How To Know When To Walk Away

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1:45Hi there. Welcome along to another episode of High Performance with myself and Damian Hughes. So today we are answering a question. How do you know when it's time to walk away? because I think this is a moment in life that nobody prepares you for, right? And every single one of you listening to this has either done it or is going to have to do it. And sometimes it's forced upon you through ill health. Sometimes it's a retirement. Sometimes you no longer feel like you're in the right place to move forwards. And that moment when you have to stop, leave that job, end that chapter, leave a relationship, a dream, or maybe probably the most painful to leave a version of yourself that you've been fighting so hard to keep alive.

2:25We know how hard it is. because we've spoken to so many people on this podcast about it, and we're about to reveal some of those guests to you, because we think the high performance is all about resilience, and we talk about it often on this show. But it's not just about staying in the game. Sometimes what we've learned is that the bravest, strongest, most, I guess, high performance decisions you will ever make is to say, right, I'm no longer growing here. And I think, Damien, this idea of never quit, it's actually pretty unhealthy. because sometimes quitting, sometimes walking away is the best thing for us, even if it's a hard thing to do at the time.

3:05But I also know it's something we haven't spoken about that much on the show and something that our audience definitely are wrestling with.

3:12Jake Humphrey: Yeah, definitely. It really dawned on me how much we get conditioned to believe that this idea of being relentless and constantly going again and never being complacent is sort of woven into our society. and especially like when we think about the high performers and the moment it sort of hit me was when we sat down with Steve McLaren. Like I sort of grew up as a Manchester United fan and remember that treble winning year in 1999 and McLaren coming in in the February and I'd never thought about until he described it the intensity of what he'd done. He'd left his family over in Derby, moved to Manchester.

3:50Jake Humphrey: He said he was up till two or three o 'clock in the morning working on sort of training drills and routines because he knew how intense the scrutiny was of the likes of Roy Keane and the other players in the dressing room. And then they won the treble and he says he was absolutely spent and that day that he sort of went to the car after the parade and Alex Ferguson said, where are you going? I need you back in here tomorrow morning. And then he took the cardboard box round and made them sort of threw all the medals into it. And I remember there was almost like two parts of me, Jake. like there was part of me like going that's amazing what a fantastic example but there was another part going that's horrendous like what about just giving the guy a break and letting him go for a rest and allowing him to walk away and think about what about what he'd achieved and sort of spend some time doing that and i think it makes you realize that sometimes we do ourselves a disservice by thinking that our high performers are foot to the pedal non-stop you know they never quit and it's actually really really unhealthy i mean there's research on this that says that the people who tend to do well when they're walking away from something always have one thing in common they don't focus on what they're walking away from they're more focused on what they're moving towards and i think once you understand that you're making a transition to something different whether it's a new identity a new job a new a new location you're more likely to be able to cope well than constantly sort of leaving a part of you behind in what you used to do or what you used to define yourself by.

5:26So good. Well, we're going to hear from Phil Jones in a moment on the exact moment he knew it was over at Man United. Joe Hart on what it felt like when Pep Guardiola told him he didn't fit in. Football manager Sean Dyche on being sacked after nine and a half years and also the month after that that very few people talk about. And Michel Antonio as well on turning down a top six club because he knew it was the wrong move. Right, let's go for it then, Damien. Where shall we begin this magical mystery tour of former high-performance guests?

5:52Jake Humphrey: Well, why don't we jump in with Joe Hart? I thought the conversation that Joe shared with us was really good. We were talking to somebody recently, weren't we? We had a guest in the studio who loved that moment when he confronted you for making some crack on the television about his teammate Martin de Michaelis. and it led us to reflect on it. But I think the bit when Joe was speaking about Pep Guardiola's first conversation with him, it's a good place to begin. Not least because Pep Guardiola, when he left Manchester City, said it was the one regret he had, that he'd been a little bit too hasty.

