The 5 Things High Performers NEVER Say

0:02Keely Hodgkinson: Hey, welcome along to another episode of High Performance. Today's episode, Damien, I'm looking forward to this because we're talking about the five things that high performers never say. And we've obviously heard hundreds of high performers say thousands of things. So why is it so important that people tune into this, listen and really take careful note of the things that the high performers that we've met have never said? Well, there's that old saying that your thoughts become your beliefs, your beliefs then become your actions, and your actions ultimately determine your results. So if we start by how we think and therefore how we choose to talk about it, that can be a really easy way in of starting to get things to improve, make things better, improve relationships.

0:45Keely Hodgkinson: You know, I remember years ago somebody saying to me, I said, oh, how are you? I said, I'm tired. And he said, why don't you ask for more energy? So rather than say I'm tired, I could do with a bit more energy. So you say what you do want rather than describe what you don't want, which is feeling tired. And it sounds like a bit of a trick, but the reality is, well, why would I not say it? And why wouldn't I focus on what I do want rather than what I don't? So if we start unpicking it, we'll see that there's patterns. We've done nearly 500 interviews. We see lots of patterns. I bet you get it all the time where people go, like, what have they got in common?

1:22Keely Hodgkinson: What's the one thing that you've done 500 interviews? That's why everyone's tuning into this episode. Yeah. Because they're like, what can I learn from these guests? Yeah. Yeah. So we're always looking to almost distill down all these amazing people's experience into something that unites us, some common ground that we can find. And I think having a look at something like this, that we all talk, but then working about how do we control the language that we use that drives our thoughts and our behaviours is a brilliant topic. Please make sure that you like, share and subscribe to this episode as we make our way through, particularly if you're enjoying it.

1:54Keely Hodgkinson: and the reason why we decided to do this is we did an episode, The Five Habits of Every High Performer that we've met and that episode went off the charts. It was ridiculous, so popular. Lewis Moody, who came in recently, said that he listened to it and I think if you've got someone in Lewis's position who's got some serious challenges in his life at the moment but also spent his life at the top of an elite environment, if he's listening, you're doing something right. Jacqueline Louis said, I love the episode about The Five Habits of High Performers. So much work. must have been put into it five minutes of prep Damien that's how we roll V Pedrero says great content Jake and Damien that ending inspired I'm glad you're a regular part of my life oh that's lovely isn't it nice and it is nice that people keep coming back to high performance again and again and I think the reason why I was keen to have this conversation about the things that high performers never say is I definitely thought growing up that high performance people that high achievement people that people who are particularly successful or particularly happy, that they just sort of had access to stuff that people like I would never have access to.

3:00Keely Hodgkinson: But the more we speak to the people on this podcast, the more that it becomes obvious that actually, as you've already said, it's habits, it's small steps in the right direction. It is realizing that your entire life is built up of doing small things well and avoiding the small things that kind of erode your ability to be impactful. And I think that's what these five things that high performers never say. It focuses on the fact that if you do do these things and you do say these things, it's not going to transform your life instantly, but it is going to slowly erode your confidence and your belief and your impact.

3:38Keely Hodgkinson: And therefore, because it's eroded those things, you don't achieve what you wanted. And then all that does is reinforce the belief that you're not good enough. And it's actually not true. Like you should listen to the five habits of high performance, but then you should also listen to this and make sure that you're not doing these things. So should we get to the first one? Yeah, go on. The five things that high performers never say. Go on, you start us. I will start when I'm ready. Now, we're going to play a clip in a moment from Keely Hodgkinson. The reason why this is so important for us to focus on initially is that I'll start when I'm ready.

4:13Keely Hodgkinson: It means that we assume eventually we have the confidence, the belief or the knowledge to do something difficult. What we've learned from the high performance that we've spoken to, as you say, over nearly 500 episodes, seven years of doing this, is you know when someone goes, oh, you just have to believe in yourself. How the frig do you believe in yourself when you have no evidence that you should believe in yourself? It's not possible. So therefore people sit around going, well, I'll do this when I believe in myself. I'll do this when I think it can be successful. I'll do this when I know that I've got everything in place to make it so.

4:46Keely Hodgkinson: But with anything that's difficult in life, those moments never arrive. Like, anything that is hard to do, anything that has a high bar to entry, anything that is massively rewarding, requires uncertainty. And I think what I've learned through the conversations we've had is that high performers still walk towards what they want whilst they're still racked with uncertainty. I used to think they were certain they were going to be successful. It is not true. Yeah, definitely. I was telling you about an amazing guy recently called Damien Brown, who's a former Irish rugby player who did this incredible feat of getting in a boat and rowing from New York over to, back on to Kerry.

5:28And the bit that stood out

5:30Keely Hodgkinson: in his incredible story and if you get the chance to watch any of the documentaries or hear him talk about this was, you can't swim. You've chosen the wrong challenge. But again, people, like when he was talking to him was like, why did you do it? And part of it was, his point was, if I find myself in the water in the Atlantic Ocean I've made a huge mistake anyway and most people are not going to survive following the Atlantic Ocean anyway so if I wait to learn how to swim before I even start thinking about getting in a boat I'll probably never get around to it I'll take my safety really seriously I'll get myself fit that I can stay in the boat and row across it and I'll focus on those elements rather than wake up You also assume if you can swim you're not going to drown but that's also not true Exactly Well he used this really good example he said one of the occasions when he was in the water the boat had capsized he said and I'm I'm tied onto the boat he said then I had an oar in one hand and an oar in the other and then I turned around and the oar that had been in one hand within five seconds I turned around and it was 60 metres away which gives you an idea of just how fast it was so he went so it made me realise that if I'm not taking my safety seriously I'm not surviving anywhere where I can swim or not I'm not getting back to the boat and getting out of this and it was a great example of the point that we're talking about here that often we constantly put barriers in our own way of i'll do it when i'll do it when i'll i'll i'll start making time when i've earned this much money i'll start doing this when i reach this position and we create barriers to ourselves that often stop us actually doing the work you know yeah if there's one line that i think we've repeated so often over the years is that confidence is built on evidence so the point is you need to start gathering the evidence if you want to be more resilient go back and gather the evidence of where you've been resilient in your life you didn't you know when you learned to walk you kept falling over when you learned to swim if if you did unlike davian you couldn't swim first time you got in the swimming pool you got in the shallow end rather than jumping in the deep end and worked it out you know you couldn't learn maths when you first did you had to keep persisting.

