Episode 12
How to lead like an Olympian
After being injured and out for four months, former Olympic fencer Laurence Halstead was unsure if he would be able to qualify. A sports psychologist helped him see that if he was giving his best effort in a performance, he didn't need to beat himself up if he made mistakes.
This was a breakthrough for Laurence, who had always been incredibly hard on himself and struggled to get over a bad loss or mistake. He had thought that being hard on himself was what had helped him get to the elite level, but the psychologist helped him shift to a more self-compassionate mindset, so he could find more joy and freedom in his performance.
As a result of this Laurence saw how sport could be a force for good in the world and is now a leader in his own right working as the Director of Mentoring with the True Athlete Project and working directly with leaders.
Invitations
- How can you have more compassion for yourself?
- If you’re trying your best, you don’t need to beat yourself up.
- Mistakes are part of our design. What can we forgive ourselves for?
Links
Transcript
If you want to lead like an Olympian, this is the episode for you.
Julia:Welcome to Generative Leaders, and this week I'm in conversation with Laurence Halsted, former fencing Olympian who now works with leaders and elite sports people to be at their best.
Julia:Be great to hear Laurence kind of what are you up to in the world and sharing with the listeners a little bit about that.
Laurence:Yeah, thanks Julia.
Laurence:I guess it, it helps maybe to, to go into a little potted history to explain why I am here and what I'm doing now.
Laurence:So I have a background in elite sport.
Laurence:I was a fencer for the British team.
Laurence:For 10 years I was a full-time athlete.
Laurence:I competed in the London and Rio Olympic Games.
Laurence:I'm from London, so London was my, that Olympics was my hometown Olympic games, which was just an, just an absolute dream.
Laurence:In between those games, I actually moved to Denmark.
Laurence:I went, took a year off after the London Olympics and went traveling and met my now wife in Copenhagen and never moved home again.
Laurence:Actually, Relocated to, to Copenhagen where I am now.
Laurence:So I've been here for 10 years.
Laurence:I retired as a, as an athlete in 2016 and did two God and had two amazing breaks.
Laurence:First I became the performance director of the Danish Fencing Federation, so I was in charge of the national team, all the kind of competitions and camps, and I also joined a wonderful little charity called the True Athlete Project.
Laurence:It was set up as a charity in the us We're now a charity in the UK as well.
Laurence:And I've just helped kind of set that up and grow that I, I was the director and I am the director of mentoring at the charity.
Laurence:But I mean, I've been doing all sorts of other things with them for, for the last six, seven years, as a volunteer for the, for the first six years, and then at the end of 2021, I left the job in the federation, and had an opportunity then to, to get a full a, a part-time paid job in the charity, just doing the same stuff I'd been doing voluntarily.
Laurence:And I couldn't, I couldn't say no to that.
Laurence:It's been just one of the joys of my life to, to kind of be on that journey with this, with this quite wonderful charity that I'm sure talk a lot more about.
Laurence:But that's part-time at the moment.
Laurence:And the other part, the other half of my, my kind of work life is just a whole mix of kind of one-to-one coaching.
Laurence:I call it performance coaching consultancy in business and academia and other sectors.
Laurence:Some speaking.
Laurence:Uh, I run mentoring programs for in businesses as well through one of, uh, as an associate consultant.
Laurence:Just a whole bunch of things that really suits me down to the ground.
Laurence:I love this kind of variety.
Laurence:Every week's different.
Laurence:Every day is different.
Laurence:And one of the things I really thrive on is the cross-pollination.
Laurence:I just love getting ideas from these conversations, taking them into whatever other spheres.
Laurence:We often hear about how much business and other sectors can learn from elite sport.
Laurence:But I think there's so much we can go both ways and from all over the place.
Laurence:So that's what I mean, where brings us up to speed for today.
Julia:Brilliant.
Julia:And I, I've got so many questions to ask you, but I'd love to hear what got you into fencing?
Laurence:Yeah, it's not a complicated journey.
Laurence:Both of my parents were Olympic fences, so it was not, I wouldn't say inevitable because my older brother and sister didn't take that up particularly seriously.
Laurence:But then I was the youngest and the last hope I guess, of my parents.
Laurence:But they did a good job of supporting me and not being kind of over too overbearing.
Laurence:But yeah, it's a, that was my word.
Laurence:I grew up in a house full of Olympic memorabilia and fencing, kind of swords on all of the walls.
Laurence:And so it was always kind of part of my life and I'm.
Laurence:I'm very grateful that I did.
Laurence:It's kind of opened up so many incredible opportunities for me.
Julia:And how did your parents get into fencing?
Laurence:I think just both of them at school or joining a local club, I think they were both at schools that, that offered fencing and just happened to do it.
Laurence:So they were the first in their families to do it.
Laurence:It is not the most common sport, but it is growing and it's becoming much more accessible.
Laurence:A lot more schools are offering it.
Laurence:It's not just private schools and the financial barriers are lowering cuz there's a lot of clubs that just offer the kit.
Laurence:And so it is a, it is the world's best sport, so they really should be more people interested in it.
Laurence:But, uh, we kind of had our heyday about five, 600 years ago in France and.
Laurence:And haven't quite got back to that level of popularity.
Julia:Yeah, no.
Julia:Exactly.
Julia:Exactly.
Julia:Well, it's, it is such a, such a fascinating, art form I think as well.
