When you go to bed at night, and then when you wake up in the morning and everything is different, that can be really scary, especially when you're involved in a high-performance programme. When you went to bed, the team was on track, you were going in the right direction, and then all of a sudden, you get up in the morning and all the goalposts have been moved. What this does do is it shows how people react to changing situations; how adaptive they are; what their behavioural flexibility is like.
Hello, and welcome back to Brain in the Game. Brain in the Game is a podcast that's been specifically designed for athletes, coaches, and parents who are looking to do their sport just that little bit smarter. And I'm your host, Dave Diggle. In this episode, we're going to look at, how do we fit into a team when the goalpost keep getting changed.
Dave's a high-performance sports mind coach, helping athletes, coaches, parents and crew do it smarter in their sport. Any sport, any continent, if you want to learn what it takes to turn athletes into champions, then buckle up your boots, strap on your helmet, and take a deep breath as we dive into another episode of Brain in the Game, as we unpack the mental strategies to perform smarter in and out of the arena.
A few years ago, I was asked to be part of a high-performance team, a national team that was going to go on the road and travel. And whereas that flies in the face of what I would normally do – I tend not to be putting myself in a situation where I'm only working with one team or organisation or one sport, I really like the diversity, I really like the ability to keep myself stimulated and interested by going into multiple different things each day – this was too much of a good opportunity to miss. And I really wanted to be part of this because it was in a sport that I hadn't actually been involved with before, and certainly not at a high performance level. And yet my skillset I could see was definitely going to benefit both the athletes, the coaches and the trajectory of that sport. So I was really excited and I was super keen. And about six weeks before the players came together and we were going to go on the road, all the coaching staff and us support crew, we met a really lovely location to design exactly what we wanted to do, what we wanted to achieve, and how we were going to achieve that.
The coaching staff were institutional in that sport. They'd all been involved internationally in that sport for many, many years. They certainly knew their craft. They were technically phenomenal coaches. The support crew, of which I was part of, we had some great S&Cs and physios and doctors. Together, again, we knew our stuff. We were probably the best at what we did. So coming together, it was a really great environment to be part of. As I said, we met at this really fantastic location. It was certainly an interesting time, the six weeks prior to the players coming on board, because what we did, we sat and we went, Right, how do we design this? In an ideal situation, what would this look like? Part of my role was to look at the identity of the team, the culture, what we wanted to achieve collectively, and where we saw that there was going to be some areas we had to focus on and change. We, as a collective group of coaches and support crew, initially identified what the DNA of that team that we were coming together, what we wanted it to be.
We then started to work on the day-to-day, how the training looked, how the game preparation would look, how the game day would look, and then how we would debrief that and move on to the next game the next week or the next country, as we travelled.
At the end of the six weeks, I think we, as a collective group, had done a really good job. We had looked at what we wanted to be as a team, what we thought our identity needed to be, the players that had been selected, how they fitted into that, and was there any of those players that needed different skill sets in order to make the most of that opportunity. And that fell very much into my purview of what I had to do with those players.
The team, as players, they turned up. The coaches, the senior coaching staff, addressed the athletes. They expressed and explained the amount of detail that we collectively as a management team had gone in to make sure that those athletes had every opportunity to be successful in the coming months. Everyone was excited. Everybody was looking to change a history that hadn't been where it needed to be. That team hadn't historically performed under other management as well as we hoped they were going to do under us. Things looked great from the get-go. The athletes were communicative. We had aligned certain sessions for the leadership group, which again was part of my purview, was to build that leadership group and train them to be really effective in how they did what they did. We did a great job in preseason with these players.
We then went on the road, and it's always going to be a testing time when you take a bunch of athletes, high-performing athletes who are highly competitive, who are like highly-tuned racing cars on the road. There's going to be little bumps in the road that we have to adjust and manage; that's to be expected. And there were a few of those, people being away from home. There were senior players who had come from the old regime who wanted to try and drag the team a little bit back towards the old regime. All of these were part of our opportunity to reeducate these athletes in, Hey, this is a new era. This is how we're doing what we're doing, and this is why we're doing what we're doing. As I said, the team hadn't been performing, historically. What we wanted to do was change that. We had a season-long plan. We didn't expect it to turn around instantly. We certainly didn't think of it like a light switch. We knew that it was going to be more like a dimmer switch, and we were going to have to keep turning it up until it became bright enough to guide the light where we were going.
