Decoding Excellence: Frank Dick OBE's Perspective

0:00Welcome to the Big Success Podcast. Cutting-edge conversations on business and personal success, as well as how to level up. Here's your host, number one business coach in the world, Brad Shoghers. I cannot explain just how much knowledge this man has around success. Having coached literally sporting teams, nations, world champs, Olympic gold medalists, Frank Dick, OBE obviously, renowned as one of the best coaches in the world. He now coaches, coaches on how to perform and how to achieve amazing things. His talent for inspiring athletes and inspiring teams and getting the highest level of performance out of organizations is second to none.

0:50The book, this is the first one of his I read, Winning Matters. I luckily got to meet him in 2016. We did a conference together in Wales. Years and years of detailed research into individual and sporting team success, and he's going to give it to you today in spades. Great storyteller, Frank Dick, my guest today on the Big Success Podcast. Well, it is my absolute pleasure, buddy, to have you on here. 2016, we first got to meet in Wales. I've always wondered, with such a resume of success, how will you answer this question? What is success to Frank Dick? What is your definition? Well, I think I was trying to sort of stand back and look at it.

1:34It's knowing that what you've done and how you've done it is why you've achieved your goal. It's that fantastic feeling you get, I did it, you know, I got there. That can be directly personal. It can be your role in a team. It can be your leadership role. and for most of my life it's been achieved through other people because being a coach your success is a vicarious one and it goes through other people but that's the feeling Brad I'll tell you a silly story about this, during the Commonwealth Games in Edmonton the night the day before the finals the Scottish 4x100 really team had qualified absolutely against all odds because you're talking about Jamaica Canada, United, England, sorry, and there was no chance but we were in the final.

2:31And I went every night, I used to go for this job down round the lake and get back in to get rid of all the crap from the day. And this Canadian coach was running towards me, he said, hey Frankie, all the best tomorrow mate. I said, thanks very much. And the next day, would you believe, against all the odds, they not only got the gold medal they got the the games record and i was doing the same run the next night and you can imagine it was really pretty cool and i went around the same lake and there's the same coach running towards me and he said preggie you were great today and without even thinking i said i know and i would it must have sounded so arrogant yeah but i didn't brad i didn't need anybody to tell me and you know the same feeling right you don't need people to tell you when you know you're correct yeah that's the thing you know i've never heard anyone think about it as a feeling has that evolved for you over time like as a young man did you see it that way or did it evolve over time well i think i think it evolved over time because i was i really didn't do very well at school and I was pretty fortunate enough getting a second chance and managed to get into Lumpur and so on and it kind of grew over a period of time and different things began to resonate with me another anecdote, I was organising this big conference in Edinburgh, it was a freezing cold winter, one of the worst Scotland had ever had and it was the very first international conference I'd ever run, so you can imagine I was really nervous as a kitten and the weather had been so bad but the university had closed the heating down on the 1st of December and the conference was on the 4th of January and they only switched it back on again on the 3rd and it was minus 14 out there so the people coming in from all over the world the Russians were there with their funny hats on guys were wearing coats up to the neck steam coming out of the mouths all over the place and I was mortified and I went to see my boss Bob Adams and said Bob, and he said don't say anything more frankly, you know your problem you think that 99 % is a failure most people in life think that 51 % is a win and I remember looking at him and saying Bob, I'm never going to be a 51 % person I can't be that way and I think that at that point it was like I was beginning to understand that it's about living up to your standards.

5:11I mean, I haven't really thought, these are great questions, but I've never really thought about this in depth before. But because you've tested this one, I have done a little bit of thinking about it. I mean, it's living up to your standards. And in our coaching role and leadership roles, or even a member of team, getting other people to live up to them too. so I mean that that's kind of the feeling yeah so when like I know for me when I chose success in my life I remember it as a 13 year old boy choosing that's what I'm going to do was there a time when you chose it or was it a gradual thing or was it just natural in your family well good good question since since you come into the teen years I was I wasn't really all that good at sport at school, but I got to the age of, I think it was 15, so a little bit later than you.

