The Secrets of Success: A Deep Dive W/ Prof. Damian Hughes

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 Sugars. Wow, that's all I can say. The big success podcast today, Professor Damian Hughes. His podcast is on high performance. You imagine the number of people he's interviewed that are amazing performers around the world. Now, not only is he a professor of organizational behavior and studied this stuff, comes from a boxing background. He'll tell you a bit more about that during the whole thing. But being the coach of many sporting teams, like he's been on the coaching staff of England Rugby, England Roses, Scotland Rugby Union.

0:45He's done a whole bunch of things and performed at that high level. His best-selling books, so many of them. I love this one. That's my favorite, the Sir Alex Ferguson, How to Think Like Sir Alex. But he's written books on boxing greats. He's done the whole thing, studied success. When we get to his answer on what is success and how it works, when we get to his answer on how to scale up, the guy has formulas beyond formulas of how success happens, how high performance happens. So tune in, go right through this thing, take notes. He gives so many formulas you're going to want to write them down.

1:22This is the Big Success Podcast, and this is Damien Hughes. And we have the Damien Hughes, the liquid thinker, the professor of high performance. Damien, how are you doing, buddy? I'm good, Brad. How are you, mate? You know, I'm doing fantastic. And I'm really intrigued, given all the people you've interviewed on high performance. How do you see success? Like, what's success to you? Yeah, it's a brilliant question, Brad. And I think it's one that I've reflected on a lot over the years. And I think my summary of it is a three word answer that which is doing the best you can with the resources you've got in the moment you're in.

1:58And the reason I think that's that captures what my version of success is, is because things change all the time. You know, the resources you have might be different now than it was when you were in your twenties. The moment that you're in is obviously different depending on your age or your circumstances. is. So continually just asking that question, am I doing the very best I can in this moment with the resources I have to me? If you can answer yes to that more frequently than you can answer no, that defines success. So has that evolved over time, do you think? Was it something that you started with or how's that shifted for you?

2:36No, it's a good question. It certainly evolved over time. I think when I was younger, so my background is I grew up in a boxing gym. So I was constantly around guys that were striving to go off and win titles or Olympic gold medals or to make a fortune in the sport. So I was very much around that sort of the extrinsic measures of what success looked like, which is a valid and obviously an important factor of it. But what was really interesting over the years is then seeing the guys that maybe didn't achieve the success in terms of a title or a medal, but actually came away from it feeling that they'd done the best that they could in that moment with the resources they had.

3:22And I think that started to shift my perspective on it significantly. Yeah. Yeah. So where in life then, was there a moment? Was it a gradual thing. When did you choose success? Yeah, I think, I think, um, so that leads us into, uh, origin story. So my origin story was that, um, I grew up in a, in a boxing gym. And if any of your listeners might have a mental model of what they think a boxing gym is, they often assume it's in some gritty inner city, uh, deprived area. And my story fits that stereotype so it was in manchester in what was categorized as europe's third poorest district so that gives you an idea of a lot of the sort of social difficulties or problems that we experienced and um when i was growing up um we sort of there's two things that shaped me one was being around high performance from a really young age people going off and going on to aspire to those goals as I just described earlier, but what I also became very aware of is the power of community there as well, that it was a place where you didn't have to step up through the boxing ring to feel that you could come in there and be respected and valued and recognized for who you were.

4:42You had to comply with the behaviors, which was about coming in and being respectful and hard work and consistent, but it was very much around that. Now, I always presumed my career was going to go down the route of going into sort of boxing, whether that was as a coach or a participant. But my dad was really keen that I pursue an academic angle because he wanted me to, he felt that that was more sustainable and a far healthier and safer career path. And I was lucky enough, I got a scholarship to a really good school. So that was seen as the way out of those kind of circumstances. and then i nearly squandered it brad so um i got there and was like a fish out of water and got myself into a fair amount of trouble and scrapes and um i ended up getting expelled from this school for uh for predictably enough fighting and what happened was um and i knew that i'd really squandered the opportunity and it was a teacher that came along the evening i'd been expelled from the school and he knew that i was from a good family but i was a little bit uh out of my depth in terms of operating in a context I'd never been before.