We went into our first game preparation. The head coaches had selected the first team to go out and represent their country, and the leadership group was certainly part of that process, and it was working incredibly well. The team we were up against first up was probably one of the best teams in the world at that time, so we knew it was going to a tough game. We knew that in order for us to identify and solidify who we were as an organisation and as a team and what we stood for, we had to really buy in and believe in that DNA that we'd created, that we'd spent weeks and weeks building with the athletes. And whereas we didn't win that game, we certainly had made massive steps towards playing the way we wanted to play. And historically, we would have lost by a huge margin. Instead, we lost by a reasonable margin. And we debriefed that and we turned around and recognised the things that had been working and why we had closed that gap and why the team was working really well. We identified the areas where it didn't work, be that a skill shortage or a communication issue or a not following protocol or plan under pressure issue.
We then built that into the following week's preparation process. We improved on that. We gained some traction with that. We then went and we played that same team seven days later. And instead of losing by the 15 points we had done the week before, we still lost, but we lost by three points. So again, we'd closed that gap to probably one of the top two teams in the world. And we were really excited. We celebrated like we had won by 100 points. And that was because the players and the coaching staff and the support crew all knew the distance we had travelled in such a short period of time and why that was so important to us.
What we saw was progress. What we saw was a return on our investment with these players.
Then, like a travelling circus, we packed up our bags and we moved to a different country. We did the same debriefing process, what we had learned in that first country, and we adjusted our protocol and our process, and we continued to develop and understand that we were on a pathway.
We played the next team seven days after landing in this new country. The process, the framework, the feedback, the systems, we went out and we won our first game. It had been the first game this team had won, so we'd got some result. We knew what we were doing was working. We knew the protocols that had been put in place and adjusted along the way were working. The leadership group was really firing. Everybody knew their role. They knew what they needed to do. They knew how they needed to interact with the team, both in preparation and training and on game day. We were really happy that we were making progress.
We went on to play five more games. And whereas we didn't win any more of the games, we were always within one or two points of winning the game. So what we were doing at this point was consolidation. We knew there were areas for us to improve, and we were working on those. Part of that was being able to work under pressure, being able to take what we'd done in training and apply it in game days. So these strategies to do that, it takes time to embed that because we revert back to familiarity when we are put under pressure.
And so the coaching staff were excellent at communicating that with the players, that, Hey, look, we're not where we need to be yet. And this is the areas that are working really, really well. We want to replicate these. However, this is where we're falling over under pressure. So our training workload and our training focus are going to reflect that, and that's what we're going to improve on. The feedback modelling between the players and the leadership group was also reflecting this. One area, I think from a coach and a support crew area that was really challenging within this group was we had meetings about having meetings because a lot of what we were trying to do was change a culture and change a mindset, a country's expectation of this team. We had meetings in the evening to decide what the next day was going to be. We would then get up at 6:00 am the next morning and have a meeting to see if anything had changed overnight during our sleep to change that day's training. We'd then have a meeting at lunchtime to make sure the morning session went the way it wanted to go. Then we would decide if the afternoon session was still going to stay the same.
It was a real heavy emphasis on us as a collaborative coaching and support crew team, which was fantastic. It was a little tiring. I would like to have seen us to back it and maybe not have as many meetings. I had a huge workload. However, it was working. I remember coming down one morning, we were in our fourth country, and we'd been on the road now for quite a few months. We had a working cadence of all of these meetings, of all the feedback with the players. We were managing workloads really well. The players were healthy, they were happy, they were progressing. There was obviously the odd issue with individual people and individual players and individual performances. But as a whole, what we had designed was working. It hadn't hit our target yet, and we were all very aware of that. However, we all had huge belief that where we were heading was working. I remember coming down one morning and I walked into the staff room and the head coach, the assistant coach, and the CEO of this organisation were sitting around the table.
