The positives and perils of perfectionism - 'A conversation with Lewis Hatchett'

In this episode mindset/performance coach and former professional cricketer Lewis Hatchett joins Gordon MacLelland to discuss the positives and perils of perfectionism and what we should be looking out for in helping to support our young performers.

During the conversation they discuss amongst other things:

• Lewis' own personal battles with perfectionism throughout his career
• Why not all elements of perfectionism are bad when it comes to performance
• Spotting the signs of perfectionist tendencies in our young people
• Having the right and most realistic levels of expectation when it comes to performance
• The importance of allowing our young people to experience failure
• Helping our children focus predominantly on their regular process goals
• Working with our children to help them understand what their 'minimum, viable performance'(MVP) looks like
• Encouraging our children to use practice and training time efficiently
• Helping our children strive for excellencism rather than perfectionism

Lewis Hatchett is a Mindset and Mental Performance Coach, Former Professional Cricketer, MSc Student of Performance Psychology at Bangor University, Host of the Raising Your Game Podcast and Creator of the MindStrong Sport App.

Additional Reading

Positive self-talk: What is it and how do we encourage it as sports parents?

How can you help develop resilience in your sporting children?

Transcript

Speaker 1 0:13

Welcome to the Parents in Sport Podcast. I'm your host Gordon Maclelland. I'm delighted to be joined today by former professional cricketer and mindset and performance coach Lewis Hatchett. Lewis, thank you for joining us on the show.

Speaker 0:29

Thanks for having me, mate. Loving to be here.

Speaker 1 0:32

Now today we're going to talk about perfectionism and the positives and perils of perfectionism, what that potentially means for our young people, what that means for us as sports parents. But before we dig into that topic, Lewis, can you just tell our listeners a little bit about yourself?

Speaker 0:51

Yeah, so right now I'm a mindset mental performance coach. I'm a former professional cricketer. I'm also the host of the Raisin Your Game podcast and the creator of the Mind Strong Sport app. There's a lot going on there. But yeah, my background was in professional sport. I have a pretty unique story how I got into it. Um my journey post-career, which ended when I was 26 for injury, led me down some very different roads to begin with. But then my interest in mindset mental performance, uh, the psychological side of sport really ignited when I actually started my own podcast, uh, Raising Your Game, and then was speaking to athletes. And then I started my master's in performance psychology at uh Bengal University, and my interest just grew. And then the creation of the Mindstrong Sport app, which is a tool that we use to help develop mental skills mindset in athletes using things like meditations, exercises, breathing, even a little bit of yoga here and there, that we can really start to work on this mental side of the game for athletes. And yeah, it's it's taking me around the world at the moment, and I absolutely love it. It's something I I didn't forecast when I was going into say professional sport as a 15-year-old kid wanting to become a professional cricketer. I didn't think this is where I'd be, but I think it's actually a path that I'm kind of I think meant to be on now. I think I'm really coming to terms with this is actually something I'm meant to be doing, and and I'm so well lended to this. I think there's so many different things that I've done alongside cricket that I've picked up skill-wise that are now coming together. And it's just, yeah, I'm I'm in, I'm in, I'm just really enjoying what I'm doing right now.

Speaker 1 2:37

Yeah, and you can see that you're doing a fantastic job. Always a good listen, um, Lewis's podcast for those of you that that like listening to stuff. Uh certainly really enlightening. Uh, and actually, one of the recent episodes was um, I guess, part of the motivation for getting back in touch with Lewis and discussing today's topic. So uh I want to talk about perfectionism. You're probably brilliantly versed to talk about this as a recovering uh perfectionist as you uh have described yourself. Um, what do you see as uh some of the the I guess the pros and cons of of perfectionism?

Speaker 3:16

Well, I actually think perfectionism is is quite misunderstood. So a lot of people think of it, depends how people see it, right? A lot of people give it a negative connotation. I'm such a perfectionist. I'm um always need to be a perfectionist. And look, I've had people on my podcast, I've had some of the like the godfathers of perfectionism, someone's like like Dr. Gordon Flett come on the show, who pretty much uh wrote some of the early definitions and found some of the early models of of perfectionism. And then, like you said, recently had Patrick Goodreaux on the podcast who created this new model of excellence, and which I'm sure we'll get into. Uh, but my my interest into it initially, if I start there, just came from me starting my academic reading through my masters, and I had gone on to a module around personality and then into perfectionism, and I just read it and I felt like I was reading uh an autobiography of myself, really. I was like, this is everything I've experienced almost almost to the point where when I did one of my assessments, I actually did it on myself, and I just completely did a full assessment of myself in the lens of perfectionism and looking back at some of my old experiences, both growing up and then into the professional arena. And like I mentioned, people see perfectionism and they see it as this I'm such a perfectionist, and they think of it almost through like an OCD lens where I need to have everything in place and everything needs to be ideal. But at the end of the day, perfectionism is a beautiful double-edged sword. But there's this paradox that exists within perfectionism. And on one side, you have what are now known as perfectionistic strivings. So these are all like the positive sides of perfectionism, which people who are perfectionists are usually they have high standards, so you want them in the team because you want them in your environments because they have those high standards. They're driven, they're motivated, sometimes creative. Um, and those are really positive attributes for people to have. However, there are perfectionistic concerns, the sort of maladaptive behaviors of it, which are you have concerns over mistakes, you doubt your actions, you need to have everything organized, you need everything to be perfect and ideal in order to take that first step before you do something. Um, you you just are worried about that criticism, maybe fearing failure a little bit. And that is a real drawback, and it creates things like procrastination. Now, anyone in, say, like the business world would have really understand this. Like, I'm not going to send that email until it's absolutely written perfectly, or I'm not going to start that podcast until I've got all the best equipment. And geez, I've felt fallen down that that road before. But in sport, it may be that I'm not going to play this game, or I'm not going to put myself forward for this game because I just don't feel ready yet. I don't feel like I'm at that level. Or I'm worried that if I perform in this game, I'm not going to perform at the standard in which I'm setting myself. And then we can start to go into where this all comes from. So, what are the causes of perfectionism in an individual? And it is various different ways in which it shows up and how it affects an individual. Um, but really it's it stems from uh three areas of self-oriented perfectionism, socially prescribed perfectionism, and then there's a third called other oriented oriented perfectionism, which is an area that I am interested in for my current research that I'm doing.

