Transcript
PADDY UPTON
So I'll set you up for a few hours this morning just sharing some of my experiences and some of my ideas that I've gained over the last 12, 15 years working as a mental conditioning coach, a coach in various professional sports and businesses.
Why am I actually sitting here sharing this? This story really goes back to the 1990s when I spent four years from 1994 to 1998 as the fitness trainer with the South African cricket team, under Bob Woolmer and Hansie Cronje. And I was in my mid 20s then. I had pretty much anything someone in their mid 20s or a young man could want. I had money. I had freedom, three, four months a year holiday, travel the world, staying in 5-star hotels, meeting girls, having free meals at every restaurant I went into with the superstar cricketers, meeting Nelson Mandela, the Queen.
But I touched-- and it was an emptiness within me, even though everything on the outside really worked and was great. And when I touched that, I looked at the individual players and I thought I could sense in quite a few of them a similar emptiness on a personal level.
And on a professional level, I looked around at this team under Bob Woolmer, who was probably the most innovative and forward thinking coach in the world at the time, and I honestly believed that as a team we could be doing so much better. But I didn't know what that missing piece was within me personally. And I didn't know what was missing with a national team that I felt if we had that we could be a whole lot better.
And really when I resigned in 1998 and put a backpack on my back and went wandering around Southeast Asia for six months living on US dollars a day budget, I started to come across some of the answers or the beginning to the answers that I was searching for-- like what's that something missing?
And if I fast forward to a few years later, studying a second master's degree in business coaching-- and I got exposed to what some of the best leaders were doing to bring the best out in individuals and in teams and create these great cultures where people's natural motivation just flowed and it brought the best out in people. And that's really where the lights went on for me. It was like that real personal caring, people's first, people centred approach to high performance in business and sport in a time where sport science, and measuring people, and measuring people's behaviours, and video people, and statistics, and all these experts coming into tell us what to do, and how to do it, and how to do it better, and things just got better, and better, and more, and more, scientific, and less, and less, personal.
And that's really what started me on this journey to start include and encompass all of those things that are required in the professional era of stats, and data, and clever strategy, and expert inputs that we need in sports and business. But that's become too commonplace. In fact, it seems to have overtaken so much of our lives.