A Human Performance Article Brought to you by our Main Partners

By Sarah Evans with additional reporting from Oliver Escritt

Recommended reading:

How People Learn: Designing Education and Training that Works to Improve Performance

What Sports Can Learn from Approaches to Wellbeing in the Business World

Why Wellbeing and Performance Are Indivisible

Framing the topic:

Our first topic-led virtual roundtable for 2023 looked at how our members were balancing wellbeing and performance. We have seen a shift away from the ‘win at all cost’ mentality towards ‘winning well’ but understand elite sport is a results-driven industry, so we asked our members what they were doing to continue to push for high performance whilst also balancing wellbeing. What is working in terms of wellbeing support and where do the challenges and opportunities remain?

The discussion spanned many different areas, but we have picked out five key ways in which our members were able to balance wellbeing with performance:

1. The importance of language

• The difference in changing one word from the wellbeing approach to our wellbeing approach, and what an impact that can have. ‘Human optimisation vs wellbeing.’
• Being intentional with the language we use. Seeing wellbeing as an enhancer rather than an inhibitor of performance. Shift this narrative from within through the coaches and staff so that they can champion the messages.

2. A whole club approach

• Have wellbeing integrated into everyday life in the organisation, and engrained in the fabric of everything they do.
• Weekly staff meetings – sharing of information around players and if there are any red flags. Start with injured players as this could be a difficult time for them and their mental wellbeing.
• Informing and educating the environment so that the more people who understand this area, the better. Mental Health First Aid training for staff, providing a bigger network of people caring for one another, whilst also supporting existing relationships.

3. Recover. Support

• It is important to prepare the athletes for adversity and build resilience to be successful in the high performance world, but then allow them times to recover and make them feel supported.
• Encouraging an environment of high challenge with high support.
• Coaching the coaches to understand this process and to weave wellbeing and the messaging into their environment.

4. Begin wellbeing work with younger athletes

• Plan monthly meetings with every academy player. Have performance lifestyle advisors checking in and helping the athletes to be more engaged with wellbeing and how it can enhance their performance.
• ‘Wheel of life’ exercise where the athletes reflect on different aspects of their life and assess the quality of their choices and time dedicated to each. This allows the athletes to understand themselves better and to see themselves as whole people and not ‘just athletes’, where their self-esteem isn’t wrapped up in performance outcomes.

5. Having a long-term vision

• Taking a step back and looking at how you can implement a framework together around balancing wellbeing and performance, and creating a vision aligned to this that everyone buys into.
• Understanding your athletes from the outset, their strengths, weaknesses and values.

Here are some of the key takeaways from our members on the call:

• What it means for a head coach to deliver challenging news and the impact it has on the player and them as a coach and language moving away from wellbeing to human optimisation.
• Wellbeing (optimisation) is not a trade-off with performance but an integration. We must understand the demands of our environments, such as, hiring, onboarding and developing staff/athletes appropriately.
• Be intentional about the timing around wellness programmes, reframe them as another normal tool for athletes, reframe as optimisation instead of a trade-off or something separate.
• Understand what the intent of your programme is. What your needs are. Main actions and objectives. Then constantly review and refine with transparency.
• Lots of quality discussion on the value of wellbeing as another tool to get athletes and/or your programme better. This should let the message resonate with everyone from the athletes and coaches to the organisation as a whole.

A Human Performance article brought to you by our Main Partners

By John Portch

• It is your choice as staff, coaches, mentors and leaders to support the entire person.

• Being able to self-report is pivotal – make sure that players feel safe and that it’s OK to not be OK.

• What brings an athlete joy? Encourage athletes to look outside of their discipline whenever possible.

There is an appetite for self-reporting

When Tish Guerin served as the Carolina Panthers’ Director of Player Wellness between 2018 and 2020 she was one of the first in the NFL. Yet far from finding herself at a loose end, she was able to hit the ground running. “One of the things I found interesting was the immediate self-reporting,” she told an audience at the 2020 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in Charlotte. “That was how I really started to measure the psychological wellbeing of our players.” Guerin was also proactive in her approach. “I had to make sure I was at the forefront, that they knew they could come to me and get that confidential interaction with me.” It worked. “Players came to me pretty much within my first week and they weren’t necessarily talking about the weather or their favourite restaurants – they were talking about real life issues that they were dealing with and wanted to combat those.”

Work out their normal

Right from the moment then-Head Coach Ron Rivera invited Guerin to address his players in the locker room, Guerin was visible around the practice facility come hail, rain or shine and joined the players at mealtimes. They knew they could check in at any stage and it enabled her to establish “behavioural baselines”, as she puts it, for each player, which is no mean feat on a roster of 53 athletes. “I know what their normal is,” she said. “I know what it looks like when a player has a good mindset and is emotionally balanced because I know what their levels are and I see them every day. That’s the benefit of being able to interact with them day in and day out.

“It’s about being able to recognise if, during a play, they struggled and I know it’s not something they struggled with typically. That’s where I’m able to go in and say, ‘hey, I noticed you hesitated before you made that block and in this play that’s not normally something you would do. Why is that?’ That’s addressing that potential performance anxiety and working through it.”

They may best respond to someone else

“One of the things that’s been important for me is acknowledging that players may not respond to me,” she said. “That meant I couldn’t come in and have an ego about that. When Coach Rivera brought me in, he let me get up in front of the team and give my spiel and I let them know right off: ‘if you prefer a male, that’s perfectly fine. I’m happy to refer you to wherever you’ll get the best treatment from’. You have to be aware of who you are serving, who those athletes are, who they might best respond to.”

Life beyond sport

Guerin explained the importance of providing players with coping skills, which are, “just those things you do to help you keep calm; that give you balance. You want to encourage activities that give the person a sense of peace, balance and a way to relax.” She also delved into tackling the ever-present threat of performance anxiety. “You want to change the thought process so that instead of a player thinking ‘I’m not going to make this block because this guy has two inches on me and about 30lbs’ you think ‘I’m going to keep my feet planted on the ground, I’m going to dig in all the way through and I’m going to hold them off with everything I have in me.’”

“Changing how you look at things can be instrumental in helping to decrease performance anxiety,” she continued. “We encourage our athletes to look outside of their discipline to something else that gives them joy. I don’t care if it’s a cooking class; we’ve had a player who’s learning to be a pilot; one guy was interested in being a glass blower. ‘I don’t know why but, hey, do your thing.’

“It helps the creative process and it helps them to buy-in more to being on the football field because now they have some balance.”

A Human Performance article brought to you by our Main Partners

By Luke Whithworth and Sarah Evans

Recommended reading

Psychology and Purpose: Creating a Thriving Team Environment

How Do you Get that Little Bit Extra Out of a Person’s Performance?