Julia:It's, it's a sport and an art form and a real sort of tradition in, in life.
Julia:So, as you went through your, you know, your Olympic career, your, and then sort of transitioning into what you are doing now, what have you learned about leadership and, the difference between generative leadership and other types of leadership?
Laurence:Hmm.
Laurence:Well, I only came across the term generative in this kind of context, I guess a few years ago.
Laurence:Um, So it's something that I'm, I'm still kind of learning, learning about and trying to figure out for myself.
Laurence:But I guess I, for a lot longer than that, I've had a kind of knowledge and an interest in how these very different performance environments kind of come about.
Laurence:So there's a, bunch of cases of really toxic high performance environments coming to kind of light around the world, but especially the UK, Canada, Australia, America.
Laurence:And it always comes back to the leadership, the performance directors, the, the board and the coach, the head coaches.
Laurence:And so I've been really kind of interested in they, those kind of cultures versus the much more healthy kind of uplifting, harmonious cultures that can exist in high performance sport as well.
Laurence:Both can create incredible kind of results.
Laurence:And this is the problem that the toxic environments, they can still deliver kind of the, the best results, and that's why they kind of, they're allowed to stick in and stick around these kind of really awful leaders.
Laurence:So I'm kind of, I kind of covered it from, from that lens, the sport lens.
Laurence:kind of how does leadership create the environment that for people to either thrive in or to, to absolutely kind of undermine and break people down?
Laurence:How both can produce results that we are ostensibly looking for, but we are so misguided with the toxic one.
Laurence:The toxic cultures were so missing the point, missing so much of what is valuable and meaningful about doing sport, about being an athlete.
Laurence:And at the same time, I think that the positive, healthy version of that, if done, done well, can just lead to even more potential, even more of the results that we actually, the kind of how the, the bottom line results, let's say the medals and the rankings, but doing it in a, in a, in a way that's far more aligned with, with kind of human nature and human, the human spirit.
Laurence:So, That's, that's my kind of my take on it.
Laurence:I actually, I was really interested to hear from, I've heard a couple of your, your episodes before.
Laurence:I dunno if anyone's asked you what, what generative leadership means to you.
Laurence:I'd love to hear that.
Julia:Yeah, no, happy to.
Julia:Happy to share.
Julia:I mean, I think it's really interesting how you sort of characterize these two worlds of kind of toxicity and, and something else that's aligned with the, with the human spirit.
Julia:And I think that, you know, if we think about the toxic culture, it's all about working harder.
Julia:Knowing more, working harder, pushing yourself even if you are in pain, even if you're in injured, It is like you are not able to show that side of yourself.
Julia:You've gotta just push through it and, and work harder.
Julia:And I think in a, business environment, it's very similar.
Julia:It's, just work harder.
Julia:That's the sort of mantra of that leadership environment is if everybody just works harder, we are gonna get the results that we, that we want.
Julia:And the.
Julia:Sort of dimension of it is that it's not about people thinking for themselves, it's about having an individual that is doing all of the thinking on behalf of everybody else.
Julia:So people are almost kind of cut off from their own wisdom because the person that's leading the organization knows best, and has stopped everybody thinking for themselves.
Julia:Whereas, I guess what I see in a, in a generative leadership environment is the role of the leader is to have everyone think for themselves, and to create an environment where they can draw out the wisdom from the collective group to get the best result.
Julia:And that that can come from anywhere.
Julia:You know, It's not limited to a hierarchy, it's not limited to a position, it's not limited to a role.
Julia:It's, it's about generating literally the best ideas and, uh, ways of doing things that just make sense within the context within which you are, you are operating.
Julia:And those leaders that really create those environments, are the ones that people walk away from saying That is where I did my best work.
Julia:And I felt really good about it and I thrived and it was hard, difficult work, but I had a great time doing it.
Julia:And so, it's this paradox of, you know, in a generative environment, people are probably working as hard as the toxic environment, but it looks like that's what makes sense to them.
Julia:They're not being driven to it.
Julia:They're, they're coming to it because it's, it's what makes sense to them.
Laurence:I, so I recently interviewed, uh, one of the mentors in our mentoring program.
Laurence:In the Canadian Olympic rowing squad, the women's eight, they, they moved an incredible story.
Laurence:I wrote a blog about it because it was so amazing.
Laurence:They moved from the most toxic type environment under a horrific, brutal kind of traditional coach, kicked him out, got in a, a wonderful, the opposite type of coach, and just went on this journey for a year and a half towards the Tokyo Olympics.
Laurence:And just so it reminded me of a line that Andrea, the mentor, said, It was incredible how much harder I could push myself when I wasn't weighed down by this baggage, this emotional baggage and anxiety that would come up under the other coach.
Laurence:And it's true, it's not about going softer necessarily.
Laurence:Sometimes it could be about that, but, but it's about how much you, you can still kind of, you can almost ask more of your, your team and they can ask more of themselves when, when this, this type of support and leadership is in place and this environment is in place.
Julia:And it's evolving, It's a, it's an evolving space.
Julia:But I, I, I sort of look to the natural world and the seasons change on their own.
Julia:Know there's not any human intervention.
Julia:They just change on their own because it makes sense given the, the change in the world.
Julia:And so, you know, if we keep looking to that natural alignment with who we are as human beings, there are gonna be times when it makes sense to push ourselves.
Julia:It's gonna make sense, but there's times we need to rest.
