I
have been talking with the family about ISO and the need for having the ISO
certification. Everybody is in a hurry
getting an ISO certification for their business in Mexico.
A friend mentioned to me that he was going to rent an office in his
mother´s house to pass the ISO supervision.
A patient told me that his hospital was going to pass the ISO
supervision. Even the Mexican Federation
of Triathlon passed the ISO in management.
Well, I investigated even further what ISO means and how to pass the ISO
IN TRIATHLON.
Certification...
to ISO management system
standards
Organizations and companies often want to get certified to ISO’s
management system standards (for example ISO 9001 or ISO 14001) although
certification is not a requirement. The best reason for wanting to implement
these standards is to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of company
operations.
A company may decide to seek certification for many reasons, as
certification may:
- be a contractual or regulatory requirement
- be necessary to meet customer preferences
- fall within the context of a risk management programme, and
- help motivate staff by setting a clear goal for the development of its management system.
ISO does not
perform certification
ISO develops International Standards, including
management system standards such as ISO 9001, ISO 14001 and ISO 31000. However,
it is not involved in the certification to any of the standards it develops.
Certification is performed by external certification bodies, which are largely
private. Therefore a company or organization cannot be certified by ISO.
Read more about how to publicize your ISO 9001:20
So,
in our beautiful Mexico certification becomes another corrupted organized
business. But it does not take away
the creation of our quality standards that we use, which are mentioned in
several posts in the blog.
Reading
the ISO page took me to another article: “the curve of improvement;” a curve
of improvement which is easy to make from results taken by our watch at
different times in our life. We have
tackled several times this subject in the blog but let´s keep writing, “it is
not a dead horse.” I write because I
blog. I blog because I am part of this
world and have been in the position of being ahead of many; I believe in
sharing things to improve as humanity. I
was accepted to Harvard to work on Brain Mapping after my specialty in
Psychiatry and subspecialty in Sleep Disorders in New York State and decided to
come back to my home town to give a try on how to create champions after what I
learned. I come from a small town in
Mexico where I live, Oaxaca, and we have had World Champions in our team as
juniors and age groupers in triathlon (created by us); or at least a team
member on the podium of a Triathlon World Championship. We have many arguments to speak about the
subject of improvement in adolescents and children after twenty years of working
forming triathletes since children (not finding already made triathletes) and
training in Team Oaxaca. There are
several papers in the web regarding this matter “curve improvement” and I chose
the one below as a benchmark.
Improvement's
Torturous Path
By
Tom Slear
Special
Splash Correspondent
Splash
Magazine:May
-
June
2005
Why
do some improve steadily and others plateau? Why isn’t the slope of an
improvement curve predictable? Basic logic dictates that as swimmers get older,
they should be bigger, stronger, better trained and therefore, faster.
Improvement might not have a constant, positive slope –nothing in sport is that
assured –but it should be steady over the long-term, with peaks of larger
magnitudes than valleys. However, those familiar with swimming know this is
simply not the case. Improvement’s path contains detours and even U-turns. Many
brilliant young swimmers plateau, and then, says Collins, who has coached three
swimmers from age groupers to Olympians, the “window of opportunity closes.
They are sure bets for the next year and the next year never comes. Kids expect
to improve every year, and in many cases, that simply doesn’t happen.”
“You
will find that across sports, there is not much correlation between those who
have success when they are 10 and 11 with those having success when they are 19
and 20,” says Dr. Thomas Raedeke of the Department of Exercise and Sport
Science at East Carolina University. “It could be for a lot of reasons, not the
least of which is that when success comes early on and you are improving by
leaps and bounds, you come to expect that. When it stops, and you are improving
only fractionally, that can be very frustrating, especially when others you
used to beat are improving more. It may cause you to question your commitment
to the sport, which affects how hard you work and whether you continue to
improve.”
In
a study he authored, Sokolovas compared the swimmers in the best all-time,
top-100 times for age groups from 10-and-under through 17-18. Among the 17-and
18-year olds, only 10.3 percent of the girls and 13.2 percent of the boys were
listed in any event as 10-
and-unders.
When compared to the lists of 11-and 12-year-olds, the percentages were 20.3
for the girls and 12.6 for the boys. Not until the 15/16 age group did the
percentages become significant –49.7 for the girls and 53.5 for the boys. As
Sokolovas concluded, “Most of the future elite swimmers swim slower than
age-group champions, especially at
ages
until 15-16 years.”
The
top-16 rankings portray a significantly different picture. Of the 43 men and
women on America’s 2004 Olympic team, 18 (42 percent) had a top-16 national
ranking in either short-course yards or long-course meters as a 10-and-under.
Among those were Michael Phelps and Aaron Peirsol, who set world records in
Athens, and Jenny Thompson, who, at 31, competed in her fourth Olympic Games.
Twenty-five of the 2004 Olympians –58 percent –had a top-16 ranking as 11-and
12-year-olds.
Instead of speaking abstractly, we have examples of
improvement and U turns. As Albert
Einstein said: “What limits my learning
is my education.”
I have a 24 year-old-old male patient for the last
three years who came to me because of excruciating abdominal pain that made him
to bend over and ending up in the ER. He was scheduled to be operated
several times for exploratory reasons, but somehow he called me before the
procedures and responded well to treatment in a matter of a few hours. I
treated him with IV major tranquilizers twice when these episodes happened.
I told him that his problem was his “breathing pattern.” I ventured to
make this statement instead of using something as “somatization,” “panic
attacks,” etc. It takes years to understand that breathing can help us or
destroys us depending on how we have learned to breathe. This patient
works as a musician and also his father. I told him since the first interview
that he needed to learn how to breathe and insisted that yoga classes could
help him. He went to yoga classes almost three years after our first encounter!
That is how invested our patients are in their problems and how much they
believe in advices.
In his first yoga class, in a matter of a few minutes,
he was able to reproduce the pain. He stopped going to yoga classes
because he could not stand breathing in that environment. He changed his
singing teacher and started with a better technique practicing breathing;
unfortunately or fortunately, he presented panic attacks during rehearsals and
understood that he could work on the anxiety bouts. Three years later, he
understood that breathing was his main problem at this point in his life and
increased practicing singing (breathing) more frequently to overcome his
fears. He came back happily and told me two things:
1) “I spoke to my father about music and my problems and
he told me that he wanted to teach me music and I just wanted to play the
guitar; so he just taught me how to play the guitar.” My father said to
me: “Now you are ready to learn music.” For his father music was a
way of living that encompasses the way of breathing and some other things for
his soul.
2) “I learned about many things that happened at the time
I was born and after being born, I did not want to know about things happening
to me.”
The case is related to our athletes that are unable to
learn about training and they do not want to see what is happening to
them. It takes years if they are able to tolerate the reflection about
what they have done; and years to return to take a different path according to
what they learned from what they experienced without lying to themselves.
We have seen many lives passed by without return because of stubbornness.
More specifically, the case is related to our
21-year-old male triathlete who was 30 kilograms overweight at the age of 8 and
now is the best U-23 triathlete in Mexico. He (and we) has come a long way and
he continues to improve, he has had the need to improve due to his own
circumstances and not because he started late.
We are available 24 hours a day to help with his improvement and he has
been with us since the age of 8.
I would not create an ISO-triathlon because there is
nothing to standardize, not even training as you can read in the blog; we need
to start educating athletes at very young age so they can be able to learn.