Framing the topic

The practice of psychology or mental skills is always a field of interest across the Leaders Performance Institute – there is always a curiosity to learn about how others are integrating and influencing the practice across different environments. Therefore, within this topic-led roundtable discussion we wanted to delve into our members’ current thinking around what is making the most impact and what some of the associated barriers are to embedding effective psychological practice.

Due to the popularity of the topic, we split the group into two to cover more of the detail.

Group 1:

• Do you have a clear definition of what mental performance is and isn’t? Is everyone aligned on that definition?
• With this generation of athlete we are seeing a real desire to have their sport be a part of who they are, thus wanting more from their club or organisation around not only inner development but professional development as well.
• There is more of a focus on developing the holistic individual – a lot of what is being done on the front end with younger talent is basic life skills and fundamental qualities. Historically, mental skills and performance was centred around performing at the sharp end without developing the foundational qualities first.
• In the space of mental performance and sports psychology, a couple of teams on the call cited that they are doing a lot of work around education and awareness of what it is and what it isn’t – having a distinction between the mental performance and mental health space.
• Approach your mental performance work with an athlete-like athletic development – it is a muscle that can be developed so you are ready when it matters most.
• In the sport of baseball, you are afforded a short pause between pitches. In terms of some of the work, one environment on the call has honed in on is the challenge over thread mentality and being focused on the right thing at the right time.
• One of the questions a team from the NBA has been thinking about is the balance between individualised learning and holistic team culture learning that sits alongside it. There have also been further considerations on how best to package and meet the athletes where they are at in the different points of their athletic and their human journey.
• In agreement on the point above, a baseball environment uses group contexts for priming and generating conversation and interest in a topic, but then sitting down with the players on an individual basis to personalise it. One of the most important components of unlocking this has been the integration with coaches, getting their buy-in and speaking the same language; working with them to set up training environments that can reinforce the concept of external vs. internal.
• We are seeing the most impact with people who are most bought into the process. Naturally, we will see those that do buy into it and those that don’t. Once we have got athletes into the process, it falls into two camps: do you want to engage in opportunities to drive performance? Or, do you want to just have conversations that make you feel better about playing poorly? It can sound harsh, but often that is the reality we see in different environments.
• Put things in very concrete terms for athletes, using language from their sport for things that they can actually transfer over and apply in their practices – a great place to practise things is in practice. So being able to give them things to actually tangibly work on and experiment. From here, when they come back to have that follow up conversation, you get the opportunity to find that process. What worked? What didn’t? What did you like? It’s important to show how these ideas related to their experiences as a performer.
• NCRW: Naturally Curious Resourceful & Whole. This framework is to support your understanding of where the athlete is. Another good analogy to consider is soil – is it ready for the seeds of mental performance to be planted? It might take those relaxed conversations and meeting the athlete where they are at before planting the seeds.
• Education within your group is important. You will have players that have been at the top level for a number of years that don’t want this specific support, but others in the environment will. It’s important to make it clear to those who are sceptical to not be a detractor to those that are proactively asking for the support.
• Consider the World Café concept: athletes are often wired to do what they are told to do, but best practices like the World Café give off a vibration of something different – create opportunities to get people into small groups and ask powerful questions, from there getting feedback from the leadership group.

Group 2:

• One of our members from North America highlighted the importance in creating relationships in the coaching and application of mental skills, between both the players and coaches; and this takes time to build. Having mental performance coaches as full-time practitioners is key for this, giving them the time and resources so that they can embed this work into everyday performance.
• It is worth noting that the importance of psychologists has become much more accepted within high performance environments. Covid helped to open many people’s eyes to the importance of mental health and mental performance coaching.
• However, it is important to remember that there is a difference between mental health and mental performance and to understand where those lines are and how to best support the athletes with what they need.
• Another key way of seeing the greatest impact within teams is having this practice integrated into the day to day of performance and not having it as an additional session at the end of the day.
• One US baseball team explained the use of short and sweet ‘drive-bys’ where the mental performance coaching is drip-fed into every day, in short bursts rather than 30-minute sessions as add-ons. They also explained how they work with and through the coaches, so the messages aren’t solely from the psychologist, but are delivered by the coaches too.
• Having the psychologist integrated into the session designs and strategy for the week is another great example of where a football team in the UK has seen success. They take a skill to focus on for the week, for example ‘confidence’ and plan how they can design the sessions to help best bring out this skill.
• Coaching the coaches – how can the psychologist help strengthen the coaching team? If they are truly integrated into the coaching staff then they can provide very specific feedback and offer a different perspective.
• Process-focused rather than outcome-focused. It is important to remove the outcome focus both with staff and players.
• Creating identity cards, is another practice one team found had a positive impact. The coaches develop these with the players individually and they put them up on the walls. This helps close the gap in self-awareness so that the players and staff are more on the same page.
• One way to help team cohesion and confidence was through creating a Google form where every player and staff member writes a couple of positive things about each player. It is anonymous, and each player receives the comments from the group.
• One barrier to implementing some of the mental performance work is when the coaches see the ‘casual collisions’ as overstepping. You have to build trust with the coaches which again, takes time.
• This leads onto the notion that the ‘coach is king’ model, which is a major barrier to some of this work. This notion of giving power away to someone else from a mental performance side can be difficult, and to overcome this it is again about building trust, and understanding what small wins you can take. Being able to allow them to see that the work is relevant, and why it is a tool rather than a threat.

A Human Performance article brought to you by our Main Partners

By John Portch

• Help athletes to better understand and use their support networks independently.

• Calibrate wellness education to your athletes or playing group.

• Identify the low-hanging fruit in your organisation.

Help athletes to take care of themselves

Nyaka NiiLampti, the VP of Wellness & Clinical Services at the NFL, spoke of the mental wellness work she does with the leagues rookies at the 2019 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in Atlanta. “My first question is asking ‘how many of you have heard that this will be the longest year of your life?’. They all raise their hands,” she said. “Then I ask ‘how many of you actually feel like this has already been the longest year of your life?’ and most of them will raise their hands as well”. A significant part of the NFL’s Total Wellness project, which NiiLampti oversees, focuses on helping young athletes to be intentional in pursuing their wellness. “[We tell them] all of the new experiences that you’re going to have over the next eight to ten months, you need to know exactly who’s your support, how do you take care of yourself, what does that support look like?” added NiiLampti. “Know it now because that’s where we see the mistakes happen, that’s where we see the impulsive behaviours, that’s where we see decision making that could really propel the end of your already really short careers… any mistakes that you make in this space are going to be really costly”.

