“Rather than thinking it’s some support thing on the periphery, wellbeing is energy. It should be the centrepiece of our performance,” performance coach Owen Eastwood told an audience at the Leaders Sport Performance Summit at London’s Twickenham Stadium last November.
“Wellbeing is an essential ingredient of performance. If you think of it from an individual level, am I really going to perform anywhere near my capacity if I’m not well? If I’m not physically well, if I’m not emotionally well, if I’m not spiritually well?
“I think this is happening, where our wellbeing is becoming more central to the question of if we’re able to perform at our best rather than just being a support peripheral piece over here where people think ‘if people are having physical or mental problems then someone is looking after them’. I think we’re moving to a place where everyone understands that.”
Eastwood’s words echo Kate Hays’ at last June’s Leaders Meet: Evolution of Leadership. “I think coaches are embracing it and I think the high performance system is embracing it, and I think athletes are embracing it,” said the former Head of Psychology at the English Institute of Sport. “The world has not been as we’ve known it, and we’ve seen real empathy and compassion towards people.”
That empathy and compassion was on show at Harlequins prior to last season’s Gallagher Premiership final where the men’s team would claim their first national championship in 11 years. A player approached Billy Millard, Quins’ Director of Rugby, with news that his mum had taken ill. “We said ‘just go. Just be back for the game’,” said Millard, also speaking at last year’s Leaders Sport Performance Summit at Twickenham. “He was like ‘what?’ ‘Just go’. So he came back and had an absolute stormer and it was very emotional and he was very thankful.
“It’s very easy to say that relationships are the most important, then you get a big call like that, ahead of the biggest game the club has had in a long time, and the coaches and the staff just went ‘that comes first. Just go, brother’. The players hear about that and there was a lot of things like that we did, it builds trust both ways.”
Millard’s point is underlined by Quins scrum-half Danny Care, who is sat beside him. He said: “To have the coaches go ‘that comes first, your family comes first’ even though we’ve got the biggest game the club’s ever had at the weekend. Then, as a player, you go ‘amazing’; we’re not robots, we’re people.”
Eastwood, who sits on the board at Harlequins, elaborated on this point backstage at Twickenham. He said: “We’ve had discussions with the players where we’ve said ‘success for us looks like us being competitive now, this team, and striving to win, but success for the club also means after you leave this club and retire from professional rugby that you have a happy life, that you’ve learnt traits about yourself and how to cope with adversity that happens in life. That you’ve got a strong group and network of people and players who become friends forever. That’s what we want.
“Our parameters of success include wellbeing and that’s very authentic – we’re not just saying that, we genuinely feel that. We don’t want them to be having a crisis in their 40s and 50s, being lost, not knowing who they are, not having good life skills, not having a good network. Again, it’s good in the short term, I suppose, to have a culture like that, but we genuinely want it to be something that extends well beyond their time playing.”
The staff around the athlete are a vital part of the wellbeing question, as Angus Mugford, the Vice President of High Performance at Major League Baseball’s Toronto Blue Jays told the Leaders Performance Institute. “That aspect of all our lives is really important for staff,” he says. “High performance is not often a balanced world, there’s a lot of time on the road and away from family, and the high stress; and I think acknowledging that human beings, in their physical and mental health are really important aspects that we need to focus on, provide resources for, and work on too.”
A similar point was made by Lauren Whitt, Google’s Head of Global Resilience, at Leaders Meet: Evolution of Leadership, in the context of building resilience. She said: “Resilience prioritises rest and recovery. You do it for your athletes. Oftentimes we forget as leaders, as managers, as other folks who are working with the high performers, we also need you at your best; we also need you able to make decisions on the fly and to be sharp and to be crisp.”
Attitudes are shifting across high performance sport but, as Mugford says, “actions speak louder than words.”
This article originally appeared in our Special Report Enhancing Your Environment: Nurturing positive high performance set-ups.
From the front offices to the locker rooms via the psychologist’s couch, we bring you ten performance lessons from the Leaders Performance Institute vaults that continue to resonate today.
1. Athletes need to feel a sense of belonging
The WNBA is renowned for its advocacy of social justice issues and one of the its leading lights, the Seattle Storm, have been at the vanguard under CEO and President Alisha Valavanis. Backed by one of sports few all-female leadership groups in Force 10 Hoops LLC, the Storm has won three championships and made every effort to ensure the players find an inclusive, cohesive locker room where everyone is committed to representing the Storm’s vest.
“It starts with establishing personal relationships and building relationships on trust and connection so that players can share with us what their hopes are off the court,” said Valavanis, speaking to the Leaders Performance Institute in 2020. “There’s a real intentional effort to learn all about all of the individuals in our organisation and we certainly have conversations with players on how we can support them and make sure that everyone is clear what it means to be part of this organisation.”
2. Engage your athletes in their development
When athletes feel secure then you can empower them in both their personal development and the collective. “I’m a big believer in getting players to collaborate, present back, research, share with the group, present to the coaching group and vice versa,” said Jess Thirlby, the Head Coach of the England netball team on the Leaders Performance Podcast in 2020. “It’s a good way for me to check understanding from the group and it helps inform how to set direction and invest my energy when I hear the playing group back and they’ve demonstrated really sound understanding of themselves and the opposition and, not only that, but coming up with ways in which we’re going to pit strengths against their weaknesses.”