6:05I was running the school half mile for the school sports, and I finished third. And I suddenly realized, that sounds crazy, I couldn't be first. That's what I said. I wanted to be first. And there was a school match coming up against another school, and I got a hold of one of the guys who was ahead of me in that race, And because I knew he was a hardler, he said, look, I think you should concentrate on the hardles. And I know you don't like half miles. I'll do that one for you. And that was it. The light had gone on at this point. Now I didn't see anything other than first, not second best. I love it.

6:49I love that question. So what is your formula for success? Like, how do you see success happening? There must be a methodology over the years you've developed. No, I think quite honestly, I used to think that success was something that happened, but it's not true. You have to make it happen or it's not yours. You're in the game for that. You make success happen. And it comes down to performance, but just to linger a bit on the making it happen, I'm quite sure you remember the guy Chris Hadfield the Canadian astronaut who went up to space and he signed ground control to Major Tom as he was floating around in the capsule when he came back down again he wrote a book The Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth and the book really focuses on the fact that astronauts are trained to expect it not to go well they're trained to make it work it's your job don't expect the airlocks to be working which is kind of scary but it's down to you to make it work and that made me think all the way back in time one of the things I had to understand is I couldn't win everything to begin with but I could get better and in track and field and swimming these are nice objective sports we work from the very outset on encouraging kids to improve their personal best so you focus first of all in their life journey towards success or whatever, you focus first of all on performance you're not in total control of results in life but you are in total control of your performance Own that Own that and make it happen And if you keep working on it One day you'll be the best in the world And do you stop thinking about it then No, Usain Bolt goes to Beijing, right He whacks the world 100 metres And to his record Next year He goes to Berlin Now at this point in his life Nobody can touch him You know, he's over the horizon so why did he break the world record in the 100 meters and the 200 meters again it's about your performance whether you're in the league or whether you're following it comes down to have you prepared for your performance and are you doing it and of course that's the essence of what we deal with in life as coaches that's the essence of what we do it's about helping other people improve their performance and I remember saying to the first time I worked with Eddie Jones back in when he was with the England team I remember saying to the coaches the coaches there you know, what do you want to do?

10:02well, we want to win the World Cup I said, what does that look like? what do you mean? what do you have to do? well, you have to beat the All Black no, no, no, that's a bad answer you have to look You're making the mistake of looking at what excellence is like today and thinking that's all you have to do to be excellent tomorrow. But what you have to understand is, what will excellence look like tomorrow? At that point, it was the 2nd of November 2015, 8 o 'clock in the evening at the Yokoha Hammer Stadium. What will excellence look like then? And then can you be better than that? and you've got to prepare your athletes for that.

10:44But by the way, as coaches, if you're not going to be the best in the world, how are the athletes going to be the best in the world? So everything, if you're looking for achievement or success in a business or in a sport or whatever, it's everybody. It's not just the guys who go out there and fight in the field. It's not just the sales staff. It's not just the marketing department. It's all of you. And if you're not all willing to improve your performance, because you won't all be world-class at the moment, we get that. You might have a couple of guys in the team, but for the others, they are trying to make their way.

11:20And I'll come back to a story on that later. Yeah. So let me flip that over just for a second then. Those that learn from their mistakes, those that turn failure into success, what is the key? How do they do that versus those who have failure and resign themselves to it? Okay. On that one, Brad, I'd have to take a step further back in that or earlier in the story. You would even like through the process of preparation and so on to get there because you have to prepare for that. The key then is to understand how important process is and to stick with it. take care of the process in my mind and you'll take care of the result or as Bill Wall said take care of performance and the score takes care of itself it's that kind of thinking progression you have to remember in any process is non-linear I mean it's not like a rocket taking off for the moon it goes in steps and sometimes it goes in dips and you've got to understand that on that journey It's just part of process.

