The pandemic has asked many of us to work under difficult circumstances, whilst maintaining high performance over almost two years.
With more uncertainty dawning in the new year, many leaders are asking how they and their teams will meet these challenges. It is easy to ask colleagues to buckle down and keep on keeping on, but taking a step back to question your motivation can give you a fresh perspective and connect you with the purpose you bring to work every day.
To discuss the concept of taking a step back to step forward, we are delighted to welcome an elite panel from Team England.
Our panel explores:
- How taking a step back can give you a fresh perspective on what drives sustained performance
- Managing the pressure and expectation to perform
- Recognising and understanding goals and limits
- Staying focused on motivation in challenging times
We hear from Team England athletes, David Weir CBE and Alice Tai MBE who share their personal experiences on how stepping back from their sports, reassessing their goals, and understanding their motivation allowed them to come back stronger than ever. We are also joined by Jonathon Riall, Paralympic Head Coach who will provide insight as to why it's important to reset and recharge to support future performance.
Transcript
Robert Breedon: Good morning to those who have joined us. I am just going to let the numbers creep up a little bit whilst people join and we will start in a moment or two. Right, numbers are looking good. So good morning everyone and welcome to our webinar on the theme of 'Stepping Forward by Stepping Back'. I am Robert Breedon, I am a partner with Gowling WLG and I am delighted to be chairing this morning's webinar. I am joined by three stars from the world of sport, specifically three elite stars from Team England. Firstly, David Weir. David is a British Paralympic wheelchair athlete. He won a total of six gold medals at the 2008 and 2012 Paralympic Games, a gold medal at the 2014 Commonwealth Games and has won the London Marathon on eight occasions. Secondly, we are joined by Alice Tai. Alice is a British Paralympic World, European and Commonwealth Champion para swimmer. Alice won gold at the Rio 2016 Paralympics and at the Gold Coast Commonwealth Games in 2018. Finally I am delighted to welcome Jonny Riall. Jonny is the Paralympic Head Coach at British Triathlon and the Team England Triathlon Team Leader for the upcoming Birmingham Commonwealth Games. Jonny volunteered for Team England almost 20 years ago at the last home Commonwealth Games in Manchester and went on to have a successful career in sports and has been integral to the development of the UK's Para Triathlon programme.
Those of us working in business industry or public services often look to sport for inspiration on how to tackle our leadership issues. What are the lessons we can learn from individual sportsmen and sportswomen? We want to understand their motivation, their perseverance, their discipline and their character and then we try to apply that to our own work, don't we, in many ways. And equally we look enviously at the great sports coaches and we wonder how they get the best from their teams. What can we learn about how to get our own teams working together smoothly and successfully?
The changed working environment over the past two years has presented us with even more challenges in maintaining our own performance and indeed challenges for leaders who strive to help their colleagues to keep going and to stay focused. And it is tempting to encourage our teams to keep moving forward, to dig a bit deeper, to buckle down and everything will be just fine. But this morning we are going to explore the importance and the benefits of taking a step back, to pause and to reflect, to ask ourselves what truly motivates us and to see whether a new perspective might reconnect us with our purpose and in doing so perhaps reinvigorate our enthusiasm for the work we do. In a moment I am going to ask our panel to explore this theme of stepping forward by stepping back and firstly we are going to hear about some of their experiences and their own reflections. We will then open up the conversation and explore some thoughts on how we can apply this in our daily work and finally we will open up to some questions from the audience for the last five or ten minutes. We are aiming to close the webinar just before 11 o'clock this morning, and just to let everybody know, we are recording the webinar and the details of that will be circulated to everyone afterwards.
So David, can I turn to your first and start with your own experiences please? Perhaps you could talk us through a time when you needed to step back in order to be able to move forward. What were the circumstances and what did you learn from that?