3. Make space in your schedule for independent development
Thirlby’s emphasis on empowerment is matched by Lucy Skilbeck, the Director of Actor Training at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art [RADA]. “One of the things we’re looking at is how we can develop a more facilitative relationship with the student and how we make more space within the timetable for the student’s independent development,” she told a Leaders Performance Institute Webinar in 2021. “We’re also looking at how can we foster in them a greater sense of independence and understanding of themselves as artists and actors; as people who can make and create work as well as deliver other people’s work. Pedagogically, how do we work with them to facilitate the growth of their individuality rather than a monocultural process?”
4. Take a step back
Paula Dunn is the Head Coach of the Paralympic Programme at British Athletics. Ahead of the delayed Tokyo Games, where her team claimed 24 medals, she spoke of the perils of micromanaging. “I thought I had to be in charge, I had to be tough, I had to work the longest hours, I had to have all the answers,” she said. “It’s never good to have a decision made by one person, so I’ve tried to work with my team, understanding what their motivations are, and just being honest when I just don’t know something or if I’ve had issues.”
5. Is the athlete’s real competition the challenge of fulfilling their potential?
Anne Keothavong, the Captain of the Great Britain Fed Cup tennis team, is engaged in the development of the nation’s players and knows that no corners can be cut. As she told the Leaders Performance Institute in 2018, the challenges can differ from player to player. She said: “Every player represents a different case, depending on where they’re ranked and how old they are, how long they’ve been playing professionally, and what targets they need to hit. I’m not involved on a day to day basis but when I see them in a training or competition environment I’m looking out for whether they’re improving, consistently working on those goals, and the other things they want to focus on to help make them a better tennis player.”
6. Track athletic development through relevant tests
The best data can be linked to specific tests and Kate Weiss, the Director of Sports Science at the Seattle Mariners, walked viewers through a hypothetical process with a pitcher at our February Webinar. “When they come in, we’re going to test range of motion, we’re going to test movement capacity; how are they going to move in a general sense and a baseball-specific sense,” she says. “We’re going to look at the different components of strength, speed, power, we’re going to look at body composition. All these different things that we know contribute to and help support what they do on the field. Then what we’re going to do is look at the on-field data and link that back and go ‘OK, maybe there’s issues with their shoulder separation on the mound.’ We’re going to look through everything and go ‘OK, is it coming from a range of motion issue? Is it coming from just a movement capacity issue?’ Or if it’s not those things maybe it’s just a coaching issue that we have to work on and come up with specific drills.”
7. Data: spend less time capturing data and more time analysing and feeding back
“For data capture and analysis, we have a mantra at the EIS: ‘we should spend less time capturing data and more time analysing and feeding back’,” said Julia Wells, the Head of Performance Analysis at the English Institute of Sport. “That’s something that’s been rooted in us since the inception of our Performance Analysis team.” She and her team supported Great Britain’s athletes at the 2020 Tokyo Games and, as she told the Leaders Performance Institute in the aftermath, they prioritise harnessing the latest tech and relationships with the end users. “The software available now is immense,” she added. “There’s so much to choose from, which can be a challenge but we honed in on data visualisation and our ability to translate data into usable insights.”
8. Do not attempt to separate emotion from performance
Sports Psychologist Mia Stellberg feels attempting to shut down emotions is counterproductive for athletes. “The more they can understand emotions, they can explain and understand what they are feeling or how that feeling came to occur is the first step,” she told the Leaders Performance Podcast in 2021. “We can never control anything that we are not aware of. So you need to be aware of your emotions, sometimes this is the most tricky part of my work, to talk about emotions to young guys at age 20 who just want to rule the world, play and win the title! Then the second step is understanding how that feeling occurs or what needs to happen before it pops up, so if we want to prevent negative feelings we have to understand what happens before it comes so that we can learn how to control, how to prevent.”
9. Embrace risk, expand comfort zones
Mental performance coach Véronique Richard, who has worked with Cirque du Soleil as well as a variety of sports organisations, attempts to cultivate ‘risk-friendly’ environments. “Risk needs to be part of your environment,” she told the Leaders Performance Institute in 2018. Richard strives to foster the conditions for enhanced skill development in the athletes and performance artists with whom she works. In short, she introduces an element of chaos. “By working through that mess, people actually increase their repertoires of thoughts and actions, which contributes to creativity,” she said. “First, I ask the athlete: ‘what are you avoiding not because you’re not skilled enough but because it makes you uncomfortable?’ There’s all sorts of things we don’t do because of discomfort; it can be technical, tactical psychological, emotional, personal, ego and then, as a leader, your role is to find the right stimuli to bring the person to explore discomfort and bring people to work in this zone of discomfort; and if you manage that successfully you actually expand their zone of comfort.”
10. Do your athletes know where to turn for help?
In 2019, the Australian Institute of Sport established its Career & Education Practitioner referral network, as Matti Clements, the acting CEO, explained in her former role as Deputy Director of Athlete Wellbeing and Engagement. “That is practitioners who can provide high level expertise on vocational pathways. It’s referral-in and we’ll cover the costs of all podium-plus-level athletes and coaches,” she told an audience at Leaders Meet: Wellbeing. The AIS also provides help for the athlete wellbeing & engagement managers with the provision of a personal development programme. “This is so that we can ensure a level of risk management and skillset across those people. What we’ve done is invite the whole system, including professional sports, into that education and we’re creating community practice hubs so that they can actually have some peer support; it’s led by us, but there’s peer support there.”