Set up athletes for their post-playing transition

NiiLampti pointed out that the average NFL career is short even by elite sport’s standards. It is essential for her to understand the culture of the league and its impact on young players. “Anything they see as a potential for someone to see them as not performing up to par in any area is a risk of unemployment,” she said. Make sure you are aware of what those unique cultural factors are but then also know the specific factors about your sport. For example, with the NFL, we know that the average career is 3.5 years. That means you’re going to get guys coming in who are super young who are not going to stick around very long; so how can you make sure you’re providing as much education as you possibly can on the front end?”. This is essential because NiiLampti has found that players “Scotch tape and bubble gum themselves together” due to college and professional football tending to be crisis-focused. She added: “You come into the league thinking ‘yeah, there’s some things I could probably work on but I’ll worry about it after I make my money and transition out’.” Organisations must change this outlook and provide support for their athletes. “We’re going to give you additional skills that might actually help you prolong your career. But [teams should] make what happens in that transition out get a little bit easier. We know the transition out is going to be difficult anyway but what are the sort of things we can do to minimise the difficulty?”

Seek out the low-hanging fruit

There are always quick wins to be found. “One of the things that we talk about is we know that every team is going to have a population of players who struggle with injury,” said NiiLampti, who put the injury rate in the NFL at 100%. “So how do you put things into place that’s low-hanging fruit? How do you put things into place for that population? It’s being aware of who’s your population as well as what are the unique cultural pieces of the environment that you work in? Start small… then that word of mouth grows… if it’s high quality and done well that word of mouth travels”.

Promote sport as a platform for increasing self-awareness

The idea of athletes as role models is as true as some of the best clichés. “We know sports also has an incredible platform and if we can educate and we can use this to further the conversations, particularly around mental health or aspects of wellness; there’s a trickle-down effect,” said NiiLampti. “To what degree, if we are using that platform to further educate the rest of the world, particularly young men and particularly young men of colour, then I think the healthier that men in the NFL get the healthier that young boys get in this country, the healthier families get, and so the healthier we are collectively”.

By John Portch

Winning is great – but at what cost?

“In Australian sport, we went through a period where we were highly successful, across numerous sports, but there were often implications for athletes’ mental health,” says Ben Robertson, the National Wellbeing Manager at Tennis Australia.

Robertson is talking to the Leaders Performance Institute about the change in thinking that came about in Australian sport.

He says: “The Australian government was looking at this and asking ‘why are we funding this? Winning titles and obtaining individual results are great, but we are potentially leaving these athletes with limited  life skills or other skills for transitioning into a life beyond sport?’ Sport has always wrestled with this, especially as it’s gone professional in the last 30 years or so.”

Robertson is joined by his colleague Nicole Kriz, Tennis Australia’s National Lead of Tours, Camps, College and Wellbeing. The duo are speaking from a camp in France where they have travelled with a group of 13 and 14-year-old players to compete in an international competition.

It is not unknown, Kriz explains, for a 24-hour trip from Melbourne to a European destination to be delayed by 12 hours or more. “And these are young kids,” she says. “Life can throw anything at them, such as travel disruption, and they need coping mechanisms. We’re not even talking about competition yet. If they don’t have the skills to deal with that then they’re really not going to cope once they’re here on the ground, and that has to have a follow-on effect on their enjoyment, being an athlete, their ability to tour, and being able to turn up and compete.”

“If they can’t find a way off-court, they’re not going to find a way on-court,” adds Robertson. To that end, Tennis Australia has committed to proactive, holistic development of its junior players through its Wellbeing and Life Skills Programs.

The latter was born from conversations between Kriz and Robertson at a time when Kriz was working with Australian Pro Tour athletes on tennis’ WTA Tour. These athletes’ performances on court and touring capacity were being affected by issues off-court.

The Life Skills Program consists of eight units: independent living, working and living with others, travel, personal development, education and career, managing money, personal health, living overseas and other cultures. These programs  seek to develop wellbeing-focused skills such as regulation and self-awareness and life skills such as cooking, doing the laundry, or buying a ticket at a railway station.

“We want to develop resilient, capable, independent kids,” says Kriz, “If we do then the parents are going to be more confident about their child’s functioning and touring capabilities as well.”

It is an ethical responsibility that Tennis Australia takes seriously. “We’re taking these kids away from their No 1 support network in their parents, friends and their school environment,” says Robertson. “It’s down to us to develop their off-court skills, and as trivial as some of those may seem, you’re developing the base for them to build on, so that when they are on the tour at 18 or even earlier, by themselves potentially, they have these skills so that it’s not foreign to them when they get there. If they have to do it later in life then the anxiety and the frustration kicks in.

“It seems really basic and a lot of it is, but it’s our responsibility on tours. We’re here to compete, we’d love to win, but that’s not the be-all and end-all of the tour and we try to explain that to the kids and the parents. Winning’s great, it’s part of the process, but you spend so much more time off-court. Of 24 hours a day you probably play for two. You’ve got 22 hours left to sleep, develop relationships; the list goes on. It’s the same for any sport.”

Holistic development

Robertson observes that the narrative in sport is gradually shifting from the idea that holistic development automatically translates into competition to the view that athletes are people who just happen, in this case, to play tennis.

“I think that’s shifted in all sports because we cannot guarantee that we’re going to take a 13-year-old and, a few years later say they are going to be the No 1 in the world. But if we’re taking them away for four, five or six weeks, we’re going to give them the best experience, develop them as a person, and over time, if they go on to be a great player, fantastic.”

Both Robertson and Kriz make the point that their programs are still in their infancy, but these initiatives are indicative of that shift in wider sport, particularly with regards to wellbeing. “The analogy we have with the kids is that they all go to the gym no questions asked. They’ll do prehab; they don’t question that from a physical point of view. What we say is ‘this stuff here is prehab for your mental health and wellbeing, which allows you to perform at your best, whatever that might be’.”

The Wellbeing Program, much like the Life Skills Program, is a focal point for players and coaches who tour with Tennis Australia.

“There’s five pillars within our Wellbeing Program: ‘mindfulness’, ‘learn’, ‘giving back’, inside that is gratitude, ‘physical activity’ and ‘connection’,” says Robertson, who taken the athletes through some box breathing techniques at breakfast that morning. “The theme for this week with the under-13 and 14 girls is mindfulness. We’ve done some deliberate practice whether it be in a classroom setting or outside around ‘what is mindfulness? Why is it important? How does it translate to on-court? Why is it important as a human being? How does it tie to your mental health?’ And then there’s conversation around ‘these things are great but how do you manage it?’ So you’re not always thinking about the future and you’re not holding onto the past. You do that anyway, but how do you then quieten your mind for short periods?”