7:38Keely Hodgkinson: So you've got evidence there that you are resilient. So if you can start gathering more and more evidence, think of it like a bank account, to start taking action to feel that you're ready, you need to have the stuff in the account where you can make a suitable withdrawal from. We'll be right back after a quick word from our partners.

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10:21Keely Hodgkinson: Like you've got to fall on your ass 10 ,000 times. I was watching a video of Seb the other day trying to stand up and walk. Bang. And he was laughing his head off because every time he said I'd be landed on his nappy, like on his ass. and it's like that's life like you've got to keep getting up when you're not ready should we go to a clip yeah go on we're gonna hear from keely hodgkinson about the importance of not starting when you're ready but just starting anyway just believing that it's there for you and the question we asked her was to what percent is your success mental and to what percent is your success physical Here's what she said.

10:59Probably going to say like 90-10.

11:02Matthew Syed: 90 % mental, 10 % physical, I'm going to say. Just because I think if I go back to, again, the Tokyo year, like I don't think anyone apart from Trevor or Jenny really believed that I would even make the Olympic team or even run sub two that year. I did knock off a big chunk of my, like six seconds off in a year, which will never happen again in my life. but yeah I just think my I've just been growing up in an environment that I'm really grateful for with my parents and stuff where they've just always told me that if I'm a person that if I really believe it it can happen and that's just something I've had in me since I was like 10.

11:36Keely Hodgkinson: I think in many ways it's the perfect place to start because Keely is there describing that she still had doubts she still had a lack of belief she still thought it wouldn't be possible she still didn't believe that her dream could become a reality yet what did she do did it anyway yeah and i would encourage people listening to this right now you know how you spoke before about um we wait for the perfect time to do something like there is not there is no perfect time to change jobs to buy a house to have kids to take a leap of faith and there is not a perfect time but there was also no time because we get about 4 000 weeks yeah right and there are i always think about this there are things that you can only do at certain points in your life, right?

12:18Keely Hodgkinson: Like you can't learn to be a fast downhill skier when you're 75 probably, but you can when you're 25. But equally, you can't sit around and drink cups of tea and read books when you're 18 and you're trying to make your way in the world, but you can when you've earned the right to do it when you're 68. So I think realize the point of life that you're at and know that there are some things that are only available to you in a small window of time. and if you keep delaying it, if you keep waiting to believe you're ready, then the window closes and the opportunity never comes again and it's on us to go for it.

12:54Keely Hodgkinson: That's a brilliant point. Yeah, again, just recognizing context of where we're doing this. There's some really interesting research on this by a couple of psychologists called Hudson and Fraley that looked at running two randomized experiments with people that said they wanted to improve a certain characteristic, I want to be more dependable. I want to be better at timekeeping. I want to be more resilient, whatever it was. And they then measured it, doing it either through getting them to self-report and write down a diary. And then they looked at their behavior, and they did this over a three-month period.

13:27Keely Hodgkinson: So they tested two approaches. One group did nothing, right? So just think about it and sort of focus on getting better, whereas the other group were told to form something called implementation intentions. So what that means is you go, if this happens, then I'll do that. So if my alarm goes off at five o 'clock, I'll just get out of bed. Right. For example, if that's what you want to do. So you have to follow something with another thing. Yeah, so it's an if-then implementation. And what they found is that wanting it wasn't enough, just wanting to get better at it wasn't enough, actually making the time to schedule the behavior.

14:00Keely Hodgkinson: So recognizing it. So there's an example they write, the paper they wrote was called You Have to Follow Through, Attaining Behavioral Change Goals Predicts Volitional Personality Change. but they use an example in the paper called Tyler Tharp's Taxi. So Tyler Tharp is an author of creative habits, but she describes how she gets up at half past five, dresses, walks out and gets in the cab to go to the gym. Now in the interview that Hudson and Fairley do with her, she's clear that the ritual isn't going to the gym and doing the workout. The ritual is getting in the cab. That's the action. That's the, if I'm in the cab, then I'm going to go to the gym.

14:40Keely Hodgkinson: because once she's in it, she knows that the rest of it is going to happen. And that's like a really simple example of what Keely's describing to us. I don't know I'm going to win Olympic gold, but I know I'm going to turn up at the track and I'm going to do those repetitions over and over again. So if I do that, then I'll put myself in a chance of becoming the Olympic champion. So what are you like with snacking late at night? Pretty good, yeah. I'm all right, I'd say. I'm pretty shit. But you've struggled, haven't you, for a long time? So I, this is a really good example for me of exactly what you've just described, right?

15:12Keely Hodgkinson: This if-then idea. I downloaded an app called Fasting. And it's a simple thing. All you do is when you've eaten your last meal of the day, like you then want to go into a fasted state until breakfast or lunch the following day, however long you're fasting for. So you just press the button on the app to say when your fast begins. Okay. So I normally, nine o 'clock at night, get a bit hungry, start rootling through the cupboards and I always say to myself the same thing this will be the last time I do this I'll start tomorrow and then the next day it's the same this fasting app is unbelievable because nothing's actually changed but I look on the app and it already says you've been fasting for 3 minutes and 45 seconds or 2 hours and 3 minutes I then don't want to break that so I want to go through and do like 16 hours or 8 hours or whatever is without eating so therefore I can't because I've already started.