Speaker 1 6:39

Fantastic. So I guess what I'm hearing is um we don't want to place a label on perfectionism as being good or bad. Uh so we're trying to raise our, I guess, our self-awareness, uh, particularly as sports parents, you know. Are we seeing it in our young people? Is it being helpful or is it potentially um hindering uh performance? What are some of the signs that we would maybe see as parents if our uh children perhaps are perfectionists? What could we expect to see in the real world almost?

Speaker 7:14

I think if you hear someone say that's not good enough or that wasn't good enough, uh, that's probably a telltale sign. I think uh I I have a couple of athletes I work with that are definitely perfectionists, and I see it more and more that the standards in which they reach, there is never something that they're really happy with of obtain uh of obtaining. They can they can obtain a really high level of elite performance, and yet they still feel it's not good enough. There's still something else to get. There's there's always something missing. Now, look, there is an element of that where you go, okay, that's a good thing to have. You want to constantly improve. But when it tips over the line that you are never satisfied with a good day, uh a good performance, that's where we start to go, okay, this is this is an issue here. This is something that is a concern. And like I mentioned, where that comes from, you have this self-oriented perfectionism. That's your own drive to be perfectionistic. These are your own high standards that you're setting yourself. So self-oriented is coming from within. Where that comes from is a range of different things. It can come from parents. There's a lot of like parental expectations in which that can come from. It can come from your own expectations, it can come from society's expectations. And that's where we look at socially prescribed perfectionism. If you look at the world we live in right now, the Instagram effect, the social media effect, the TikTok effect of having to have such high standards, maybe on self-presentation, on self-image, that's a big one. That it's a it's a pressure to be perfectionistic, to have that high standard at all times. And therefore, placing that perfectionism on someone else means that they go, okay, well, if I don't meet that standard, then am I, is it any good? And I'm why even bother if I if I can't reach that standard, or I'm no good, or I'm not good enough if I don't reach that standard. And it's unrealistic sometimes, especially in that social media world. We know it's not the real world. We know it's not exactly people are portraying their highlight reels, their ultimately glamorized best self, sometimes even AI-generated, filtered selves, and you're creating a non-realistic standard for people to achieve. And that's exactly what happens in perfectionism is you create an unrealistic, high expectation of yourself at certain times. And then the last one being other-oriented perfectionism, which is found in leaders, coaches, that is your want for someone else to be perfectionistic. I even think of this in say relationship terms, where people have. I spoke to uh Dr. Andy Hill from um York University, uh, York University, where we spoke about the ick culture that's happening in relationships, where people find these imperfections in people and that they they that turns them off in the relationship. But that is essentially other orientated perfectionism. It is my want for you to be a certain standard. Um we see that in coaches and in parents, and you're placing a standard onto them. And if someone is already perfectionistic, that could start to rear up that internal perfectionism themselves, that self-orientate perfectionism. My standards are only increasing because I'm feeling this pressure coming on from people outside.

Speaker 1 10:27

Yeah, I'm now beginning to um slightly doubt my own uh perceptions of the world and now thinking about my own sports parenting here, uh, particularly with my second child, sometimes about is that drive that I want to see her potentially reach a standard? Is that coming from me? And actually, maybe that's hitting a conflict point at the moment because she probably wants to do that herself anyway. And actually, I'm probably adding a negative implication to something that if I just let it run its course and support, probably be over, you know, she it might work out for me. But it certainly gets us thinking. I I know I'm very conscious at the moment, and I spend time in sessions talking to parents about this and young people uh about the social media world and what they're actually seeing and the realities of a sporting journey, uh, and the the the fact we know that it's gonna be littered with ups and downs. We know it's probably never really ever gonna be um perfect. There are some good things though. I'm always careful, and I know you are as well, about you know, labelling things and saying things are good and bad. There can be some healthy comparison, though, can't they? When we're talking about supporting our children, raising young people, uh, you know, and I'm thinking about things like maybe where young people are watching other performers and perhaps learning from them or taking ideas of things that that they use. And a couple of the Olympic uh guys going off to the Olympics this year, I was talking to them about this just in general, and they were saying, Oh, yeah, no, I watch um, you know, that that Olympic medalist, and I've nicked some of the bits out of her routine and and done stuff like that. So they see that as healthy. It's not degrading their own ability, they're seeing it as a way of uh aiding performance. I think we've got to help young people with all of that comparison piece.