Direct observation is a useful way of assessing transference. “Some kids will practise during the game; at the change of ends they’ll sit and you’ll observe them. Two nights ago at dinner, I asked a player to name ten emotions. They could give me four and then got stuck. I said ‘right, you’ve got to come back tomorrow and give me the other six’. I asked the player ‘how did you feel?’ We tied it back to on-court; they won the match and had a bit of trouble in the second set. ‘What were you feeling? Let’s name those.’ That’s the ad hoc opportunity to teach them around emotional literacy and language and go ‘you don’t always go to the big ones – there’s little ones in between. And how do you self-regulate? What are the tools?’ They’re just ad hoc conversations but learning is ongoing the whole time.”

Kriz stresses the importance of educating the athletes to help increase their self-awareness in addition to broadening their language and understanding of stress responses. “When you are putting some language and context to it, kids can refer to that quite easily. If they’re unaware and they don’t have the language around the self-awareness, then they’re just going to react and respond and behave without thinking. So if we can put some understanding and some context around it, then they are better at identifying where they are in this and it’s not just ‘situation-respond’.”

Losing streaks stand out as an area where such tools could be useful. “What’s a ‘loss’?” asks Kriz. “We try to change the language around that. We haven’t spoken about results at all on this trip because this is a developmental tour both on and off court. We try to remove that pressure already from results.

“So if they’ve already heard that language and that education at 14, they can refer back to that at 17. It’s not black and white, win and lose or good and bad, it’s about ‘what am I learning here?’ If they’ve got that reference point they’ve got the skills moving forward to deal with it and reframe it and change their perspective on it.”

“The one thing that coaches ask is ‘did you compete?’” says Robertson. “‘Did you compete to the best of your ability? Yes and you lost. OK, you can swallow that, be proud of your efforts. Sometimes you just get beaten by a better player but you’ve got to learn from that. And if you didn’t compete to the best of your ability then why not?’ Then it’s backtracking to ‘I didn’t sleep well’, ‘I had doughnuts for breakfast’, whatever it may be. The conversation is purely around competing. You don’t want to be too content or comfortable with losing but you want to ask ‘did I compete to the best of my ability?’ Why or why not? That’s the conversation that coaches have with them and that’s where the skills come in because if we said to them go and do it all yourself and they’re overawed and they get smashed on court and off court and they say ‘I hate tennis, I’m out’.”

Both Robertson and Kriz state that this can be a challenge because tennis is ranked – a fact not lost on players, coaches or their parents. “We’re trying to change that narrative and make them feel comfortable that it’s about development,” says Robertson. As long as they’ve done the best they can it’s about learning for the next tour and then the next tour and then the next tour. And then it’s the same with the parents because the kids get off the court and they feel accountable and want to ring mum and dad to explain the result. ‘I won or I lost’. We’re still on a learning curve with a lot of our parents that this is about development on and off the court, but we’re seeing growth. By the third week, they’re comfortable with who they are, they’re talking to other international players, they’re self-managing better, so there’s a bit more energy.

“Conversely, you’ll have a player who is up and another who is down, so you’ve now got to go back and tell them ‘we need to get you through the next little bit’ and bring in some self-management tools that we’ve practised. It’s just that reassurance because they have it in their head that they need to be the best player here and then they get all the sponsors, then they go to No 1, and then they start to forecast and some of the parents do too.”

Match videos are also sent to the players’ parents and private coaches, who are mostly back in Australia, within 24 to 36 hours. It is a relatively new practice but it feeds into Tennis Australia’s aims. Kriz says: “They can work through it with their private coach and have a better conversation about what’s going on as well, not just judging it on a win-loss. So we are saying to the parents before you have a conversation with the kids or the coaches, before the private coach is having a conversation with the kid, watch the video and then let’s go through it as opposed to judging straight away on wins and losses.”

Developing life skills

Tennis Australia’s Life Skills Program, which is being mapped to adolescent development and designed alongside the Australian educational framework, combines online theory and activities with practical application in a way that is both fun and interactive.

Kriz cites an example of an online exercise. She says: “We’ve taken a screen shot of a departure board at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris and one of the questions will be: ‘if your flight to Stockholm is LU378, tell me what terminal you need to be at, what time you’re departing and what time your gate is’. We’ve then put some quizzes in the back end of that. Then once we actually go to Charles de Gaulle, we’ll go to the departure board and say: ‘OK, you guys learned how to do this this week, now I want you to put it into practice. Find it for us.’”

She returns to the theme of engagement and buy-in from players for life skills. Coaches and parents are starting to view them as a priority too. “Once you have buy-in then the engagement piece becomes better. Once the kids go ‘I need to do it and I want to do it’ it’s then asking where in the schedule on a daily basis we can do it. Once you have that there’s a huge appetite from the kids because they feel better equipped and more confident about travelling and there’s a certain amount of pride they take.” On another occasion, the players were taken to a railway station and shown how to buy tickets under supervision. The group later returned to that station to check their learning. “The next time, they were very excited to know they could do it. They were the ones going ‘we’ll buy the tickets too because we know how to do it’. That’s what you want. That’s the win. Once you have those little wins it becomes easier. It might be that you say ‘that took half an hour, we missed three trains, we watched three trains go by that we could have been on’ but then the next time it’s all worthwhile once you see them really excited about it. You know if that’s in two years’ time with their family or five or ten years’ time with their partner then they’re going to be able to do it.”

All of these skills are built incrementally and developed in line with their individual assessment and tour needs. “Each week we build upon what we’re asking of them in independence. Whether it’s ‘OK kids, this week we’re going to show you how to do the laundry. Next week you’re going to find the laundry, Google it, and you’re going to show us how to do it’. We do the same thing with restaurants or meals. Then, ‘we’re going to show you how to book courts, talk to the tournament director, introduce yourself, book transport, buy balls and fill up your water – you guys are going to do that.’ Once they feel comfortable and we’re confident they can deal with it, then we continually load them up. So by the third week we’ll have them calling up and booking the courts, as opposed to us doing it for them. When they’re confident and capable of managing it, a lot of confidence comes from knowing you can do it.”

Tennis Australia’s holistic approach requires a new definition of ‘success’, because it cannot be measured solely in professional tennis careers, trophies or prize money. “If the kid has a great professional career, whatever that may be; if they are retired at 22 because of a severe injury or they didn’t quite make it and they come back in, they go to college, and they come back in as a lawyer at TA or in the media team – that’s success to us,” says Kriz. “We have a responsibility there and success can’t just be performance, we have to move beyond what success means in our sport. Because it doesn’t matter if you’re No 1 in the world – your career will stop at some point. When they are in our care we need to provide them and assist them with those developmental skills to move beyond sport.”

