Brain in the Game | Sport Mind Coaching Podcast
Dave Diggle
Episode Thirty-One – Business and Sport - Is it Really that Different?
Hello and welcome back to Brain in the Game, the podcast specifically designed for athletes, coaches, and parents looking to do their sport just that little bit smarter. BITG is the only real mental podcast, and I'm your host, Dave Diggle.
In this episode 31, I've got a bit of a treat for you – this week I was interviewed on Make It Simple TV, by Andrew Macaulay and Heather Porter from Autopilot Your Business. You might find it strange a high-performance sports mind coach is being interviewed about business, but 20% of my current clientèle are the high-end corporate business clients. What they're after is the high-performance sport mindset we're putting in these athletes. They want that same competitiveness from the arena, they want in their board room. That same precision of setting goals and achieving them. Andrew and Heather interviewed me just to find out what I do with my business clients.
I'm going to play that interview for you today. Listen for what Andrew and Heather are interested in, and the key tips I hand over about how I approach the business side of elite mind set:
Welcome back to Make It Simple TV, co-founder of Autopilot, Heather Porter. In this show, we bring in our inner circle of experts from all over the world to chat about their life in business lessons. In this episode, we are joined by Dave Diggle. We've known him for ages, doing seminars all over the world. He's coached some extremely elite athletes, and why he's also interesting is recently he's told me about helping some high-powered executives to be more empowered with the board room setting. First, let me welcome my co-host Andrew Macaulay.
Hey Heather, great to be on the call again. I met Dave a little later than you, but it's always fascinating to see his progress. He's the author of a book I found just on the top of my bookshelf the other day when I had a move, so we might dig into that one later, too.
Now we'd like to welcome Dave to the show. How are you Dave?
Fantastic Heather, how are you? Good to see you guys again.
Dave, why don't you share with us and our viewers about how you got into what you're doing right now?
I used to be an elite athlete. When I was competing, I was never really a very 'talented' athlete, I was more tenacious than talented. I always knew there was another way of competing that wasn't just about talent. When I stopped competing, I got into teaching in schools. I noticed so many kids were learning differently, in ways that didn't necessarily fit into criteria about how teachers thought kids should learn.
When I stopped teaching, I started looking at different ways of studying – psychology, neuralistic programming, CBT, hypnosis – and I looked at how people learn. The big secret, I learned, was the mental game. That's the missing component to so many people's successes. I started going down that avenue, focusing on what I could do with my background as an athlete, and my scientific background, to create a perfect environment for people to succeed.
What sport were you an athlete in?
I was an elite gymnast for Great Britain for many years back in the '80s. That was my sport.
So working as an athlete by yourself, you probably have a lot more mental voices going on than as opposed to being a member of a team, right?
Yeah, absolutely. When most athletes train in a group, and if you watch the Olympics at the moment, the ice skaters all train on a rink together; then come competition time, you're put out on your own. That environment of going out there and being able to trust what you learned all comes down to you. You don't have someone next to you to say “I'll pick up the slack if you fall over,” you're out on your own and you really have to dig deep and go “What do I know here, and how do I apply this?”
You were telling me about how you were starting to work with business professionals. Why are you going into that area as well?
It's not been a conscious choice initially. Working with my athletes was my background since a young age. I used to get a lot of people talk to me from business, asking if I could help them. I used to reply “I'm more focused on sports”. But the more I got into running my own business, I realized there's no difference – the way I approach creating an elite and sustainable athlete is the same way I work with business owners today. Probably 20% of my clientèle are high-end business people.
Is there a common theme you see between executives and elite athletes? What most commonly holds them back from success?
There is. When I was working with athletes, I was seeing things I was doing in my business. I wasn't applying what I already knew to my business. The most common thing I see is people only focus on the now. They get very caught up in the emotion of “That didn't work right now, it's all over, my career is gone.” That's the same thing in business, as well. When in reality, it could just be a stumbling, and a great lesson to learn to apply later to the next competition or the next board room meeting.
What's one tool in your business that you simply can't live without?
When I was a gymnastics coach and teacher, I used to carry a bag full of tools to work every day. As a mind coach, now you'd think I'd have less, but I have so much more! I love my technology. I use GoPros everywhere just so the athletes can see what I see – often what we think we see isn't the reality we think is going on. I use my iPad everywhere. But I think the greatest tool I have is my creativity. Thinking outside the box everywhere.
But the one thing that goes everywhere with me is a bag full of tennis balls, and blindfolds.
Ooh, do tell.
The tennis balls are for some cognitive exercises I've created to stimulate the left and right hemisphere of the brain, so we're not just thinking logically or just thinking outside the box, but stimulating the neurons across the whole platform. I set up a cognitive pattern for people to do with them.
The use of the eye masks is because our eyesight overrides and overwrites our memory. If we go somewhere, and we've visualized or cerated a pattern we want to follow, when we get there and see that, our brain already starts to override that. I use a blindfold so we can trust our internal chatter and the pictures we create in our brain. I use that with athletes as well as board room members, which can sometimes be a bit funny.