5:54And he came and spoke to my parents and said that he was prepared to go to the school and stand up for me and offer a testimonial. But I knew it was literally the last chance saloon. And that was what, and that was the moment. I remember that evening, that night thinking, I don't think I'm particularly bright, but I know that I can work hard. I know that I can learn. I know that I can commit myself to any tasks that I'll put my mind to. So I'd describe it. It was when I reached about 15 was the moment that I knew what I needed to do to go on and be as successful as what I could be. Yeah. Yeah.

6:30It's interesting. You know, when you look at success, whether it's chosen for you or there's a moment or that sort of thing. Since then, obviously, you've developed that. What's your model for how success happens? How do you find that success works? Well, I mean, what you described there, so that incident I described from my own childhood, I was really intrigued years later to discover that Sigmund Freud described that as the golden seed moment. Yeah. He says for everybody that goes on to achieve success against their own parameters, they always have a moment where somebody somewhere believes in them and sows that seed of what they think they're capable of.

7:11And that was certainly the case for me. so I think for a lot of people that happens that golden seed moment whether it's a parent whether it's a teacher whether it's a priest whether it's a local person in the community goes and does that so I think that can often be a trigger for it but I think in terms of how I how when I work with people or teams I suggest that they can go on define success I do a really a simple exercise that is bad success leaves clues. Yeah. So what I ask them to do is say, you tell me the parameters of what success looks like for you. If you're in the sales team, it might be your best customer relationship.

7:52It might be the best quarter results you've had. If it's a sports team, it might be the best result you've ever achieved. And then we do a forensic analysis of what that successful moment looked like. And there's three things that I find follow from that analysis. The first one is it's an inclusive exercise. So everyone will have an opinion. And secondly, what leads from that is everyone feels they can speak freely and be included in it. But the third and most significant factor that emerges is that confidence is then built upon the evidence. So you're not asking people to do something that they're not capable of.

8:27You're demonstrating that you've already done it. And what we're now trying to do is more of those successful behaviors that lead to more successful outcomes. And that's where I always start because I think there's a danger in trying to come up with a formula, like a lift and shift method that says this worked there and therefore it'll work here. I think it's always got to be organic. And that to me is the best way into those conversations. Yeah. So when someone's confronted with that, you'd use the word confidence there. What gets them to really act on it? What's your experience on how do we get them to take action on that knowledge?

9:07Yeah. So again, that's, I mean, it's a really incisive question. And I think what often leads them to take action is if you can start to like drill it down into certain specific behaviors. So if I use my own example of say the boxing gym, one of the behaviors there of the success leaves clues was about the behavior of discipline. But what does that mean? so one of the rules that we had in the gym was that you weren't allowed to use bad language because to use bad language was a sign of ill discipline that if you couldn't think of anything to say to fill the silence or a moment other than a swear word that indicated that you lacked discipline to be able to hold your tongue so it wasn't a moral thing it was seen as linked to the behavior of discipline that in the environment of a boxing gym discipline was one of the core tenants of what success was going to be like.

10:00So I think what, what is important is to boil it down into a really specific controllable and replicable behavior. So then people understand that that gives them a way into the conversation or a way into the action. So I'll give you an example. We recently interviewed James Kerr, the author, Claire, James Kerr, the author of Atomic Habits. and James Kerr was talking about this idea of doing one press up doesn't make, like doesn't make you fitter, but doing one press up is a vote for the person you want to become. It gives you a way in to want to be an active, healthy individual. So I think that resonated with me because of the examples of what I was saying of not using bad language in the boxing gym didn't make you a better person, but it made you, it gave you a vote for the person that was regarded themselves as being disciplined and able to hold their tongue.

10:53Yeah. I love that word. It gives you a vote for it. So let's flip it over then. How, how do we learn success from our mistakes or from our failures? Yeah. So that to me is married up with a word that I think gets misused an awful lot in our modern world, which is the humility that I think people think that if you say that, oh, I'm humble, I'm down to earth. I'm just like you that automatically confers that, that, that virtue on you. And I think humility isn't saying you're humble. It's a mindset and it's a mindset that I see. Uh, you would develop in three stages and it's those three stages that then allow us to learn from mistakes.