Robertson refers to former player Ash Barty in making his point. “She was the No 1 player in the world, won three grand slams, and left the sport at 25. That’s a success because she’s achieved what she wants and she’s left the game on her own terms and in a really good place – but that’s just one athlete. How do all players get to leave on their own terms and ready for the next chapters of life?”

By Rachel Vickery

In 2016, the Golden State Warriors were on the brink of reclaiming their NBA title. At 3-2 up heading into game six of the final, away to Cleveland and off the back of a record-breaking season, Golden State was one win away from the Championship.

A very different version of Golden State would appear on the court. Instead of the masterclass in group flow, fluidity, risk-taking, and creativity that the team had become known for, passes tightened up, players hesitated, threw air balls and missed routine passes and shots. Cleveland came out dominant, while Golden State made seven significant passing, handling or shot errors in the first three minutes alone. They never recovered, losing the game 101-115. They lost the final game and lost the Championship.

Golden State’s inability to recover when they were in a corner and the pressure came on was devastating but not unique in high performance arenas. How could a team who had the physical skills to execute some of the most creative basketball seen to that point in history not read the court, mishandle the ball, miss shots they could usually take with their eyes closed, and lose all semblance of composure and control?

While some may say they choked, a more objective view would identify negative changes related to the human physiological stress or threat response. When a human crosses their threshold for pressure in a given scenario, they may experience loss of peripheral vision, reduced fine motor skills, biomechanical timing changes, lack of intelligent decision-making, and emotional regulation. The negative consequences of these changes in pressure situations can be devastating yet are highly preventable with strategic awareness and intentional training.

Unfortunately, many high-performing teams misinterpret momentum, past results, and winning streaks, believing this means by default that they can execute under pressure. In many instances, it’s more likely they have just never been tested.

When a lost game does not negatively impact the season’s outcome, a team can afford to be creative, try new things, and take risks because the consequence of failure is not a threat to the season’s result. However, if a team has ignored the critical skill of learning how to work with the changes that occur when the pressure is on, the stakes are high, and the consequence of failure becomes real, the cracks will show.

Most readers are familiar with the difference in play between a team aiming to win and one trying not to lose. A team playing to win exhibits creativity, fluidity, clear communication, confidence and risk-taking. A team focused on not losing plays with a fear-driven approach, tight technique, hesitation, self-doubt, and blaming others – not qualities that result in a high performing organisation.

There is a significant human, financial and reputational cost of not being able to execute in high-pressure moments that impact coaches and athletes, executives, leadership, and support staff. The focus is often on the people in the performance arena being able to execute their roles. But it is imperative for sound governance, intelligent decision making, career longevity, optimal communication, organisational reputation, trust and ethical elite high performance that learning these skills extends to every human in a high performance role. This education must include front office, leadership, support staff and board members.

By not strategically and intentionally setting individuals and teams up with an awareness of:

a) how their bodies and minds physically change in different pressure and threatening situations,

b) skills to acutely deploy in the moment of pressure if needed and

c) front loading strategies to prevent them from getting into that situation in the first place, high performers are set up for failure by “hoping” this skill shows up. To borrow a term from the military, ‘hope is not a course of action’.

The reality of high performance environments is magic happens outside of your comfort zones, not within. You can’t be a world champion by being average. You can’t lead a team through unprecedented times using your old, familiar approaches. You can’t set a personal best anything without pushing past the boundaries of what you’ve previously thought possible for yourself. By definition, being outside one’s comfort zone feels uncomfortable. Unfortunately, humans, by nature, don’t like to be uncomfortable!

In ancient times, being outside one’s comfort zone signalled the possibility of life-threatening danger. In modern times, while the triggers are usually not life-threatening, the response remains the same as some part of our ancient brain remembers or still believes that being out of our comfort zone is ‘unsafe’. If left uncontrolled, this response derails performance in high pressure but potentially magic situations.

Most people recognise their experience when outside their comfort zone, and their ‘fright and flight’ response (sympathetic nervous system) kicks in. Their heart beats faster, their breathing tightens up, they feel tenser, their vision may narrow, they lose fine motor skills, and they can’t think or speak as clearly. These are all consequences of the physiological threat response – a very ancient and normal survival response, hardcoded into every human to prime us for action and protect us from danger.

What is less appreciated is the impact these changes have on performance and execution in critical moments if this response is uncontrolled. Consider players who:

1. Make technical, tactical and handling errors (due to loss of fine motor skills or biomechanical timing changes through increased muscle tension and breathing changes);
2. Misread the field of play (loss of peripheral vision);
3. Don’t hear calls (auditory exclusion);
4. Forget the game plan (poor memory recall);
5. Make poor decisions (executive processing goes offline);
6. Lash out at opponents or referees when calls go against them (loss of emotional sobriety).

However, this physiological response in and of itself does not have to result in poor performance. When a person’s control of their physiological response means their operating state or arousal state stays under their threshold or ‘redline’ in a given situation, they will be aware of the heightened response but without the negative consequences to performance.

To use the threat response advantageously, without misinterpreting it as ‘something bad is about to happen’ or letting it derail performance, requires skill and training. The magic of harnessing this response lies in early identification of when it kicks in, navigating it for optimal performance and preventing it from crossing the threshold where performance is compromised. Achieving this requires a combination of skills to deploy in the critical moment, skills to increase one’s threshold and front-loading strategies to put a buffer in the system in the first place.

There are several misconceptions about performance in high-pressure environments and an individual’s ability to execute or not. These misconceptions can leave significant performance gains on the table and the discard of valuable people too early. However, these misconceptions also point to where teams can make improvements.

1. ‘Performance under pressure is a psychological skill, taught by psychologists’ 

Human neurophysiology, human behaviour, and a physiological threat response thousands of years old drive reactions and responses to high pressure and threat perception. Our ancient and automatic responses can undermine even the best psychological training despite modern technology and awareness. Further, positioning performance under pressure as solely a psychological skill deters many alpha and elite performers from exploring understandings and ways to manage the negative consequences of a heightened operating state for fear of being seen as mentally or emotionally weak.