16:07So if the time has begun, then I won't eat.

16:11Keely Hodgkinson: And it's a really valuable thing. And I think that's helpful for people that are struggling to get going. It's just kind of create a situation for yourself where, I don't know, I want to explore finding a new job, but I've never sort of had the bravery to do it. You say to yourself, right, I'm going to subscribe to an Indeed or like a job finding website. I'm going to pay the 15 quid. When I've subscribed, I have to start using it. Or I have to update my CV. And once I updated my CV, that's when I start to share it. It's like begin the process in some way. Kind of box yourself in a bit. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

16:48Keely Hodgkinson: So implementation triggers. The original scientist behind that phrase is a guy called Peter Goldwitzer. And he did it with students that had to do an essay over a Christmas holiday period. And some were just told, you need to do it over the Christmas period. Just think about when you're going to do it. and some were told, set yourself an implementation trigger. So if I get up on Christmas morning at six o 'clock before the rest of the family, then I'm going to spend an hour before the celebrations start. And what they found is giving people implementation triggers of thinking about where they're going to script the behaviour.

17:21Keely Hodgkinson: I'll do that and that will follow. Tended to be the ones that followed through on their actions. So just finding something that gives you that trigger. It might be like, I want to get better at doing squats, for example. So if I brush my teeth, which is already an ingrained habit with hope, then while I'm doing it, I might do 10 squats in the bathroom while I'm doing it. Habit stacking. Yeah, it's all the same kind of thing of just combining it. So an implementation trigger is like the scientific term, but it's just think of it as if I do that, then this action will follow. Very cool. you are listening to high performance and we're talking about the five things that high performers never say.

18:03Keely Hodgkinson: The first one was, I'll start when I'm ready. The next one is? That's just the way I am, Jake. Right, why is this such a dangerous phrase? It's almost like an expensive habit because what you're doing is you're almost making it something about who you are rather than a behaviour. So you can change your behaviour, but it's more difficult to change. Who you believe you are. Yeah, who you are. So I sometimes say this when I work with teams, that I can challenge you and go, if you turn up late and we've agreed that timekeeping is really important in our culture, and I can go, stop being disrespectful, right?

18:38Keely Hodgkinson: You're being really disrespectful when you turn up. Now, that's implying that you're a disrespectful person, that that's part of your character and part of your personality traits. Whereas if I was to say, when you show up late for a meeting, it makes me feel like I'm disrespected. It gives you the opportunity. you can change the behaviour of timekeeping you can get better at that but it's more difficult to change the perception of yourself as being a disrespectful person I wonder then whether the way that people are spoken to at an early age actually informs this sort of thing like if you say to a kid you're disrespectful they grow up thinking well I'm disrespectful it's the way I am if you say to a kid when you do those things it makes me feel disrespected it's a very different it's a different way of talking which is interesting because then this isn't just about us it's about how we can make other people feel that they are not fixed.

19:25Keely Hodgkinson: 100%. I mean, the labelling theory from Howard Becker talks about this an awful lot where when we lay... Like, you think about it in school where, like, who's in the gifted and talented set. Not me. Yeah, but again, so you're giving some people a label that then the implication is, well, what if I'm not? Does that mean that I'm not gifted? I'm not talented because I've been recognised for that. It's like when we... She had to be real Ferdinand and do you remember when he was saying that like from an early age he did ballet and then he'd learn eventually, I'm not bothered by it, that I'm not going to accept your label, that it's a feminine activity to do.

20:03Keely Hodgkinson: And then he carried that resistance right there through when he opened his restaurant in Manchester and he says, Alex Ferguson and David Gill called him a disgrace because he wasn't focusing on being the best footballer he could in their eyes. And he was like, if you're going to give me a job when I finish playing, and if you're going to be there to carry me through that post-retirement stage of your career, then I'll listen to you, but I'm not just going to accept your label that I'm a distracted footballer. So this whole idea of labeling can be really powerful in some cases. If we label ourselves and we give ourselves positive characteristics, but allowing ourselves to be labeled can be dangerous.

20:44Keely Hodgkinson: I remember reading, I was going to include it in the research for one of her books, but our editor sort of took it out in the end. But there was a story of a psychiatrist down in Portsmouth that surveyed, he did a really interesting study, where he basically described a young man that was behaving in a dysfunctional way on public transport, shouting at people, being abusive, and generally acting a bit of a dick. And he described the report of the behaviour and gave the young man two names. One of the names was Wayne, and one of the names was Thomas. And when he sent it out to 300 psychiatrists to describe it, Wayne was diagnosed as having more likely to be a drug addict, likely to be a drunk, likely to have come from a broken home, than the same behavior described by a man called Thomas.

21:40Keely Hodgkinson: And the point the research was saying is, even a name gives people a sort of a heuristic a mental model a label that you want to support support on somebody so i mean i remember reading that at the time i remember there was an article in the paper when wayne rooney was playing football and it was like a mocking article that he was that he was studying for gcses while he was a footballer that he was trying to educate himself and it was almost like the the condescending nature the way that he was referred to reminded me of that research of how names come with a label and often we do it to ourselves.

22:19Keely Hodgkinson: Yet that's not something that any high performer of that allows themselves to have stuck on them without their express permission. Okay, so in a moment, I think what's valuable for people is for us to work out how we can ignore those labels or change what we think of those labels. We can do that in a sec. But I think first, let's have a clip from a former guest. Who should we hear from? Well, why don't we listen to Matthew Syed? So Matthew's an incredible writer. He's done a number of books, The Black Box Thinking and Bounce, the two that come to mind. But he spoke about his journey from becoming an academic to being a celebrated public speaker.

