The Harsh Reality of Life Outside the Tennis Elite

0:28Watch it early on the High Performance App.

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1:24And that's where Opera Air comes in. It's a lightweight, fast, secure browser built not just for productivity, but for your well-being. With Opera Air, mindfulness is built right in. You'll find free breathing exercises, guided meditations, and soundscapes with ambient sounds, lo-fi music, and binaural beats, all designed to help you focus, relax, and even spark creativity while you browse. Hey, welcome along to another episode of High Performance with myself and Damien Hughes. I'm going to talk about our own personal take on those moments. But today's also a bit different because we're going to invite a guest to join us just for a brief conversation about sharing the world's tennis courts with some of the greatest players.

2:14And talking of the greatest players, it's Wimbledon season. It's the British summertime. It doesn't always guarantee sun, the British summertime, but it always guarantees Wimbledon. So we thought that we would frame today's conversation around the game of tennis, but more importantly about the game of constantly chasing wins. Damien, can I start by sharing a quote from John Wooden, the legendary basketball coach? Yeah, definitely. The Wizard of Wooden is always worth listening to. Again? The Wizard of Wooden is always worth listening to. And that, people, has remained in the episode because life is not about getting things right.

2:50It's about having a go. And when you come up to school, go in again. Okay, here's the quote. Success is peace of mind. There is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to become the best you're capable of becoming. Now, the reason why I love that so much, Damien, is because John Wooden is a man who traded in victory. He's a man who competed to win. He's a man who won an incredible amount. Yet the wonderful thing about that quote is it's a direct reminder for all of us, whether we're parents of young sports people, whether we are thinking about success in the workplace, success in our personal lives, maybe there are sports people listening to this.

3:27It's a reminder that so often the world tells us that success is winning, whereas actually so often success is about doing the best that you can do. And maybe today we should have a conversation to help people reframe what winning and what success looks like. Well, that question is always worthy of a greater consideration, Jay. You stand on the touchline of any youth football match and you can often see parents prizing the victory over the idea of being a good teammate or learning or just enjoying running around in the fresh air for a couple of hours. So yeah, if we can frame it in a different way, I'd love to have that conversation.

4:03What sort of research has been done into this, Damien? And can we actually confirm that focusing on doing your best rather than on winning actually can lead to a better outcome? Because I think too often we think if you don't focus on winning, you don't win. Well, a conversation like this is often followed by a name, Carol Dweck. that most people are familiar with. Back in 2007, she followed 373 seventh graders through two years of junior high school. And they found that those students that framed achievement as getting smarter, what we know nowadays as a growth mindset, they tended to keep improving, working on math skills versus those kids that were given a fixed mindset, being told they had a certain talent, a certain aptitude for the subject, so that when they hit difficulty, when they hit their upper level, they saw that that was the end of the journey rather than just the end of the beginning of the journey.

4:53So we know that this idea of having the growth mindset and investing in our talent and seeing it as a seed that as long as we nurture it and keep watering it it will grow and it will blossom tends to deliver better results for all of us. And by the way, I am responsible for part of this narrative about winning because I remember when I was hosting football matches a team would lose a final on penalties and we'd criticise their performance. Another team would win a final on penalties and we would say the performance was fantastic. And often the managers or the players involved in those games, Damien, would actually text the pundits that I'm working with, saying to them, hold on, have you watched that game?

5:27We were brilliant. We just lost. Sometimes a penalty shootout is a lottery. I think we can all slip into this kind of headline-grabbing way of looking at the world, where if you're a winner, you're successful. If you're a loser, then you're unsuccessful. And I think any conversation we can have to help reframe people's thoughts on winning is probably a really healthy thing for people listening to this and maybe their children as well. So what's that line from Bear Grylls that you regularly like to quote, Jake, about resilient people? That resilient people have outperformed talented people a thousand to one.

5:57Right. So we're hearing that kind of theme repeated over and over again, people telling us that I wasn't the most talented, but I was the one that kept working hardest to invest in my ability, whether that's Alan Wynne-Jones, the world record holder for Caps in Rugby Union, whether it was Johnny Wilkinson, you know, the iconic England rugby union player, whether it was Steven Gerrard telling us about he had to go all in when he was captain in Liverpool. This story has a common theme that goes through so many of our high performers. Well, it's time to welcome someone to the show then who can give us a different view of what winning actually looks like.