6:31Jake Humphrey: Why don't we listen to Joe explain it? It wasn't painful. It was frustrating. It wasn't painful. It was a great man who had a vision that I didn't fit into. it was frustrating I didn't mind you know if it was to go to a panel and coaches were sat there and my name was brought up and he said no for me that's not which is what he said he's a good goalkeeper but for me the system doesn't work which is fine for his opinion but then he took charge of the club that I was a part of and that I loved but what can you do? what can you do? I'd love to I'd love to have stayed and tried to prove otherwise not even prove you know he was it would have been, look, I can try and help you to come to the level that I need you to, but I can't start you.

7:19But I'm living in that world where I want to play for England. I want to play at the highest possible level. And you can't play for England if you're being trialled at a football club. Well, I couldn't at the time. So yeah, it was just an unfortunate circumstance, but I don't think it wasn't a personal attack on me. It was a man who had a vision and I didn't fit

7:38Jake Humphrey: into it it's a bit of a random segue on the hits from what joe's just shared but i lost my phone recently i was traveling through belfast airport and when i got through baggage control i realized i'd lost my phone in the taxi that i'd come from now by the way there's a glitch in the uber system that you cannot phone the uber driver from a number that you haven't booked the car from and yet the number i'd bought the car from was in the back of the car so the whole thing was starting to get incredibly stressful but it wasn't the fact that i'd lost what you'd describe if you look at it objectively as a piece of glass and metal it was everything that was in it it was my contacts it was my phone and the memories and my diary all of that seemed to disappear with it and it then made me realize how i identity can be very much the same as that it's it's the thing that you value it's almost become to define who you really are and i think what was really interesting with Joe there was that he was able to uncouple Pep Guardiola's decision from who he was it wasn't a personal attack it wasn't attack saying Joe Hart wasn't good enough he just felt that Joe Hart the goalkeeper wasn't good enough and I think there's something really healthy there about having that sense of detachment to be able to observe other people's decisions and be able to walk away without bitterness without rancor or without becoming quite cynical I think that's the real incredible aspects of our conversation with Joe that we can all take away.

9:09Look, it reminds me of when we got to the end of our conversation with Gordon Ramsay. And actually, from all the clips of Gordon's that have been replayed by people over and over again, I haven't seen this one used very often, but do you remember when he said, I said, what's your sort of one golden rule for success in life? And he said, no, I said, what's the best advice you've ever been given? And he said, take it professionally, not personally. Yeah. And I think that is a very, I think that's a very important point for us to understand here when it comes to this idea of walking away is that sometimes it is on our terms but this was absolutely not on joe hart's terms and then it becomes about trying to work out how do you look after yourself in that situation a totally opposite example of someone walking away was was phil jones and actually i find this clip from phil jones who was playing at manchester united at the time is really quite moving and you know how we've previously spoken about sonder and not seeing people in 3d damien not understanding their true story and their sort of hopes and fears and you know phil jones was one of those people that it became like cool to be critical of him you remember yeah um which i think is such a shame because he's such a nice guy but no one or everyone had kind of forgotten to look at the man behind the footballer and it just became let's just be critical of phil jones so when he spoke to us about the time that he took his very last training session or competed in his very last training session i think uh i think this is interesting i remember i did this turn or sprint and i just felt it and i was like oh my god like i can't i can't carry on i can't carry on i remember i've drink spray i came over to the physio and my words were this is my last training session and he was like yeah yeah okay whatever and to this day it was my last training session done How did that feel saying that?

10:57I was ready for it I was ready for it it was a relief a relief off my shoulders that I didn't have to put myself through this pain in my knee not physically, not mentally but pain in my knee I didn't have to put myself through that anymore and it was a relief off my shoulders a weight off my shoulders knowing that I'd committed to that answer the most moving part about that actually damien is the fact that phil talks about relief at the end of it and i think that's a really important point that i think i want to just dwell on just for a few moments because there will 100 be people listening to this conversation knowing that there's something in their life that um is no longer serving them knowing that they're no longer in the right place but it's that fear of the next step and how they're going to feel afterwards.

