How shifting your perspective can change the game with Tom Daley - Handpicked

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1:53Hey everyone, welcome along to another episode of High Performance. This is Handpicked, where myself or Damien sit down and reminisce about a former guest on the show and just talk about some of the lessons we've learned and maybe hear a few clips. And I think what's nice about this, just to give people a bit of background into how this works, you know, the team will ping us a message and say, look, we'll record a Handpicked today. Can you tell us what you'd like to talk about and i love just suddenly going in the archive and going oh we spoke to them oh we had that conversation oh we learned this lesson like we're talking going back five years almost yeah and this one this episode i can remember the date specifically it was november the 12th 2019 before the world got stood on its head with the pandemic but that was the day after we'd done our very first ever recording of this so tom was our second guest that we sat downwards to interview so i like listening to it because one it reminds us of the journey that we've been on personally from those early forays of just working out whether we had something that was worth putting out there into the world but also as well because it felt a real privilege to get to meet tom he came along without knowing the high performance podcast he was just really trusting and open to want to come and share the incredible journey that he's been on i remember of those days me and you a couple of microphones and basically disbelief that anybody would want to come on to this thing that we created that no one had ever heard of that hadn't ever even been transmitted called high performance and here we are all these years later well should we get into a clip and then talk about why you chose this episode particularly yeah well if you're forgive the pun let's dive straight in my dad was unlike a lot of the parents um of sporting people he didn't pretend or even try to know anything technical about diving he didn't pretend or try to say things that I needed to improve on or work on he didn't pretend to try and adjust what I ate or adjust how much I slept he let me figure it out and he was just there for me whether it was uh a a good training session or a bad if I had a bad training session he knew that we would just drive and go and get ice cream like he wouldn't even have to say anything he just knew what would make me feel better he had your wednesday night curry ritual yeah exactly wednesday night when my grandma would come to watch training and we'd go and get an indian after training and even just things like the way that my dad used to make me feel about competition i remember that first competition where i was diving for the first time in a senior competition at 10 years old the senior national championships i remember we got the list of how many people were going to be in it and there was 18 divers and i said to my dad i'm so nervous like what if i do badly what if i don't dive as well as i do in training you know it's the first time i'm going to dive at a senior event and he just said to me tom there's 18 divers in this competition if you come last you are going to be 18th best in the whole country like how cool is that and when he said that to me i was like you're right 18th best in the country that's pretty darn good and so going into that competition i remember thinking oh don't worry because even if i come 18th i'm still 18th best in the country so that the way that he used to say things to me just took all the pressure off it's a wonderful clip to start with because actually this idea of reframing has become quite a common hot topic on this show and at that time we'd never explored it before and that's actually the first time that anyone ever came onto high performance and spoke about reframing where we are to totally change our perspective and therefore our approach yeah and it's such a powerful example for a couple of reasons one is to be framing the ability of just seeing the positives in the situation rather than be fearful of the humiliation of coming last see it as actually your last of the first if you like so that's a really good way that liberated him but I love just the conversations I'm had there just about being present as a parent you know like I know people that work in youth sports often talk about the car journey being actually a really seminal moment for lots of young people where parents will try and coach they'll berate they'll criticize they'll try and interfere with what coaches are doing because you've got that one-on-one time with a child and I love the fact that Tom highlights his dad didn't try to interfere with what his coaches were doing.

6:20He was just there. He was just a silent presence, giving him that reassurance and that foundation to then go and express himself. Great lesson for all of us on this handpicked episode of High Performance as we reflect on our conversation with Tom Daley. Here's another clip that Damien wanted you at home to hear. Every morning I'll write three things down that I want to, even if it's just, sometimes it's just reminders sometimes it's something that i goal that i want to do for the day for example like today i'm going to be doing one of my my twisting dive on three meter for the first time this season uh i want to stay positive when i go into the pool after because i know i've got a hard gym session later so sometimes after a hard gym session you can feel like you're not gonna have the best pool session and also just being able to make sure that i uh i mean pick up some milk on the way home so like there's three but there will always be three things i write down every day that i want to achieve and and again i'll do that at the beginning of every year but the difference is now that i i don't write outcome goals outcome goals for me uh are a slippery slope thinking like if i was to write down win world championships or win world series that for me is too much focused on the outcome and outcomes you often can't control the only thing you can control is the process so controlling the controllables and focusing on what you need to do to get to where you know where you want to be and you know like how you can achieve the goals i wouldn't want to write down but to be able to focus on the process of each individual thing as it comes rather than just thinking i need to get there and not think about how there's a really interesting bit of research on this Jake that says that your brain responds to the achievement of a goal whether it's a massive one or whether it's a small one so if if you set yourself a target of achieving a million pounds in your bank balance your brain will give you the same level of dopamine hit that if you'd set yourself the target of achieving a hundred pounds in your bank balance you've still hit that target and you still have the satisfaction of doing it and I think what Tom told us there was there's a couple of things of set yourself small controllable goals every day like he does whether it's about I need to do the shop I need to pick my son up at a certain time I need to get to the gym and do a workout whatever it was that he was setting himself he gave himself that small dopamine hit three times a day of the sense of achievement the control that kept him motivated and engaged because over a four-year cycle that the Olympic journey often requires.