David Weir: My experience goes back to. I had a big experience in Rio where I did not deliver and things happened in Rio that I. It was out of my control and when I got back I couldn't deal with the situation, so my mental health plummeted really because I felt like I was letting a lot of people down and myself down. I just felt like I was a failure in life and I had to take a step back from the sport. I carried on training for about six or seven months after. I won the London Marathon the year after in 2017 but I had no feelings, I did not. I did not really enjoy the experience of the day, I did not enjoy the feeling of winning and I knew there was something seriously wrong. So I had to take a step back and come away from the sport and really find who David Weir was and is and it took me a long time to figure out what I wanted to do. Is it the sport that is making me depressed or is it me myself? So I had to really dig deep and it was a tough time in my life. It was not just sport that was up in the air, there was home life that was not great either. So it was just, you just feel like it is all year and you get no-one else to blame. So that was my first sort of going back and sort of visiting who I was before I was an international Paralympic star.
I think it really goes back to the pressure of competing in 2012 as a home nation as well, you know, being the lead star going into the games. I did not feel no pressure, it was really weird. I just dealt with it like it was a normal race. It was only after that I felt the entire world was on my shoulders, that I had to deliver every time I got on the track. I had to deliver when I got home to see my kids, I had to, I just felt like I was doing it for everyone else and not myself. I sort of realised that in 2017 and so I come away from the sport and try and find out what I wanted to really do. Do I want to retire, do I want to carry on? So it took me a long time to figure out who I was really.
Robert: Thank you, Jonny [sic], and I am sure people will have appreciated that candour and openness around clearly a difficult time and perhaps be surprised in some ways that that such a key achievement in other people's eyes and you did not feel that on the day. I think people find that surprising, we might pick that up with you later.
Next I would like to bring in Alice. Alice, before I ask you to talk about the time when you have paused to reflect and think about motivation and purpose, can I ask how you are doing after your recent operation? For those who may not know Alice has recently had her right leg amputated just below the knee and many people will keen to hear from you whether that was successful, Alice, and how you are getting on.
Alice Tai: Yes, so that went great. Apologies, I am sat on my sofa because I cannot sit on the table and I have this lovely blanket to keep my legs warm, so apologies for that, I feel a little bit unprofessional. But yes, I just had my right leg amputated below the knee and it could not have gone better I think. I am really looking forward to just kind of eventually getting a prosthetic and living my life again and, it has all gone really well.
Robert: Well, that is great, that is good news. So if we then turn to the theme for this morning, how about your own experience and times when you might have questioned your motivation? When was that for you and how did you deal with it?
Alice: So for me, kind of the pinnacle where I really felt like I kind of just was not motivated and not enjoying sport was around Rio at the Paralympics. I was 17 at the games and the two years going into them I was 15, 16. I was really losing my love for the sport and it was just a case of I had been brought up loving it and then as soon as a professional tint got put on it I just felt like I had disconnected from the reason that I started and I was so excited to get the hat with the flag on with the Union Jack.
I was so excited at the potential of winning medals that I really got washed up and my mental health just plummeted. I remember I was in a hotel room at the trials for the Paralympics and I just, I did not want to be there. I would go back into the room and just cry and I did not even really want to go to the games. I could quit swimming before that, before that competition just because again I needed to take a step back and even though, so I took two steps back. The first one was before the trials for Rio where I quit swimming for three months and then went back to my old coaches from when I was a child and they slowly got me back in the pool and I regained a love for the sport but not competitively. But I decided that I should go to Rio because I felt bad on my family and everyone who had invested so much time and then after Rio I took another huge step back again and then re-found swimming for myself and it took ages. It still, it took a good year and a half before I was training again and competing and enjoying it the same as when I was kind of 11 years old but taking that step back and just slowly relearning and learning to just enjoy again, that was really the main point for me.
Robert: That is great, thank you, Alice. It is fascinating that we, our assumption is not it, when we see sportsmen and sportswomen like yourselves is that competitive element drives you but it was almost the, at times there, the opposite for you. The competitive element was what was putting you off, it is interesting.
Jonny, if I come to, if I come to you then, as a coach, these examples sound like you could be effectively losing your elite athletes just as they are coming into their own in the run-up to big competitions and so on and it is, there may be some parallels with the challenges that some managers in the workplace are facing. We have had record numbers of people leaving their jobs, this phenomenon known as the Great Resignation over the last couple of years. As a coach with a team of sportsmen and sportswomen, how do you keep someone in the team to maintain that high performance whilst accepting, as we've heard from David and Alice, sometimes they just need to stop and to rethink. Do you, essentially, do you have to let them go sometimes to be able to bring them back?