6:35He's written an amazing book called The Rackets, all about life as a tennis player who didn't quite make it. Because Conor Nyland is Irish tennis's ultimate nearly man. He's a folk hero now. He's a guy who clawed his way out of the sports financial basement, cracking a dizzying 129 in the world. And then he gatecrashed Wimbledon as the first Irishman in the men's main draw since the 1970s. And that was obviously a breakout moment back home in Ireland. Weeks later, Destiny dealt him a Hollywood script, the Arthur Ashe Stadium and Novak Djokovic on the other side of the net, millions of people watching.

7:14However, he'd apparently eaten a rogue plate of New York sushi, which left him with terrible stomach cramps, food poisoning, and he eventually had to abandon the match. After that, hip surgeries finally pushed him into retirement aged just 30. But he's now decided to peel back the curtain on what really happens around the world of tennis, exposing the bruises, the bounce checks, and some of the 3am bus rides that exist beneath the glitter that we all see. And it's an absolute pleasure to welcome him now to High Performance. Well, Conor, welcome to the show. Maybe we should start then by asking you what you believe High Performance actually is and whether we've all got High Performance wrong that we believe it only belongs to the elite of the elite, of the elite who are picking up trophies and lauded for their success?

8:04Yeah, I mean, that's the thing, I guess, about my story is it throws up those questions. I sometimes feel like the definition of high performance in tennis anyway, and maybe in lots of sports, is getting on TV. If you're not on TV, you haven't kind of made it and you're not successful. And then all of a sudden, when you get into that world, whatever sport it is, people sort of are able to tick that box and say, you've done it, you've been a success. and obviously I spent most of my career not on TV, playing challenger events and futures events around the world and feeling like I was a world-class tennis player but only getting to play the biggest tournaments a couple of times over the eight, nine years I was a pro.

8:45But did you reach your own high performance, Connor? Did you take your life and your career as far as you physically could with your talents and your abilities? I feel like I couldn't have tried any harder but I don't feel like I fulfill my ability. So I think we're all, I suppose, victims of our environment a little bit, if victim is the right word, but I felt like I kind of maxed out what I could coming from Limerick in Ireland. I got to play the biggest tournaments in the world. It's not necessarily a level playing field, pro tennis and even junior tennis. If you're from England or Australia or France or America who have the Grand Slam tournaments, You're able to get wild cards from your junior days into the biggest tournaments in the world or even some of the lower ranked professional events, which give you a leg up.

9:31So what would you say, Conor, actually does separate somebody in the top 50 from someone that maybe is ranked in the top 150? Very little at that level. Like the difference between somebody at 150 and 50 could be six months, you know, they're just not there yet. They might be playing at that level, but they haven't put together the results. and you can jump from 150 to 60 in the world with two or three challenger wins over the course of six months. So it's a really fine margin. Now, if you ask them what the difference was between somebody top 20 or top 10 and somebody 150, I guess there's probably seven or eight components to being a world-class player, and those guys hit all of those.

10:12So you look at a Djokovic or a Murray, they're 6 '3", they move unbelievably well, They've got weapons in terms of massive first serves, big forehands. They've got variety. They compete really well. They've had a great junior career with no gaps. They obviously have a little bit more natural talent as well. There's seven or eight things that they're stacking, and maybe somebody like me has three or four of those things. So were you judging yourself by winning tournaments? Or do we have to understand from your story that sometimes what we need to do when we're chasing high performance is set what our own version of high performance is?

10:48because yours was different to Roger Federer, Rafa Nadal, Andy Marino at Djokovic, wasn't it? Even though you did the same job. Yeah, and I mean, I remember going to a junior event in France called Le Petit Zah, which is the biggest junior event under 14 in the world, and looking at a guy called Juan Carlos Ferreira, who is Alcaraz's coach now, who went on to win the French Open himself, and going, I'm not at this guy's level, you know, and this is at 12 or 13. And I'd gone there dreaming of being a guy who wants to win Wimbledon and came back from that event thinking I'd love to play in Wimbledon and have a look at these guys.