11:34So the first stage I often talk about when we refer to humility is peak idiot stage where you have high levels of confidence, but low levels of knowledge. So you have an opinion, you've always got a judgment. There's nothing that you don't know. so it's like when you go to sports games and you see somebody sat in the stand declaring that they did a better job than the athletes out there or you watch the talent programs on tv where somebody says i want to sing like mariah carey then they sound like a cat being strangled it's peak idiot they're almost they're deluded to the point they don't know uh where they are and what the capabilities are so the quicker you can get over yourself in that regard you enter what i describe as the valley of humility and this is just characterized by being curious like what you like like you demonstrate on this podcast you know asking questions listening to answers and like we interviewed a guy once called nims purger who's incredible he's um he grew up in nepal and he joined the gurkhas soldiers regiment then became a member of the british special forces the first gurkha to ever do it and then he decided that he wanted to climb mountains now there's a documentary on netflix on this guy called 14 peaks where he scaled the 14 highest mountain peaks in the world in a record time now for context the previous record was seven and a half years and nims purgey does it in six months and he had this great line that he was talking about that he says he says your ability to be world-class at anything depends on how long and comfortable you are at being shit at it for and that to me was such a great line because it was always like because that's where the learning is.

13:12That's where the failure is. But if you fail and then you go through, but you're humble enough to reflect on it and work out what did I do? How do I do it better next time? And you ask all those great questions that you teach, the longer you can spend in that zone, eventually you get to stage three, which is the hill of knowledge, the hill of success, the hill of whatever achievement you're trying to get. But you're never afraid to come back down that hill into the valley to pick up more information from other people that you can then take back onto onto that hill and allow you to go and keep repeating that success on a consistent basis.

13:46So I often talk about that. You can often see people that, and ask them, what stage are you at in the mindset of humility? Are you giving out opinions all the time? Cause that's indicates you're at stage one or do you, can you get over that and get into that valley of humility quickly? And that's what I've seen repeatedly and consistently Brad is that the consistent sustained high performers are constantly in that state of valley of humility, or they're in that stage of delivery and then coming back down and doing that review on a regular basis. Love it. You're on the Big Success Podcast. We will be back with the liquid thinker, Damien Hughes.

14:25We're going to talk about how to think like Sir Alex Ferguson. We're going to talk about a whole bunch of things on winning when we get back after the break. When it comes to attracting customers, the only difference between your company and Microsoft, Ford and Coke is great advertising. In instant advertising by Brad Sugars, you'll find everything you need to create killer ads that won't break the bank. And we're back. I'm Brad Sugars. This is the Big Success Podcast. Damian Hughes, the high performance guy. But as a professor of this subject, I'm very intrigued to get your thoughts. How do you succeed at high performance?

15:03Yeah, well, I think the first definition of that is to define what high performance is for you. So on the podcast that I co-host with Jay Comfrey, that's the opening question we ask everybody. And what's interesting is in nearly 200 episodes, we've yet to receive a consistent answer to that. And that to me is almost that, that first of all threw me a little bit until I stopped to reflect and I went, actually, that is the answer. That it's everybody defines it differently. For some people, high performance is related to their family. Some it might be related to their careers. For others, it might be related to the financial wealth.

15:42And I think until we have a clear definition of that for ourselves, we can't go after it. We find ourselves caught up in the rat race, chasing other people, getting into competition for prizes that we don't necessarily want to win. So I think that's a question that I've reflected on an awful lot. And then, but when people say, oh, chase your purpose, not your passion and phrases like that, that's a great line to use, but what does it mean? And what I like to help people do is to answer that question of, well, what is success for you? I use four questions that come from the work of a guy called Dan Bootler.

16:23So Dan Bootler is a journalist for the National Geographic, but he wrote a brilliant book called The Blue Zones, where he went around the areas of the world where life expectancy outstrips the rest of the planet. And what he was asking the question of was, what makes these people live longer? Now, because it was so diverse, the regions, geography, diet, and things like that played a certain part. Of course he did. But what he found is they all had at their heart, what in one Japanese culture called their icky guy, but it translates as a sense of purpose. And what Dan talks about in his book is there's four questions that help us identify our icky guy.

17:04The first one is what do we love doing? The second one is what are we really good at? The third one is what does the world really need from us? And the fourth one is how can we use this to generate wealth? So I think when we ask those questions and that allows us to move somewhere closer to identifying what our sense of purpose is and what our definition of success really is. And I think it's a really great way in to then help people ask the question that are you structuring the rest of your life to be able to facilitate you getting closer to your definition of it? Yeah. Love those four questions.