Julia:It makes sense that, you know, there's times we need to reflect, and this is the full expression of, of human nature.
Julia:So, it'd be really great to hear more about the True Athlete Project and of the insights that you've had in le in leadership through the work that you've been doing there.
Julia:And then also, some of the work that you've been doing with, with business.
Laurence:Yeah, so like I said, we are a pretty special charity.
Laurence:I think I actually, I wrote a book in 2021 which outlined our kind of full philosophy and our approach to athlete development and sport and what, what sport means in society.
Laurence:And I think just that the, that our approach to sport and being an athlete can fill a book is kind of says a lot that, that there's a lot behind what we're, what we are all about.
Laurence:So, I mean just the, the journey of this mentoring program that I've helped kind of set up and, and grow has been so special.
Laurence:So, , we match kind of Olympic level, elite level athletes with young aspiring athletes of, of any level, actually not necessarily kind of star talents.
Laurence:And they go through a year long program.
Laurence:It's, it's actually the most structured kind of mentoring program that there is in exist in sport.
Laurence:There's not that many out there, but ours is the most kind of structured.
Laurence:They go through this years, years program together, meeting every one to three weeks.
Laurence:Lots of kind of really personal conversations.
Laurence:But we also have our kind of curriculum that describes our, our philosophy, our approach.
Laurence:It's all about a really holistic approach to, to athlete development.
Laurence:So we have five pillars on performance, psychology, on identity and values on mindfulness.
Laurence:Mindfulness is a thread that runs through all of our kind of programming on community responsibility and on nature and connectedness.
Laurence:So really it's a program and this is what we are about.
Laurence:It's a, it's a program not just about who these people are as athletes, but who they are as people in society and humans living on the planet and, and how all of that goes into kind of how they show up in their training, in their performances and can help them if they kind of get a picture of this and are aware of all of these things.
Laurence:It can help them be better athletes and achieve what more of what they want.
Laurence:And we've just, it's grown from one pair, one kind of pilot pair in 2016 to to seven, to 17 to now.
Laurence:We d we have year on year 30 to 35 pairs globally.
Laurence:So spread last.
Laurence:This last cohort was 33 different sports, 12 different nationalities.
Laurence:It's just an amazing kind of collection of people who are aligned.
Laurence:So our mission in the True Athlete Project is to create a more compassionate culture through sport.
Laurence:And all these mentors, amazing kind of high level athletes, all these young athletes.
Laurence:So they come to us because they're attracted to this, to this mission.
Laurence:They're not all fully a hundred percent aligned from the start, but they, they see something there and they, they, they wanna be a part of it.
Laurence:And, and it just has, like I say, it's just been such a joy to, to go on this journey with these, with this program and to see what, what an impact it has.
Laurence:And I started as a, as a big fan of mentoring.
Laurence:I had a, a bit of my own experience, kind of mentoring, kind of classic big brother mentoring a little while before that, but now I'm just a complete evangelist for the power, the transformational power of mentoring.
Laurence:There is without hyperbole, there's, there's nothing like mentoring for transformational kind of growth and development of, of individuals.
Laurence:It really is so incredible what these both mentor and mentee, and I heard your, your last, your last guest Liam speak about this.
Laurence:How much the mentor gets out of the relationship.
Laurence:And our mentor, we often hear from mentor, our mentors, they feel like they're getting more out of it than the mentee is.
Laurence:And this is kind of Olympic champions mentoring a 17, 18 year old young talent, and they feel like they're getting more out of it.
Laurence:Obviously the mentee is just having an incredible time.
Laurence:And then it is not that the mentor's getting.
Laurence:but that's, that's how it can feel for sure.
Laurence:So there's just this, there's just so much power to that relationship, the mentoring relationship for the young person to have a, uh, this neutral older kind of sage, wise sage just being there for them in their corner without any judgment.
Laurence:It's just been such a pleasure to see this come into the world, and this is, this is generative stuff, I think.
Laurence:This is one of the best ways to help people get to see that kind of power in themselves, both for mentors and mentees.
Laurence:And it starts with the connection.
Laurence:It's all, we have this wonderful curriculum, all these great, great, this great content, but it's, the power isn't based in this connection of two people kind of creating a bond and, and what that does both of their learning and and development.
Laurence:So that's one, that's one of the programs that we run is this mentoring program.
Laurence:And we do various other things with coach development.
Laurence:We do mindfulness classes for athletes and coaches.
Laurence:We work with whole organizations now, kind of leadership all the way down through coaches to, to athletes.
Laurence:And we just, we have some kind of innovative methods and, and classes and workshops around love and compassion and gratitude and, and they're not just the, the, the soft, fluffy stuff.
Laurence:They're, they're the things that will really impact the people's experience of doing their sport at all levels up to Olympic level, and will contribute to their, to getting better performances.
Laurence:And I, I know because I've lived this, a lot of this has come from my direct experience of just changing my approach to performance, almost 180 degrees.
Julia:So can you share some of the insights that you personally had that kind of le led you to being this evangelist about, about mentoring and, and, maybe share some of the stories that, that have really resonated with you?
Laurence:Yeah, sure.
Laurence:So the thing that strikes me, I've had a, a number of insights kind of during my sporting career.
Laurence:The one that kind of leaps out to me when I think about insights, because it was such a kind of an acute moment in my, in my life.
Laurence:It was, it was, uh, when I started working with an amazing sport psychologist back in 2012.