11:22That's the sort of difference in the level. But also, I remember working with a sports psychologist when I was about 160, 170 in the world. Obviously, my goal was to try and crack top 100. I remember him saying to me, well, how many world ranking points do you need to get to the top 100? And I said, well, it's about 400 ATP points. That's what it was at that time. And he said, well, let's break it down over the next year and all of a sudden I felt a lot of pressure kind of lift. I was going to every tournament thinking I want to try and win the event. Whereas now once I had that kind of reframe, I realized if I lose a first or second round, that's fine.

12:00I already have that kind of covered in my year and that sort of really helped me, I guess, process losses and move on from them. Because in tennis, you know, you're losing pretty much every week. Even the very top guys are only winning three or four events a year. How important is mentality and what are some of the lessons that you learn through your tennis career in terms of being able to cope with those pressure moments? I'm thinking in particular the instance in 2011 when you were just one set away from playing Federer, when you were 5-1 up. Well, don't take any lessons from what I did at that point.

12:38because with Sportler Alert, I was up my first time playing at Wimbledon and played a guy, Adrian Manorino, 50 in the world. I was about 150 myself and qualified in and played a great match over four hours and got myself in a winning position with Roger Federer on centre court awaiting the winner. And the Fields of Athenry, which is a famous Irish song, started to get sung around the court. and I like to blame it on anything other than myself. So I hone in on that in the book. And I did get it done. In fairness, Man Arena, my opponent, sort of went into lockdown mode and stopped missing. And I guess for me, I had struggled, like a lot of tennis players, with closing out matches.

13:24That's the thing, again, if we go back to what separates the guys in the top 10 to everybody else, it's how good they are as closers. And I guess with the adrenaline and the songs being sung and the flags, I overcooked it and I would hit a serve and I'm not building the point. I'm taking risks. I'm trying to finish the point too early. I obviously don't feel comfortable. I'm anxious. And all of a sudden, Manorino, my opponent stops missing and 4-1 becomes 4-2. But at 4-2, I feel like the momentum's gone. I kind of feel like I'm in a really bad place, even though I'm actually up 4-2 and at 4-3 I feel like I've nearly lost and I over-egged it and yeah I wish I'd probably done what I usually did when I was younger and just tried to make balls and just trying to get over the line in a heap but I didn't do that.

14:14And I'm sure there will be parents of young tennis players that have tuned into this episode or even young tennis players. I think some home truths about what life is actually like in the world of tennis. I mean I remember seeing that in Andre Agassi's book, he said, or you said after reading Andre Agassi's book, if Agassi was lonely but never alone, players on the Futures Tour are both. So what did it feel like during your career to be both lonely and alone? Yeah, not great. It was, again, being maybe an Irish player, the only Irish player at a tournament made it a little bit more difficult. I did feel a little bit more isolated.

14:51I'd talk about it. that at the events you'd have maybe six or seven French guys in every draw, six or seven German guys, and they're not necessarily inviting the Irish guy for dinner. It's a very competitive environment, and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to know, well, if I see a guy on his own, if I keep him on his own, he probably won't be performing as well. So there isn't a sort of a culture of camaraderie in tennis because you're all out there fighting for the same things. So I found it a challenge. I traveled to Switzerland after I finished college in the States. I played four weeks in a row in Switzerland, more or less, totally on my own and came back from that event and said, I need to travel with a coach at the very least.

15:34And if you look at your Andy Murray's, when he sort of cracked the top 20 in the world, at whatever age he was, probably 18 or something or 19 at most, all of a sudden he immediately built a really big team around him. That was as much, I think, the camaraderie element and having fun and making it almost like a Davis Cup atmosphere where there's a big group of you at dinner every night. And that's really, really important. When you say it was hard, would you go a bit deeper on that for us and tell us actually how it felt? It was really lonely. There were so many doubts, so many bad moments. I did feel like I could manage it when I was winning.

