OpenGrip Management — training employees for success

OpenGrip Management — training employees for success

I used to be an English professor, and the basic pedagogy of teaching is:

• Teach the material
• Have them practice the material
• Quiz them on the material
• Assume they got it or didn’t and keep going

That’s how we all got taught (if we were lucky), and that’s a default expectation of how things go.

But here’s a secret I learned when I did a brief stint of subbing for Junior High: there’s a whole other piece that happens that we don’t notice.

We learn things over and over again. The SAME grammar I taught adult college students was taught to junior highers.

Guess what, my six year olds are learning commas right now. I taught grown adults about commas, too, like they’d never learned.

We cannot, in life, assume that we learn a thing once and we’ll retain it. So why do we train like we do?

So, in training someone, we must mentor them, and that’s why we use the OpenGrip method:

Open grips in climbing are kind of the opposite of what humans naturally want to do, which is hold on for dear life.

The reality, is, you get way less stressed and tired, and can hold smaller things, if you keep an open grip. We don’t assume mastery through teaching something once, we do it by mentorship (or spotting, aka, being ready to catch someone when they fall, in climbing).