Laurence:It was a, the year leading up to the London Olympics.
Laurence:I'd gotten injured in the first kind of training session of that year, broke my wrist in my sword arm and had, I was out kind of for four months, I didn't know if I was gonna be getting back to any kind of level to qualify for that Olympics.
Laurence:But worked with this wonderful sports psychologist and she just, through a couple of conversations we had, helped me, helped me see that that if, basically, if you, if you are giving your best in a performance, if you're trying your hardest, you don't need to beat yourself up if it goes wrong, if you make mistakes.
Laurence:This was my life beforehand, all the way up until at that point when I was 27 that I was incredibly hard on myself, kind of in tears after losing almost every time, just take days or weeks to get over a, a bad loss or a mistake.
Laurence:And, and I thought that that's what, like a lot of people now, I realize I thought that's what was helping me.
Laurence:That was what, that was what meant that I was at that level that I'd got to elite level was because I was this kind of consummate professional.
Laurence:There was nothing was good enough.
Laurence:I was always kind of honored myself to do better.
Laurence:And katie, she just helped me see that none of that makes sense.
Laurence:Actually, you can, you can forgive yourself for making mistakes if you've been trying, if you're trying to stick to your game plan, live by your values.
Laurence:And it sounds so simple, but it, it revolutionized my approach.
Laurence:I literally, over the course of it wasn't overnight, but maybe over the course of some weeks and months, which is lightning in terms of kind of mindset change, I shifted completely into a, a far more self-compassionate place where I, I really just wasn't getting hung up on losing, on making mistakes because I was so focused on, on the process of what I needed to do in there.
Laurence:If it didn't go my way, it was fine.
Laurence:And that opened up so much more joy and freedom in my performance.
Laurence:That was also the period we were using a kind of framework around, this was all the chimp model run by Steve Peters that I was getting an understanding of, of kind of the processes of my, my brain and my mind and what, what was helping me and what was hindering me.
Laurence:And that gave me a, a deep insight into all the ways that my brain was not on my side.
Laurence:It wasn't just doing the things that needed.
Laurence:I needed to, to help me because I was an nearly athlete.
Laurence:It was far more often doing things that would hinder me.
Julia:And it, it is so innocent, isn't it, Laurence, that you know, to realize that you live in a human mind that works in a certain way, that you can innocently learn to misuse against yourself is such a fundamental universal human experience.
Julia:We all use our minds against ourselves innocently all of the time.
Julia:And it sounds like, you know, you'd become an elite professional in doing that to yourself.
Julia:And so to have someone come along and kind of tap you on the shoulder and say, Hey, Laurence, you don't have to use your mind in that way, there's another way to use your mind that's different, sounds like it was really freeing for.
Laurence:Uh, absolutely.
Laurence:I mean, it, it led to the, the following years were just the best years of my career, both in terms of performance, in terms of enjoyment and feeling of meaning.
Laurence:I literally, I didn't have, it took me five minutes to get over the worst results.
Laurence:So the great, the great kind of sign of how impactful this was in the Rio Olympics, I was in my first match in the day.
Laurence:I was competing against a Chinese guy.
Laurence:I went eight nil down in a match to 15.
Laurence:So it was looking like a complete kind of whitewash.
Laurence:It was.
Laurence:It was, could have gone horrendous.
Laurence:And previously, a few years back, I would've been absolutely kind of laid low by anxiety and fear and hum like this, what if I lose this 15 nil?
Laurence:I'll be humiliated in my Olympic debut.
Laurence:It's just horrendous, kind of.
Laurence:It would've all weighed on top of me and I didn't have any of that.
Laurence:I was, all I had was a kind of fierce determination of what do I need to do now to get back in this match?
Laurence:And that kind of, I, I got back, I got right back up kind of almost level with him, then he pulled away in one.
Laurence:So it didn't have this Hollywood ending, but that juxtaposition of how I felt in that moment versus all of my career, as soon as I, a match was getting difficult, what kind of the, the, that anxiety that would rise in me that was just so sharp.
Laurence:So I've been teaching this kind of self-compassionate approach to, to athletes and coaches since then and just unanimously when people, when it, when it's the right time for them, not everyone buys into it straightaway equally, but when it's the right time for somebody to get it, they unanimously say, this has helped me phenomenally to, to improve my experience and, and performance.
Laurence:So there's this, this taught me the kind of power of the, the love approach versus fear.
Laurence:This is the, this is the Star War.
Laurence:A story arc, right?
Laurence:That love beats fear, and I've really, I've experienced it myself.
Julia:Well, it's you know, to me it looks like that when you can see that it's your mind creating that experience and that once you have that realization that you can see that, it then creates this space of choice of, well, it's almost like a crossroads that you kind of get to of do I go left to fear, and I kind of know where that's gonna take me, or do I go right into the present moment where all there is is love?
Julia:Because when you're in the present moment with no imagining of the future, or imagining of the past.
Julia:So, in your story it was imagining the embarrassment you would feel when you left, or imagining all of the previous matches that you'd lost and how you felt after that, you know, When you, when you are not bound by either of those two stories and you're just in the present moment, that's the zone, that's the, that's the place of the zone, that's the place of flow, that's the place of focus.
Julia:And when you're in that place there, there is nothing else.
Julia:So everything else just just falls away.
Laurence:But it, I mean, this is the holy grail of, of performances being in flow in the zone, and it feels so, almost mystical that you can't, you almost can't get there by willing it in any way.