16:11You could justify it. But when I was losing and would take two or three losses in a row in a week, I was, yeah, not in a good place and was dreading sometimes getting on flights to tournaments, you know. And this was pre-smartphone, really, certainly pre, you know, the constant instant communication. Talk about in the book, I, you know, would spend a lot of time in my hotel room, you know, there'd be CNN, CNN on the TV and on a loop. And you'd also have to rest a lot. So you couldn't be going out sightseeing. And sometimes you'd have a match at, say, 7 p.m. or 8 p.m. at night at this one court venue in the middle of France and you're waking up at 8am or 9am to get breakfast and then you've got like 9, 10 hours to kill on your own in some small town.

16:59That was the reality of the Futures and the Challenger circuit. It was a really tough place and I know a lot of players on the men's and the women's circuit find it really, really, really difficult. And you speak quite movingly in the book, Connor, about your parents' relationship, both with you and with the sport of tennis as well. You know, there are those occasions where they do show up to give you that support and that sense of belonging. What advice would you pass on to any parents listening to this that do have aspirations for their children that maybe want to pursue a career like yours?

17:35If your child is at a really high level in the under-12s and the under-14s and they're nationally, they've got a chance of being sort of an international player but if they're not the chances of that person quote-unquote making it are very very slim so you see a lot of parents sort of living out their dream 15 16 they're still thinking this player is going to be a pro even though they've never done anything internationally it doesn't come out of thin air so from a practical perspective just to be very conscious of what your child has sort of exhibited so far as a player and don't start expecting them to become you know a future Wimbledon competitor if they're not one of the very very best in their country I guess from a day-to-day you know that that car journey after the match where the kid is sort of feels like they've got no escape you know I guess there's a an honesty about the tension between myself and my dad who was very, very into my tennis and was a great dad, but also was able to shout to me at 11 years of age after losing a match, you know, body language, have you ever heard of it at the very top of his voice and I'm kind of in the car and you can't get away.

18:48And all parents, I think, probably have those moments where they kind of, you know, want to scream at their kids and on that. So I just say go easy on them, you know. But I know as a parent myself, it's not easy to always have that balance. but striving for it's important. And now that you've written a book and you can reflect on your career, Connor, do you think that you were a professional tennis player because your dad took such an interest, because he shouted at you in the car when you were 11 and you couldn't escape, because your mum was fierce at that point, or do you think you managed it in spite of the way they were?

19:24That's a great question. There's no way I would have kept going through the whole process from five to 30 without my parents being okay supportive but also putting me in a position where I sometimes felt like I needed to do it it's a bit like I sometimes felt like I was getting told to go and do my homework you know or go and do my piano scales or whatever it is with tennis the amount of time you have to put into it it's it's six days a week. It's intense. And so my parents were there to tell me when I hadn't done my practice session or needed to do it better. So no, I wouldn't have been a professional tennis player if they hadn't pushed me.

20:07Do you also think in a strange way it helped you that you weren't involved in tennis because of the razzmatazz, the glitz, the glamour, the TV audiences, the crowds of 30 ,000? Because, you know, you were almost playing on the tour that was in town when when the major tournaments might have been happening elsewhere. I mean, there's a great bit in your book where you write about leaving Kyoto with your dad and you wrote, before the cherry blossom began to bloom, it seemed fitting. The Challenger Tour always felt a little out of season. The show was happening somewhere else. So I wonder if that kind of helped you because the only reason you were playing was actually for the love of tennis.

20:44It wasn't for the love of your ego, was it? Yeah, and that's the first line I wrote. You know, all those 2020, I think it was, that sentiment, that feeling I had leaving Kyoto with my dad and it being, as I say, a kind of a melancholy about the Challenger world. That tone is what I wanted to capture. Now, it took three years to create a book out of that sentence, but that's sort of where I was coming from. So yes, it was, you know, not maybe as romantic as love of the game, but it was certainly I was trying to I was trying to achieve things I was ambitious to to get into the biggest tournaments I had invested so much in it and I always knew post-playing if somebody asked me you know oh did you play pro if I tell somebody I played pro tennis and they say oh how did you do and I say I was 150 in the world they'll just have a blank expression on their face but if if I say oh I played Wimbledon I played Djokovic at the US Open they will all of a sudden have a totally different context for what I did so I knew that I need I needed that and going back to what I said earlier that's why within six months of me getting that getting those those two tournaments I was I was off the tour I think there's a lesson though that we can we can instill in young people particularly and people that might be listening to this it's like if you want to get involved in anything in life whether it's professional sports or something else don't do it because it feeds your ego do it because you love it do it almost for the right reasons do you know what I mean Yeah, no, I completely agree.

