Lessons from the month with Simon Sinek, Ashley Cain, Sabrina Cohen-Hatton and Dan Carter

0:00Before we start today's episode, I have news that the High Performance App is now available and you can download it for free. And on there, exclusive content, including our live Q &A with two-time Rugby World Cup winner Dan Carter. Simply search for High Performance in the app store right now and then use your exclusive code HPAPP to get in.

0:24Hi there, it's Jake and Damien here. Hi everyone. Hope you're well. Look, at the end of every month, me and the professor sit back, reflect, talk about the lessons we've taken from the episodes that we brought you this month. on high performance and actually this month was no exception it's like another of those months where they're totally different guests giving us totally different messages but we can learn so much from them these lessons from the month are invaluable for me sometimes the pace at which we're recording and moving from one to another is quite hectic so having the chance just to stop think reflect is fantastic and i enjoy it as much as i hope the listeners do let's get straight into it then particularly if you're new to high performance and you don't know what this podcast is about, or maybe you missed an episode this month.

1:06Well, let us guide you through some of the lessons that we've learned over the last few weeks. And we start with Dan Carter. I mean, this was recorded on stage at the Hackney Empire, about 1200 people. And again, some brilliant lessons from Dan. Yeah, well, first of all, let's acknowledge it was a landmark episode for us. This was our 200th and we wanted to go to the guest that most people resonated with first time around. So to meet him in person and have him there was a real privilege. And what Dan spoke about was the art of winning, which is the title of his book, but it's also about how he's reframed the lessons that he's taken from being at the top of the rugby world for so long.

1:44And he's now transferring that into his second life, his post-playing career. Here's a little snippet from our conversation with the All Blacks legend, two-time Rugby World Cup winner, Dan Carter. For me there was a real loss of identity. Who am I now that I'm not a rugby player? And it happens with a lot of sports people and now I've learned through talking to business people as well that they experience the same. They just, they need change. And so that navigation of change was a really challenging thing for me but I had some incredible learnings. I spoke to some of my former teammates that had gone through that change.

2:24I talked to some business people that have navigated change. And I was just kind of learning as I was going. I was like, I need to document this to be able to help other people that are going through a similar situation to what I'm going through. And I ended up meeting a guy called Kevin Roberts who had worked with individuals, businesses, sporting teams around repurposing. And it was quite sort of confrontational. He was really challenging me and he made me look within, deeper than I've ever looked within before. What are my characters? What are my beliefs? What are things that I'll never do?

3:02What are things I want to take from my previous life as a rugby player that I want to take into this next chapter in my life? And all of a sudden I had some framework. But it was a really valuable process for me to go through this repurposing process with Kevin. It just gave me some framework and some direction to walk towards.

3:30When you think back to that evening at the Empire in Hackney, what is the one lesson that you have taken out of that conversation that you take into the rest of your life? I love Dan's phrase around being a poet and a plumber because the point he was making there was it came from Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn he attributed it to. but it's the idea that you have to be a poet to imagine the possibilities to allow yourself to be free thinking but then the plumber is you need to put the scaffolding in place to make sure that you're taking yourself some way towards it so i think sometimes being a dreamer is great but it needs to be then underpinned by clear action what did you take i really liked his idea about delving into your history into your family history and finding out where you come from i think that there's a there's a part of this which is about the fact that the modern world tries to make us think we can do everything on our own you know instagram and linkedin are full of people talking about their personal achievements on their personal journey actually everything's about collaboration and we're talking about your friends and your family as a kid being collaborators your bullies at school being collaborators your colleagues now being collaborators whether you get on with people or you don't they're all collaborators because they've all helped to shape you into the person that you are today but actually more than that you know delving into your family history what did your forefathers what did your ancestors what did your family do what traumas and challenges have they faced in the past i love this idea and i've started to do it myself since we spoke to dan about well my dad's cousin came around the other day and i wasn't expecting to see her a few days after we spoke to dan and i just said to her look so explain to me your your side of the family like is there anyone that my family are all from sort of east anglia for those view outside the UK that's on the east side of the country um and I was saying anyone from anywhere else what's the history and all that sort of stuff and I actually think that it allows you to be kinder to yourself right because I think if there are things that you struggle with you can say to yourself well you know what I might be struggling with these but I bet you so did my great great great grandfather or you know there's a reason why I struggle with this it's because the people who've created me over centuries never had to deal with this equally when you're great at stuff instead of thinking look how great i am you think god i'm so grateful to the people in my past for developing the skills that i'm using today because we are a product not just of our parents but we're a product of our great great great grandparents the traumas the challenges the successes the failures that they all had have helped to create the people we are today we're not alone i love that i well i remember last year you giving me that challenge when i was stressed about something and you said well what was the name of your great grandparents and i didn't have a clue but the point you were making was actually have a little bit of perspective on what you're facing but equally what you're saying is that builds on that and goes also draw on the strength of them they use that great term then dan introduced it on stage as waka papa the maori term for doing precisely that and i think we can all do a bit more waka papa in our own lives absolutely um who should we talk about next the next guest i don't think this month we could get away without talking about what I would consider to be one of the most difficult episodes that we've ever done and I mean it difficult in to listen to the raw emotion that Ashley Cain shared with us when he spoke about the death of his beautiful young daughter Azalea and how he's channeled that grief into a purpose to make a difference for other young people suffering with cancer.