23:02Matthew Syed: I got invited to give a talk to Goldman Sachs. And I was suffering with terrible imposter syndrome. I mean, why am I an ex-table tennis player speaking to these investment bankers? And I went to a state school, hadn't done much public speaking practice. You know, the press conferences in ping pong were not that well attended. So I hadn't had the kind of the mentoring and the domain experience to be a good public speaker. So I bombed a little bit. I got heckled a couple of times and I left. Here's a fixed mindset response. Because I failed, I'm obviously not very good at speaking. If I'm invited again, I will politely decline.

23:38Matthew Syed: Can you see how a fixed mindset creates self-limiting beliefs? And I thought, no, let's have a growth mindset response. Maybe I can improve at this. And I Googled public speaking practice, found a local club called Toastmasters, near to where I lived and still live in Richmond. And I went every second week for three years. You give a talk, you get feedback, you give feedback to other people, just a group of people like me trying to build their social confidence. My mother, who went to a state school in London, left at 16, because she did badly in maths one day it would have been in the 1960s a teacher said you just don't have a brain for numbers think how disempowering that is because if you don't have the innate equipment what is the point of listening to the maths lesson what's the point of

24:21Keely Hodgkinson: doing the homework see i think this is important because i think so many things happen to us in our lives and things have happened to you things come to me where you can easily go well that's who i am and what I need people to understand today is that when they now and whether they're walking the dog, driving the car, going for a run to listen to this episode, if they can, as I'm sure we all can, list off all of the things that we're not very good at, all of the things where we're not elite, all of the areas of our life where we feel, well, that's just the way I am. What we have to remind ourselves in this situation is that's not who we are, that's what's happened to us and the two things are so different and if that experience can be a negative one as Matthew experienced when he stood up on stage, then actually we have the power to also make it a positive one.

25:09Keely Hodgkinson: And I think it's that understanding that we should hold our beliefs lightly. We need to live, Brian Cox, one of our greatest ever guests, said, you know, scientists want to be proved wrong all the time. You know, we need to explore. Life is a kind of an experiential opportunity. we need to experience stuff and experiencing failure and struggle and self-doubt and getting things wrong is massively valuable so you've had those experiences but they're experiences they're not who you are yeah but I think that lends itself to like something that I've thought for a long time like when people go oh as you get older you get wiser and you go no you don't like I've always laughed about this like I know we've met lots of stupid old people and I've met lots of smart young people it's not the age that gives you the wisdom it's the willingness to reflect on it.

25:59Keely Hodgkinson: It's funny there, isn't it? Don't you ever meet older people and you think, how the fuck do you think that? Like, how are you that stupid still? Like, how do you still believe that's a valid opinion? Yeah, yeah. And it's because I think they haven't spent their life working out, like, actually how different could life look. Yeah, yeah, just the thinking about thinking. So I was, I mean, I'm not putting my mum in the category of the people I just met. No, no, no, no. But I was talking to her the other day about building high performance and building Whisper and other things and she went, oh, don't talk to me about business, I don't know anything about it.

26:29Keely Hodgkinson: My mum's nearly 80. And I'm like, you don't not know anything about business. You've actively chosen not to learn about business, which is fine. But don't then say, don't talk about business. Say, business isn't stuff that I've studied yet. It's such a different way of seeing the world. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think this is the idea of our willingness to reflect on these labels, the willingness to explore experiences we've had. And then, do you remember Gordon Ramsay had that great line when we were asking about the kitchens he'd been in, and the best kitchens are places where you take feedback professionally and not personally.

27:08Keely Hodgkinson: So when Michel Roux is telling him that that's not good enough, that pie you've just baked, he's not hearing, I'm not good enough. He's going, no, the quality of what I've just produced can be improved. and that's how he claims that his whole development happened. But talking about labels, like Matthew used a couple of phrases there about the fixed and growth mindset and this relates to Carol Dweck's research on this that has sort of caught on like wildfire, especially in education where people go, oh, that's a fixed mindset. The fixed mindset is that's who I am, that's how I'll always be. The growth mindset is where, like you were saying to your mum, yeah, yeah, you can get better.

27:48Keely Hodgkinson: The magic of the word yet. I'm not good at maths yet. Yeah. So that's really valid, and I think it's an easy way in to understand the topic. But the fixed and growth mindset stuff has had a bit of a kick in over the last 10 years as well that it's worth us just acknowledging. I mean, there's been some research on it, like recent studies have suggested that the impact of it isn't as high as what is sometimes suggested. So one study that was conducted across nearly 365 ,000 students argued that it actually accounted for about a one percent difference in overall performance so the authors of this particular study had the line that says it seems that authors with a financial incentive to report positive findings published significantly larger effects than the authors that didn't have that incentive oh hold on so you're saying people that have written a book about growth mindset that they want people to buy are telling people that growth mindset really matters and their study finds that because obviously that sells more books whereas their study finds that actually it might not have such an impact.

28:49Keely Hodgkinson: Yeah, so it does matter that we're not discounting that but it's not the game changer that we can sometimes be led to believe. There's no way that it's only worth 1%. Well, the research is suggesting that... I think the research must be flawed. No, in all honesty, think about it like the power of thinking that something is possible and therefore you give it a go that cannot only be worth 1%. But that's the point we're making. Because otherwise you don't do it at all. Yeah, yeah. But that's exactly what Matthew describes there. And I think this is a bit that we overlook. It wasn't the fact that it was the growth mindset of him going, I'm not a bad speaker, right?

29:27Because just not allowing that label of going,

29:31Keely Hodgkinson: I can get better at speaking and believing that is important, but it's just about opening the door. The bit that we have to pay attention to is when we start to change that belief of I can get better at this, it's the fact that he showed up every fortnight for three years and stood in front of that room and spoke in front of them and got feedback and then refined his approach and went back two weeks later to do it. Yeah, but I don't think that you even go in that room and do that without the belief that you can. Exactly. So I think the growth mindset there informs the behaviour. Bingo. The growth mindset doesn't make the difference, the behaviour does.

30:07But without the growth mindset, the behaviour's not changed.