Laurence:So you've trying to come up with all these strategies and drawn all these tools and methods to, to help you become more present.
Laurence:But it feels.
Laurence:So elusive, but this was one method that I, that really, really helped me to, to get there.
Julia:Yeah.
Julia:Well, it's that, it's, it sounds like it.
Julia:And and that's the point, isn't it?
Julia:Is like the value in seeing how something works, you know, when you can kind of see, oh, this is, this is how it works, this is how, this is how my brain is working right now, versus this is what's happening to me.
Julia:It's just a very, it's a very subtle, nuanced uh, experience, but it's, it has a profound effect on the difference that it creates.
Laurence:Well, actually it's, it, it often is subtle nuance, but I, I remember so clearly the first time I sat down to meditate.
Laurence:The first ever time, it was a little while before this, so I don't know why I didn't get this, where this insight didn't stick very well.
Laurence:just sitting down and meditate, focus, classic kind of focus, focus on your breath for five minutes, whatever it was, and the, I could, my brain just went firing in all sorts of directions after 10 seconds and then 10 seconds again constantly.
Laurence:And I realized, hang on, I've got this simple task.
Laurence:I am trying just for five minutes to focus on my breath.
Laurence:And I, and my brain is not letting me, it's just doing whatever it, whatever the hell it wants.
Laurence:That was a sudden, that was a real insight.
Laurence:I thought my brain was on my side, and it's very clearly not.
Laurence:It's just throwing shit at me constantly.
Laurence:And where that stuff's coming from.
Laurence:I have no idea and I'm not choosing it.
Laurence:And I mean, that's kind of the, the insight that we want everyone to, to get to or to start with perhaps.
Laurence:And I got that, that would've been a few years before this in my early twenties.
Laurence:It clearly took a lot longer to sink in the kind of film profundity of that.
Laurence:But I often say that to when start meditating and just, just get that, that insight into what, how your brain's working, because if it's not on our side, then what does that mean for us?
Julia:Well, and, and I guess I would, I would just slightly annotate what you just said, is that our brain is on our side most of the time, bringing us things that we need, but we don't ever direct it in that place.
Julia:So, you know, if you notice, many people have, you know, if they, if they focus on something, their mind will be very helpful in the things that it brings them um, you know, of that focus.
Julia:But we are often just not focusing.
Julia:So the, so the mind goes, well, I don't really know what you want, so I'm just gonna show you, throw you a whole bunch of shit.
Julia:And and, and maybe something will be helpful.
Julia:I don't know.
Julia:It's kind of like, well, you are not directing me, you're not giving me any place to focus, so I'm just gonna give you a bunch of random shit.
Julia:Like, do the shopping.
Julia:Did you go to the bathroom?
Julia:What's on TV tonight?
Julia:You know, It's like any of these, any of these
Laurence:Yeah.
Laurence:Yeah, you're right.
Laurence:Your brain is on your side a lot of the time, and that's why then I think later on when I got this chimp model where you've got this kind of metaphor for what have the process in the brain, you have the chimp, which is your reptilian kind of responses, and you've got the human, which is you, the conscious.
Laurence:you're conscious choosing of what to do, and then you've got your computer, which is your inbuilt kind of conditioning.
Laurence:That really helped me kind of separate out kind of what, what's happening when my brain is, is with me and, and we are on task and what's happening?
Laurence:And it's just the, it's the chimp who's just throwing these, throwing this stuff at you and you, you need to understand how to, how to manage your chimp.
Laurence:So that that let, that allowed this insight to kind of really embed in me.
Julia:And that, and that's what I was saying earlier is that, if you dunno how something works, it's very difficult to operate it.
Julia:And, you know, If you, if you think about, I mean, certainly for my life, I was born into a human mind and it didn't come with an instruction manual, and my parents definitely didn't have an instruction manual for it.
Julia:And so, you know, we are all kind of trying to figure out, well how does this thing that we are born into bloody work so that we can use it effectively?
Julia:And and so, we create a whole load of theories about how we think it works, that is actually just a misuse, you know.
Julia:It's like these days Apple mobile phones don't come with an instruction manual.
Julia:It's supposed to be all very intuitive and, so we, we kind of use it to the best of our ability.
Julia:But I dunno about you, Laurence, but there's been so many times when my 17 year old son has shown me something about the way that my phone that I'm like, oh my God, that's amazing.
Julia:I did not know it could do that.
Julia:That's incredible.
Julia:you know, and then it's fundamentally changed my use of the phone and it's like the human mind is kind of the same, the same way.
Julia:And you know, once we get that kind of deeper understanding of how it works, then you know, our ability to operate it just infinitely improves.
Julia:And we have to use all these metaphors about the way it works because it's, it's kind of invisible and elusive.
Julia:Because, you know, it's like I can conceptualize from my biology classes how my heart works.
Julia:But it's, if you kind of think about it, nobody's taught about how the mind works in biology classes,
Laurence:And when you put it like that, isn't it so incredible that we haven't figured out a way to just introduce this to children, to, to the education system?
Laurence:This is brain training from the very first all and probably all the way through, because you can increase the complexity, but we just go straight into learning about stuff.
Laurence:I mean, there's some, some of it's inbuilt, embedded in what we teach, I guess.
Laurence:But nothing explicit, nothing.