Speaker 12:27

Yeah, I don't think, like I said, there's nothing wrong with having high standards. There's nothing wrong with having high standards as an athlete. You shouldn't be shouldn't be ashamed of that. You should actually be proud of that. That's ultimately what sets you apart, right? That's what sets you apart from Joe Blogs on the street that you are going down that road. And it's there needs to be a price you sort of pay in that sense. Like if you want to have these, and this is me talking as a as an athlete now that's gone down that road, there is always a price paid when you are choosing to go down a road that no one else is going down, and you just have to be aware of what the costs are to that, and so if I'm choosing to go down this road, then there are some sacrifices that are probably going to need to be made. And we've had a conversation pre-recording about that some people will try to protect people from those costs, but in protecting people from those costs, you probably rip them off the high performance that they actually strive for in the first place. So you could argue, is that a good or bad thing? You're protecting them from these maladaptive behaviors, the negative impacts, the perils of what high performance can bring. But are you ripping them away from the one thing they did want to achieve in the very first place, which is the motivation to be a high performer, to be at that level, to be doing these great things? So there's nothing wrong with going after those. It's just being able to protect it. And that's why I really enjoyed my episode with Patrick Goudreaux about his new model of excellencism, which ultimately is about trying to keep all of these perfectionistic strivings, the good things, and trying to negate and maybe remove as many of the concerns and the negatives as we can.

Speaker 1 14:19

Yeah, I I wanted to uh dig a little bit deeper into that conversation because it was a brilliant conversation. And I'd never heard the use of the word excellentism. I mean, heaven helped me when I was trying to spell it or type it into Google to find out a little bit more. I think Google was struggling with it. But it's a fascinating concept, and I think it does give us a really nice framework of excellentism, perfectionism, similarities, differences, but they're very subtle differences, aren't they? Can you do your best to, I guess, dilute your two-hour conversation with Patrick into what just summarize what you were discussing and talking about?

Speaker 15:00

Yeah, I think I just have to do this quite often. So I try to simplify it very quickly by just saying perfectionism has these incredibly high standards, sometimes unrealistic. And excellencism, if you again, I encourage people to go and listen to that episode. It is two hours long, but I've had multiple messages come from it, not only from yourself, but from parents and going, wow, this is a much better model or much better approach to having high standards within my child, myself, whatever it may be. And and not only that, Patrick's got one of the greatest French accents, French Canadian accents you can hope to have. And he's so passionate about it. Yeah. But but ultimately, what he talks about is that we are trying to remove some of these negative concerns from perfectionism and trying to keep some of the good things because they are good, they in themselves are inherently good. So why not change essentially the perspective that you have in it? Let's not shoot for perfection, let's shoot for excellence. And it actually was similar to something I'd had with um Dr. Gordon Flett, right? So Dr. Gordon Flett spoke about being a rigid perfectionist and an adaptable perfectionist. And essentially a rigid perfectionist being someone who, and I had felt this as an example, where let's say in your training program, you've got to go for a run. You say, uh, I need to improve my cardio and and I've set a run out for tonight, but suddenly it starts thunderstorming outside. It's hailing, it's just horrendous. A rigid perfectionist will go out in that rain. They will, they, the drive to achieve that scheduled uh training slot and that session is far greater than the perils of going out in the rain and being dumped on with all that sleet and hail. They wouldn't even consider maybe going into the gym and doing it on a treadmill because it's not what the standard that they set out for themselves. Now, I have done that. I have been the person that, and I still struggle with it today, where if I've got a gym session locked in, like I will not go to bed until I know I've achieved it or done something. And sometimes I've gone to the gym at one in the morning and just gone to achieve it. It's just I've been so rigid. But he presented this idea of being an adaptable perfectionist, really loosening the reins of that thinking and that perspective and saying, okay, but if you're rigid as a perfectionist, that kind of sits in only one silo of conditions. You're only really going to perform in one set of conditions. But if you can be adaptable, that's a far better athlete to get. If you were to show an athlete two options, do you want to be perfect or adaptable? But you were to say being perfect, that might be enticing, but it's only going to work in certain conditions, in certain environments at the right time. But if you're adaptable, you can actually turn your high standards and use it as your advantage and then use it when you need to. And that's kind of similar. It's not exact the same, but what Patrick is talking about in excellencism is trying to keep those high standards, but kind of dropping them a little bit and just lowering going, what is excellent? What is what needs what is excellence today? Right. So excellence today in say my sport of cricket may not be getting 100. An unrealistic expectation of going to every game and getting 100. An excellent game today could be just the approach you have in the sport, the approach you have, the energy you need to put into your performance. It could be a really gritty 30 that you have to get through because the pitch is not going to get you 100. Right now, the round of championship cricket that's being played, there's a lot of scores below 150, 200 at the moment. It's a round of cricket where the pitches are doing a little bit. It's very challenging for the batters. So if you were in that changing room right now, a coach would ideally be saying, look, the expectation here may not be to get 100. You're motivated to get 100. You will want to get 100. But if you set your expectations or your performance outcomes that are acceptable to you being 100, you will only feel disappointed if you go and get like a gritty 30, what the team needs, because you've not met that expectation that you've set for yourself. You've set an unrealistic expectation, you've not achieved it. And so you have felt you're not good enough, even though you've done something that's positive for the team. Do you kind of see what I'm saying? Is that you're not setting, you're not setting a standard based on what you would like to achieve that you think is is actually what is needed right in front of you. And excellence can be in many different forms, right? So it's almost unlimited because excellence can just be in the approach you need to be. It can be the character that you have as well as the performance that you put in, which can be adaptable, which can change depending on what's in front of you. It's not rigid and it allows you to perform in many different environments.