17:46I'm going to go read that book for sure. So let's move that then to a team aspect. How do we, the high performance culture, how do we instill that? What's some of the steps to that? Well, again, it's a really good question. I think when we talk about, I often encourage people that maybe run teams, don't talk about culture because culture is an abstract term. It doesn't mean a great deal. So if we went and asked 20 people for a definition of culture, I reckon we'd get at least 20 different definitions of what that means and there'd be some overlap so what i prefer to do instead is to direct them and say what type of culture do you want and that leads us into some really quite fascinating research that was done in the early 1990s in stanford university there's two billion professors there called professors baron and hannon and they used to lecture that culture could be a competitive advantage for a team and everyone would say yes i agree where's the evidence so these two guys got funded went into silicon valley and explored this topic and then after 25 years of it they produced a paper that said what happens is when you put any group of people together to achieve a common objective a culture will emerge but it's a type of a specific type of culture will emerge and what they said is commonly there's five of them so the first type of culture you can have is a star culture where you go out your way you recruit the best talent you can pay them the highest salaries you can afford, give them the best facilities, and you sit back and wait for all those talented people to deliver.

19:15Now, what was interesting in the Barron and Hannan study, Google was one of their companies they studied. So people get distracted and think that Google, therefore the star culture is the one that works. And what the evidence says is it can work. And when it does, it'll be spectacular, but far more frequently, it'll go wrong. And when it goes wrong, the failure will be just as spectacular. so i once interviewed a football coach that worked at real madrid they have this galactic culture in soccer and he had this great line that said the trouble in the star culture is everyone wants to be the head waiter and nobody wants to wash the dishes and it's often that lack of respect that discrepancy um that will undermine it the second type of culture you can get is an autocratic culture and this is where it's around um an individual sets the tone my way of the highway so it's almost it might be the founder of a business or his charismatic chief exec but it's basically that fiefdom and now what the trouble there is is when they start making flawed decisions or when they start taking their eye off the ball or they surround themselves with an echo chamber that's where the culture could often be dragged down the wrong pathway the third type is a bureaucratic culture and this is where you have lots of policies procedures rules regulations it's almost like you have a perma layer of middle managers.

20:37So everything has to go through that. So it's not agile. It's not responsive. Decisions are often made by a committee and consensus. The fourth type is an engineering culture. Now don't be blindsided by the name. An engineering culture is where you recruit people based on technical expertise. So what happens there is you recruit somebody because they might be great as an accountant or somebody as great as a marketeer, but you don't worry about how they behave or how they fit into the rest of the organization. So one of the obvious consequences of that is you can get lots of office politics, people developing their silos and not necessarily sharing ideas.

21:16And that then leads us to the fifth culture, which is what's called the commitment culture. And a commitment culture answers two questions at the heart of it, Brad. The first one is, what are we here to do? What's our mission? And then the second one is what are the behaviors that everybody has to subscribe to? So all you're asking is what do we do and how do we do it? But you're transparent and explicit about that. Now, what the evidence from Barron and Hannan told us is that the one culture that thrives over a sustained period is a commitment culture. And when they measured this against all the traditional metrics of a business, share price, market share speed to market what they found is commitment cultures outperform those other four types on average by around 22 percent wow so this is where you get really interesting because then when you then say to people what have you got currently and they might identify go oh we've got an old socratic place what do you want the answer is often how do we do a commitment culture so then you help people structure it because what can often appear like a a a clash within an organization we often ascribe it to personalities we go oh they don't like each other yet whereas when we look at it through the lens of a cultural model you can often see that a clash might be an autocratic culture coming into conflict with a bureaucratic culture and And there can only be one dominant culture in an organization.

22:45So that's where I often, I find that's an easier way in for people to be able to go, ah, right, now I know how to create a high-performing culture. What they're effectively describing is a commitment culture. And then you start to look at the ways in which you do that. But you start with those two questions about sense of purpose and what I call the non-negotiable behaviors that everybody has to adhere to. Love it. Love it. So let's go on. You mentioned sustainability and Sir Alex Ferguson, I loved your book. Thank you. It's interesting because it's like, did you live with Sir Alex for a period of time?

23:23How did you get inside his head like that? But the sustainability of success, what are some of the key factors to sustaining success? yeah so i what i found is i i thought there was three things that ferguson did that often gets uh that gets overlooked in terms of sustaining it the first one was that he he saw things in four-year cycles so he viewed this whole the the trajectory of his team as a four-year cycle and whereas most people were being in that reactive or responsive six to 12-month cycle So what he would do is he would view that over that longer term period. So he would recognize that he needed to get rid of somebody, say, in the second year of that four-year cycle, rather than wait to the fourth year so he could start to recruit.