2. ‘Performing under pressure is determined solely by what you experience and do in the moment of pressure’

There is a cumulative effect to the threat response, with many things that elevate someone’s operating state as having nothing to do with the ‘thing’ itself. Think about your reaction if an idiot cuts you off in traffic on your drive to work. If life is humming and you’re feeling good, you’ll likely respond differently than if you haven’t slept well, argued with your partner, your team has performed poorly all season, you’re running late for an important meeting, and it’s rush hour. If you have a different reaction in these two scenarios, you’re not reacting to the idiot driver; you’re reacting to the accumulation and escalation before the idiot cuts you off. The performance arena works the same way. For most high performers, the performance arena is their relative comfort zone. They love competition and the opportunity to test their abilities. However, pressures related to (as examples) contracts, travel, young families, media and fan feedback, battles with self-worth, value and identity cause many high performers to enter their performance arena in an already elevated operating state. The normal and expected elevation of their operating state by a couple more notches at “go time” can be enough to push them across their threshold, and the cracks show.

Front-loading skills and strategies, rather than solely focusing on learning skills for the critical moment, are crucial to account for this accumulation and put a buffer into the system.

Typically, the problem is brought to awareness or focus in one of three areas (right-hand lower corner of Diagram 1) – the breakdown of task execution and outcomes, the heightened perception of pressure/anxiety, or the self-medicating/self-sabotaging behaviours.

3. ‘If a human fails to perform under pressure, it’s anxiety, and it’s in their head / they are mentally weak’

See the two points above. Irrespective of the performance arena, many high performers have the mental and emotional resilience to handle, excel and thrive in high pressure. But their physiology can still get out of control underneath the surface, leading to the negative consequences outlined previously. If someone can execute skills in lower arousal environments but not under pressure, assuming or labelling the problem as “anxiety” ignores the impact that a myriad of other physiological drivers will have on escalating the threat response that has nothing to do with “anxiety”. And it often has nothing to do with the performance arena, either! Part II of this article series will explain this point in more detail.

4. ‘People can either handle pressure, or they can’t’

Executing under pressure is a highly trainable skill, just like any other sport-specific skill. Unfortunately, it is often omitted in training during early career development, meaning performers get a long way through their careers due to natural talent or early physical development before this gap appears and the problems show. The assumption mistakenly gets made at this point that the operator can’t handle pressure. Most people who falter in high-pressure situations have just not learnt specific skills to prevent or recover from when their operating state crosses their threshold.

Additionally, a person’s threshold will differ between scenarios. An exceptionally qualified black belt martial artist will comfortably face down an opponent in a dark alley but get a dry mouth and sweaty palms at the thought of giving a speech in front of a thousand people. A seasoned firefighter will move confidently into a structural fire with no fear for their safety but momentarily freeze and move forward with heart palpitations and fast breathing when confronted with performing CPR on a young baby.

5. ‘Performance Under Pressure just “shows up’

There is a mistaken belief that operators can do the technical and tactical training, turn up in a big moment, and perform when the pressure and stakes are high simply because of their technical excellence. Coaches and team managers will often bemoan the sub-par performance that falls well short of potential without realising there is a skill gap. Most high performers do not automatically know what to do or expect mentally or physiologically when in high-pressure situations. Without intentionally learning skills to control their state in these situations, they fall victim to the negative performance changes outlined above.

In the most simplistic view, consistent elite performance in high pressure and high stakes moments requires two things:

1. The ability to execute to one’s physical potential and
2. The ability to stay in control of one’s operating or arousal state.

Many of the negative consequences of high pressure and high stakes environments, and the strategies employed to overcome them, are linked to the human threat response (particularly the sympathetic nervous or fright or flight system). How an individual breathes when they aren’t thinking about breathing will also impact this response by signalling whether there is a threat or everything is safe. These two areas directly affect the other – either positively when trained strategically and with intent; or negatively when left to chance. Consistent elite performance in high-pressure environments needs both areas to be trained intentionally in a coordinated way and in advance of ‘go time’.

We see the following negative interactions when these two factors are not well controlled.

Diagram 1

Typically, the problem is brought to awareness or focus in one of three areas (right-hand lower corner of Diagram 1) – the breakdown of task execution and outcomes, the heightened perception of pressure/anxiety, or the self-medicating/self-sabotaging behaviours.

Some of the changes to task execution and performance for athletes are identified earlier in this article. The same concept applies to coaches, executive teams and support staff in their respective roles, although how it shows up may vary. The subsequent increase in pressure and anxiety for the individual, team, coaches or team management related to poor performance; and the impact of negative media and public criticism leads some individuals to self-medicate or self-sabotage. Any combination of alcohol, drugs, porn, gambling, food, missing training, out-of-arena altercations, excessive work hours, neglecting family, affairs, and unethical decision making may be present. Unsurprisingly poor mental health and suicidal tendencies sit in this mix also.

Teams will often try to fix the problem in one of these three areas. If a player misses kicks – they spend more time on their kicking technique (unfortunately, often in a relatively relaxed, no-pressure state). If a person – particularly coaches and management personnel- struggles with anxiety, they either keep it to themselves, are medicated, or receive insufficient expert guidance. If a person has an addiction or behavioural problems, they are disciplined, sent to rehab or hide it in shame.

This traditional approach is fundamentally flawed. Waiting for performance issues in pressure environments to show up (whilst hoping they don’t) and then reactively fixing them does not result in excellence and consistent high performance. Punishing poor performance under pressure in the absence of a front-loaded strategy of skill acquisition in this area is akin to throwing a bunch of humans who don’t know how to swim into a pool and then yelling at them to stop drowning.

Consistent elite high performance in high stakes and high-pressure environments means going “left of boom”, understanding the situation for what it is, and front-loading strategies to set up for success, thus avoiding a negative response. Normalising the physiological, cognitive and biological reactions that humans have in high-pressure environments and training and optimising for it is far more impactful on performance than just wishing or pretending it wasn’t there or reacting to the fallout after the event.

Part II of this series will dive deeper into how the human stress response works in high-pressure situations, how it disrupts performance and some skills and strategies to thrive in high pressure and high stakes environments.

Rachel is one of six Leaders Performance Advisors, a group of leading performance thinkers providing more subject expertise to our member-only content and learning resources. To find out more about all our Performance Advisors, click here.

By John Portch

Throughout 2021, there were conversations in high performance debating the balance between wellbeing and performance and, increasingly, the two are seen as indivisible.

“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.

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A Human Performance article brought to you by our Main Partners

By John Portch

• Wellbeing needs to be woven into the fabric of your organisation. 

• Resilience should be perceived as a skill much like any other. 

• People are more likely to commit to initiatives they helped to create.

Wellbeing – not just a nice to have 

It is increasingly discussed in high performance circles and there is a growing understanding that a focus on wellbeing at an individual and team level should be the norm. As the Royal Australian Air Force [RAAF] pointed out in their Member Case Study Virtual Roundtable in 2021, when wellbeing was tied to high performance and organisations worked backwards from that point, personnel increasingly see the relevance and organisations witness greater engagement. Wellbeing is the foundation of performance and sustained high performance. 