Jonny Riall: Yes, I think the whole question is a fascinating one and it is amazing listening to Dave and Alice because those scenarios are really common. I have athletes who exist in our team who have had exactly the same scenarios and I think everybody would recognise the challenge of trying to be the best athlete in the world. And I guess the way that I have often referred to it is it is, there is an enormous physical toll that an athlete has to put their body through which is quite rare and normally as humans we tend to shy away from stuff which hurts and these guys put themselves through that, hour after hour, day after day, but you also have someone's hopes and dreams ultimately in your hands and your responsibility.
Now I have never been an elite athlete but I try to really understand what my role was and I guess front up to the responsibility that you have when you lead a team. So my roles have been called Head Coach for a long time and I guess a lot of people think I stand with a stopwatch and a clipboard and, you know, you might go into a lab and work with the physiologists, and all of that stuff happens. But I guess the biggest sort of eye-opener to me is that every single decision you make, every single behaviour that you allow to either happen or not happen impacts on people's lives. So I would say I probably spend the best part of 60/70 per cent of my time probably not on some of the quite detailed athletic work, and it is about culture and it is about what it feels like to be a member of this team.
So I will tell the shortest of stories just I think to bring it home and it adds to the stories that Dave and Alice have told. So in the lead-up to Rio it was the first Paralympic Games that we were going to participate in, triathlon made its debut in Rio, and we identified an athlete through a talent ID programme in 2014. Two children, family, really similar age to me, so at that point in time about 30, had a really good job as an engineer at Airbus and a good living. Hopes and dreams are powerful things and, you know, we said 'We think you have got some talent and we think you could be pretty special in this sport.' I could miss out tons of detail and tell you the bit where he won in Rio, and he did, he came home with a gold medal. The toll on his mental health to accelerate his learning from being a family man, having a good income and a stable income to being in a world which is incredibly unstable, like David said, you know, you feel the pressure to deliver every time and that is never, it is never always achievable, it is never possible, and in Paralympic sport especially we are kind of governed by people's classifications and that is not stable either. So two years post games that athlete was told his classification was not going to represent in Tokyo and in fact he lost his job. And I tell that story to a lot of our staff and to a lot of people who want to work in our world because I guess for you and I, Robert, you do a good job at work and you hope that you carry on the next day, and actually in this athlete's world he did the very best job he could and it still was not a stable world.
So I can add a little bit more detail as we go on but I think for me the key thing that I can do is to tell athletes that it is, not only is it fine to step back, we are going to make you at times. I guess the parallel that I draw, and there is a lot of, I think there is a lot of learning in this, is we would never say to David 'Right, what we want you to do today is to go out at 6am, we want you to push your chair as hard as you can till 10pm and do it again tomorrow, do it again tomorrow, do it again tomorrow' because you'd break. But almost the mindset that can kind of creep in in performance sport is that your mind is having to push and push and push and push. So in the same way that we would write a plan that has peaks and troughs, you would have recovery time in there, you would feed it with great nutrition, you would hopefully have a fantastic physio to help stop injuries, we have to do the same when it comes to people's mental health. So I think the thing that I actually wrote earlier is it is absolutely fine for athletes to step back but I guess in my role it is absolutely not fine if that is as a consequence of the system that they exist in. If that is happening with athletes after athlete after athlete because ultimately you are chasing this kind of dream of medals which is an interesting thing in itself, for me that is not alright.
So, yes, the attempt to try and create systems and cultures, bring people in, invest money into areas to really try and support athletes to plan what else are they good at in life, what other support systems do they have? And another analogy, just listening to those two there, it is like a rollercoaster, you know, and a rollercoaster can be exciting, can be really good fun when you're on it. You probably would not want to be on it 24 hours a day but what does somebody have to get off, when they get off that rollercoaster, what do they have, what support systems do they have? And if they do not have any, that is when you can see real troubles. So we try and put in place things to kind of mandate, if I am being really honest, that people do spend time and energy and we support that time and energy to make sure people have got other things than simply the, I guess, the chase for a performance or medal.
Robert: That is great, thank you, Jonny. I might come to David and Alice, I was struck by your story of the athlete and that uncertainty and the change in the classifications, Jonny. So there is, it sounds like that uncertainty is almost part of the life of a sportsman and sportswoman. So perhaps David and then Alice, how do you keep your focus when you have got those uncertainties going on around you?