12:32You'll stumble sometimes and you'll fall. You'll also have moments when you fail. But the key is, since we're trying to make progress, the key is to understand that, I think somebody else came up with the word, fail fast. If you're going to make your mistakes, if you're going to stumble, get over the line. And why is that a probability? Okay, it's a really simple question I have to ask some people. listen, if I'm asking you to change things change the way you do things if I'm asking you to change how we're going to play here how you're going to sell, how you're going to market do you think there's a better chance of you making a mistake when you've gone beyond the familiar than if you stay behind the familiar yeah, we're going to make no folks so just accept before you get on the journey this is part of process key in all of that is can you learn fast?

13:31Okay, I'll modify that because I used to stick with the quote from Ari de Houston. I think the first time you and I met, I'm pretty sure I put it up on the screen. Probably the only sustainable competitive advantage we have is the ability to learn faster than your position. Well, I was pulled up short by a guy called Vin Walsh, one of the top learning psychologists on the planet, I think. And he said to me, no, Frankie, it's to learn better and faster than the opposition. Learn better. And one of the things that got me thinking about that is, wow, you know, well, how do I learn better? I mean, I don't remember, I don't know about you, Brad, but I don't remember anyone sitting me down and helping me learn how to learn.

14:23Yeah. I mean, I don't think I'm going to be saying that. I do remember as a young man, I'm guessing I was 21. I actually attended a training program called Learning to Learn because of that fact. I was like, I didn't even know how to learn. You're on the Big Success Podcast. We're here with Frank Dick. We're going to be back in a moment. We're going to talk about winning and team and leadership, and we're going to get all of his insights. In Instant Promotions, Brad Sugars outlines how to find target markets, locate appropriate media representatives, write world-class press releases, and attract customers through innovative, tailored promotional campaigns.

15:00Pick up instant promotions today. You're back on the Big Success Podcast. I'm Brad Sugars, the Frank Dick. You know, one of the best coaches ever to have existed. How do we succeed, Frank, at being a great coach? How do we succeed at that? Okay, well, first of all, there's something that I did want to mention a bit earlier. And that is, speaking to, you'll know a coach, Alex Ferguson. Yes. You know him. And I brought Alex in to do a bit of chat to some coaches at one point. And his opening line was the two things you've got to be really careful of if you're going to be a successful coach is you've got to be able to manage failure and success.

15:52Now, failure I got, right? We just discussed that. But why success? Well, success, if you're not careful, can be a serious seductress. She can convince you that you've arrived. but the truth is if you're going to get into the success game into the success arena you never arrive you're chasing the horizon there's always something else called perfection beyond the horizon excellence is something we can all work on and we can deliver we can do that and then you redefine it but the truth is you're on a journey to try to get to perfection and it's like the horizon it just keeps moving ahead of you you never arrive and so we've got to be careful my mom taught me um success breeds success well i wasn't very successful so i was struggling a bit and um but but then then alex said success can be real progress yeah and that's because of you can get complacent and you can just say well i'm there just not why do i have to change a winning formula yeah the truth is you'd better change the winning formula because other guys are going to come up and be better at that than you dang so clear actually i was i was listening to an interview with a great golfer just recently and he said you know i have seven bad shots around he said i never have a perfect round i have seven bad shots on average when i hit one i just go oh there's one of my seven and then i move on to the next thing frank you've taught so many coaches What are the top things that you think a coach should learn to be better at coaching?

17:31And in essence, business people are coaches of their people too, I guess. Okay. So just lingering with that, let me give you kind of a sense of case study from my world. Here's the first one, because it was a success moment. I was a coach to the UK team and they were competing in what was called the European Cup the European Cup is the top 8 nations men and top 8 nations women competing for separate cups and not necessarily the same nations in each competition but we, the UK team, had a team in both and in this competition just to explain the numbers in this competition there are 20 events on the men's side 100 meters, 200 meters is on.

18:24There are eight teams taking part. You get eight points if you're only one entry per event. Eight points if you're first, one if you're last. So maximum number of points we're looking for, 160. And I did, at that point, the British team at the very best were a bad third on numbers. And so I did what you would do. I went through everybody's performance in the other teams in my team on a good and a bad day and I concluded that we were 14 points away from the big two the Soviet Union and the German Democratic Republic and so I wondered how do I get over to my kids that between today and tomorrow they individually could do something to create a team success bearing in mind that track and field is a very individual sport that compete with each other.