Laurence:I mean, I, I kind of had this realization that I felt incredibly lucky to have amazing sports psychologists, an amazing kind of training ground to practice and to learn about my brain and how, how it can help me, how I can help it, help me.
Laurence:And so few people get that opportunity, that, that kind of privilege to, to learn about their brain in that way.
Laurence:And then I coming to work in, in businesses I have done recently seeing that, I mean the budget in teams for team building and personal development and stuff are far beyond what my fencing team had in a budget.
Laurence:But we had a full-time physio.
Laurence:We had a psychologist for whenever we needed them.
Laurence:We had video analysts.
Laurence:We had all sorts of support functions on hand for us.
Laurence:And people out in the workplace have none of this support.
Laurence:I mean, at best they could hope for a coaching program every now and then, or the odd workshop.
Laurence:But this kind of thing, I, I then got a, got excited about coming and teaching some of, some of what I've learn about how the mind works and how you can, yeah, the, some of the lesser known things about kind of performing under pressure and to, to people who just would never have had that opportunity before.
Julia:Well it would be great to hear about some of those, cuz I think you know a lot of the people that listen to this podcast, a, they're trying to generate something in the world that generally has never been done before.
Julia:Very much like you are doing with, with the project that you are, that you're running, compassion in elite sport is not something that's ever been done before.
Julia:Uh, and they're also feeling that performance pressure.
Julia:They've got this vision, they've got this, kind of idea of a way to change the world.
Julia:And then there's all this performance pressure that comes with that.
Julia:So, know, it'd be really amazing if you might share some of the lessons that you've, that you've learned around that with, with the listeners.
Laurence:Yeah, I like to kind of talk about a few particular concepts.
Laurence:Self-compassion is one, so it's the, this is one of the biggest misconceptions we have is, like I said, self-criticism being really harsh and being perfectionistic is helpful, he's gonna help us perform.
Laurence:And it's the absolute opposite that's hindering us.
Laurence:That's, that's inhibiting us.
Laurence:So a self-compassionate approach is, is far more powerful.
Laurence:So helping people realize that treating yourself with forgiveness, kindness, care, just like you would your best friend or your favorite kind of colleague or, or parents, sibling.
Laurence:That makes total sense.
Laurence:We are far, we, when we just don't tend to do that in the same way.
Laurence:We, we treat ourselves far worse than we do the people that we love.
Laurence:That doesn't make any sense.
Laurence:A value-based kind of foundation to, to what you do, um, had also an amazing experience of kind of setting out my core values in life and, and using them to, to help lay a foundation for, for wellbeing.
Laurence:When you have this kind of deep sense of who you are and what you care about yourself, just doesn't get affected by the ups and downs of performance that's stable all the way through.
Laurence:They can help you kind of navigate situations, make decisions in line with your, with, with your values.
Laurence:So there's, there's really kind of deep wellbeing and, and performance benefits.
Laurence:So just getting where you want, but, in a values kind of led approach.
Laurence:Mindfulness comes into it as well.
Laurence:I think just this mindfulness is both a, a foundation of self-compassion, just being aware of what your inner inner dialogue is going through.
Laurence:But so many other kind of directions that mind mindfulness spreads out in.
Laurence:Uh, something like embracing the vulnerability of, of performance is something I like to, to talk about.
Laurence:And, and this kind of gets us a bit closer into the, to the team approach, which is all around kind of psychological safety, compassionate environment, psychological safety, they're, they're very similar and similar in, in what they, they mean in reality.
Laurence:The idea of creating an environment where people can bring themselves, who they are kind of behind the, the work mask to work, not that they have to say, they can say everything they want off the top of their head and not worry about it, but you have to be able to kind of be a, a, a whole human being in what you're doing.
Laurence:And if you can do that, you can show up like that and your colleagues can, it just brings a whole lot more connection, harmony, understanding, compassion.
Laurence:So this is where I really, where I really kind of push my work with teams in, in all spheres is, uh, getting people to kind of bring more of themselves to the table.
Laurence:And in doing so, you just create this kind of waterfall of effects.
Laurence:Psychological safety grows out of connection and understanding.
Laurence:So then you're allowed, then you are much more, people are much more able to kind of admit when they've made mistakes, to ask for help, they're not so worried about sharing opinions cuz they might be stupid.
Laurence:And these are things we know that psychological safety is just a massive driver of team performance.
Laurence:So when people feel safe to, for all of those things and kind of supported, then they're able to take more risks.
Laurence:They're able to yeah, ask for help to kind of, to push themselves, and, uh, and really that's, that's one of the, one of the core kind of key drivers.
Laurence:So I, I come, I just come back to these kind of topics about values.
Laurence:So I do work with getting people to explore their personal values and then share them with their teammates and their colleagues.
Laurence:And they're just those wonderful conversations where you talk about what you really value about life and about yourself, helps take off layer of, layer of corporate mask and reveal a bit about yourself.
Laurence:And that just goes, it's, it's always kind of shocking for people to see how far that goes, just to, to get that insight into what somebody feels about themselves and some of their doubts and kind of some of their vulnerabilities.
Laurence:You get some of that on the table and it really, this is team building.
Laurence:You don't need to go and build rafts and cross lakes and go abseiling, you just need to share a little bit about.
Julia:So, what advice would you have for a leader that is potentially suffering some anxiety or some, fear about their ability to go and do whatever it is that they're trying to do in the world?