David: For me I am OK because I am in the toughest class and it does not get changed much.
Robert: Right.
David: So I am alright with the classifications but I have to deal with it on a daily basis at my academy. So now I had an athlete who is a T33, which is brain injury, cerebral palsy, stroke cerebral palsy class, and he got to Tokyo, you know, when he started people said he would never make it to a Paralympics, he would never be a GB athlete, so it was the biggest achievement of his life and now there is no competition for him. So you have got to, you know, keep him energised, keep him focused, and funny enough we have got a sponsor that sponsors our academy and they are not just giving us money and helping, they are actually giving job opportunities for athletes as well, and if he did not have this other avenue I think it would have broken him even more because he felt like he has achieved and then not achieved. So I have to deal with it at the academy but he has dealt with it very well because he has got he has got other opportunities and he has got a job but he still loves training, he still loves races. There are still going to be races for him but at the moment it has been pulled from Paris, so it is tough on the weaker classes, it is really tough and, you know, we have to deal with it on a daily basis at our academy and we try our best to try and help them mentally as well and physically.
Robert: Yes, so there is something about life outside the particular event there and Alice, in your perspective, I know you, you are passionate about using your sport as a, almost a platform for other areas of interest. Is that how you keep your focus or is there something else that comes into play?
Alice: Yes, I often describe myself as having too many baskets and not enough eggs because I try and do too many things because I enjoy having a lot of variety. But I also talk to a lot of the younger athletes coming up and make sure that they understand the importance of having a balance. When I was at school my GCSEs and everything, although they were still important, they were very much pushed to the side. It was kind of 'Oh, is there a camp on at this point? OK, well, we will organise it so you can sit them abroad' instead of, 'Well, what would, what would you rather do, would you feel more comfortable doing them with everyone else and just how they should be done normally?' And I just, I stress to the younger athletes just the importance of that, and again, going back to classification, it is so unpredictable and there have been athletes who have gone from being first in the world, world record holders in their classes, predicted golds at the next games, to moving classifications and then the next month they're deselected from programmes and that is then end of their career in the sport.
So it is extremely fickle and it is kind of terrifying because you can only do the best you can do and with the fear of being moved out of a classification when you're not competitive there is also the fact that people can come into your classification. So one of our athletes, he is staying, he stayed in the same one, he won a gold medal in Rio and then he didn't even get selected for the team in Tokyo because he would not have finalled because everyone in that final had been moved from another classification. So it is just, it is so unpredictable, so having other things to do, it is a must in sport and I think the culture is getting better and people are realising and I'm happy about that.
Robert: So perhaps, Jonny, pick up with you, there is something, you talked about the support network and we have heard about the importance of recognising the fickle nature of it all, as Alice said. So in terms of keeping people motivated, we often, in the business world, people talk about whether you are going to use more of a supportive style, praise and encouragement. Some people respond to more of a tougher approach. What, how do you, how do you use that with teams and the different styles of approach you might take?
Jonny: Yes, I think the first thing to acknowledge, there is not anything, there is not a right or wrong here. We have got an athlete on programme and he will say to me like 'When I am down, I just want you to be horrible. I just want you to be mean, I want you to give it to me straight', and I actually really struggle with that. So I will hold my hands up, my style is incredibly supportive for all the reasons that I have said because I acknowledge the fact that it is, well, it adds pressure, it is pressure, implicitly so. I think a lot of the time there is not a massive need to add any more. And then also I guess you have to take this into context, so you go back, lets say 30 years, Britain was not very good at sport and did not win many medals, so at the time there was a really, there was a changing of the guard required and there was people who needed to step through and really, really push boundaries, whereas I think what you see now is we are very, very good at sport and athletes who come into the world of elite sport want to win races. I do not think I see many people who do not want to at least try and win races. So I do not see in my world there is a massive need to play a really strict hand a lot of the time. I think that is too simple, I think it is far too simple to look at it as you are either one thing or the other.