Speaker 1 19:47

Yeah, and I I think you're right. I think it would be interesting to um look at the expectations on that pitch for the semi-final of the T20 as well, where I think actually they would be lucky if they get to 10 in the uh Afghanistan South Africa game, looking at how the pitch was playing. That was tough. If they'd all got 10, it's probably a winning score almost.

Speaker 20:06

Yeah, well, I was I was in uh I spoke to you before I was in New York and I got to go and watch the South Africa-Bangladesh game. And just as a cricket fan, it was amazing. But the pitch itself was really challenging and a great game. The pitch leveled the game, but you sit there and you go, No one was going to score like a fastest ball 100 that day. So if any of those players went out and said, Okay, well, I need to score 50 or 100 in order for today to be a good day, well, it's an unrealistic expectation that if they don't meet it, even if they've created some form of match-winning performance of getting a 20 runnable 20 that wins, puts their team over the line because that's what the game did, you'd still feel not enough because you just didn't achieve that expectation you you set out for yourself. So the idea is to go out there and lower your expectations but kind of still aim up. It's what it's what a combination of what Mo Gaudat would talk about of lowering your expectations of life, but also someone like Jordan Peterson who would say lower your expectations but still aim up. There's nothing wrong with lowering your expectations as long as you're still aiming up and it's an achievable step that you can take. But sometimes we, as perfectionists, definitely, we set such high expectations of ourselves that that step in order to get towards it can be so daunting and such a risk, especially if we don't achieve that performance. But not only that, it's sometimes even too big a step that we don't even want to take that step because it's it's like, well, what if I what if I fail going after that? What if I don't achieve it? And if I don't achieve it, then what does that say about me? And it it is really about expectations and managing those.

Speaker 1 21:44

Yeah, I want to dig a little bit deeper into that. This idea of how do we help our young people set the right level of expectation? And I think there will be a lot of sports parents who are listening to this because I can relate on. On a personal level with my own children to some of the bits that you are talking about there. That is there almost at times a fear of failure so that you don't actually put yourself in a position to actually do what you're probably capable of doing. So it becomes a self-preservation thing, as opposed to actually aiming high. So you end up almost not even attempting to do it or wanting to do it unless all conditions are absolutely in your favour. How are we helping young people and parents with this? I mean, it's not, there's not obviously a silver bullet. That's another good read, by the way. Those of you listening, uh know silver bullet uh by Steve Hearson is a really good uh book talking about how complex the world actually is. But what would we be thinking about, um, Lewis, in terms of those two pieces?

Speaker 22:52

In terms of how we help parents and athletes.

Speaker 1 22:55

Yeah, and just talk about how we set the right level of expectations, perhaps, on a given day, but also how we help young people not fear that bit of failure, almost not fall into that trap of procrastination, which I think we can all do at times.

Speaker 23:13

Yeah, I think one thing is setting your expectation of what failure really means and having a good reframe of what failure actually is. Now, you talk about that there's there's so many people, and I'm I talk about this, and even my research is going into fear of failure and its its impact on perfectionistic athletes, but I think saying failure is a good thing can sometimes be easier to say than and much harder to do. Right? We we you hear it all a lot, we've got to fail. The amount of athletes that failed, and there was a great speech by Roger Federer recently at Dartmouth University, which went viral, and it's so true, it is so true, but I think the way in which you and I look at this from my lens of my experience, my parents, like no parent out there, had a manual of how to manage their child, right? Especially one in in sport. But my parents were never really pushy in performance. They knew I needed to perform, but they just kind of kept putting me in front of situations and kept saying, This is the next step you do. What's the next step? What how you get there? And I and I was kind of left to figure out how I was going to get to where I wanted to get to. Now, for me, I knew, for example, in cricket, I needed to take a certain amount of wickets, I need to have a certain average, I need to have good stats in which I could show coaches and be like, look, I'm good enough, like I'm doing that. And then that broke down sort of what I needed to achieve. I needed to go and to do the training to get myself those skills that would allow me to achieve that. But my parents never, when I went to a game, said, You need to take five wickets, right? You've got to take five wickets here. It would be based around, um and there were very rarely conversations. It would be about right, try to be consistent, um, like do your best, have good energy, things like that. And they weren't massive conversations. My parents were quite hands-off, which was again a real positive. I spoke to uh Roger Black on the podcast, and he he said his parents were really uh standoffish in a sense. And my dad would drop me at games and kind of be like, right, go figure it out yourself, and then we'll talk about it later. But we rarely rarely did. And I think there is there is sometimes overmanagement then that can happen from parents that that do that, where they will suddenly go, right, how are you gonna perform? Like, you've got to get 100 today, and if you get a hundred, or actually, if there is a good performance, if an athlete does have a good performance, they and let's say again in the cricket terms they get a hundred, or in football, they might get a hat trick or whatever, it might score a bunch of goals. They praise that performance, that outcome so much that it sets a future expectation that a perfectionistic athlete may start to think I need to achieve that. Um, I I had this even in a business context in one of my corporate clients where I had a lad hit his targets after one week, and then he set the expectation that every week following that would either need to set and hit that target or exceed it. But in the environment that he's in, in the world that he works in, that is just such an unrealistic expectation because no one in the history of that business has ever done that. So after he had a performance, he set a new expectation of it continuously needing to be like that rather than saying, okay, well, this is just a good performance out of many. And when it comes to failure, I think managing that fear of failure comes from a zoomed out lens of knowing what is it that you're kind of willing to accept in a say season, in a career in terms of failure. Now, I worked with a quarterback, a high school quarterback in America, and and he had training sessions where he would blow up. And I was like, Why are you blowing up? He said, Because I'm not completing passes. So what's your expectation? Why when did you start blowing up? He said, As soon as I missed my first pass, I blew up and I just couldn't. That was it. I said, So hold on, you anything below a hundred percent completion rate, you are not willing to accept. And he kind of nodded. So I jumped on Google and I was like, Tom Brady, pass completion rate. And I think Tom Brady's is 69%, maybe 70%, the greatest of all time.