Laurence:I mean, drawing, drawing from, from my experience, I, I mean, I always start, so this could be one of my coaching clients, for example.
Laurence:I, I always start with the values kind of piece, the values exploration and just kind of setting out.
Laurence:What it is that they, that they care and value about themselves.
Laurence:And that always sets the scene for you can begin to see that these things can't be affected by whether you're successful or not.
Laurence:These are just ways that you want to be in the world and you're always, you know, you're not living them a hundred percent, but you are always trying to, you're striving to.
Laurence:We make them kind of a bit more practical about how you can live these out in daily life.
Laurence:And then I, I'd often come back to this kind of focus on the process that, again, the anxiety arises from fears and thoughts and doubts, thoughts in the mind that that aren't necessarily true or reality or even connected to reality.
Laurence:And this is our kind of shared interest in, in insights principles that those thoughts are only, are only relevant or only powerful as much as you give them power.
Laurence:And, and there are various ways that you can strip them of that power.
Laurence:You can use mindfulness just to kind of let thoughts go.
Laurence:I had this experience of the, the kind of the, the biggest driver of my kind of pure sporting performance was where I really kind of made granular what focus on the process meant.
Laurence:So just quickly, I described what my best performance looked like in terms of effort and attitude.
Laurence:What does it look like, feel like?
Laurence:How did I move, how did I feel?
Laurence:What was my attitude at the time?
Laurence:How was I responding to in the moment?
Laurence:And then I would rate myself purely based on my effort and attitude.
Laurence:Nothing.
Laurence:And there was all things in my control.
Laurence:So nothing about the score, the result of the match didn't matter.
Laurence:I was rating myself on my input and my attitude.
Laurence:And almost over, over a period of time, the, the result isn't interesting anymore because you can't control the result.
Laurence:So this helps you kind of relax into, well, my job is just to do this, this stuff here.
Laurence:I'm gonna do my work, I'm gonna, I'm gonna do my preparation and train hard and, and try and focus in the moment.
Laurence:But that's my job.
Laurence:My job isn't, isn't necessary to win.
Laurence:My, I can't control whether I win.
Laurence:I can't control the referee, the weather, whatever.
Laurence:And there's so many equivalents in, business environment.
Laurence:You can't control your colleagues, you can't control the markets, you can't control your boss and the board strategy.
Laurence:You can do this bit here.
Laurence:And we focus on, on breaking that down and, and making that clear.
Laurence:And then, and then the anxiety just tends to, I mean, you, you can't hold onto it really.
Laurence:When you are, you know what you're in control of, and that's the thing that you focus on and rate yourself on, then anxiety comes from the unknowns, right?
Laurence:It comes from the uncontrollables.
Laurence:What if, what, what are people thinking?
Laurence:And as soon as you kind of set out, well, that's nothing to do with me, what people are thinking, whether I get a promotion, that's actually nothing to do with me.
Laurence:What's to do with me is that I can do this, this, and this one.
Laurence:So that's a couple of, a couple of places I might start with.
Julia:Yeah.
Julia:No, that's, that's really, really, really helpful, Laurence.
Julia:And, it is that imagining, the using the mind of the imagining of all of the unknowns.
Julia:And also getting comfortable with the fact that we're in the unknown all of the time.
Julia:We, we, we have ideas about what's going to happen, and, you know, sometimes they can be pretty good at being closer to the reality of, of the future.
Julia:But the only thing that's ever really known is this moment that we're in right now.
Julia:Everything else we are making up.
Julia:And that goes from moment to moment to moment to moment to moment.
Julia:And you know, so kind of getting caught in that trap of trying to predict the next moment or the next 25 moments or the next year of moments, and suffering the anxiety of the unknown of that is sort of, you know, when you start to look at it like that, it's like, it just doesn't make any sense.
Laurence:Yeah.
Laurence:We create a little movie in our heads and then get horribly stressed about the movie.
Julia:Yeah, we just freak ourselves out.
Julia:and it's so, it is, it is so innocent, isn't it?
Julia:It's so innocent to, to do that, and to not realize that that's what's going on.
Julia:It's like you get this feeling of anxiety and it kind of, it looks like, well, I've got this huge match that's coming up.
Julia:But what you don't see is all the invisible thinking that you've got about how that's gonna go, how that's gonna be, how that's gonna happen, that's, that's kind of playing out in your mind.
Julia:That's all being loaded on this one future event.
Julia:That if you can start to start to see that, that, it's like, well, I could go there, but is it helping me right now by going there?
Laurence:So this is a, this is another question I had for you.
Laurence:So it is so often just an unconscious process that everybody's kind of going through an autopilot to some extent, and that's, you can't escape.
Laurence:You can't escape that until you raise awareness.
Laurence:And so I, I see mindfulness meditation as just a wonderful starting point for all of this kind of work.
Laurence:Because it's just, it's exactly that.
Laurence:It's raising awareness of what's happening for you in the present moment.
Laurence:How much does, does mindfulness kind of figure in, in the work that you do or in kind of in insights, principles, work?
Julia:So, the, the work that we do is, is really understand helping people understand how the mind is designed so that they can use it in the most effective way that works for them.
Julia:And by seeing that design, some people it makes sense for some people to start meditating and doing and doing mindfulness.
Julia:That's, that's a potential outcome of the work that we do.
Julia:But other people find other things more helpful for them.
Julia:And so you know, we don't give people.