22:19And even if there's a sport that you are better at than another sport, if you prefer the other sport, go with that. You know what I mean? I do think team sports are a lot more forgiving. I sound like I'm trying to turn people off tennis. I do love tennis still and still watch it and get a lot out of it. I'm still very involved. But you just need to be, I guess, being forewarned is forearmed. Isn't that the phrase? And I guess I want this book not to sort of scare people off the game, but just to understand what it might look like if you aren't prepared and have the resources around you. This is kind of what it can start to look like.

22:56And if there's a sport that you prefer playing and it's a little bit easier on you, certainly consider the team sports maybe too because I think they are a little bit more forgiving. What about where your self-worth came from, Connor? Had you allowed yourself to get into a place in your life where your self-worth actually came from winning tennis tournaments rather than the person that you were? I guess, and that was one of the things that I felt a relief when I finished playing was the self-analysis, the constant self-analysis when you're a tennis player, probably with every sport, kind of went away.

23:30It's the 24-7 nature of it. It's tied to who you are. If you're winning, you're happy. As I said earlier, when I'm losing, I'm not. So yeah, that self-worth, it was absolutely tied. It always makes me laugh when you hear the top players, when they say they've won Wimbledon, they say it's the greatest moment of my career. They never say it's the greatest moment of my life. And I don't know whether they're trying to do some sort of a psychological trick with that wording, as if their career and their life are very separate, like clearly winning Wimbledon when you're 23 has to be the greatest moment of your life so far.

24:03But they're quite keen to show, and maybe it's a little bit of a posturing that this is only the greatest moment of my tennis career. It's not the greatest moment of my life. So I find that, I always find that wording quite interesting. So for me, it was so wrapped up and entwined in who I felt I was. Have you seen the famous Roger Federer speech? Just that he did a kind of a university inauguration where he talks about, I won 54 % of the points I played for. So then he says, so I lost 46 % of the points that I played for in my career. Therefore, you have to become comfortable with failure. And part of me understands what Roger's saying.

24:39But the other part of me thinks, well, you also won 80 % of your matches. So there's two things going on here. Yes, you had to become comfortable with losing, but you kind of knew that in the end you might have lost the point, but you won the game. I wonder whether you were ever able to get to a point where you were comfortable with losing because you were losing the points and invariably also losing the games. Yeah, and you don't want to get into a habit of being comfortable with losing either, right? So it's kind of a really difficult balancing act where when I was playing my best tennis in my late 20s, I was very, very good at moving on from errors and mistakes within a match, which is what Federer is talking about there.

25:21So in my junior career, like most tennis players, I'm, you know, tossing the tennis racket around a little bit. All the rest, I had a little bit of that in my pro career as well, like most players. But when I was having those really good years of 28, 29, it was a book by Barbara Teller, which is called Golf is Not a Game of Perfect, which really changed how I looked at my own mistakes and how I approached tennis matches and my psychology within tennis matches, which was when you're working on something technical, that's for the practice course. And once you get into a match, you've got to just let that go.

25:55Whereas previously, you know, my serve was always the one thing that was probably my problem shot. and I used to have my service toss, used to get it too far out to the court. And so I would always be working on that. And if that started to happen to me in a match where the toss started to go a little bit awry, I'd be thinking to myself, got to bring the toss back in, got to bring the toss back in. I'd get more and more frustrated with myself. But once I read the Ritella book, I just said, listen, I'm going to let the technical stuff happen on the practice court and just in the matches just try and figure out a way to win.