11:47I think it's very hard to feel relief if you're Joe Hart and you've been pushed out by a manager. But if you're making these decisions on your own terms, then I think relief is probably quite a common feeling afterwards. So I think instead of us dwelling on how do you walk away, I think we should be asking the question, why do we walk away? And if, again, it comes back, like so much of what we talk about in the show comes back to the conversation we had years ago with Simon Sinek, where he guided us both through finding our why. if you go to the effort of finding out your why if you go to more effort to understand yourself what drives you what thrills you who you are how would you describe yourself if you come to that answer and where you are in life is not where that answer sits then the natural result of that is

12:31Jake Humphrey: we'll walk away then isn't it yeah absolutely i think that value alignment of recognizing that sometimes you might outgrow a room sometimes a room might just move on in a different direction from you but i think this is one of the things that i think we can all learn from our high performance guests is this this constant self-orientation knowing where they are and who they are so they're always responding with that clarity of recognizing that i've outstayed my welcome and maybe this doesn't work for me any longer and i think that was what was really interesting with phil that like you say he became memetastic of people that love the idea of making in front of him and yet he's a guy that is incredibly self-aware he knew exactly what his limitations were and what his strengths were and he wasn't kidding himself when people were talking about him never playing for united and stealing a living he knew himself just what he was going through and how painful the experience was i think just that self-awareness we can all get a little bit better at that to make sure that we're constantly asking ourselves am i in the right place to allow me to thrive the me today not the me that was 10 years ago me today can i thrive in this environment and before we finish talking about phil can we just play that clip um where like he talks about going home and his wife's waiting for him oh yeah have a listen i always feel like when you say you're retired it's like all right that's it finished done see you later thanks for coming where it's not like that for me i've still got so much to give but that was it was a relief honestly it was a relief and I got in the car and I remember being in tears on the car on the way back I walked into the door and my wife was like like she just knew I mean that is an emotional an emotional landing and I actually think there would have been maybe relief from his wife as well in a very different way I remember when I stopped doing the football presenting and lent much harder into high performance yeah I felt a sense of relief as well I've played you before the clip the voice note from my mum have I heard Damien yeah you heard it when we did our tour do you remember should I play it now yeah go on so back when I was hosting Champions League and Premier League football like if you're going to do that job you're going to get criticized right it just is the way it is sadly um it shouldn't be the way it is and it feels wrong to even say it's the way it is but it kind of is um if that makes any sense at all this is a voice note I got from my mum one day after I'd done a Champions League quarterfinal or semifinal, I think.

15:07Hi, sweetie, it's Mum here. I've just been browsing Twitter, seeing what's going on in the world or in your world. You've got loads of horrible messages. Are you OK? Is there anything we can do or say? Speak soon. Bye.

15:25Jake Humphrey: Oh, Mum. You know the bit that gets me for that, when you first played at me a few years ago, is like your mum desperately trying to think what can i do to help yeah i mean like how yeah how helpless her and she sounds lost at that moment yeah it's heartbreaking and i think again when you understand that this isn't like when like this isn't just on you is it it's not just you receiving that horrible messages it's like it's harriet it's your mum and dad it's everyone around you that suffers as well yeah mate i think like flo and seb would come home sometimes because they They type, it was a game, it became a game when they were about seven or eight years old to type my name into Google at school with their mates.

16:07Oh, right. And then some of these like shitty headlines from some no-mark journalist having a pop at me for trying to do my job well. Like they'd then come home and report to me what was written. Like, did you know this was said? And I would be like, no, I'm sure it wasn't. Horrible. But you know what really helped when I stopped doing that job? Was that I had something to come to, which was high performance. And do you remember I leaned in and we suddenly went from one episode to three episodes a week and started finding other shows and creating other podcasts and all the other things that's happened in the last three or four years.

16:39I don't think that the growth of high performance has nothing to do with me leaving BT Sport. I think the two are absolutely linked. And I think if I'd have stayed doing my job as a football presenter, this podcast would be 50 % what it is because I wouldn't have had the time or the commitment for it. but also like it's 100 % the right thing. So sometimes I think we need to understand that what feels like a really scary moment, actually we don't know whether it's a good or bad moment until two or three years down the line. But sometimes you walk away and don't have somewhere to go. And we spoke with Eddie Howe about this and we can hear him talk about it now because I think actually the best thing for Eddie, interestingly, was having nowhere to go, having to press pause on his life.

