Lessons from the forge #1: Strike while the iron is hot

The first of 21 lessons I've learned about life, leadership and change from my journey as a practicing blacksmith, making useful things and burning myself along the way.

My main anvil (one of three) - a proper workshorse. From Facebook marketplace, some bloke’s garage in North Devon.

Alongside my work as a coach and trainer, working with leaders and teams in organisations, as well as herding my small children I’m a practicing blacksmith.

This isn’t a hobby. I’ve trained with various experienced smiths, I have gone on a number of courses and I’m a member of both The Blacksmiths and Metalworkers Association of the South West and the The British Artist Blacksmiths Association (BABA).

I currently work two days a week apprenticing to a master blacksmith and for the past four years I’ve been making knives, tools and heritage ironwork in my own forge on my smallholding in Devon, UK, where I also teach people the basics of the craft.

Over that time I’ve often thought about how this practice teaches me so much about leadership and life through the skills, techniques and challenges that come with it.

One day, while working on some gates for my employer, I wrote a list of all those insights with the intention of writing a ‘listicle’ style post. Once I’d gone past twenty, and realised how much was packed into each, I decided that this was going to have to be a series.

So here it is: the beginning of a long-running mini-publication in itself of ‘Lessons from the Forge’.

The majority of this writing will be free but, for the first time, I’ve *also* introduced a paid support tier. Some articles will be only available for people in that tier, but all others will be available to everyone

I’m doing this because I love writing and I get so much great feedback from my readers but I’ve always let it be a bit of an afterthought to my other work.

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Lesson #1 Strike while the iron is hot

Most people will be familiar with this turn of phrase - it’s one of many that you’ll find peppered throughout the english language that points to the historical and cultural legacy of blacksmithing (more on this in future posts).

It’s a wonderful mental-visual metaphor - the image of acting at just the right time to get the result you want.

But in the forge, when working with live material, it’s the subtleties and nuances of acting with discernment and decisiveness that are critical to understand.

Mild steel, which we tend to work with when doing most day-to-day work, is solid stuff when cold.

The idea that we can shape and mould it to our will is one of those semi-magical ideas that used to shroud the village smith with an almost mystical (and sometimes suspicious) air.

Under heat, however, if we allow the material to get to just the right temperature, we can manipulate it - not just using a hammer but with all sorts of hand tools, helpers and jigs - in ways that transform something dull and shapeless into ornate or purposeful shapes.

For this reason forges - or smithies - are intentionally dark places. We don’t measure the temperature of a piece of steel by degrees, but by colour. We can only see this in the dim light of a Blacksmith’s workshop.

And because every fire you light is slightly different, every bit of steel a different mass depending on its shape and size, there is no specific time to leave it in the hearth.

Instead we wait and watch until it becomes the perfect shade of bright, cherry red, verging into the yellow.

At that point, with just the right force, at just the right angle and using just the right tool, you can fairly easily bend and shape the workpiece into the next stage of your project’s need.

This requires both patience and careful attention.

In your eagerness to get started, it’s too easy to pull the steel out of the fire and start hitting it.

If you do this, firstly it won’t move as easily as you need it to, leading to having to put too much effort in, which over time leads to strain and injury.

As someone prone to impatience, when I started out on my journey in the craft, there was a point at which I developed such bad RSI (repetitive strain injury) in my elbow that when I reached to pick up a toilet brush one morning, I had a sharp, firey pain that was so bad I knew I needed to adjust how I was approaching my work.

Secondly, the other outcome from working steel too cold is that it can fracture and fall apart. Especially when doing small work - an ornate leaf, for example - hitting the piece when the colour has gone out of it means that it’s likely to break, ruining your project and forcing you to start over.

On the other end of the spectrum, leaving the steel in the fire for too long, allowing it to get to a bright yellow, then into white, means that it will start to blister before melting altogether.

At best you will have tarnished your final piece, at worst you lose bits of it as it drips into your hearth, leaving molten steel in your fire.

You may already have a sense of what meaning we can draw from these experiences but there are specific ways they have informed my wider work and life - either coaching clients working in tricky organisational settings and career transitions, initiating and running my own projects or simply trying to be a good dad and partner.

If you’re approaching a challenge or change, patience and careful attention are your closest allies, if you can cultivate them to a skilful level.

Waiting and watching, feeling for when something has heated up to just the right degree, is critical.

Whether that’s initiating a new project, starting a change programme or starting a conversation at home about something that’s difficult, timing is everything.

Sit with it, carefully watch it, wait to not just see it, but *feel* it. Notice for that point when things are at just the right moment for the right action.

Impatience will lead to nothing being quite ready - whether that’s about other people and where they are at, or your capacity to do what it is that needs to be done.

This is about sitting with all the tension that frustration, anxiety or excitement that accompanies those thoughts of ‘something needs to be done’. Relax into it, allow it to be there and focus your attention on what’s really happening to the potential piece of work and everyone’s readiness (especially your own), not the pressing urge to just get started.

Acting too early means that you’ll be working too hard, introducing too much tension, either causing potential harm or just leading to things cooling down and hardening back up again before you’ve even got started.

Conversely, don’t allow yourself to get distracted and leave things until they’ve overheated: that problem at work tips over into a crisis, your time in your current job leads to burnout or your child’s struggle at school ends in unnecessary suffering and mental health problems.

By that time, everything is on fire and it will only be about damage limitation - or having to take a big step back and come up with a completely new plan.

Sometimes this is necessary, but often it happens because you’ve become complacent, fearful or distracted.

Working with red hot steel in a high pressure environment has helped me to get better at knowing when things are at the point where just the right level of action or intervention will have a positive or generative impact.

This means I’ve sat on projects (like this one) for months - or even years - before acting. Not because I didn’t have the energy for them - I might feel very excited about my new ‘great idea’ but I’ve learned that the idea alone isn’t enough.

Things within me and without me have to be in just the right place for my action to have a good chance of leading to a good outcome.

And I’ve had to sit and watch my children struggle or sit on my own frustrations with how something is playing out in a relationship, knowing that if I step in too soon I’m going to disempower someone or explode a situation that will inevitably reach a point where I’ll have the information and feeling to do just the right thing.

Just like any piece I work on in the forge, all of this doesn’t mean that I’ll always get the result I expect or turn out in a way I like, but striking too soon or too late will inevitably lead to a mess.

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