What is a typical before and after scenario when someone works with you?
I have a cricketer who's quite well-known, he just made it onto the big circuit. He came to me about 2 years ago telling me he was told he's never going to make it, he's not naturally talented, etc. I could see the talent in him, but the biggest block was his mind set – he was believing what other people were telling him. We spent a bit of time, and in about four months he started being selected for state, then internationally, and now he's on the cusp of playing for Australia.
I guess from my perspective, it's “Never say die”. If you have a will and some talent, that's good enough for me. We'll get him over the line.
Do you find it's important with the other people you surround yourself? I always hear “you're an average of the closest five people in your life”. How important is it that you surround yourself with amazing people that think positively?
That's really important. We do tend to take on other people's baggage. Creating the right team around you is probably one of the biggest tools we apply. We look at the athlete and say “what is your talent, and where are your short falls”, and how can we put the right people in there to create the right structure for you? Having the right team around you is as much about who you want around you as it is what skills they bring to the playing field. It's mental, emotional, and skill based.
I look at my athletes as a business – if I were to take them on as a business, what aspects of that business work, and what aspects need to be tweaked or replaced? The people we put around us are no different.
Give me one thing people don't know too much about you.
When I work with people, they often ask what my background is, and I talk about being a gymnast for Great Britain, and I talk about how much that set me up for who I am today. People always turn around and say “okay, since you were a talented athlete, it was easy for you”. But I never got into gymnastics simply because I was talented, I wasn't necessarily. I was put into gymnastics because I have no natural sense of balance. I was in an accident when I was 8 months old that smashed my skull. I have no hearing and damaged nerves in my left hand side, and I've got no natural sense of balance – I was that goofy kid who would run along and just fall over.
My parents decided rather than wrap me in cotton wool, which is what the doctors suggested, hey – go and learn it. Immerse yourself in it, and learn that skill. That's a philosophy I take on with everything I do. If I don't know how to do it, I'll go learn how.
Talk about a barrier to going into a professional gymnast. I think everybody watching this should be listening to what Dave's saying. He could have potentially just said to himself, “I have this handicap, I could never become anything”; to not only becoming a pro himself, but now working with some of the most esteemed athletes in the world. On that climb forward, do you have a mantra you live by?
I do. Over the years, I've had several, depending on where I'm at in my development. But the thing I live by, that I teach all my clients, is “We cannot change or replicate what we do not first measure.” What that means is, if we want to make change, we have to know where we are, we have to understand what works, and we have to understand what's not working before we go somewhere blindly, or we'll end up with the same issues. I'm a huge believer of knowing what works for me. Every day I think of that.
Andrew and I talk about this all the time in our podcast. If you create a product on line – because Andrew and I are in the on line space – how do you know what to create unless you measure it? Actually put something out there and find what people want, instead of guessing what they want.
I want you to offer up three simple tips to everyone watching this to help them have that high-performance mind set.
The first one is putting the right team around you. Everyone needs to have the right team around them at the right time. Even though circumstances change, and we change, in our business and our performance, make sure you're aware of what your needs are at that time, and the the people around you are working for you.
Tip two: reward yourself. None of us do this particularly well. So many of us are driven to achieve that when we do hit our goals or objectives, it's “Right – on to the next one.” If we don't stop to look at what we achieve, there's no emotional buy-in or purpose to keep doing that. We'll get to a stage where we just feel overwhelmed. We'll get to a stage where it will feel overwhelming. Taking the time to go “I did that really well – I can replicate that and keep using that.” That's a great thing, especially in high performance, where we're very critical of ourselves. The higher we go in our professional, whether business or sport, we tend to become more critical of our successes – so take time to reward yourself.
Number three: journal. We kind of touched on this with our measuring. I ask all my clients to keep a journal so we know what's going on, and we can look at what's worked. I have a journal template that all my clients use, and we ask the same 14 questions every single night. Part of that is familiarity so they become aware of how to answer those questions throughout each day before they get to them. It's like if you went out and bought a red car, you'd see more red cars on the road. By having those set questions, you know what they're going to be, and you'll start looking around you more for them.
That journal process enables you to calibrate more efficiently, so you can look at your business and performance and say “When I do this/this/this, this work; but when I do that, things kind of go off the rails.” That enables you to put things right.
I love those tips. Going back to number two, how often do you think people should reward themselves, and for what sort of thing do they reward themselves for, and does it get watered down if you do it too often?
That's a great question. We can over-reward, and you do lose the importance and relevance of that. If you do set a daily goal and you do reach that, you should reward that. It could be as little as recognizing it and patting yourself on the back – so that you can go “I like that feeling, I want to be able to do it again.” If it's a big goal like representing your country, or getting a house, or getting a client through the door, then it should balance. If you just got a million dollar client through the door, you're not going to go out and buy yourself a box of chocolates – you're probably going to go out and spend a bit of time or money on yourself and say “That was worth it – that hard work and tenacity to get that million dollar client through the door.”
So it should be a balance of what the objective was, and the frequency is whenever you hit it. And if you don't hit it, turn around and say “What do I have to do to hit it tomorrow?”