24:15So he was just thinking far longer term than I think most other people do. So that stopped him getting too high on his successes, but too low on his defeats. I think the second thing he did was he managed upwards brilliantly. So there was a period in his first five years at Manchester United where he didn't win a trophy, where the team were hemorrhaging cash, yet not delivering success. And yet when I was looking enough to speak to some of the people that were responsible for maintaining faith with him, what they said was he was fantastic at constantly communicating up to us what he was working on, why he was working on it.

24:56So one of the interviews I did with one of the, with one of the board said, if we had sacked him, the next guy that would have replaced him would have taken a year to work out where he needed to be directing his energy. And it was exactly the place that Ferguson already was doing because he'd explained to us. So I think managing upwards is often a really underrated virtue of coaches because we assume it's about the cult of their personality, whereas they have stakeholders to manage. And then the third thing that I think he did really well was he refreshed his own coaching and support staff on a regular basis.

25:33So if you compare his next comparable rival, Arsene Wenger at Arsenal, in the first 21 years of each of their careers at Manchester United and at Arsenal, Arsene Wenger had one assistant for that 21-year period. Ferguson, in that same period of time, had seven. And I think that's significant because some of these guys were leaving to go on to pursue careers themselves. But what Ferguson was doing was recruiting people to plug his gap in knowledge. So when he had a young crop of players coming through, he recruited Brian Kidd that was an expert at nurturing young talent. When he had an experienced crop, he recruited a Portuguese coach called Carlos Quieres that was more savvy than him tactically.

26:21So he was constantly open to new ideas and new ways of learning that allowed him to stay fresh and not get stale in terms of what he was doing himself. Yeah, yeah. So let's go then the winning mindset. You teach a lot on the winning mindset. I think your take on that is really unique. Can you share with us how that has evolved or how you came to that structure and how people can succeed at having that mindset? Sure. Well, thanks for the feedback. I think what I did was I was lucky enough to go around the world, going into elite environments and meeting coaches, predominantly from sport. And I was looking at first principles, Brad.

27:03So I was like, forget the outcome. What were they doing that was consistently present at the very start? And what I found was there was five things that regardless of the sport or the context they were operating in, that tended to be consistent amongst elite coaches. and I gave it a simple acronym called steps to help people remember it but the first thing was they were focused relentlessly on simplicity now that's an obvious point because nobody likes complexity but I'll give you an example from Ferguson there's a he he shared an example once when I asked him I said what what's the difference between a good and a great coach and he took a tennis ball and threw it to me he said catch it now that was an easy task so he took two and threw with them both in the air at the same time.

27:46He said, catch both balls. I managed to do it, but it was harder. So he did it with three and then he did it with four. And finally, he threw five balls in the air at the same time. And I struggled to catch one. He said, that's the difference. He said, what lots of people do is they throw five balls in the hope that some of that information might stick. What the best coaches do is they, before they walk into that meeting or that session, they ask the question, not how many balls can I throw, but how many can you catch? and that there forces you to prioritize your information in the order that you want people to remember it so that's what i mean by simplicity the t bit is around creating environments where people can think so this was almost like a hidden superpower i saw brad that what these coaches were focused on was not having the right answers but creating a space where the right questions could be asked because they understood that when people are asking a question there's two things going on underneath the psychological surface of that hand being raised to ask the question.