9:03That's a long time to keep your motivation up, to keep focused all the time. So he doesn't expect that's the case. It's about breaking it down into those small incremental steps is really powerful. And if it's good enough for Tom Daley, that's good enough for any of us. Brilliant. And another theme that came through in this conversation was one of bravery, wasn't it? Yeah. Well, there's two separate occasions that Tom shared with us where he's required bravery and courage to face the world in many ways. And we'll listen to him explain those two occasions in a moment. But I think the definition of bravery I'm using here is just the courage to be yourself and to still show up, even when everything indicates that you should want to hide away, or maybe just go and bury your head under a and hope that it passes one of them is the unspeakable tragedy of his father passing away at a really young age and the other one is the courage to reveal his true sexuality let's listen to him explain both when my dad passed away you know like going i went and competed at the national championships the week after which looking back on now is like kind of like crazy but i must have just you know that's what my dad would have wanted me to compete like i would have like he would have wanted me to carry on I didn't miss any training sessions and I was I don't know there was just something that was very tunnel vision on that and it was almost like I was shutting everything out um but yeah like again like I didn't think that any of the diving people understood how I was feeling I was always trying to just you know get things done and not think about it and just be like I know I know what I need to do and I just need to do it and then the similar thing my whole life is obviously I knew that I was different my whole like from as long as I can remember and I think when I came out in 2013 again I felt like no I almost felt alone then I was like I don't know if people understand how difficult it has been for me growing up and feeling different feeling on the outside and feeling like I was an outsider but people didn't know that I was an outsider I knew that I was an outsider and I wasn't the same as everyone else and I think in a certain way I think growing up as a as a gay little boy and then growing up with knowing that and not knowing how to say it or if I could ever say it especially in the public eye that there was something I think about that that I wanted to prove that I could be good I could do well at school I could do I could be good at sport and that wasn't going to define me and so I think my whole life I felt a little bit on the outside and a little bit like people didn't understand me as an athlete my dad passing away being gay all of those things I think people can sometimes and but everyone if you think about it everyone is a little bit different in some way and it's about embracing those differences because those differences can often be the things that set us apart from the rest when it comes to life experience and what you can handle the power of this really damien is i think it's easy to speak to people about high performance and great achievements and things when everything is aligned when everything's in flow when life is playing the way you want it to play out but actually what tom is talking about here is dealing with the times where it isn't like that and you feel like you're swimming against the tired and you're in incredible pain and i think that's an important thing for us to always remember when we have these conversations we're not talking to incredible high achieving people about the greatest moments in their lives almost every episode the conversation is far more about how they dealt with the really difficult times and came through them yeah i remember many years ago meeting the boxing coach angelo dundee you had like an old kernel of advice that used to say don't look at who's in your dressing room when you win look at who's there when you lose because that tells you something really important about the messages and the people that are really with you for who you are and I think it is those moments where you lose whether it's you you lose a person that Tom just said or whether it's just you lose the will to keep fighting or whether it's something as menial as losing a diving competition in this context I think the ability to still show up and just be your best self to just keep persevering and keep striving there's lessons there for all of us we all have those moments of setbacks disappointments and defeats but the ability to just keep going is the definition of high performance in many ways brilliant thank you for that mate i really enjoyed that reflection of our conversation with tom daily don't forget if you want to hear the full conversation with tom then you can just download the high performance app and you can listen not just to the tom daily conversation but all the conversations we've had so far on high performance.

13:57Thank you very much for listening once again. And I hope that this was a good reminder to you of the incredible golden advice and information that exists in the back catalogue of our high performance conversations. See you soon.

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