Resilience is a leadership capability 

“The world is changing around us,” Lauren Whitt, the Head of Global Resilience, told an audience at last June’s Virtual Leaders Meet: Evolution of Leadership. “How do we navigate ambiguity? How do we remember and recall there is a great amount of certainty in uncertainty and there are these base things that we know to be true that we can continue to focus on?” 

She explained that there is a long-term plan at Google to build-in resilience as a leadership capability. “It isn’t a side bar campaign – it is being woven into the fabric of our senior leaders, our top leaders, our managers; it is being woven into the core of their training, their leadership capabilities. Our leaders need and must be intentional about how to be present, how to talk about the hard things in a productive way, but more than anything, how can they be resilient leaders helping their teams respond to stress.” 

Greater resilience = greater energy and better decision making 

Whitt’s wisdom is not limited to the world of Googlers, with England men’s Head Coach Gareth Southgate speaking openly on the Leaders’ Rules of the Game podcast last summer about the link between his resilience and his wellbeing. “What I recognise about myself is that if I feel in a good place, that my own wellbeing is in a good place in terms of sleep, exercise, then in actual fact I feel stronger to take those things on and less affected by it. If I’m not sleeping well and I’ve been travelling a lot, if I’m rundown, I’m not physically in as good a place, I find that can affect my mood a little bit more and then I’ve got to be careful with my decision making. I’m very aware of my own personal state and [I am] able to control that and react to that a little bit more and put things into perspective better as I get older.” 

Give everyone a say in developing your organisation’s wellbeing initiatives 

Zach Brandon, the Mental Skills Coordinator at Major League Baseball’s Arizona Diamondbacks told the Leaders Performance Institute in July last year that he and his team have been intentional in seeking feedback around their work. “It can be hard to improve what you don’t or what you can’t measure,” he said. “If we’ve offered a session, a formal group session with players, very often we are trying to gauge their feedback afterwards. We’ll ask: ‘What stood out for you? What did you take from that? What remaining questions do you have? What did you feel might have been missing?’ We’re really purposeful with how we ask those questions and we try to include coaches as much as we can in not only being part of those sessions but in the design.  

“We track participation in sessions; who’s attending and how often. If we send digital content to players we keep track of its reach or the engagement. We solicit feedback and we try to be really purposeful in making sure that in doing so we know what’s working and what’s not with the players and coaches. We want to make sure that whatever we’re communicating with players, it aligns with their messaging. I think a big piece of our team culture is having a shared common language and alignment of mindsets.” Players and staff across the clubhouse feel they are being heard. Brandon added: “People are more likely to commit to things that they help to create.” 

A Human Performance article brought to you by our Main Partners

By John Portch

What constitutes wellbeing and what does not?

Though it might seem like an obvious question, there is not always a consensus within a team or organisation, and even where there is a consensus, astute organisations will seek to continually iterate definitions that everyone in the building can support.

When the Carolina Panthers appointed Tish Guerin as the NFL’s first Director of Player Wellness in September 2018, their aim was to ensure that wellness was built into their team environment.

“Are we making sure that we’re building a culture that subscribes to making sure we’re all in good mental health?” asked Guerin when she spoke at the Leaders Sport Performance Summit in Charlotte in February 2020.

Guerin, who has since departed her role, was firmly at the intersection of mental wellbeing, resilience and training. Elite sport continues to promote wellbeing, it remains at the heart of the discourse, but there is a sense amongst Leaders Performance Institute members that teams can be doing more to promote wellbeing at an organisational level.

The Australian Football League [AFL] took a step in the right direction in 2019 with the publication of its first Mental Health Framework, which views mental wellbeing as the cornerstone of general wellness.

The Leaders Performance Institute discussed the topic with Kate Hall, the AFL’s Head of Mental Health, in 2020, when she spoke of the work being done behind the scenes for their women’s league [ALFW].

“We put together a best practice guide for our player development managers,” said Hall. “They’re a designated development role and they’re not for the development of craft or any on-field aspect. It’s all about the growth of the individual athlete.”

The guide has not just been lifted wholesale from the men’s game either. Hall added: “What we didn’t want to do was just repurpose the pillars of player development that are used in the men’s competition because it’s a very different journey as an athlete and the competition’s very different in terms of it being a part-time competition. After extensive research, we worked with the players and the player development managers to develop a best practice guide to outline pillars of how you should lead player development in the women’s competition. Essentially the things you should focus on when you’re growing the whole person, not just an athlete on the field.”

This encompasses the earlier stages of the talent pathway too. “Our designated wellbeing coordinators are working with our under-18s, who are hoping to be drafted this year. They articulate a curriculum for our young players that illustrates the mechanisms, tools and strategies they can use to build their mental fitness. That’s quite explicit, we measure at baseline on these types of qualities and we measure them at the end of their talent year as well.

“Our concept of mental fitness is get in early. The sooner you get in and empower young athletes to really grow in this space, then their demanding this of their coaching staff and leaders within their club.”

‘Getting in early’ characterises the approach of Zach Brandon, the Mental Skills Coordinator at Major League Baseball’s Arizona Diamondbacks. “Building a robust, systematic, and preventative approach to employee wellness requires that leaders address policies, practices, and perspectives in their organizational culture,” he told the Leaders Performance Institute in August.

“Perspective begins with organizational values and addressing if, and how, employee wellbeing is prioritized in the culture. This requires that leaders and staff be intentional and progressive with their language surrounding mental health.”

Brandon added that leaders play a pivotal role in showing that self-care is not selfish. On that note, Gareth Southgate, the Head Coach of the England men’s football team, has set that example to his players.

“What I recognise about myself is that if I feel in a good place, that my own wellbeing is in a good place in terms of sleep, exercise, then in actual fact I feel stronger to take those things on and less affected by it,” he told the Leaders Performance Institute in June. “If I’m not sleeping well and I’ve been travelling a lot, if I’m rundown, I’m not physically in as good a place, I find that can affect my mood a little bit more and then I’ve got to be careful with my decision making.

“I’m very aware of my own personal state and [I am] able to control that and react to that a little bit more and put things into perspective better as I get older.”

The hope is that it will rub off on England’s players and support staff. At the Diamondbacks, Brandon advocates a similar approach. He said: “In reality, supporting wellbeing and resilience for your employees is really a competitive advantage, especially with the ever-increasing uncertainty and complexity found in work environments, which often lead to stress. Leaders should aim to install comprehensive prevention strategies within their organizations rather than rely on reactive support as issues arise.”