30:10Keely Hodgkinson: So that's the catalyst. but on its own it doesn't account for 10 % improvement it might just all right so growth mindset that doesn't change your behaviour yes is not very valuable but a growth mindset that then informs what you do next is exactly and that's the bit that I think we can sometimes allow ourselves to be seduced and going oh I just need to change the way I speak about it no no no change the way you speak about it that then informs how you're going to behave about it next time so believing that I can be a better public speaker then means that I'm going to go back to that Toastmasters event two weeks later and take on board the feedback and improve.

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33:53Keely Hodgkinson: Ticket-inclusive packages offer a range of prime seating and lounge access options, venue-dependent priority entry, food and beverage selections from LA's diverse dining scene and elevated service and continuous support, making your day at the Olympic Games one to remember for a lifetime. Get ahead of the curve with an LA28 hospitality package. Discover more at hospitality.la28.org forward slash high performance. It's doing the work. It goes back to our first point with Keely Hodgkinson, being willing to put the reps in. It gives you the confidence to do it. the catalyst of having a growth mindset because I can get better at it it's just the start of it but it's not the answer on its own Okay, it's time for the third sentence Go on, you choose this one So you'll listen to our episode The Five Things That High Performers Never Say The third one that they never say is It's not fair High performers don't live in this world where fairness exists because life isn't fair welcome to the lived human existence and the reason why they don't say it is what are you going to do with that information?

35:03Keely Hodgkinson: If you think life isn't fair, then it leads you to a place where you never try because it might be that on that particular day the fairness isn't there, therefore all of the effort leads you to nothing. You know, life, I often think that running is such a cool thing to do if you can. My knees aren't very good, but if you can run, you should because running is a reminder the more you do it, the better you get. No one runs more and gets slower or gets worse or gets less fit. for doing the running. But life isn't linear in that way. You know, life is something where you can put all your effort into doing a certain thing and it still doesn't work out.

35:40Keely Hodgkinson: So then you've got two options. You either say, well, it's not fair. Or you realize that actually you're not in control of the outcome. You're only in control of the process. So therefore it's actually a really, it really informs you in a fantastic way where you go, but you know what, I can't even bother wasting 1 % of my brain power thinking about the outcome of this, because I do not control that. What I can control is the effort I put into trying to get there. Because if I don't get there, I still give it my best shot. But if I do get there, then fantastic. The alternative is it's not fair, I'm not going to try.

36:15Keely Hodgkinson: But guess what, you're never going to get there. Brilliant. I remember being at a seminar years ago, like this is about 15 years ago, and it was when Steve Peters... Ledge. Yeah, I don't think he was working with Bitsy Cycle at the time. I think he was still at Rampton, the high security hospital. But he was speaking to a group of students and he picked up on this idea of like, worst thing you can say is life's not fair, it's not fair. But then what was interesting was he went, who told you life was fair? And then he started to unpick it and you go, because you would have read books when you were a kid and in the story, the goody always wins.

36:53Keely Hodgkinson: do you know what I mean? Bad things happen to good people in reality. And that was the point he was making was, so just get your head around it. If there's one thing that he was maintaining to the students that he was talking about, was like, shit happens, so just get on with it and stop talking about this idea of life being fair because we've been conditioned to believe that life is fair and then it trips us up the first time we experience it. I think it was Steve, so I might be misattributing it to him, but I remember when he spoke about this Buddhist parable that sort of resonated. He said, a man's walking along and an arrow hits him, which obviously hurts him, but while he's lying there, a second arrow hits him in exactly the same spot.

37:33Keely Hodgkinson: And the point he was making was, the first arrow is the unfair thing that's happened to you. Somebody else fired it, you had no say on it. But the second arrow is, what are you firing to yourself? Because you've not done anything about it, you just lay there complaining and agonising about the first arrow that's hit you. and the point he was making was that life isn't fair, but what we choose to do in response to that is the bit that distinguishes us and that distinguishes so many of our high performers. I mean, I'll give you an example. Should we listen to somebody that I found really intriguing when we met him personally, but there was a coda to what he told us and what followed a few years later.

38:13Keely Hodgkinson: I'll explain what I mean. If we listen to Joe Hart, the former Manchester City and England goalkeeper talking. Is this the clip where he talks about how various people had opinions of him throughout his career? That's exactly it. Let's listen to it.

38:28Matthew Syed: I'm in and around the best in terms of players, in terms of coaches. I've made friends through the years with serious football people and their opinion is important to me. My family's opinion is important to me. I'm not saying it's not important that someone says he was too pumped up for the game. But I get that it's a flippant comment. I get that it's a comment of someone who knows nothing about me, knows nothing about how I work day to day, knows nothing about the previous however many hundred appearances I'd made with medals around my neck. I was in exactly the same mode, exactly the same mode, exactly the same person, but I just didn't perform.

39:06Matthew Syed: So how can you please everyone when, if you do, you'd make errors at such a high scale. It was a high-profile game, especially Iceland. And I made a mistake. So, cool. The people need to say what they need to say. They need to feel better about England going out of the tournament. And I can't get away from it. I was one of the factors we went out of that tournament. But that doesn't crush me. That doesn't destroy me. I don't blame people for writing those articles. I don't blame people for sensationalizing what could be perceived as a downfall because that is the world and the business that I'm in.

39:45Matthew Syed: Like I say, it's not ideal. Like, we all want our tyres pumped up, and rightly so. I've had some incredible headlines written about me, but it's whatever, you know. Like I say, I just really want to stay in the moment, stay on the training field, and try my best every day.

40:04Keely Hodgkinson: I love that because he's not victim blaming he's not looking to throw somebody else on a bus this isn't fair that he said that about me he's just uncoupled yeah I made the mistake I'll take responsibility for that bit but you do what you need to do and I'm not going to dwell on it the bit I mention this is because it was part of a wider conversation where we also pushed him on when Pep Guardiola came in at Manchester City and got rid of him without almost giving him the opportunity to prove himself. And what happened a couple of years after we'd spoke to Joe was when Guardiola retired, or it was when Guardiola left Manchester City and he did an interview.