unknown 27:28

Right.

Speaker 27:29

And Patrick Mahomes will probably be in that one as well. So I said to him, right, look at this. You're not willing to accept a percentage 30% higher than the the best quarterback of all time. If you went into training and you hit 50%, that's still bloody good for someone who is 16, 15, 16 years old. Like, what are we talking about here? So you have to zoom out that lens for them and go, you're setting such an unrealistic expectation. And also in that process, you're not learning anything about you. If you do flawless performances over and over again, if you genuinely are perfect and you create perfect performances over and over and over again, what the hell do you learn? You only learn what a perfect performance looks like. But then when days turn up and we know sport because it's beautiful in this way that it's idiosyncratic and the conditions are against you, you feel a little bit tight and sore. It's about those athletes who can deal with what's in front of them, how they reset their expectations of that day, they reset their standards for that day to get some form of excellent performance, not perfect, but excellent performance of what that day requires. And then they're able to perform consistently. That's the best performance I've ever seen that consistently can do that. But if you shoot perfor for perfection based off a great performance previously, or you're a parent that said, Well, that was a great performance, let's do it again, let's do it again, without the realistic, zoomed-out perspective of going, that was just one good performance in maybe a season where we do that two or three more times, and that's still an incredible season. So the the performances that you get, especially when they're positive, can really reset those expectations from the athlete and the parent. And I think overall, what I'm trying to get at is it zooming out and going, what is it that I'm potentially willing to accept? And I can get on to later about the minimal viable performances as to something that people can strategically set, something I found that works really well for both athletes and maybe in this context would be a parent to understand what that actually is.

Speaker 1 29:29

Yeah, brilliant. I mean, gosh, so much to unpick there. How on earth do we summarise all the stuff that Lewis has discussed there? Because there's some absolute golden amongst it. Um, one of the few things that that I can certainly connect with Lewis and in our work with parents is I'm a bit like you, you know, obviously it's the reframing of failure and disappointment becomes really important in talking to our kids. Um I'm like you as well, though. I mean, you hear a lot of oh, you've got to embrace failure. I mean, whoever wants to embrace failure, I mean, it's a horrible time. I don't want to embrace failure, thanks. It's the the last thing I want you to say, but actually that's what we can often hear in terms of terminology. I think there's bits for us as sports parents to understand in the in many ways, it's good for us just to facilitate and keep putting our children in front of situations and allow it to, you know, evolve and work things out for themselves. And actually, just almost, I think as Steve Magnus would describe, is just get them on the start line in many cases and just be a parent. Um, I think expectations rise in sports parenting the moment our children potentially wear a kit that makes them look like mini adults, or somebody tells us that our children are quite good, or we suddenly have a really good performance that we then think, oh, well, this'll happen again next week, or I'm gonna see this now on a regular basis. And I, and I and any coaches listening to this episode, I'll never forget this. And I held this view for about 20 years. I don't know where I got it from, but I always felt when I was coaching teams and groups that if they showed me a level of performance, I could expect that as a bare minimum every week because that'd show me that they were capable of doing it. That means they were selling everybody short if they didn't hit those standards again. And I held on to this thoughts for years until I had Steve Magnus on the Parents in Sport podcast. And Steve's an amazing guy, works in performance, worked at the Nike Oregon project with Mo Farrow and Alberto Salazar, um, really high performing runner. And he said, Gordon, but that's just bonkers if you think about it in the real world. Because he said, surely then the world record would go every single week in all the events where we're measuring it. Because if we ran 151 last week, we're going to run 151 next week. Or if we swam 30 seconds in the pool, that means we can go under that because we're permanently getting better. And yet, actually, we got to the stage where we ended up talking about the reality of it is that your very best days in the perfect flow where the world is just brilliant are actually sadly not going to happen that often. But then you've also got to hope that your very worst days aren't going to happen that often as well. And actually, what you're looking to do is raise the middle. So instead of getting parents talk to the kids about, you know, always looking at the ceiling, actually, let's just raise the floor a little bit. What is a normal, you know, level of performance? And the bits you were talking about there that you pulled from sport on general percentages, we've done the same as well. I think there was a period of time Harry Kane was scoring one in four shots. Mo Talla was dribbling dribbling the ball eight times and losing it four. Adam Lythe opened the bat in for Yorkshire last year and I think got to 50, about 17% of his innings. So that's, you know, again, one in five, one in six chance of what might have been deemed a good performance by him. Got an England international who, um, in a period of a game recently made two tackles out of 10, you know, a success rate of 20%. We've got an all black who's carried the ball 10 times in one game for a gain of 10 meters.