19:18Go to any business, all the sales guys, the people are competing with each other, right? But they're wearing the same badge. They're part of the same organization. So I tried this. Today and tomorrow, you've got a 14-point mountain to climb. It's a mountain because you can't come back next week. This is the one. It only happens today and tomorrow. It's 14 points because that's the difference between what you're worth on paper and what the opposition is. But if you are worth 20 to one section of the room, If you're worth one point on paper and you can turn it to two, you give me just the same step up the mountain as you guys who are worth five points can deliver six.

19:55And as for you, Linford Christie and Colin Jackson, all I ever expect from you is eight, so don't give me seven. The kids were going out of the room. They were looking at my papers to see what I had done for them, shaking their head, muttering about me. But this is just what I wanted them to do. I wanted them to understand that by getting to the top of their individual marathon, they would make a difference. They would make a difference. The scene now goes to the

20:23stadium, into the event, into the ring for the first event. Hammer was a guy called Shane Peacock, who was a second reserve worth one point on a good day. And he gets in, the kids are all shouting at him, come on, Shane, give us another point. And he gave them two. He got three points. Chris Agabuzzi was worth five. He delivered eight. The kids in the warm-up area, normally when they saw the blue vests of East Germany or the red vests of the Soviet Union, they were running to the toilet. Now they wanted to tear the tracksuit off. Let me out and I'm going to give you my points now. After the two days, the men had the trophy.

21:01The women, the highest number of points ever recorded by a West European team. How's that possible? As a coach, making sure that you create opportunity for your people to take ownership. Because once they do that, and they commit to that, and engage with that, that will make the difference. This is a people business, Brad. And that was the biggest lesson that I've learned from you, I have to say, in addition. But in my journey through the you have to be good at the technical business, you know, which leg do you move first, which back, you have to know, you have to have to know that. But you better understand the people business, or there's no point of having the technical business stuff at all.

21:47And the way I know that is that there are some things in life you can be taught, you can be taught the science of coaching, the technical bits and pieces, but you can only learn the art. And that's through experience. the problem with experience as Vernon Law summed up was she's the crudest of all teachers because she gives you the test first and the lesson second but the fact is you'd better have the test but more importantly you'd better have a coach there to help make sure that you've learned a lesson from the test athletes so I don't know if that helps another bit about coaching that you may be interested in was Daley Thompson as an example again for business and for sport Daley was a double Olympic gold medalist world record I coached Daley and the decathlon just for the viewers and listeners, decathlon is 10 events, you know, 100 metres, 400 metres hurdles and so on and there are field events, jumps and throws and as a coach I knew I couldn't coach all of the events, not to the level that he needed me to be and I always tried to live this idea of there are three things you have to know in life you've got to know what you know you've got to know what you don't know and you've got to know somebody who does and get them into the party and so what we did there were five other coaches involved to make sure that Daly had the right development program now my role at that point I figured we've all got our own definitions of what good leadership is but my picture of great leadership is you're the conductor of an orchestra.

23:31You know? You've got to have people in front of you who are everything from a soloist to somebody fresh out of college. You've got strings, you've got brass, you've got woodwind, you've got all of these things going. And they all know the role that they've got to play. And it's your job to make sure that nobody's stronger than somebody else, that you create, as a conductor of the orchestra, you create harmony from the diversity lives in front of you. I mean, that's your job. Now, when you're coaching somebody, an individual like a Daley Thompson, it would be like me coaching you, Brad, or coaching a leader or coaching somebody.

24:10There are different parts of your job that have got to be somehow or other be brought together in a balanced way to allow you to get the score that you need to be, the performance to be as great as you can be. I couldn't allow the throws coach to make Daley so heavy to throw the throws that he couldn't jump or sprint anymore. I think that's another part of the art if you like of coaching is understanding that balance. A lot of people say to me, what you should be doing now frankly is you have to concentrate on the weaknesses. No, that's absolutely the wrong way around in my opinion. If I've brought you into the team Brad, I've brought you in because of your strengths.