17:25Let's hear from him and then we'll talk about it. I'm going to have a year. And I told everyone that needed to know it was going to be a year and I wasn't going to break that for anything. Was it important to tell people so they could hold you to it? Well, it was. If you've got an agent going around and going, go for this interview, go for that interview. And I'm saying, no, he needed to know. Now you're still trying. Of course. He wants to get paid, right? Of course. But I was adamant. And I think I just, I knew I needed it. like the biggest mistake I could have made I believe is going straight back into another job that would have been disaster not just for me but for the club because I wasn't I knew I had to leave at the end of that season because I think it was a two week break because of COVID so two weeks the lads were back in for pre-season training and I wasn't there mentally I would not have been the manager that Bournemouth needed me to be but if that was the case for Bournemouth that was the case for anyone else so I just needed to get away i'd love to explore this with you damien the importance of just pressing pause of having nothing to fill your day of understanding who you are what you're about and where you want to go next and i think it would have been a bad thing for eddie as he openly admitted in that conversation

18:39Jake Humphrey: if he'd have just gone straight to another job yep well again if we if we go back and remind ourselves of what eddie said that he made a commitment to his wife that he was going to take 12 months off because he'd done 12 years at Bournemouth and that brief interlude at Burnley where he said he'd not stopped it was full-on 24-7 365 days a year and he had no time to reflect he had no time to collate his training notes what he'd learned what what he'd learned worked and what hadn't and I think sometimes we can sort of keep filling ourselves up with knowledge and courses and information and experiences but unless we ever allow ourselves time to let it percolate and just store it away and put take the lessons discard the stuff that isn't relevant that we keep repeating the same thing so we're not like i sometimes hear this when people go oh you know with age comes wisdom and i go no it doesn't because i know lots of stupid old people and i know lots of really smart young people it's not age that gives you wisdom it's your willingness to take time to stop and think and reflect and learn from it is the key and i think too often when we get caught up in this in this trap of busyness we don't do what eddie did there and i think it's no coincidence that he went into newcastle and rejuvenated them when he came back you know he was he he kept the principles that made him successful at bournemouth but added elements to it when we've spoken to kieran trippier dan burn uh callum wilson people that have served with him he sounds a far better coach now than he did when he was at bournemouth and that's because of that 12 month period that he gave himself to stop now there's research out there jake that says i'm sorry now there's research out there jake that if people are listening to this going oh i'd love to take 12 months off you don't need 12 months like sometimes it can be as much as five minutes So I was recently reading, I was recently doing some research based on our interview with Ben Fogle, where Ben was talking about forest bathing, you know, that he goes out for a run for an hour regularly just for his own mind.

20:50Jake Humphrey: But then he'll say you walk in nature and it's a Japanese term, forest bathing, where you just sit in nature with no distractions. And there was research from King's College in London that said you don't even need to walk in a forest to do it. sometimes just looking up at the sky noticing the trees around you listening to bird song has a huge impact on your health your well-being and your clarity of thinking so anyhow took 12 months great be nice if we could all do that but we can all take two minutes just to get ourselves outside look up at the sky look up at the trees and appreciate nature to be able to reset and bring ourselves greater clarity i think where we've stumbled to in in the last few minutes is that walking away is kind of the outcome.

21:35But knowing yourself is the thing that allows you to get to the outcome, whether you stay or whether you go. I want to play a couple of clips from two people who really knew who they were and what they wanted to be. First of all, here's Mikel Antonio, the former West Ham striker, talking about when some of the biggest clubs in the country were keen on signing him. Have a listen.

21:57I had links from top six clubs to play right back. I didn't want to play right back. So I refused to do that. I wanted to be a winner. Then I started the season at right back. Just to buy in a top six club. Like, are we talking the big names? I'm talking top six. Definitely top six. But it was right back. And I believed I was good enough to be an attacking player in the Premier League. I didn't want to play right back. Maybe I might have been financially better, but I wouldn't have been enjoying my football. And I think in life, I feel you need to enjoy what you're doing instead of just chasing the money.