So there is a phrase that I like to kind of stick to a lot of the time, so it is 'culture eats strategy for breakfast'. I am not the first person to say that, I certainly will not be the last. So we create a culture which drives excellence and we are very upfront about that. We are not here to try to let people float through their athletic career but what we do not talk is about we are not a culture where we are trying to win medals, they are very different things. So actually you can become the best athlete in the world and you might not medal, you might not go to the games but that striving, that aspiration to try and be the best is a fulfilling one. And similarly, and we have seen many of these people, you might win lots of medals at a Paralympic Games and never be your best, never need to be your best. So we are about excellence and we are very proud of that but then we are incredibly people-focused. So I guess, answering your question, what we try and do is have a, we call it an 'individual athlete' approach, it is one of the pillars of our culture I guess. So we can challenge each other as staff, are we asking our athlete to do that because we just want them to, because it is easier for us, or are we actually taking an approach about what is best for them? And Alice gave a fantastic example in the exams and the GCSEs, what is best for that person long term to enable them to try and deliver excellence in all areas of their lives.
But I guess for me the bit that you cannot shy away from here, so culture I will go back to, that needs to exist with everybody and it is not good enough for people to say they get it. They need to show, day in, day out, they get it, and if you do not get it, you are never going to be consistent in the way that you lead your teams. So being really honest we have removed staff from our team because they just do not get it and we have recruited based on a set of behaviours that we want to see that we think will help support the culture we want to deliver. So having the right people in place first and foremost is pretty critical and I would say if you do not get it, there are ways that you can. You know, you just need to broaden your horizons, speak to people, listen, really understand what that world is like for that person because a lot of the time I think there are a lot of assumptions when people are under pressure.
So the things that really stand out for me in our world, there is a commitment there, we have worked really hard over the last ten years to make sure we have the right people, anybody new coming in is assessed against that culture. And I guess words are fine, they are one thing, but support is needed in this because actually the biggest challenge I think I have found is trying to get an athlete sometimes to step away from the pool or the gym or the track or the road, wherever they are training that day and give some back for themselves. And sometimes there is a real educational piece, again exactly like Alice said, to take younger athletes and help them understand why they should invest in themselves from day one and then that investment part, again time is fine but having some support and having money behind that. So even if I look broader at British triathlon, we have a head of culture and people development that exists in our wider organisation. We have a head of culture and people development that exists in our performance team, just two different people. We have an investment that runs across, people can get money to pay against things that they may want to invest in themselves, CPD etc.
And even if I just look at my experience as a staff member, do I always take it? I probably honest I do not, but every Wednesday it's an expectation that you do not work, every Wednesday afternoon, sorry, not Wednesday. So two o'clock onwards, from two o'clock till five o'clock we have a block out meeting in our diaries which is your own CPD. It is called 'transition time out', play on triathlon words there, but it is basically, come up with a plan and that is your time within your work time, we are not expecting you to do this when you go home to your families, to invest in you. And again the hardest thing is getting people to commit to that, so it is a bit of a juxtaposition. You know, you have got to give the opportunities but you have really got to help people to understand what it is there for. So it is not one thing, it is a bit of everything but I guess it is about the individual and what they need.
Robert: I am hoping there are not members of my team listening who are going to try and persuade me to have every Wednesday off now! So you have explained I think the focus is on doing your best, is not it, not necessarily winning a medal, it is about performing to your best and then seeing the individual and all the aspects of their life and giving that support network, that is coming across very powerfully. I will come to David and Alice just to see whether that resonates with them in a moment. I would just encourage people who are on the webinar, we will open up the Q&A section now, so if you have got any questions for our panel this morning, perhaps start to pop those in the Q&A and we can pick those up in the second half. But David I come to you first. Jonny's description there of that sort of wider support network and the culture, does that, is that resonating with you, can you see that?
David: Yes, I can see that. I just do not think I used the avenue to the best of my ability, so I have sort of relied on my coach for everything, as my friend, as my you know, like you said sometimes she could be hard, sometimes she would, you know, put an arm round me when I needed it, my sports psychiatrist, everything, you know? So it, yes, and it was only till I was really depressed that I found that I had to go and talk to someone that did not really know me and did not understand me and away from the sport. I felt like I had to go and speak to someone that was, really did not even have an interest in sport and it was nice to open up to someone that. I think she did know me in the end but at the beginning she did not realise who I was. It was only till I explained what I had done, she realised. I think it just depends on the person as well. Some people need, you know, we have got athletes at my academy where you have to be a little bit hard because they will not train for you but then sometimes later on when you can see they have put a lot of effort in, you have got to put an arm round them and praise them. So, you know, I have learned from my coach, the way she taught me and I am trying to do it with the academy athletes that I have got, young, old, whoever comes in.