24:54my first priority in life is to make sure these strengths continue to grow i'll only make a weakness a priority if it interferes with your ability to deliver that strength or in a team situation if it's interfering with other people's abilities to do their strength do these things make sense for business 100 100 so i want to go back to this one uh the first book of yours that I got to read.

25:30When you talk, well, I guess the first question for everybody listening, though, because I've read the book, I want everyone to read it. Why did you call it Winning Matters? I think this is important for everyone to understand. Why name it Winning Matters? Well, that comes back to the, you know, and thanks for appreciating the first point I was trying to make, how you feel about success. It comes back to that, you know, Brad. And I know this will sound really harsh, but if losing doesn't hurt, winning doesn't matter. That's the feeling part in the whole thing. And I kind of feel that sense of challenge.

26:18I mean, you know, so many people will talk about motivation and put a price on it. You know, you'll get a bonus this year. You'll get this next year. You'll get a new car and so on. But truly, the greatest motivation is the right challenge. It's having the right challenge in front of you and buying into that, you know, and really engaging with it. I mean, I've got some quite a nice garden. I have to say it's mostly down to Linda, my wife And the gardener I get involved in there every now and again And it took me a while to realise this But I began to understand I felt a challenge to make the roses beautiful Because these are my priority in the garden And it suddenly dawned on me one day It doesn't matter what you do, Frankie They're destined to be beautiful It's your job to make sure that the things that might stop that happening are dealt with.

27:21And so there's a new challenge. I mean, I just, I'm not sure if I've really been clear on this from the outset, is that it's about seeing challenges, addressing them, and knowing at the end of the day that what you did and how you did it is why that's happening in front of you. You know, is that OK? That's perfect. Gang, you're on the Big Success podcast. We're going to be back in just a moment. I'm going to ask Frank about how do you scale up? What's the difference between those who do good and those who become absolute champions? Renowned as one of the country's best and most consistently inspiring motivational speakers, Frank Dick is the current chair of Scottish Athletics, as well as chair of the IAAF Academy.

28:16To learn more about Frank Dick, please visit frankdick.co.uk. Frank, what is, in your mind, the difference between the did great and the absolute champions? You've coached both ends of the scale. What's the difference? Okay, well, first of all, I'll take you back into my world again. there's a notional journey that an athlete takes. They start off as beginners, they're developers, and one day they're high performers. And that journey, I think a lot of people get into their head that what it is is you start off as a Fiat Uno and you finish off as a Ferrari Testarossa. And I get that. But the more you get into working with really high achievers, you realize that they are not part of that journey.

29:11They fracture it somewhere along the line. And so going back to my analogy, what's the connection between a Ferrari Formula One car and a Testarossa? They may have the same brand, but they're not the same motor. You need different people driving them and you need different people coaching and preparing them and so on. and so I think and I did a I'll just digress for a second I did a seminar, a webinar for India two years ago with a guy called Arne Ghoulish, I brought him in he's one of the top guys on talent identification and we spent four days four hours a day with different speakers and so on and the conclusion at the end of that is you're wasting your time trying to spot talent.

30:09And his argument was talent emerges. Talent, how many sports do you know that come to the age of 16, for example, and they go to do a trawl, and they find some kids are better than other kids, they bring them in, and they're on the high-performance pathway and go all the way through. They do this in track and field very often. I'm going to ask you to take a I'm pretty sure it will be an educated guess on this one of the athletes in the world who get a world championships junior medal that's 19 years of age how many of them do you think medal in the senior competition when they get into the An educated guess would be it's a fairly low number.

31:03Yeah. Would you imagine less than 10 %? I would imagine less than 10%, yes. Yeah. But why? That's a great point. Well, in sport, and maybe you can alter the ages on this, But in track and field, 60 % of the medals will be between the ages of 24 and 28 in the Olympic Games, World Championships, roughly speaking, and 85 % between 22 and 30. So we know the peak performance years. so something's not happening either something's not happening between 19 or something has not been addressed properly before then and in my simplistic language when I'm speaking to coaches about this I say you've got to be careful you don't squeeze all the juice out the orange too early and what they discovered in the research that Arnie was doing is that if you have people as late as possible doing several disciplines, several different sports, on the foundation of that, they are more likely to medal as seniors than the kids who specialize early on.