Both Brandon and Southgate spoke of the notion that wellbeing goes beyond the mental and it was a point picked up by Tom Patrick of the Royal Australian Air Force [RAAF] during a Case Study Members Virtual Roundtable in August.

Patrick, the RAAF’s Performance Optimisation & Wellbeing Lead, stressed the need to educate each squadron with the understanding that there is more to wellbeing than mental health. To assist in that continuous process, the RAAF is training what Patrick called ‘wellbeing advocates’ to support its proactive approach.

He said: “We are identifying people in the unit and squadron that have that real trust relationship with everyone, who might be the first person to reach out and check-in. We’re focused on developing others to get better in this space, before having to think about more medical-based models around wellbeing.”

Download the latest Performance Special Report – Winning With Nutrition

Long relegated to the side lines, nutrition is finally getting the attention it deserves when it comes to helping athletes achieve peak performance. Download our latest Special Report, produced in partnership with Science in Sport and featuring NBA champions the Milwaukee Bucks, the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys, and English Premier League club Aston Aston Villa.

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Recommended reading

Lessons in Duty of Care & Athlete Support

How the English Institute of Sport is Seeking to Promote Positive Mental Health

Does Your Team Take Athlete Engagement & Wellbeing Seriously Enough?

Framing the topic

Before partaking in a number of breakout discussions we explored some ideas and contemporary thinking around duty of care to our athletes. Helping us to explore these topics was the English Institute of Sport’s Performance Lifestyle Technical Lead, Dawn Airton. She provided us with five key thinking points and a number of considerations for us both across our organisations and individual roles.

 Thinking points and considerations: duty of care to our athletes

1. Make it everyone’s business in your team to encourage athletes to talk about their whole self.
2. Speak about it in terms of the positive impact on performance.
3. Speak about it in terms of the positive impact on mental health and wellbeing.
4. Make it an integrated part of performance planning.
5. Remember the impact you can have on someone’s life. Athletes often enter our world as children and leave as adults. Every engagement you have with them will shape them now and for their future.

What about some considerations for us all and the roles we hold:

• Looking back on your career what would an athlete say about you and the impact you have had on their life?
• What do you think is your role, and the role of your team, to provide a duty of care to athletes during and post their athletic career?
• Scaling it 1 to 10 (10 being high and 1 being low) what performance impact do you think providing a duty of care to athletes will have on performance?
• What are the barriers stopping you and your team providing a duty of care to athletes?
• What questions on this topic still need answering within your team/culture?

Thoughts from Dawn: current thinking and reflections

• In some environments, when things are so data-driven and measured, it’s hard for this profession to demonstrate performance impact. It can also be difficult to talk about holistic and athlete development in an industry where so much time is taken up focusing on those marginal gains. Often mental health, wellbeing and welfare can be overlooked. We can often be focused on what athletes can achieve in the moment and not necessarily life beyond elite sport.
• It can often take challenging situations within some high performance cultures to make change. This then drives people to come to this profession to seek expertise and support. It’s not about helping athletes to survive, it’s about making them thrive.
• Performance lifestyle is also about performance reasons – we want to make sure the athlete can be seen more as a human being and beyond their success as an athlete. A ‘More to Me’ campaign was launched to allow athletes to bring their whole selves into the elite sporting environment.
• It’s crucial to integrate performance lifestyle into performance planning to make sure we are integrating lessons of life and holistic development in the programmes.
• Transitions – think about transitions not just from a world-class programme, it should also include transitions into a world-class programme, transitions through a world-class programme, as well as transitions beyond.
• Understanding athletes, their lifestyle and family needs before they came into your environment is hugely critical to understanding how best to support them in that moment. Sometimes we may not think enough about that life beforehand but it is hugely important.
• We’re trying to help athletes all the time in developing a higher-level of self-awareness. Athletes have a long career after their athletic identity, so how do we support them effectively in understanding themselves?
• In the EIS Performance Lifestyle team, all the team are training to become Executive Coaches and Mentors – the philosophies of coaching and mentoring are very much embraced throughout the programme.
• Our role is to create a safe environment where athletes don’t feel judged or that their chances of progressing through the performance pathway are challenged. The safe environment also includes the notion of athletes being heard, that we listen and ask high quality questions to help them find the answers for themselves.
• We want to help action change – through coaching and mentoring, we want our athletes to be able to take the first right step to enhance, learn, develop and take a sense of control in a world which can often be out of their control.
• A challenge that still exists is that performance lifestyle practitioners are often the only ones athletes feel they can talk to about their whole self and needs – therefore, they want others to understand that. How can we help our athletes to have these conversations more regularly?
• More work is being undertaken around athlete transitions – a Futures team has been created that helps athletes up to two years before they retire from elite sport. Before, that support was for six months but it was recognised that this process can take longer. There can be mental health challenges in transition as they lose their identity and explore who they are if they are not competing anymore.
• Encourage your athletes to talk to other athletes about their experiences.
• The EIS is looking into David Lavallee’s work in this field to try and evidence work in having a dual-career and developing yourself outside of sport. You can develop yourself in being an elite athlete for longer because winning or losing doesn’t define you.

Breakout reflections

• Accountability and resourcefulness – how do we create opportunities for them so that the player care person and role is not a personal concierge but that we are helping to create self-sufficiency?
• A consideration was how to work with the athletes to develop a mental and emotional wellbeing stress action plan. Can we better work and devise a plan with them which in turn becomes a club-wide initiative?
• How do we change culture and who changes it? Will we see a shift in this culture infiltrating up as a lot of younger athletes and staff who are a part of our organisations are more accustomed to this way of being and level of support? Will this challenge the traditional top-down perspective to cultural change we can often see in high performance sport?
• Where is the individual coming in at the entry point? What skills do they have and how can we identify those better knowing that everyone is different? Then looking to combine these with where we are trying to get them to (skills delivered in the programme).
• Develop the person within the player, but understanding how that can really support performance outcome. In some sports, performance lifestyle experts are only employed for a short period of time each week, so how do we create buy-in from other performance staff and educate them across coach and player education?
• What are some of the barriers we face? Athletes first recognising that this is something that they need and the value to it. The way we break down the barrier is having athletes who have been through the system and have positive experiences with people in these roles.

Download the latest Performance Special Report – Winning With Nutrition

Long relegated to the side lines, nutrition is finally getting the attention it deserves when it comes to helping athletes achieve peak performance. Download our latest Special Report, produced in partnership with Science in Sport and featuring NBA champions the Milwaukee Bucks, the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys, and English Premier League club Aston Aston Villa.

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