Julia:Prescriptions of what they should or shouldn't do.
Julia:We teach them about how the mind works and and then we see that they have their own wisdom to see what's gonna be helpful for them.
Julia:And and, and that's, that's what we're always pointing people to is their own wisdom about, you know, once they see how something works, they see the implications of that and then what to do makes, makes absolute, absolute sense.
Julia:So to give people a prescription or a set of techniques, just, it doesn't look like it makes sense to us cuz that's taking people away from their own, their own wisdom and their own their own way of, of seeing things.
Julia:However, you know, in the work that we do, one of the realizations that we help people have is to understand that they're alive.
Julia:They're a living, alive being that's, that has an aliveness to it.
Julia:So it's changing all of the time.
Julia:That they are aware that they have consciousness.
Julia:And that allows them to be aware of the world, but also what's going on inside their own minds.
Julia:And that they are thinkers.
Julia:They create with their minds the experience that they're having.
Julia:And there's you know, a series of implications that, that come from having those realizations.
Julia:And so we try to give people an experience of all of those three things.
Julia:And so, you know, seeing what's happening in your own mind is a really helpful way of, of realizing that you are alive, you are aware, and you are a thinker, and that those three gifts are essentially creating your experience in every, in every single moment.
Julia:So, it feels like Laurence, that would be a great place for us to sort of conclude our conversation for today.
Julia:But it would be great to understand how can people learn more about the True Athlete Project?
Julia:How can people get in touch with you?
Julia:How can people support the wonderful charity that's deliver, you know, creating the next generation of elite athletes?
Laurence:Yeah, well firstly, it's not just the next generation of elite athletes.
Laurence:We want to change the culture of sport at all levels.
Laurence:So that's from PE classes where so many kids are turned off from sport from the very beginning, all the way up to elite sport.
Laurence:So it's because sport is such a, a ubiquitous activity for the world, the whole world we want to change the whole culture.
Laurence:But it would be, I mean, we are always looking for people who wanna support the work, and we are, yeah, we, we feel like we are on quite a special mission kind of ahead of the curve in a lot of the way, a lot of ways that the sports world is starting to catch up to the importance of compassion in, in all environments and mindfulness and mentoring especially.
Laurence:So if anyone wants to be a part of that journey with us and, I was always looking for sponsors and partners.
Laurence:So good, happy to do that shout out.
Laurence:So just have a look at thetrueathleteproject.org.
Laurence:That's our website.
Laurence:I've got my own personal website, laurencehalstead.com, and, uh, I'm always happy to hear from people.
Laurence:I'm never too busy and, uh, will always respond to anyone who reaches out if anyone's interested.
Laurence:So just for a chat or to to hear more about this work, any of these multitude of different work approaches.
Laurence:So yeah, love to hear from anyone who's interested.
Julia:Brilliant.
Julia:And you mentioned your book as well Laurence, is that available on your
Laurence:Uh, I don't set it on my website.
Laurence:Uh, it's on available on the True Athlete Project website or anywhere the books are bought.
Laurence:It's called Becoming a True Athlete, a Practical Philosophy for Flourishing Through Sport.
Laurence:It's aimed at athletes and coaches and anyone supporting them.
Laurence:So if you have an interest in sport or have a child who's, who's sporty, then it could be for you or for them.
Julia:Great.
Julia:Well, Lorin, thank you so much for having.
Julia:Session today.
Julia:And I'm sure we'll have many future conversations and um, you know, we'd love to get you back and, and sort of hear about your, your ongoing journey in, in the
Laurence:Yeah, well maybe when we've done done a bit of this work with some sports teams, we'll come back on and discuss it then.
Julia:That was such a great conversation with Laurence and I loved how he talks about how we can all have more compassion for ourselves.
Julia:It's finding that space that allows you to do that.
Julia:So I'd like you to spend a moment just reflecting on how you might have more compassion for yourself.
Julia:And ask yourself if you're trying your best.
Julia:You don't need to beat yourself up.
Julia:It's not helping you.
Julia:We can all ruminate on our thoughts and, go into what we coulda, shoulda, woulda done differently.
Julia:But if we are having those insights now, they weren't available to us at the time.
Julia:So we were trying our best at the time, and that experience gave us the insight, knowledge, and reflection to be able to generate those insights after the occurrence.
Julia:So it's helpful to reflect, but that time has gone, and the insights that you have and the reflections that you have, help you learn for next time.
Julia:The second thing that, uh, Laurence really asked us to reflect on is what mistakes can you forgive yourself for?
Julia:We all make mistakes.
Julia:We are human.
Julia:It's part of our design, but we've got this in-built capacity within us for learning.
Julia:And the more mistakes that we make, the more that we can have the opportunity to learn.
Julia:Children who are learning to walk fall down around 300 times before they get up and learn to walk.
Julia:As adults, we typically don't have that patience for that process, and the average human who tries to take up windsurfing will give up after five tries.
Julia:Not much learning going on there.
Julia:But if we wanna get good at something, we have to have compassion for the mistakes that we make.
Julia:And have the ability to learn from them.
Julia:So just keep seeing this in-built capacity that you've got for that learning, you've got for that process, and start focusing on the process cuz that's where the joy, freedom, and exhilaration of leading comes from.
Julia:I hope you enjoyed this episode and if you did, please do share it with someone that may also find it helpful.
Julia:You can do that@generativeleaders.co.