Speaker 33:26

I had a I had something similar. So I had something similar, and it was a and I I like telling this story on expectations and setting those standards. Is uh I was on a training camp towards the the back end of my career, and and John Lewis, again, former teammate of mine, actually been on the show before. Uh he's now the England women's head coach in cricket. And John is a legend of the game, absolute legend of the game. And um, he sat down as a group of young bowlers and he said, lads, how many wickets do you think I've taken? And I think he's taken either just shy of 700 or 700 first class wickets. He'd been around like a 20-year career, right? And he said, Okay, out of those bunch of wickets that I've taken, how many Fifers do you think I've taken? We're like, Oh God, I don't know, John, like 80, 70, 80. And he said, 35. And then when we broke it down, because those games that we're talking about are two innings games, right? So there's two innings, so you almost doubled the amount of F times that he would be out there bowling. You would class a Fifer as your day, like it's your day you've achieved. He said essentially 7% of the days that I went out onto the field were my day. So it was never about what you do with that 7% and trying to raise the 7%. It was about trying to manage the 93% and those days where you just take one or two, you are bowling from an end, and it's your job to be consistent and allow someone else to have their seven percent day. And then it's just about getting by and then hopefully being in the team until bang, your seven percent day turns up and you're like, right, it's my day. Everything's clicking, everything feels good. And the problem is that you and the same thing as I then looked at the stats on batsmen, right? So some of the best batters, the top 10 batters that have ever lived and played the game, I think it's basically about 25% of test match conversions to hundreds. So that means one in eight innings that they have, they will get a hundred. Now, those are the greatest players of the game ever. So if you're an athlete and say cricketer and you're going into a 15-game season, and you're saying a can a great season for me would be to get three, four hundreds in this year, you're you're exceeding the stats of the best that have ever played. All right, it's not that level, but the point being is that you're setting an expectation of the level of performance you need to achieve in order to be happy and content with yourself that's potentially unrealistic.

Speaker 1 35:49

Yeah, and I think we've got to be really careful how we frame that um with our children. And I speak to some uh parents and young performers who end up doing some analysis. And I don't know if you've ever watched yourself on TV, I'm sure you have, but we always look 10 times worse than I think we play. You know, I think but I used to watch videos and thought, God, it was really good. And it looked like that, and it's like, oh my goodness, this doesn't look anything like what I'm watching on the TV. And we've got to be very careful with the youngest performers that we are not painting as, oh, well, it's gonna look like that because it isn't. And and they're making these mistakes, and yet we don't seem to see it yet. We can sit through analysis and say, and and again, the from a parenting point of view, sometimes as well, we miss some of the strength, we miss some of the good bits because all we're actually looking for is what can we do better? What are the negatives? And maybe that's not helping either, because all we end up doing is zoning in on the things that are wrong. Now, yes, of course, there's going to be elements of that because we want people to improve and learn from it, but we've also got to be doing the other side as well, haven't we?

Speaker 37:03

Yeah, and and this comes down to what I was talking about, these MVPs, which are sort of the strategies I use for people to come out of this perfectionistic mindset when they're going into whether a practice or performance. So it MVP can be a minimal viable practice or a minimal viable performance. And again, it's really worthwhile just taking a few moments, whether you're an athlete or a or a parent, to say, like, what am I kind of willing for them to accept here? Now, you have to frame this with the knowledge that sport is not really fair and it you never get perfect performance, you never get the elite performance every game. So if you only judge yourself based on the outcomes, you will forever be at the mercy of things that are totally out of your control. And if you're at the mercy of things that are out of your control, but then you want to try and control them, that is the pure definition of anxiety, stress, frustration, pressure, you name it. So the idea is to have as much in your control as you possibly can, to feel like you're confident, to feel like you can do what you want to do, to feel like you aren't setting potentially unrealistic expectations. So the minimal viable practice or minimal viable performance is going into the session and saying, what is the the leak, the minimum standard of performance that I'm willing to accept here? So that could be if I take that quarterback example, just a past completion rate of 50% or 45%, right? That's what I'm aiming for. If I achieve that, I know that that's a step in the right direction. You might increase that by a percent the next step stage, next session. But also, it doesn't necessarily even have to be an outcome, right? It can be the minimal viable performance I'm going to have, is the energy I'm going to bring to this game, is the character that I'm going to be here, what people are going to say about me after this performance. Because I don't know if today is going to be my day for outcome. But I can, if I control the things that I can control, I hope that I'm in the best possible frame of mind to turn that 93% day into a 7% day, right? Into a day where it potentially was going to be just a here or there performance to a great performance. Because again, we don't know how far off we are in a performance from it being a great day. But if we again, and I think I use cricket again, and I'm sorry for constantly badgering on about cricket, but like there's so many batters I know that have ripped themselves of the opportunity of a great performance because the beginning of their performance isn't at a standard at which they are happy with. They may not be at the right strike rate, they may not be going at a certain rate, and then they do something out of character, they do something out of process, and then they rip themselves of turning that into a great day because they've had some sort of perfectionistic idea of what the start of their inning should be. Whereas if they base it on, okay, well, the minimal viable performance I'm willing to accept here is my intent, my energy, the way in which I want to go about this, my character in that moment, I want to be brave. You then just keep pushing that performance down the road enough, and you're not judging it on outcome. Even if you get a first baller, even if you don't achieve the standard you wanted from an outcome point of view, you can put your head on the pillow at night going, I said, I achieved what I said I was going to do, and I'm just going to go to the next performance and try it again, or I'm going to review what I've just done. Did it work? Did something distract me? And then we just go to the next one. And then hopefully, if I keep doing that, eventually a performance will come. But the problem is we focus so much on outcome and the standard that side of things that we rob ourselves of all the opportunities that are in front of us in in the performances that could get there.