22:35So I like that, Damien, because he's kind of putting joy above the need for money. Yep. And very different, but kind of similar. I now want to play a clip from Stuart Broad. Because I think you can't do this unless you know who you really are, because there's always a reason to stay. And the reason that Stuart Broad had to stay was that he was still a brilliant cricketer, but he made the decision to walk away, to go home, to FaceTime Molly, to tell her what he'd done. And I thought her advice was fantastic. Let's have a listen. I knew I had a goal to finish playing for England. I knew I wanted my last ball to be at the pinnacle, England versus Australia, at the Oval, a gorgeous place to play.

23:22And I think that's what makes me most proud is that I stuck to my principles of knowing that I wanted to finish at the top and you know I went through a bit of an emotional roller coaster in the final 10 days of my career I started thinking about it a bit at Old Trafford and then the oval just came so quickly you know when you've got a big decision hanging over you time seems to go like disappear on you a bit doesn't it so I had to it was getting to that stage of the game is approaching the end you know I need to I need to to know what I'm thinking and I FaceTimed Molly on the Friday night, still umming and ahhing a little bit.

23:56And she said, trust your gut, trust your gut, you know, we'll support you forever. I love that, man. Like the way that his wife, I guess they were married then, said to him, trust your gut, trust your gut will support you forever. But then obviously he had no gut feeling, he said, so it makes it so difficult. It's a great reminder that if you don't know yourself, if you can't look inside and go, right what do i want what are my values in any given situation it makes every decision in life

24:26Jake Humphrey: really blooming difficult yeah so if you listen to this and you're thinking i i've got a decision i need to make sometime soon my advice would be first of all just just look at what you've done and look at the characteristics you've brought to it that are unique to you it might be like if you go back to your example of walking away from from presenting live football and you go what like what was unique to you is creativity the ability to drive connections or curiosity and empathy that you didn't lose them the day that you stepped away from presenting live football you just decided to move to a different environment and use all those same characteristics to do something different and i think any of us can learn from your example on that jake and take the characteristics the values the the skills that we have and uncouple it from the identity that we might have allowed to grow around us in terms of what we do.

25:21Jake Humphrey: And then we can give ourselves the freedom to take those skills and characteristics and values into any environment that we want. So as I said to you earlier, psychologists talk about entry points and exit points that we have to understand that to leave somewhere, to go for an exit point, we need another entry point to go into and know the environment that we're going to go and offer some value to. we can all we can all do that on a regular basis nice if you scroll to where it says rap and goodbye will we'll do this together you can just read this here verbatim damien so there we go look the question at the start how do you know when it's time to go phil jones knew when he couldn't pass a ball joe hart knew when the conversation didn't happen mccantonio knew when the offers felt wrong and what they all have in common is that they trusted that signal and i really hope that this conversation has given you a little bit of language, a little bit of maybe permission for that when that signal shows up in your life, you feel equipped to make that decision.

26:21Jake Humphrey: Brilliant point. I mean, the research and nearly 450 conversations now on high performance keep pointing to the same thing over and over. It's the people who walk away well and not the ones who leave because they've got no choice. They're the ones who leave because they're clear about what they're walking towards. And having that sense of clarity is available to every one of us that's listening right now. The thing is, you've just got to be honest enough to ask for it. So right. And if you've got a topic or a thought or a fear or something on your mind that you want us to talk about on one of these Wednesday conversations, please just reach out to us.

26:56We really do want High Performance to become more of a community going forward. We want this show to be for you, about you, solving your problems, putting you at the heart of what we're doing. So please just ping us a message. What subjects do you want us to discuss? You can DM us. you can leave a message on on apple on spotify on youtube wherever you're enjoying these conversations and if you can just hit subscribe it changes the world for us it means we can keep growing and we can bring more amazing people to a conversation about high performance thanks a lot

27:24Jake Humphrey: damien thanks mate i love these conversations like like you do and i love it when people sort of reach out and tell us the things they want to wrestle with so just to echo that please send them in and we'll explore it for our for our benefit as well as for yours absolutely right continue to be kind to yourself remain curious empathetic and understanding and we'll see you next time for another conversation here on high performance

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