I have a question on the journaling process: running a small business can be very reactive. You can have the best intentions to plan, train a team member, etc.; but something happens – another fire, another problem with the client, and you're running over there to fix that problem with the client. When you're talking about journaling, how can you best fit that into your extremely busy schedule – and how can you remember what you even did that day?
Continuity. With my clients and myself, that journaling program only takes 15 minutes. Fourteen questions – find somewhere you sit every night. It could be in bed before going to sleep, or in the arm chair before turning the TV off and going to bed. It's so your brain goes “When I sit here, at this time of night, I need to recall what's happened during the day.”
Things happen during the day. Something's going to happen every day to pull you off-track. If you're aware of what your track is, it's much easier to get back on track if you have that continuity. I talk to my clients about 'not trying to re-assess at the crash site'. If they don't do anything, and the train crashes, and they try to put it right from there – you're at a crash site, things are going to be broken. It's much better to start putting things right when the wheels start to go wobbly.
The journaling process is almost training the mind to pay attention better to things as they happen?
Yeah. As our studies have shown, a million bits of information are popping past us all the time. If we want to focus on what we need, we have to be aware of that; otherwise it's just putting your hands out and taking what you get. We do become reactionary, like bumper cars, and I'm a huge believer of creating a track to stay on.
We know you work with athletes, and you're starting now to work more with business people. What would you ultimately like to be known for in the future?
I love what I do and I love giving people opportunity – people who probably wouldn't have been given an opportunity to achieve in the first place. I think when I do fall off the perch, I'd like people to say “His philosophies and his structure are what helped me achieve.” But I also like working with kids. You spoke before about some of the books I've written, and I'd like that legacy where people consider, I'm not just one-dimensional but there's so much to working with athletes, with CEOs, and writing kids books. People don't have to be one-dimensional, they can be multiple things. That kind of “Rubik's Cube” mentality, I'd like to be the Rubik's Cube. I love the '80s anyway!
What would be one life lesson you've learned that you'd like to share with us?
Never give up. It's an old saying, but we spoke earlier about my hearing issues and disability – if I hadn't been given that exposure then, and had to deal with it later in life, I don't think I would've handled it as well as I did with a kid. That simple thought process of “it is what it is” enabled me to move on, and to achieve. Never give up, and have the mindset of a child sometimes.
When you were a kid, did you know there was an option to give up? Or did you just go “My parents said I have to go to gymnastics and learn how to do this, and well, so I have to.”
I knew I could've given up. I was given that opportunity numerous times. Whenever I hit things that were above and beyond the normal blocks – having no balance and doing gymnastics, balance is core to what you do, and all this spatial awareness I had no idea about. But I'm a tenacious kind of guy, and the more you tell me I can't, the more I say “I need to”.
How can people find out more about you?
Our website, smartmind.com.au , is our hub where most things are distributed from. I have a podcast called Brain In The Game, that get syndicated 1-2 times per month, and that's a good way to reach people and have them hear some of the philosophies I have. I'm on Facebook, Smart Mind Institute, and LinkedIn – all the social things you guys are teaching me about!
I think Dave, you were saying you have a gift for our listeners?
Absolutely. Everybody needs to be shown how to do stuff. It's hard for us if someone says to do something and we don't understand how to go about it. I've put templates together just to start people looking at how to structure their thoughts, how to reward themselves, and do the journaling program. Your listeners can take that down and start using them.
I'll be checking that out – especially the journaling one! Any finishing words Dave?
It's been my pleasure being on your show, guys. I've watched you grow over the years and I've learned a lot from you. It's been my pleasure to be a part of this, and its your tenacity in business and your lateral thinking that has attracted all us together and help put the right team together. That's what we do – put the right people in the right places – and I'm pleased to be a part of your 'right people'.
Thanks Dave, we love having you as a part of our right people, too.
That we do. We'll see you next time on Make It Simple TV.
I hope you enjoyed that interview as much as I enjoyed doing it. It was a great honor to be asked by Andrew and Heather to be part of their program. Those two have done phenomenal things in the business world and have climbed to the top of Social Media Marketing. For me, as a mind coach, I look at the way I produce athletes the same as the way I would produce high-performance business people. My athletes, I treat like a business. We look at how efficient they are, and the return on investment – the mental, emotional, and cognitive investment; and I also look at the way when I'm working with a business owner, a CEO of a large corporate, I want them to treat and see themselves the same way my athletes do – as the elite of the elite.
If you have the same mind set in business as my athletes have in their competitive environment, you are destined to achieve and get great results. Those templates Heather and Andrew have, you've got access to too. If you go to www.smartmind.com.au , you'll be able to sign up and get access to all those – and many more – templates we use at the Smart Mind Institute. And as always, you can go to BrainInTheGame.com.au or iTunes, and you can download any of our podcasts.
I look forward to our next episode of Brain in the Game, and until then, train smart and enjoy the ride! My name's Dave Diggle, and I'm the mind coach.
Copyright 2012-2022 Dave Diggle
https://www.smartmind.com/