7:00But this is the day where we're ringing the bell so this is when you see on Instagram and Facebook and all these things where the nurse is lying in the corridor and the kids walk down and ring the bow. That's to say that you have beat cancer. So we go into the hospital and obviously Azalea was very popular in the hospital. So pretty much every nurse that was there was waiting in the corridor for her because everyone wanted to see her ring the bow. We went in. And these are the little things that I don't talk about, but you put her in her best out of it, you know? you make sure you look nice, South looks nice, because it's a big day, it's like, your wedding day isn't it, it's basically, a thousand times bigger than that, and we went in, seeing everyone, went in the room for, to get a check up, to walk out, to ring the bell, and the oncologist walks in, like she'd just seen a ghost, and she said, Azalea's relapsed, and she's not only relapsed, we found tumours in her stomach, in her kidneys, in her spleen, in her lungs.

8:18And then they went, there's nothing we can do. And at this point, I pulled Saf and I pulled the oncologist and I said, we're going out to ring that bow because she deserves to ring that bow. And I said, while we're going out to ring that bow, you better think of the next thing that you can do because there's no way I'm taking my daughter home right now. I said, we've fought too long and fought too hard for this. So we went out and rang the bow and then we come back in and I just said, what's the plan? I said, you have to understand. I said, I've been so kind. I said I've been so considerate to all of you guys the whole way through because I know how hard you work.

9:04I said, but if you think I'm a man that is going to take his daughter home now to die, so you've got another thing coming.

9:13There he is, Ashley Kane. I think what stood out to me in that conversation with him was this sense of like, if you'd have said to him 10 years ago, tell me about your life. He would have said life's great. I've played professional football. Most people don't manage that. I've now got a life as a reality TV star I'm going to nightclubs I'm literally being paid to get drunk and chat to women and have fun and be seen and go in nice cars and I show off all my wealth on Instagram and stuff like that and only now having found a true purpose through tragedy actually he's able to look at those lost years as he calls them now and realize that actually he was rudderless in many ways and you know nobody would ever want to go through what Ashley's gone through and our hearts go out to him and his partner and his wider family for the trauma that they've gone through but there is also a really strong lesson for all of us who haven't been through that trauma but still need to know and understand the power of purpose in our lives because that's really what Ashley was sharing with us.

10:11Yeah definitely he was a great example of that phrase we've covered a few times on here about post-traumatic growth of when something like this happens to you if you can fit it within some kind of narrative that makes sense it can allow you to grow and use it as a springboard and i think like you say we don't need to go through the tragedy that ashley has endured but we can use our own experiences as a springboard to take us to where wherever we want to get to we were also joined this month by sabrina cohen hatton now she's currently the chief fire officer for west sussex fire and rescue but this was a conversation about where she started not where she is so she lived on the streets she had to fend for herself but despite that despite the sexism she's faced in her career she is the absolute epitome of someone who's separated fault from responsibility here she is i experienced homelessness as a teenager i spent two and a bit years rough sleeping on and off on the streets of a town in South Wales called Newport after a really challenging few years after my father died.

11:19And high performance to me at that time meant survival. Have I survived another day? Yes, that's a high performing day. I'm still alive. I'm still here. Nothing has happened to me in the night. That was high performance. And I think it's not just someone who's experienced homelessness, because I appreciate that that's not something that affects everybody, but everyone can relate to some kind of trauma that they've experienced on some level, something that they found difficult. And sometimes high performance in those kind of circumstances just means getting through it. Now, the reason why I mentioned before that clip the difference between fault and responsibilities, I think so many people get caught up in the blame game in life.

12:05understanding that just because something isn't your fault still makes it your responsibility is a really really powerful thing for people to understand sabrina did exactly that it was not her fault she was on the streets it wasn't her fault she had to go through those traumatic experiences it's not her fault that she's a woman in a male-dominated world but it's still her responsibility to find a way through you know for our listeners covid is the perfect example it was none of our fault but we all had to find a way to get through it and take responsibility for guiding ourselves through that international crisis.