But you have to do it on an individual basis, you cannot treat everyone the same, and I have only realised that when I have, you know, stepped back from my career. I know I am still racing fully but when I set up the academy I expected every athlete to be like me. You know, I train at a hundred mile an hour, I train like I race and then I realised that not everyone is like that, so you have to really just take a step back from the academy. Sometimes I just do not get involved in the coaching, I just sit back and watch and then evaluate what I need to do and then I go and approach them and talk to them, what they need. For example, we got a new athlete, Marcus, who is in the 52 class which is quite a low class and he has been training for a year and he used to get very frustrated with pushing technique and coming out of his lane, and then last night I was watching him and he was nailing it every time, every time, and he was staying in his lane. And I said 'it is because you, we have shortened your stroke, so you come in at the same time.' Because of his disability, if he lifted his arms up too much at the back he would wobble everywhere. So now he has changed his stroke but it has taken time because we had to learn his, you know, we have told him the basis of pushing and now he has learned his own technique that is working and he was so happy with himself. And it just, I just get a massive achievement that I am doing something for the sport as well, I am putting something back, so seeing these guys doing the sport that I love, I just get an absolute buzz out of it.
Robert: Yes, that is fantastic. Your example of how you, how you came in and almost expected everyone to be at the same level, it reminded, I do not know whether this is true or not, but the stories of Glenn Hoddle as a coach at Tottenham, I think, where he could not understand why no-one could cross the ball quite as well as he could!
David: Yes.
Robert: And it is just recognising that, and trying to bring out the best in people. Alice, perhaps your reflections on this whole piece about the culture and the individual aspects to it, any thoughts on that?
Alice: Yes just kind of piggybacking on what David has said. I think within a team setting it is really important to be able to listen, empathise, understand and then support the individual in the way that they need but then support them in a way that also benefits the team because no-one is the same and the beauty of working in group settings whether it be sport or external to sport is that everyone brings their own strengths.
I feel like sometimes the ability to speak up and kind of not be vulnerable as such but be able to be intact with your own emotions and communicate them without feeling like there are any consequences or that you are going to be invalidated for them is super important and once one person is able to speak to someone about that it kind of spreads. I have seen it within para swimming where the swimmers, when I was younger, the whole culture was very much we are here to train, if you are feeling down sweep it under the rug do not bring it to the pool, no-one wants to know about it, positive, positive, positive.
Now the generation of athletes below me they are very very in touch with their emotions and it is great because they speak, someone will speak to me about how they are feeling or the staff and the staff are also very in touch with it. If my coach for example has had a bad day at work, not at work he's a coach, but a bad day in general and something has happened and he knows he is a bit naggy and a big kind of on edge, he'll come to the session and just be like I am really sorry if I come across like this because I have just had a rubbish day and I just want to let you know because if I snap at you it is not because you have screwed up as much as you think you have, it really is just I have had a bad day and so on in advance. That really helps because if he does then turn around and snap and everyone is like he did not deserve that it almost, it does not justify it but, it makes it easier as a team to work through and also support him. So it kind of a whole team culture of support.
Robert: Yes that change you describe Alice we are seeing it increasingly in the workplace with the increased focus on health and wellbeing and recognising the challenges that people have outside of the workplace and that brings up Jonny's things from earlier on.
Jonny we had a question in on the Q&A about the piece around culture and you have mentioned the important of agreeing that and you have set the behaviours and you bring in the right people, you even talked about perhaps excluding the people if they do not exhibit those behaviours so how was that culture determined in the outset. What was the process and did you engage with the athletes and the individuals with it. How did that come into play?
Jonny: Yes I have read that question, it is a really important question, it is brilliant. The thing, culture has become a really big thing in sport as a consequence of pockets of not very good culture. The risk is that if something is decided upon a team as opposed to it being decided by a team and I am not just trying to tell a story of where we did it well but thankfully the approach we took and this was back in 2013, 2014 and it was a cross programme because again I do not think you can have genuine culture and expect it to be different in different pockets.