Speaker 1 40:35

Yeah. And I think that sort of mental framework of things we can control, you know, our actions, our character, uh, things that are irrelevant of what's going on around us, we can switch back to is really important, isn't it? Rather than setting, I guess, performance goals that could go straight away. You know, if we set an expectation, oh well, I'm going to make, you know, eight out of passes, eight passes out of ten are going to be perfect, let's say. And in the first 10 minutes of the game, we've already made a mess of four. As you say it, then what it means is it's not like, oh, well, this is a disaster. And actually the performance becomes even worse. Whereas if we're saying, actually, you know, I'm going to be uh I'm going to be brave, I'm going to be courageous, I'm going to fight for every moment, I'm going to bring this mindset to the table, you can switch that on all the time, can't you? Irrelevant of what's gone before.

Speaker 41:28

Yeah. And as a parent, you can start to create those with your kids. Yeah. So you can start to set those out and say, right, what's our minimal viable performance that we're going to be happy with today? Removing outcome. So not outcome-based performances or practices. And the reason I always uh I say a practice as well is sometimes we rob ourselves of a great practice because we we set an unrealistic expectation of what our practice should be like. I don't fail in practice. I'm not willing to fail in practice. I gave a good example to a lad I was working with the other day. I'm showing him an example of my practice was I use when I'm batting, and I only use this for batting, I can use it for bowling as well. But when I start batting, I have the intent for the first 10 minutes to not get out, right? That's my sole goal. So I have to create an energy about myself to not get out, right? Capitalize on babbles and hit aggressive shots, but it's not get out and waste that 10 minutes because I try to replicate what happens in a in a game and I need to do that to practice. But then I had another moment, sort of 10 minutes later, where I shouted to my teammate and I said, right, I'm gonna try something. And essentially that was me signaling to him, I'm about to fail and I'm about to, this is gonna look ugly. This is about to look wrong. And I need to do this because I'm trying to explore something new. And so I do that, and then he knows whether he knows or not, but it's just more for my sake that I'm kind of giving myself permission to create some failures, but I'm doing it not tentatively, I'm doing it trying to explore this new part of my game that I want to work on. And then eventually I finish it with just sort of correcting, uh just being really uh hitting some check marks of the things that I do well to finish the session on a good note. I don't want to finish on a session that where I've just failed all the time and I don't feel capable. But I would do that with my bowling as well. I would start the start the session as if I was starting a game to put myself on that pressure, to create a standard for myself that I want to try and achieve. I want to hit my my um I want to hit my most consistent ball as much as I possibly can and see where I'm at and practice my process. And then midway through I might say, right, I'm gonna practice a slower ball, a new thing. And that is, I need to announce that to either myself or those around me to go, this is I'm I'm I'm gonna fail here. This is gonna be messy. Sorry if this looks rubbish, if you want to apologize for it. But this is, I need to fail in order to learn how to get it better and things like that. But sometimes we think in training, we need to be at such a high standard because we're being judged and we need to constantly do things perfectly that we rob ourselves of the opportunity to get better and grow, when actually the reality is it's a very Simple conversation of just going, I'm about to try something new, see how this goes. Uh, this is me exploring, trying to get things right. Feel free to teach me, coach me through what you you see. Um, and that's why going into a practice session saying what is the minimal viable performance I want to try and achieve in this practice, which is I'm gonna go about it committed. I'm gonna, if things go wrong, I'm gonna stay on task and just accept that things are gonna go wrong. Or today I'm gonna be really uh detailed in my approach. Okay, it doesn't, again, none of those things give an outcome, say how well the session's gonna go. It's just your approach to doing it. And if you as a parent can set that as well, you when you have those conversations in the car or where you have those conversations at home, it's like, okay, well, today was a session where we said we were gonna go into it committed, detailed, focused. Did you do those things? Yeah. Yes, no. If you didn't, what got in the way? How do we how do we improve next time?

Speaker 1 44:59

Yeah. Absolutely. And I I think that that's that's really you know, valuable advice that that was sort of giving out there. Um just moving on, just generally, let's just open this up slightly as we move into sort of the last part of the the podcast. You're working with a lot of young people all around the world at the moment around their mental skills. Um I love the for me, I just love the authenticity and realism of your of your work. And probably that tends why we we get on pretty well um off there. But what are you seeing? Uh what are you seeing in the teenagers, young people of today, um in terms of how they're approaching their sport, some of the challenges that they're facing? And what would be, I guess, your you know, final general advice to parents just around things that you're seeing, things that they might need to be aware of that are ultimately going to give our young people the best chance of fulfilling their potential both in and out of their sport?