12:36So I think these kinds of conversations with people are really, really impactful and educational for the audience. Well, definitely. I mean, you couldn't get a more credible witness as somebody like Sabina to tell us that. The bit that I took away from it was her work, not only with the fire service, but also as a psychology graduate, where she spoke about how she's combined the two to enable us to be able to make better decisions in life. and she spoke about her three control gates which I've been taking them away and using them myself where the first question is what's your objective what do you want to happen the second question is what do you expect to happen and then the third question is what are the benefits and the consequences of what you're about to do what Sabina explained is when you ask yourself those three questions the decision you'll come to at the end of it tends to be more robust and often tends to be better.

13:29So I think she's a great testimony of that because she's obviously made smart decisions in her life to separate the fault versus responsibility and go on to hit the heights that she has. Her book, for anyone that's interested, The Gender Gap, is really worth a read. Yeah, I thought she was absolutely fantastic. Talking of fantastic, the final guest of the month, Simon Sinek. We were both buzzing for this conversation. Yeah, he's one of the sort of leading management thinkers of our generation, isn't he? I think he's a guy that is able to take quite complex ideas and explain them in such simple, profound ways that you think, why didn't I think of that?

14:08Here's a clip. For yourself to learn your own why, first of all, understand that a why is basically an origin story. It's where you come from. We are the products of our upbringing. The experiences you had growing up make you who you are, make me who I am. Your why is fully formed by your mid to late teens and it doesn't change for the rest of your life. You have only one why. You are who you are. Now, whether you're living in balance with that is a different conversation. Whether you're making the decisions that are of high authenticity, and that's all that authenticity means. Authenticity means the things that I say and the things that I do reflect who I actually am.

14:45That's all it means. That's a different conversation. And so when you know your why, the ability to make those choices becomes a lot easier. You know, we've all had the feeling of flow and things like this, except it's a little bit like a roulette game. Like sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn't. It's like I've done the same thing a thousand times. How come it doesn't feel good anymore? So here's a fun way you can learn your why. It's called a friend's exercise. Do this with a best friend. Do not do this with a spouse. Do not do this with a sibling. Do not do this with a parent. It doesn't work.

15:11Best friend, somebody who loves you, who will be there for you. They'll pick up the phone at three o 'clock in the morning and you would do the same for them and ask them the simple question, why are we friends? And they're going to look at you like you're nuts. because the part of the brain that controls that deep feeling of love and trust doesn't control language. It's a difficult question to answer. And so they'll say, I don't know. Of course they know. They just don't have the words for it. And so you actually stop asking the question why, and you ask the question what? What specifically is it about me?

15:43Come on. What specifically is it about me that I know that you would be there for me no matter what? And they'll him and they'll ha and they'll struggle and you can't help them and you can't let anybody else help them. You You have to let them go through the process. And they'll start describing you. I don't know. You're smart. You're loyal. I trust you. And you play devil's advocate. Good. That's the definition of a friend. You have that with lots of people. What specifically is it about me that I know you would be there for me no matter what? And again, they'll go through a few rounds of complaining and describing you.

16:14And eventually they'll quit and they'll start describing themselves. And this is what my friend said to me. They said, I don't know, Simon. And all I know is that I can sit in a room with you. I don't even have to talk to you. And I feel inspired. And I got goosebumps. In fact, I'm getting them right now. It happens every time. Because what they did is they put the value that I have in the world into words. And I had the emotional response. And that's what will happen. Somebody will say something that you will either get goosebumps or you'll well up or something will happen. That's when you know you've hit it.

16:44Because the thing that you give to the world that you should be working to give to the world consistently is the reason those people love you. It's the reason why you're not friends with everyone. And if you do this with multiple friends, the amazing thing is they will say very similar, if not the exact same thing, because that's the thing you give to the world. That is your why. It is the reason you get out of bed in the morning. Oh, what a way to round off what's been another really fascinating month on High Performance. Can I just say a huge personal thank you to the hundreds of thousands of you who've downloaded High Performance over the last four weeks.

17:18And if you don't know already, you can get your hands on the high performance app just go to the app store search for high performance and use the code hp app that's hp app to get into the app for exclusive content i'm getting so many people tell me about that jake are you yeah the benefits they're getting from it the ability just to be able to pause on certain moments rewind go and focus on certain areas of interviews that they can then share with other people i think that anyone that wants to be able to pass the word of high performance on download the app now love it mate i've loved not just this short conversation but the entire month i just the richness of these conversations i love it man yeah it's a real privilege i just think we're lucky enough to have this ringside seat next to some of the greatest minds the greatest thinkers and greatest achievers out there in the world and to be able to distill their learnings and lessons for so many people is a real privilege and it's not one we ever take for granted thanks a lot buddy thank you mate