40:43Keely Hodgkinson: The one regret that he said he'd had was not giving Joe Hart an opportunity to prove himself. And I think Joe's response of not looking to blame people and not suggesting that life's not fair and he was dealt a bad hand, allowed Guardiola the space to reflect on his own behaviour and therefore be able to come back and decide that he had made a mistake as well. And there's something really quite powerful about that of when we don't look to become the victim of circumstances but have the high agency of believing that things have happened but it's how I'm going to respond to it that's going to be significant.

41:22Keely Hodgkinson: I think you see a reaction from other people around it as well. People want to help you. It's like when we spoke to the CrossFit champion, Matt Fraser. If you stand on the side of the road and your car's broke down and you're waving for help, nobody stops. If you start pushing it yourself, everybody will stop because we like people that don't allow themselves to be wounded by the arrow and just lay there. They're the ones that get hit by the arrow and then move to do something about it. I also think so much of this concept of life is fair or unfair is because we spend our time comparing what's happening to the story we wrote in our head.

41:57Keely Hodgkinson: But it was just a story that we wrote in our head. It wasn't based on any facts. It was just like, I wanted a certain outcome and I didn't get it. Like, who says that life should be easy? Who says that this Wednesday afternoon at work should be a good day at work? Like, life is a constant challenge in various different ways. So I was thinking before this record, like, what are the things, because I've definitely had moments in my life where I've felt like it isn't fair. How have I coped with it? And I came up with the following things. the first thing that I've tried to do in my life is to compare less.

42:28Keely Hodgkinson: So I think for me, fairness often feels worse when I look at what other people are doing. I actually see far bigger, more successful podcasts than ours where I am massively questioning their output into the world, whether it's actually genuinely valuable for people. But why am I comparing? I'm just doing my own thing in my own lane. They found their own lane and okay, they've been massively successful and congratulations to them, I need to stop worrying about that. focusing on the things that I can control was a real good one for me. So my effort, as Zachary Joe said, my response boundaries, my attitude, how you move forwards.

43:02Keely Hodgkinson: And I think the final one, which I think was important for me, is to allow the feeling of this is unfair. Like to actually realize that it's actually a really normal thing to think and a really normal thing to feel. And therefore, if I'm not resisting it, if it's not making me angry, if I'm not getting frustrated by it, then it kind of, it hasn't having an impact on my life. You know, things can fit. So what's the trigger for you for that? Because that's a really powerful list that I think is helpful. I find that helpful as I'm listening to it. What was it that triggered you to want to think a bit deeply about your reaction?

43:39Keely Hodgkinson: It was when we were writing How to Change Your Life. Yeah. And in the intro to the book, I was writing about how I failed my A-levels. Yeah. and still kind of ended up with a job in television. And I was kind of thinking, why do I reflect on that moment in my life so often when it was in 1997, like nearly 30 years ago? And it's because it was the first time that life felt unfair. Right. But it worked out really well. And therefore I was thinking, well, if that felt unfair and it was the best thing that ever happened to me because it meant inadvertently I got a job in TV, well, maybe what I need in my life is more unfair stuff.

44:20Keely Hodgkinson: maybe I regularly need to feel that life's unfair because guess what it might lead to something amazing so then I stopped fighting the sense of unfairness because I just think it's pernicious I think like the number of people I know where they like they look browbeaten downtrodden exhausted and disinterested and when I speak to them about it we often get to a point where they're like I just feel so unfair see the reason I ask you that is because it reminds you of like there's a neuroscientist called Michael Gazinga who talks about our brain is a pattern-seeking machine. We're constantly trying to make sense of the world and the world around us.

44:58Keely Hodgkinson: And that's why I was asking whether there was a trigger for you because you've seen patterns, like whether it's on the podcast, whether it's your A-level story, and you're then going back and rewriting the story. You're looking for a different pattern because it's easy to just assume the story and the pattern of, well, life's not fair and I'm just on the shit end of that deal. Or you can go, well, life isn't fair and that's fine because it's how I react rather than do it, which is what you've done. And that's what I think we see as a pattern with so many of our high performers. They've all had setbacks.

45:31Keely Hodgkinson: They've all, whether it's been, Sam Burgess talking about having to nurse his dad through MND, whether it's people that have talked about losing big games and the humiliation that follows, whether it's you know johnny wilkinson talking about winning the world cup and not finding the contentment that he assumed was waiting on the other side of it but all of them have then been willing to go well life's not fair it's not what i thought it was going to be but that willingness to hold the pen and write your own story like you've done i think is really powerful thank you brother um i think we need another sentence that high performers never say yep I have never heard anybody say to us I've done enough which is a blessing and a curse in some ways because that we've sometimes sort of reflected haven't we when we've come up interviews and gone how much is enough for this guy or like when are they going to just be hexing except that they've done enough yeah but they don't for some but then we've also said but that's actually the very reason that we want to speak to them because they're striving they're constantly going after what clip should we play Alan Wynne-Jones the sort of most capped Welsh rugby player rugby player of all time I think talking to him about how he almost defined himself by his willingness to keep pushing back the physical and mental boundaries of what people thought was possible it sounds cliche complacency was my my biggest fear it's like you know there's no such thing as satisfaction it was always I wanted to win a World Cup I wanted to win a European Cup but never did that.

47:07Keely Hodgkinson: It was fear of complacency or comfortable not having satisfaction, whichever way you look at it. I think, well, there's always someone behind you. There's always going to be someone bigger, faster, better. This is the only sentence so far that I struggled with a little bit. Yeah. And I think it's fine to say that high performers never say I've done enough because they don't. It's factually true. I question whether it's a healthy thing to say. Well, do you remember really early on when we were recording with Sean Wayne, the England football league coach. I'm never happy. That was a bit... He'll be annoyed at me again now.