Speaker 46:03

Yeah, well, I I did recently have a uh a recorded episode with Dr. Julie Johnson from uh Nottingham Trent University, where we spoke about uh paper she had done in swimming, and it was some strategies they'd come up with to working with specifically Gen Z athletes. And the majority of the people I work with are in Gen Z. Probably will eventually start to move into Gen Alpha. I think the next one is coming through. But they're I we both concluded that we think they'll be very, very similar. We can't deny that young people are growing up in a digital age. So some of the things that they had found, and this was qualitative research that they'd done. So it was a lot of interviews with coaches and athletes. And the thing they'd come to know with, say, athletes, and I see this, so this is both from this conversation and then my experience, and I'm seeing that, that communication social skills in person are a lot less than what they used to be. It's very hard to have those in-person conversations. It's undeniable that a technological age is creating a distracted mind. And that's why I found there is a thirst for, say, meditation through our Mind Strong Sport app. We've got athletes that are really wanting to understand how do I remove these distractions. And then really, a lot of what we've spoken about today stems from a lot of perfectionism, the expectations that they're putting on themselves, the world around them, what it's telling them. Um, but there are also some really interesting things that did come out of, say, my conversation with Julie was they do know a lot about their sport. They're more highly knowledgeable about the sport themselves. So they know so much about it because of the information they're about able to get. They know so much. But the challenge does become is you can know everything, but doing it and allowing that rubber to hit the road and then experiencing it, experiencing the failures. I know failure is something I need to go through, but geez, the experience sucks. And being able to deal with that and having the resilience to get back up and go again, or just go through a really challenging situation. Uh, I'm seeing a lot of um of athletes that do find that a struggle because one, it's they self-identify as the failure as them being a failure, and then the distracted mind finds that there's opportunities they perhaps miss. So, all of this where we can look at the younger generation and every generation kind of does it to the one below it, where they say, well, it was a lot harder in my day. But there are some things where in the world that Gen Z athletes and young people live in, it is complicated. It is really, really hard. It is very, very difficult to find out where you fit in in this world right now. And sometimes your only job as a young person is to just figure out where the hell I fit in in this world. And so it's really easy to take on things that perhaps put you down a path that you don't necessarily want to be going down. And I think the the uh want to try and fit in with a lot of people and this want to try and fit in with society and whatever silo that is can rob you of your own authenticity of how you're going. And so you do see athletes that are not necessarily fully authentic in themselves because they're so worried about what other people are saying, this um this fear of other people's opinions of them, a bit of faux. And you see it really, really damage them when things don't go well. So the emotional control is quite intense. So it's really it's never been as intense as I've seen or even experienced when I was younger, just because there's so much coming at them. And so that creates a whole set of new challenges. And I think we have to be really open to how we are skilling ourselves in order to deal with it. So, for example, I knew that emotional control was something that was going to be really big for a lot of my athletes that I work with. And me showing emotions was something that I struggled with growing up. I was quite stoic, it's how I've been brought up, it's its own, my my own parental upbringing, and that's just our family. And so I took on therapy in October last year, and I gave my therapist one goal. I said, I want you to be able to get me to a stage where I can portray my emotions in a far better way. And that's allowed me to connect with people better. I think it's come out in my podcast. I've felt more emotive in some of the stuff that I've done. I'm I'm still a work in progress, but also it's given me the ability to look after myself in that sense so I can look after others, but also learn how I can do that for other people. And yeah, all of these issues that we see young people are facing, there is still one thing that I do say to them, and this is why I've branded a lot of my stuff mind strong, is that we've spoken about mental health for a long time in young people. And I think the conversation is great. However, if we only talk about something, we do them a disservice, whereas actually we want to make them mentally stronger. People feel by default better about themselves when they feel mentally stronger and capable of taking on challenges. And when we can do that, no matter how big or small that challenge is, we start to move in a direction where we become the character that we want. And that was pretty much how I built myself up as a young person was I defined the character I wanted to be, and then I just aimed at that and went towards it and made decisions really easy. And also on a larger scale, for young people right now, if the person next to you you is pretty much got the same amount of anxiety and self-doubt as you have, which we know is pretty much true, what an opportunity that creates for you to jump above everyone else, to go and seek excellence to get to that place. All you have to do is be willing to go through some really challenging times, be supported, the parents around them, try and support them in a way that doesn't connect their self-worth with outcome and the expectations that you're placing on them. Maybe look at reframing your own expectations, where of my own expectations, and hopefully this podcast and maybe some of the others around it that start to go, well, where are my expectations coming from? We can look within rather than just looking out. And and then eventually that can hopefully get those athletes to a place where they are starting to be mentally stronger in themselves and they're starting to achieve those aspirations that they they they want because it just takes a little bit of work and you will surprise yourself along the way, I'm sure.

Speaker 1 52:24

Lewis, what what an amazing way to uh finish the episode. Uh, thank you for all you've shared, your honesty, um, your authenticity, as I've already mentioned, but also uh what you're seeing in the real world and the challenges that that young people face. And I hope that uh our parents who are listening to this and coaches uh have gleaned something uh from today's episode. So, Lewis, thank you for joining us.

Speaker 52:53

Mate, absolute pleasure. Love it, love the work that you're doing as well. So please don't stop, keep it up.

Speaker 1 52:58

Thanks, Lewis. So let's hopefully speak again soon.

Speaker 53:01

Yeah, mate. That was awesome. Yeah, good job. Thank you for listening.

Speaker 1 53:05

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