26:27And it just allowed me and freed me up. and I was really good at moving on from mistakes. So I think Federer, listen, he was obviously losing plenty of points, but as you say, he was winning the big points and won an awful lot of tennis matches, so he was finding it a little bit easier. But he had a problem with his temper when he first moved on to the Tour. I know at 18, 19, he had a little bit of a reputation even for not dealing with mistakes very well. So he moved on from it. But yeah, in fairness, it's a great stat. Yeah, I think in some ways though, getting angry, you can argue is dealing with mistakes well because you obviously hate making them.

27:05Yeah, I mean, Nadal talks about the mask in terms of body language, which I always really liked that the fact that he's referring to good body language as a mask, as opposed to making yourself feel better. so he's acknowledged when he says you need to wear the good face and put on the mask when you're playing a tennis match that's him showing that he understands that I'm pretending and that's okay for now until I start to feel better later so I think if you can manage mistakes for yourself yes that's going to help but also in terms of how your opponent perceives how you're dealing with those mistakes so it's sort of a double-edged benefit I guess Connor we were looking to speak with Joe Conta around this and she was telling us around her career sort of caught a wave in the second half when she worked with a Spanish psychologist called Juan Cotto who gave her a really neat formula that she said was great at being able to process mistakes.

28:05She said that when you hit a struggle, your resistance equals the level of pain that you might suffer. So she said, the struggle will feel like it's a 10 and if you resist it and fight the struggle at a 10, the pain is 100. whereas if you can reduce your resistance levels to zero the pain reduces to zero so she described techniques like writing the word smile on the handle of a tennis racket or writing letters to herself that she could read in between sets is there any tips or techniques you could share with our listeners about how you learned to process mistakes and be able to move on quickly yeah well I've never heard that um that way of looking at it and it's really good and again it's really practical and you look at Coco Gauff at Roland Garros last week with just a simple piece of paper repeating over and over again I'm going to win I'm going to win Roland Garros and it's really really simple stuff isn't it you're talking about the best athletes in the world here and they're writing down a piece of paper that they want to win the tournament and I guess it needs to be simple for me I didn't probably do enough of that I didn't have all those techniques again the Bob Britella thing really really helped me and I remember listening to a Spanish football coach speak before to a group of junior footballers saying you know in life it isn't good to deceive but in in football it is you know in terms of whether it's a movement in terms of faking opponent with when you got the ball or even as I said with body language so it's getting comfortable being a little bit fake I guess in terms of your body language like I said earlier that really helped me and all of a sudden you start to convince yourself that you that you're feeling better.

29:44So they were the kind of tips that helped me. And now that you reflect, Connor, and you've written this brilliant book about it, do you look back and think that you were a high performer? Because you can look at what you didn't achieve or you can look at the fact that hardly anyone makes it into the top 200 in the world. Hardly anyone plays at Wimbledon. Hardly anyone takes on Djokovic. Hardly anyone can deal with a single serve from a player in the top five in the world. Yet you didn't just return those serves, you returned them and won the points. Have you got to that point where you, are kind to yourself about what you did achieve.

30:16Yeah, I know exactly what I did and didn't do as a tennis player. I have a good handle on that. I do feel like I was a high performer. I definitely feel like there were periods in my life where I wasn't a high performer and that was why I fell down and didn't get to the very top. You know, as I say, there was pockets of my childhood and where I wasn't totally dialed in and you can't miss a moment if you're trying to get to the top of pro tennis you know that you can't have a duff year or two because the tour and the players and everybody just moves on and keeps getting better so the very best players the guys who got it right every step of the way but yeah i feel like i was yeah a high performing tennis player absolutely um i would have loved to have won a match at wimbledon i was pretty close but that definitely for me qualifies as high performance when you look at in the context of somebody who's won 20 odd slams like jacovic who takes it to a ridiculous this level not so much but I feel like I did okay and this episode Connor is dedicated to the person that says second is the first loser to the person that when they get a runners-up medal at a major tournament and by the way I've seen it in my son's under 10 football team when the runners-up medal gets put over their head they immediately remove it because it isn't a winner's medal I always laugh at that moment because I think it was Lothar Mateus did that first when he lost in the 99 final to United and it was a really great moment because he did feel like he had been robbed and did feel like the winner that day and now when you're taking off after you've lost 5-0 you know when you're under 12 or something it looks a little bit silly but um but yeah always makes me laugh that one but what would you say to those people that think that high performance or even that winning is only standing on the top step is only getting the gold medal is only being number one and not number two.