So we are obviously the head coach of a Paralympic program but in that sense we did it as a collective performance team Olympic and para. So every single athlete and every single member of staff had a one to one where we discussed this bit specifically but rather than saying something really kind of lofty, what would you like the culture to be and feel like here. We just had a really kind of honest conversation and like Alice said we just tried to listen, so we asked a few simple but I think critical questions, so when you have been at your best what was happening for you, what did it feel like around, what were the interactions of people when you went to competition in camps and they went brilliantly why did they go well, not just practically but interpersonally? Then when things have not been going too well, what did you see, what changed, what behaviours did you see from us, what behaviours did you see from yourself?
There was a lot of work, I guess, really aware of peoples' opinions and peoples' thoughts and emotions. We spent a decent six months trying to pick through what we had heard. Themed them and then we ran a number of sessions where we basically took the big themes back to the team and said look this is in summary, in summary this is what we think we have heard. This is a chance to check whether we are right or not and if we are on the right page we are now going to put our time and effort into the things that you said help you. It just helps to summarise I guess five key things which, and they evolve over time. Sometimes the wording changes but gives us a starting point and commitment to say can we hold ourselves accountable to delivering in this way. But that was our athletes as well, I do not think it can be separate so in this context I do not think you can expect managers to be one thing and staff to do something completely different. You are all in it together.
Robert: And you have stressed there I think that importance of the consultation and the collective buy in and that willingness to hold one another to account sounds like that is really important.
Jonny: Yes it will not work if you do not.
Robert: We have had a question in the Q&A about inevitably there is a significant pressure on individual athletes' personal pressure and in the workplace we are seeing more and more headlines at the moment about pressure in work and burn out. So perhaps to David and Alice what are the techniques of dealing with that pressure? How do you cope with that, are there any particular techniques you adopt?
David: That is a difficult one really, for me if I know I am going to a big race say like the London marathon, if I know I have done everything in my power to be the best I can be on that day I do not feel a lot of pressure but if I know things have not gone quite right then I feel the pressure because people still expect me to win or do well so. It just depends how the year has gone, how the training is going. Loads of little things so if things are not going right I sort of just say to myself you have just got to do your best on that day and do it for yourself and that it what I have been saying. I was diagnosed with depression and in terms of the team, you know, every race I do now I do it for me I do not do it for anyone else.
That is how I deal with it and I, you know, going back to what we were talking about, stepping back, I just had to do it for myself and realise that I really wanted to do it. I had to enjoy the sport again and I think that is a big thing in the workplace as well, you have got to enjoy it. When you lose that enjoyment, that is why I went back and came back and if you look at my records, in a four year cycle after the Paralympics in 2012 I did not do the world championships in 2013 because I could not physically or mentally get in that zone again to try and perform at the highest level. I was absolutely shattered for a good year to be honest. That year I did not really, I came fifth or sixth in the London marathon and that is when the pressure started to come because when you see negative comments on social media or news outlets saying that is this the end of David's career and you know I had just won four gold medals at the biggest Paralympics ever so.
So now I just do it for me and I really enjoy it and I'm happy in what I'm doing.
Robert: So you are almost sort of blocking out that external pressure, if the pressure is there it has come from you rather than the media.
David: Yes and from everyone else. When I do my media stuff now I always say I am just doing it for myself and I am happy with what I am doing, now the comments are when are you going to retire? So it is just like, you know, just give me a break a little bit but, I just laugh it off now and the answer to the question is I will retire when I feel like I want to retire.
Robert: Yes, before I come to Alice you may have seen David there is a question in the Q&A about that time when you were talking about taking a step back and you reflected. Was there anything that really helped you understand yourself and what you wanted? You clearly, there was a lot going on.