47:42Keely Hodgkinson: Oh, yeah, yeah. I should tell you that Sean listens. He said to me once, he said, why does Jay take the piss out of my accent? And I said, don't worry, he does it to me. Constantly, Sean. I'm not happy. There's no offence intended here. I love you, Sean. You're a ledge and one of my heroes. But I think it's also sad that, like, Alan Wynne-Jones says, I want to do a World Cup, I want to win a European Cup. I never did that. I wonder whether that's unresolved in his mind. I wonder whether Sean Wayne, as he breathes out his last breath, will think, oh, why didn't I search for happiness a bit more often?

48:12Keely Hodgkinson: Who was the boxer we spoke to? Karl Frampton. Do you remember when we were into Karl Frampton? The jackal, yeah. He was saying to us on the interview, I just want to become a three-weight world champion and then I'll be happy. Yeah. It didn't happen. So is he then unhappy because he wasn't a three-weight world champion? Or does he realise that actually he was a two-weight world champion and that's probably enough. Does Sean may not realise he did enough? Alan Wyn Jones realise he did enough. I get why it's important. I also get why it probably causes mental health problems for a lot of people.

48:42This sense of having never done enough.

48:44Keely Hodgkinson: So here's a question that you might or might not be able to answer. Go on. How can we live a life where we don't spend our time thinking, well, I've done enough, so I'm going to take my foot off the gas, but equally not be derailed by this constant nagging doubt of I've never done enough? like where's the where's the balance it's a brilliant question and i think some of it then sort of depends on us understanding are we focused on the outcome of the process because that idea of like like the process where you just constantly want to master the task that you're doing you want to get better at it you want to understand the nuance of it and you're happy with sort of small incremental gains because you love it for the sake of it whereas if you're doing it because I need that world title because it's something about my identity.

49:28I think when we focus on the outcome,

49:31Keely Hodgkinson: it can lead to unhappiness. So almost it doesn't matter that you feel you've never done enough if you love what you're doing because you're loving what you're doing. Therefore, you are happy. You are joyful. Well, that word that you're saying there, Jake, about love is something that I sort of explored this in trying to understand it. And there's a Canadian psychologist in Montreal called Robert Valorand, who's got something called the dualistic model of passion. And he makes a distinction here that I think might help answer that question, where he says there are two kinds of passion that are almost indistinguishable from us outside of somebody's life looking into it.

50:11Keely Hodgkinson: So the first type is what he calls harmonious passion. And this comes from where you feel a sense of control. So you choose the activity you're doing, and you know you can put it down at any time. The other type of passion is obsessive passion when the passion controls you. So obsessive passion has been linked to feeling dependent, being rigid and inflexible in what you do and often the negative emotions if you don't achieve your objectives. So there was one study of 150 sort of academy footballers in the UK and what they found is that when you have harmonious passion, it has a positive effect on whether you're likely to burn out at some stage or not.

50:50Keely Hodgkinson: there's plenty of people assume you've got to be obsessed to reach the top you've got to be relentless you've got to be constantly grinding to do it well all the evidence says having a harmonious passion is what gets you there because you love it for the sake of it and it doesn't come with the heavy bill that obsessive passion often demands from it so there was a story that alan told us when we chatted with him when he moved into his dream house with his wife and his kids and then he talked about he then got up the next morning and got on a bike and flogged himself to that. And when I went back and listened to it, knowing we were going to talk about it today, there's a line where he says, I got on the bike at six in the morning and you said to him, how hard did you go?

51:30And he went, just hard enough.

51:32Keely Hodgkinson: And that to me is an indication of Alan having that harmonious passion because he's choosing the level that he's going to in that moment in time. He's choosing when he gets off the bike. And that, to me, is harmonious passion in action. And I think there's a pattern we've seen, whether it's Sean talking about never being happy. I think it's the fact that he's never coached the perfect game of rugby league. And that's something that he can constantly aspire to because he loves it. He's not obsessed about it, but it's something that he's constantly looking for. The flip side is Johnny Wilkinson.

52:06Keely Hodgkinson: I think, by his own admission, it became an obsessive passion. the idea of lining up 15 balls who was it who told us it was Michael Owen told us watching him in training where he'd line up balls along the halfway line and he had to kick all of them over the crossbar and if he got to number 14 and missed it he had to go all the way back to number one and start again that to me sounds like obsessive passion that's controlling Johnny rather than him controlling it final sentence that high performers never say well go on you choose this one I did it on my own because that is to remove this understanding that life is a team sport.

52:45Keely Hodgkinson: And the reason why I wanted to include I did it on my own is something that high performers never say, is that everywhere I look, there are people now wanting to tell you that they are the reason for their success. Everyone is a self-made woman or a self-made man or a self-made success story, and it's all lots of bollocks. And people say it because then they can sell you a course or they can get you to follow them or they can tell you that they're a megastar, but nothing happens on our own. and I want to point out Laura Kenny, the most successful ever British female Olympian of all time. You could look at her and go, what a self-made success story.

53:16Keely Hodgkinson: Her talent, her desire, her passion, her hard work, her commitment. But as she told us, it was not a self-made success story. She did not do it on her own. Here she is.

53:30Matthew Syed: Got thrown into living in Belgium for six weeks, totally on my own, didn't speak the language. Luckily, my sister was living over there. so I could go and live with my sister. And that was the first point that I was like, wow, like this is going to be tough. But and I'm totally on my own. That was the first moment where I was like, oh, this is me steering my career now. Like this is very much me in control of this. And it was young. Like 18 is definitely young. I mean, so many things happened that I look back and I'm like, wow, I'm actually carnage. Like I set fire to a jacket potato, for example, because I'd never cooked.

