sparring session will consist of 2-3 minute bouts with your coach where he will absolutely massacre you. The first time I did this was in a stuffy hot wrestling room at MIT, and most recently before my amateur fight in Thailand. After about one minute of this was enough to send my flabby powerlifter form kneeling against the ropes with death rattle. But my coach didn’t relent, my head was hit with a battery of pads that forced me to scurry whatever O2 molecules were left in my lungs back to my muscles to keep going. I realised why he was doing this 7 days later during my fight; During training we can pause, relax take a breather, but during the fight, any sign of fatigue makes your opponent come at you harder, your exhaustion means nothing to them.
As a management consultant, the lucky ones get “beach” or “bench” time where we can take a breather after a client engagement to focus on fixing our fraying family relationships or lift a dumbbell every now and then. Use this time to up-skill in areas that you struggled with in the last engagement, this is your “training time”. That way when you start the next engagement, dealing with a challenging client or cleaning an excel in 30 minutes won’t exhaust you as it used to, you will be mentally stronger and able to handle the challenge. That means you can fit more on your plate and your consultant stamina will definitely thank you for it.
2. You’re only as good as your nutrition
Consultant diets are notoriously bad. Sure, the lavish dinners and hotel breakfast buffets may seem amazing at first, but that third jam donut by 10am while your rapidly tightening shirt begs for replacement is just getting you hooked on sugar. Sugar makes us feel good, it gives us a hit of dopamine and for those working the hotel -> client -> hotel lifestyle, we need all the dopamine we can get. But that sugar addiction isn’t good for you at all, and there are other ways to treat your body and your mind.
Before Muay Thai I weighed a whopping 109kg, most of which was fat on top of my “powerlifter’s frame”. I justified eating a whole pizza by the fact that I just hit a deadlift PR. But now I’m 82kg and I can deadlift 60kg more than when I was 109kg. A proper diet helped me work out for longer, since eating well helped me optimise my cardiovascular output in the ring or in training, It This is key when it comes to the brain which literally uses 20% of your daily energy output; probably even more on a 12–16 hour consultant daily work cycle! So get the good carbs in, throw the junk out.
3. You are not your failures, work to your strengths
It was a good year before I could throw decent roundhouse kick, and even now I don’t turn my hip over as much as I should. I lost sparring rounds, and my first amateur fight. People hinted that my trainer was even betting against me in the fight! Did that stop me from trying? Yeah a little initially but I realised that taking it too seriously meant that I felt less motivated to train overall.
As a a management consultant, you will work long hours and you will make mistakes. You will look around at more tenured people and they will seem to make less mistakes than you, and your manager who has probably slept far less than you that week may or may not be understanding. But it’s NEVER personal (unless it is, which is like 1% of cases, and you should probably speak to your development manager). Be kind to yourself and just give yourself time, don’t take your failures too seriously, learn and grow from them. Because just like there was a time when my trainer couldn’t throw a roundhouse kick, there was a time when your manager was in your place trying to survive.
When I realised that I might not be the best kicker, I stopped caring about making my kicks as good as my peers. I was a pretty decent lifter and my power shots could compensate for my lack of mobility. I learned that even though I didn’t make the most aesthetic powerpoints, my data science skills were definitely up there and I used them to do my part for the team.
4. The most important part of your day is sleep
Take it from someone who thought they could show up to 9am training after binge watching Vikings all night, your concentration, motivation and dedication will all take massive hits if you deprive your brain of the adenosine-cleansing wonders of sleep.
Management consulting is world renown for having a terrible work-life balance. There will be times when you will stay up until the early hours of the morning getting something done for your manager. During the first week of an engagement I made the mistake of going all in and trying to prove how efficient I was. Two weeks of sleep deficit later, my concentration and output failed hard.
Now everyone’s sleep requirement is different, some need 7 hours to feel refreshed, others need 5 hours. But if you don’t get your sleep requirement of the day, there are ways around it. When I was in Thailand I would go home after my early morning training and get a good meal and nap in before the afternoon session. At the client office, I would gobble up my lunch and take a 30 minute nap in a room somewhere. There’s always somewhere to take a nap. I remember once I did a multi-stop Uber from the office back to the office (on my own dime of course) just to catch 30 minutes of rest before the post-lunch work kicked in.
5. Make sure you spend time with your friends/family/loved ones
The best part of Muay Thai for me was the amazing cool people I would meet every time I trained. Now, being a management consultant and trying to fit 1.5 hours of ‘me time’ in the work day (most late-night classes finished at 8pm, then shower, run back to office) will be very difficult to negotiate with your manager.
But those 3 sessions a week were all I needed to be happy and feel like a real human being again, so I fought tooth and nail for them. On weekends I fought hard against any attempts to make us work Saturdays or Sundays; those are family days for me. I teach my little bro his maths homework, I go for walks in the park with my mum. Turn off your phone, and turn back on to life. Your sanity and social network will thank you for it. And your manager will thank you for it in terms of your output, because whether he/she realises it or not, socialising outside the client team is so important to keep up the effort required in that 60–70 hour workweek.