28:44The first one is that I've given you the opportunity to demonstrate trust. You're building trust in the relationship. How you respond to that, whether it's respectful or you act with integrity or sensitivity, either builds or erodes trust. So Eddie Jones, the Australian rugby coach, had this great phrase. He said, nothing you do is neutral as a coach. everything you do either enhances or erodes the trust in the relationship so that's what the thinking environment does but the second factor is you create psychological safety as well for people to be able to think so when they so this phrase psychological safety is i know you're aware of but for your listeners it originates from the work of amy edmondson an organizational psychologist at harvard that where her origins of her work came from was that she went into hospitals in the boston state area looking at what made a great successful hospital and what she found didn't make sense that the best hospitals had the highest near misses and recorded accidents and and cock-up rates but the worst performing hospitals had the lowest rates and when she looked at that on the surface she thought how can that make sense and when she dug deeper she found that the best hospitals had cultures where people could admit errors and mistakes in a safe environment so the learning could happen at a far more accelerated pace so that that's the t bit of creating the space for people to think and ask questions the e part is just around emotional intelligence so i'll give you a neat story i that when i went into detroit i went to the boxing gym there called the crunk boxing gym and that was regarded as a greenhouse of talent and i was writing a book at the time about one of its alumni a guy called thomas hearns who was a five-weight world champion and to get to the gym where it was based at the time was to go into some of the poorest projects in the detroit area so the experience was quite intimidating in terms of the gangs the drugs the crime that was pretty endemic but the head coach there was a man called the manual steward and he couldn't have been kinder or nicer to me but when i walked into his gym on the first day he said damien he said how do you feel and i thought he was being polite so i gave him a polite answer said manny it's great to see you how are you what he did next blindsided me he went how do you really feel and i found myself just with verbal diarrhea i was just talking like you know i know you're busy manny i can go come back another day if you like and he said to me that's fine he said you stay with me and when i got to know him a bit better i asked him about that first visit and he said everybody gets a second question he said when i saw you turn up in my gym i saw this nervous looking white english guy stood in front of me telling me how excited you were and he said the words and the pictures didn't align he said so that led me to one or two conclusions you were either a liar or a sociopath so the second question speeds it up and the second question how do you really feel and my answer that time told him that i was telling lies to mask my own nerves which is why he then took me under his wing and he said but i do that with every kid that comes in this gym that's if you want to know the success it's the emotional intelligence to read somebody's emotions and respond accordingly so that was a big learning for me the p part was around of the steps acronym was around keep language practical and inclusive don't use jargon don't use sort of insider language because you exclude people from the conversation on that that's a pretty simple one but then the final s on the acronym was around telling stories so what i would often find is i'd be traveling back from these visits and when i was writing down my notes they were all story form they were all and that eventually made me realize that these guys were passing on knowledge through the power of stories and when i went and explored it there's a brilliant work by a psychologist called gary klein who wrote a book called the power of stories around this and what he found is when he worked with sort of like um like emergency crews like ambulance uh staff or firefighting staff or people in the army what he found was that storytelling was the best way of passing on learnings and lessons within those environments because it offered context, but there was a kernel of truth at the heart of it.

33:12So that's what I discovered that these great coaches, when they were developing this winning mindset, were consistently keeping things simple, creating space for people to think and ask questions, being emotionally intelligent, making sure their language was practical and accessible, and constantly searching for stories to re-emphasize or to illustrate their point. So that's sometimes what I do when I work with coaches. That's almost like the acronym I have in my head to work out if they're not getting the results they want. I find it's like a useful inventory to work out where do they maybe need to sharpen their focus.

33:50Love it. You're on the Big Success Podcast. We have the genius of high performance, Damien Hughes, the professor. We'll be back in a moment. We're going to talk about scaling up. Damian Hughes is a bestselling author who combines his practical and academic background within sport organizational development and change psychology to help organizations and teams to create a high performance culture. He is the author of eight bestselling business books, including Liquid Thinking, Liquid Leadership, How to Change Absolutely Anything, How to Think Like Sir Alex Ferguson, and The Five Steps to a Winning Mindset.

34:24His latest book, High Performance, Lessons from the Best on Becoming Your Best, has become a number one Sunday Times bestseller. His work has been translated into 10 languages. He has also been nominated for the 2007 William Hill Sportsbook of the Year Award for Peerless, his biography of boxing great Sugar Ray Robinson. In 2009, he co-authored a critically acclaimed biography of boxing legend Thomas Hearns in Hitman, The Thomas Hearn Story. In 2013, his latest biography, Marvelous Marvin Hagler, became the UK's best-selling sports biography. He was appointed as a visiting professor of organizational behavior and change for Manchester Metropolitan University in September 2010.

35:06He is a co-host of the High Performance Podcast, an acclaimed series of interviews with elite performers from business, sports, and the arts, exploring the psychology behind sustained high performance. He has served as a member of the coaching team for England Rugby League, England Roses, Scotland Rugby Union, and a wide range of international and national sporting teams. To learn more about Damien Hughes, visit liquidthinker.com. We're back on the Big Success Podcast. It's scale-up time. It's level-up time. Damien, I have to ask, you've worked with so many people that have done amazing high performance.