54:04Matthew Syed: Because why would you? Like my mum literally did everything for me at home. I turned up with a dirty skin suit at the first training session because I didn't wash it from the session before. Because why would I? Normally I leave it outside and my mum would wash it. And so it was just like a massive learning curve. I would say, yeah, it was probably 18 where I was like, wow, I need to grow up and I need to grow up fast. Your mentality and the way you think about things and the way that you're able to process things. I think I learned characteristics, whether that be from people around you. Like my mum, she lost loads of weight.

54:36Matthew Syed: She literally lost eight and a half stone in a year and a half. I had that person to like idolise throughout my entire career. And whether it was her that taught me that without actually teaching me that, I don't know. But I do think that like your mind behaviours, I'll definitely learn. My mum and dad always keep me really grounded throughout life like they have done. I always go back to them. I'm constantly on the phone to them. And I think, you know, having them there and being like that and kind of bringing me back down to earth, I guess, after the important races has kind of really helped.

55:10Keely Hodgkinson: I love this idea of thinking about your collaborators in life. And I often challenge people, you know, when we're doing a talk to a group of people or a business or a corporate event, I often say, think about your collaborators. And people will often think of the first boss that believed in them or their parents or their best friend that's always been there to support them. Or like, you and I have collaborated on this podcast. You know, you're my collaborator, as is Will, producer from day one. But I also say to people, yeah, but your collaborators are not just the people that you hold in high regard.

55:42Keely Hodgkinson: Let's go on. Well, your collaborators are also the bullies at school that built your resilience. The collaborators are also the teacher that told you you were thick, that made you think, I'm never going to believe that version of myself and I'm going to prove you wrong. The collaborators are your first boss that you were scared of because you realized what kind of a boss you were never going to be. Brilliant. Your collaborators are the people that have also made your life difficult because we are made up of all of our experiences. I don't think you can live your life where you go, I'm just going to look at all the good things that happened and believe they're good for me and all the bad things that happened and think they're bad for me.

56:18Keely Hodgkinson: because often the bad stuff that happened to you is good for you. So we need to have this idea that life is a team sport, that our collaborators who've been there from day one, you know, the person that taught you to read at school when you were five cannot be discounted from your story if you're a broadcaster when you're 45. So don't tell me on your socials, I've done it myself, it's bollocks. like the more we can look outside ourselves for the reasons for our success and the less we're internalizing what we've achieved then the lower our ego is the higher our emotional intelligence is and I think the happier we are brilliant what a great way of framing it so everybody's teaching you something you're open to it yeah yeah yeah it kind of makes sense they're all collaborators they're on the journey with you I think there's three things when I'd listen to Laura, because again, this is a pattern.

57:15Keely Hodgkinson: I think that none of them claim to be, like you say, self-made or none of them claim to be lone wolves. They all acknowledge they're part of a pack. Even the athletes that we've met that are renowned for being solo competitors, famously, like Usain Bolt, telling us that when he went to see his coach, he'd said to him, you need to learn how to lose before you learn how to win. And it was about, you need to surround yourself with better influences and people that just want to be with you for those successes. You know, we had Ian Gary on the podcast this summer and when he got beat recently in the title fight he went to, I dropped him a line afterwards from an interview I'd done years ago with Angelo Dundee, Mahmoud Ali's coach, who said, look around your dressing room when you get beat and find out who's there because that will tell you who deserves to be with you on the journey that you're going to go on when you'll be successful again.

58:11Keely Hodgkinson: so I think learning to recognize the people around you is something that we see so often from our high performers they do though give themselves lots of credit I think just to circle this back to some of the other things while they give credit to other people and the impact they've had they do give themselves lots of credit for their role in it as well of choosing and curating the people around them and but there's an interesting area that I don't think we talk about enough on this which is luck as well because there's so many of them like it's almost difficult to acknowledge that if you're Alan Wynne-Jones, how lucky were you that you were born with genetics that meant you were going to be six foot seven, you grew up in a...

58:50Keely Hodgkinson: In a rugby-playing country. Yeah, exactly. And there's elements of it that go, well, that was nothing to do with you or anything around you as well. So I think recognising what you do control and some of that is about having the people around you, but then being willing to give the credit away is a really powerful pattern that we've seen from so many of our brilliant guests. And thank you all so much for continuing to support High Performance. We had some lovely messages from John Appleby1480, who loved the conversation with Laura that you just heard a clip from. IG2D says, I always remember Laura at the 2012 Olympics.

59:23Keely Hodgkinson: I even remember the name of a French rider, Clara Sanchez, who ultimately secured Laura the goal by beating Sarah Hammer in the fast individual events. Were you there that day, Jay? Yeah, I would have been there, yeah, 2012. Feels like two minutes ago and 100 years ago, all at the same time. Johnny B6575 says what an amazing conversation with Alan Wynne-Jones I was gripped by every word and Anthony McPeak2234 on the Joe Hart episode said favourite moment is when he talks about Pep and not having anything negative to say because he understood it was a decision by one person he disagreed with it but I accepted it so there you go the five sentences the high performers never say Damien I'll start when I'm ready that's just the way I am it's not fair I've done enough and I did it on my own and the thing I'd want people to take away is that not one of those is a character flaw every one of them is a perfectly reasonable sentence but what it does is it just quietly moves you into a direction where you don't want to be thank you so much mate appreciate your time please like subscribe share these episodes I really hope this was valuable for you and if as Damien's just said if you do say those things be kind to yourself you know we all do things that maybe aren't the thing that will take us closer to high performance but we're also human beings.

1:00:37So keep that in mind.

1:00:39Keely Hodgkinson: Thanks for joining us. And remember, stay humble, curious and empathetic. See you next time.

1:01:06Matthew Syed: playing in the grocery store, reminding you that the year is coming to a close.

1:01:10Keely Hodgkinson: Time to kick end of year into high gear.

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