32:04You have to find your definition of success as you go and as I said I learnt that pretty quick at 12 or 13 that maybe this is playing in Wimbledon not winning in Wimbledon. Conor thank you so much for your time we really appreciate it man. Pleasure yeah absolutely great I really enjoy the podcast and following you guys for a few years so continued success well done. Damien what an interesting conversation with Conor and you know what of course we would love to speak to Roger Federer Novak Djokovic Rafa Nadal on high performance. But actually, sometimes there's a pretty good argument that more value can be found in speaking to someone like Conor when it comes to trying to find high performance in our own lives.

32:44Yeah, definitely, Jake. It reminded me of a famous story that often gets attributed to Roger Federer when he'd signed with Nike. And they had an advertising campaign that said, I hate losing. And Federer apparently put his foot down and said he wanted it changing because he said he wanted it reframing that I love winning because his point was I love winning more than I fear losing because like you referenced with Conor himself that everybody's going to lose so you might as well get used to that but actually focus on the bits that you do love. What it's prompted me to reflect on is the kind of questions we can all ask ourselves to define what success looks like.

33:20I mean, a question that I often challenge people when we have this conversation is who influenced your original definition of success and does that definition still continue to serve you to this day? You know, what might have been appropriate at 15 years of age is a father of a couple of kids. That might not be the definition that's as helpful today. You know, does your current framing of success align with your deepest values of who you want to be considered as or is it about managing external expectations? And finally, like, does reframing success to be able to focus on what I've learned, how I've grown and how this lights me up inside, is that more important than necessarily the trinkets of winning trophies or where you finish in a league table or how much money you've got in your bank account?

34:08You know, these are questions that any of us can reflect on when it comes to defining what success means for us. And we also ran a poll, actually, for you, our high-performance community, and we asked you, what's the real measure of success in sport? And these were the options, Damien. Reaching your potential, having no regrets, Winning titles or earning a living. Which would you put as the real measure of success? I reckon it'd be having no regrets. So leaving it all out there. You see, interesting. Because... Go on, what would you put? Well, I'd say the same as you having no regrets. Because the most popular answer was reaching your potential.

34:45So more people actually voted for reaching your potential than having no regrets, winning titles and earning a living combined. But here's my take on it. What if you reach your potential and you're still full of regret? You're still full of disappointment. You still wish there'd been more because you can still regret the fact you didn't have more potential, right? But I think reaching your potential doesn't guarantee freedom. You've reached your potential, but it doesn't mean that you're okay. Whereas I think having no regrets puts you in a place where you're like, right, you know what? I'm okay with it.

35:17Even if you didn't reach your potential, you're still comfortable because you've got no regrets. You know what I'm saying? well that goes back to you know like that original conversation that we often cite with phil neville where we spoke about doing the best you can with what you've got in the moment you're in that i think allows you to walk away and not have regrets that there's always stuff that you might do differently but there's a different moment different information that you could have had so yeah it's an interesting response but i think more personally what it throws up is we have to define it for ourselves on our own terms we can't let anybody else take the pen and write our definition of success for us because that only leads to unhappiness.

35:57And let me just remind you before we sign off that Damien and I have sat across from hundreds and hundreds of high performers and the majority, in fact, the vast majority, are not very happy despite the incredible things that they've achieved. They've got this mindset of always wanting more and arguably that mindset is the reason they've achieved so much. But who's the real high performer? The person who's achieved an incredible amount but doesn't feel happy and content and in flow or the person that regardless of their achievements, regardless of their accolades, is happy with where they're at in life.

36:29I'll leave you thinking about that. And if you want to get hold of Connor's book, it's called The Racket. It may or just help you or someone in your life reframe what winning is actually about. Thanks a lot, Damien. Thanks, Jake. Don't forget to hit follow or subscribe wherever you enjoy high performance. If you do that, it takes mere moments and it means we can grow this show and attract even more listeners and more incredible guests. Have a good one. Thanks for listening and we'll see you soon.

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