David: At the time I did not know what I wanted, the only thing I felt was that I could fix myself was going away and enjoy my own company. Years ago I did not like being on my own, I always had to be with people or be with someone or ring someone and then I just found that I found peace when I was on my own and I could have my own thoughts and that is what I really done and that is what worked for me. It was a tough time because I was on my own a lot but I felt like when I was getting information or talking to friends and then talking to my coach or someone else. I was getting so much information again and it was too much for me to cope with so I just took myself away actually to the south coast a lot. I just felt more comfortable by the sea and funny enough I met my partner two years ago and she was from Hastings so it all seems to all come together now. So for me it was just being on my own and figuring out what I really wanted to do with myself and enjoying David Weir and not David Weir the wheelchair racer.
Robert: Alice can I come across to you, this question around the personal pressure that is particularly intense in the sports world. So what techniques have you got for making sure that you are looking after yourself and not allowing that pressure to cause problems?
Alice: Yes I worked a lot on this with my coach and we decided instead of focusing on kind of the goal at hand which I guess was medals in elite sport, we were just going to celebrate small successes. So if I had a really excellent session or excellent day training then we would make sure that we acknowledged that. I think sometimes we get caught up in this huge end goal and it may seem like you are taking forever to get there and it is just constant kind of waves hitting your own hurdles. If you actually look at how far you have come already, whether in a project or training leading to an event it is really kind of satisfying and rewarding seeing that you have actually made progress already.
I think in times where I do reflect back it is normally when I am starting to feel more stressed and more pressure and I tend to just chill, just have, whether it be an hour, half an hour, a few minutes, just to myself and just relax, then start again but acknowledge how far I have already come.
Also with swimming when I get under pressure at competitions I kind of just stand there and look at the pool and I find it almost comical and I just go it is just a hole in the floor filled with chlorinated water and I am going put on this weird kind of swimming costume and a bit of silicon on my head and jump in and that really grounds me a lot, because it is just a bigger picture, it seems strange when you think we have got the rest of the world and the whole universe and I am just about to jump in this manmade hole of water. That helps just really assessing how kind of trivial something can be.
Robert: Yes so again there is something about that, as David was talking about, that sort of external pressure and saying that is not important this is just about my achievements and I love your analysis about celebrating the small steps, the little wins so.
Jonny perhaps to try and draw some of that together, do you recognise those stars and approaches, you can see that in the team members you are working with and is there anything else you wanted to, any themes that we might draw this to a close with?
Jonny: Yes I will try and keep it short. I see every single one of our team has something that they do and it can be different, especially when we get to competition it is our jobs to know those guys really well. Some of them will want us to be around them and they will want a friend all the way to the start line and some will just want to be left alone but I guess where my head was going when Alice and David were talking is, this is sport to the extreme. But I guess trying to spin this round, if you take everything that these guys do and just strip it back a little bit, actually the basics of exercise, the basics of good hydration, good food. It is so important when it comes to peoples' mental health now. The pressure and the external side of sport can sometimes strip that away but I think from a real personal view. The toll of the last five years of trying to get a team to a games or is the games happening or not, what are we going to do if it does not and then it is extended and all of a sudden now all I get every day is, the next games is less than three years away, you are two and a half years away. It is a year from qualification and I still do not feel as if I have really stepped of the plane from Tokyo.
I came back tired, I was not eating well, I was not sleeping well, I was not exercising and I was overweight. The challenge then to my mental health as an employee as a worker I would see immediately that there were some real basics and one of our cultural bits is basics first always. It is easy to think about all the special things you could do and there are apps and there is mindfulness and all of this stuff but if you can just move your body, treat it well, it will look after you a lot more than if you do not. That is what I try and hang onto. It does not always work but yes consistent with it is a good start.
Robert: That is great, thank you very much. Well we have not got anymore Q&A so I think we might draw things to a close there, so it just remains for me to thank you all for joining us this morning and obviously particular thanks to David, Alice and Jonny for sharing their experiences.
I have been particularly struck by your willingness and your openness, your candour to share and it has been really motivating and I am sure that those who have joined us this morning will take a lot of that away with them. I think we have seen this morning the benefits as you have all described the taking their time to just pause and reflect and to examine our motivations and crucially for all of us who have listened in this morning we should not be worried about taking that step back, taking the time to reflect and just picking up Alice's theme, re-celebrating the small steps as we start to move forward again.
So thank all very much for your time it has been hugely informative and we are very grateful for your time thank you.
Read the original article on GowlingWLG.com
The content of this article is intended to provide a general guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought about your specific circumstances.