32:26Wow. And I don't know how relevant that is to business, but what it made me think about, and I've only loosely discussed this with people who do business far better than me. And so why, when people come into your business, why do they not get a chance to play other positions or do other roles and not the one that they've come in for? And as if to support that, I don't know if you remember the footballer called Johan Cruyff? No. He was a Dutch soccer player, brilliant player. And you went on to be a manager. With Barcelona, I had to do a conference across in Spain, and we were both on stage. And one of the things that he explained to me, he said, you know, when people get selected for the youth team, for the first two years, they must learn to play out of position as often as they play in position.

33:33only in that way do they understand how other players in the team see the game yeah and only in that way can you give them the right level of support uh to to make the team gel properly yeah um and again i don't i don't know how relevant that is to business but it seems it seemed to me that it could be relevant yeah look it comes so relevant that When I coach business owners, I find that business owners who've only ever done one thing, like they were an engineer for 20 years, they don't have 20 years business experience. They've got one year's experience. They just did it 20 times type thing. And so it's that mix.

34:14Frank, I want to dive into the quick fire round and just ask you a couple of very fast ones, fast question, fast answer. How do you succeed at setting goals? What's your thoughts on that?

34:29Well, the constantly changing, one of the things that I would like to feed in here is that it's really important in life that you disrupt your thinking from time to time, at least once a year, maybe a couple of times. And I see that, you know, asking people, what if we did something different? Why not do something different? What are our other options? What are our possibilities? And I see it kind of like Newton's cradle. You take the ball off one end, call it disruption. You let it go. You have dreams. The next ball is decisions. The next ball is design. And the next ball that flies off the other end is delivery.

35:08But remember, it's coming back again. and you've got of course I can understand that some people can say well I've got one goal in life but you don't you've got multiple goals in life I'm going to say you might have a grand purpose a grand vision a grand mission but in between time you've got to give yourself short term goals medium term goals and use these as a bit of challenge and competition because that gives you the feeling of success it brings success on the way through love it love it what about self development How do we succeed at developing ourselves and focusing on that personal development?

35:46Well, first of all, don't stick in your own patch. Always look outside. One of the things I really enjoyed working with Eddie was, for example, we invited in a personal friend of mine, Boris Varkovsky, who was the chief coach for the Syracuse du Soleil. Now, you might say, well, what's that got to do with rugby? What's that got to do with track and field and so on? but he had a special mind about how to create movement that we'd never had before. And I think that your personal development, of course you've got to be driven for it. And wrapping up in that, by the way, that for your own personal development, there are three big parts to it.

36:29There's your physical, there's your mental, and there's also your emotional. And when you're looking at development, You have to look at all of these things And then at the other end of that When it comes to recovery You know, when you're exhausted out there Please remember that there's different processes In recovering from physical fatigue From mental fatigue And from emotional fatigue Emotional investment If it's not properly managed Can be, on the one hand People can achieve great things But on the other hand once it gets negative you can be dragged down a really deep hole yeah and one of the most important things i say to coaches is make sure that your emotional corridor is one that everybody understands you never go too high you never go too low they'll look to you as a coach for emotional stability and a lot of people miss that you know empathy um emotional intelligence it used to we We used to think of these as real softy things as a coach.

37:38But now I know they're really, really important. Frank, Coach's Hall of Fame, sporting hero. Final question. What is the best advice you ever got or the best quote you ever read on the subject of success? Okay. I knew you were going to ask me this and I had a good think about it and I have three for you. Got it. Okay? One of them is Aristotle. And believe it or not, I never met him personally. He was quite a lot before me. His point was excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act, it's a habit. I love that one. Coming back to my earlier point about the people business, I love these words from George Washington Carver.