When I walked in, I knew I'd walked in on something. I apologised, I excused myself, and I walked out. I kept all the other coaches and support crew outside until that meeting had completed. Then we walked in as a normal morning meeting to decide what we had decided on the night before was still going to be the game plan for the morning. The room was different. The focus was different. The head coach was different. Instead of him saying, Okay, what do we think? His first words were, We have to win this next game. Otherwise, all of your jobs are on the line. We didn't know how to take that initially. We looked at each other and gone, Is he joking? What happened is he had been put under pressure. The CEO had come in and said, Look, we want more wins. We can see the progress, we can see the growth, we can see you're going in the right direction, but we need more wins. In order to put bums on seats and sell more tickets, you have to win. Instead of the head coach saying, Okay, we're on a right trajectory here. It's either going to take time or we double down on what's working, he changed.
He went from a collaborative environment where we understood what we were doing. We had a really good framework where every single session was collectively improving the next session. He applied this huge amount of pressure. He then turned around and said, Okay, our workloads are going to change. No longer do the players get time off. No longer do the players have short sessions to manage their workload. Every session is going to be a full session. Every session is going to be an assessment. Every session is going to dictate who plays the following weekend. I had a very good working relationship with this head coach. I waited until everybody stood up and walked out, and I said to him, Hey, can I have a conversation with you? And he said, No. He said, I know what you're going to say. I know what you think. If I'm honest with you, I agree with you. However, the pressure has been put on us and we have to perform. We can't have this long viewpoint on this anymore. It's got to be the short return.
I went, Okay, we'll do what you tell us needs to be done. However, I do want to let you know I'm not sure this is going to give us the outcome that the organisation are looking for.
That morning, the training session was different. The head coach stood in front of these players and said, Okay, the honeymoon's over. Every single training session now is a competition. And the players had a very similar reaction to the coaching staff, and the pressure changed the training. The changed training, changed the attitude and the culture. The attitude and the culture changed the preparation for the game day.
Come game day, we had this disconnected group. And where we had been collectively growing towards a consistent performance, we had the biggest loss of that game. We all make mistakes. We all react emotionally to certain situations, particularly when we're put under pressure. It's a real human thing. Our fight, flight, or freeze mechanism kicks in. I'm going to force the outcome. We're going to dive for the line. We're going to put everything on the line. The players had gone into that fight, flight, and freeze mechanism. Some had gone into fight mode. Some of them are flighted and disconnected, disengaged, weren't communicating, weren't following protocols. Their performance had dropped. Some had just frozen. They didn't know what to do. They were waiting to be told by the leadership group, Well, what's their next move? What do we do here? No longer was this a collaborative, growth-orientated, 'let's look at what's working, what's not working, what we need to do, different' mindset. This was now a survival mindset, and everybody had gone from collaboration to self-preservation. The coaching staff, whereas they'd been asking for input, now gave directions and orders. All the staff, instead of collaborating and saying, Hey, this is what's going on in my world. I need your help. They were saying, Right, I don't want you sticking your nose into here. I'm going to focus on my thing. You focus on your thing. You stay in your lane. Pieces of information were being missed. The medical team weren't discussing the psychology of the athlete with me, as much as I tried to discuss the psychology of the athlete with the medical staff. And all of this self-preservation mechanism that kicked in meant it was like a game of snakes and ladders. We'd hit the head of the snake and we were sliding all the way back to old familiar behaviours.
In doing that, everything that we had learned, all the traction we had gained, all the framework that we were relying on capitulated. We hadn't embedded it hard enough, long enough for that to be our primary response. We went back to old familiar behaviours, self-preservation. That didn't give us the outcome we were after. The next three games, we lost and we lost heavily. The morale of the team was shocking. Players were staying in their hotel rooms. They were no longer coming to the community area and playing cards with each other and talking about games and talking about skills and what their communication modelling is. They weren't going to grab coffees together and saying, Hey, look, when we get out in training today, let's focus on this. Everybody had become insular. As a mental performance specialist, I could see this unravelling in front of us. I started to try and have conversations with the key players in the leadership group, with the key staff members, and trying to work out, Hey, how do we turn this around? How do we go back to what was working? We're hugely focused now on what's not working, and we've become consumed, highly emotively driven.
When we think about this from a forming, storming, norming, and performing perspective, we know that Bruce Tuckman's team dynamics of forming, storming, norming, and performing formulates how a team cohesion and team identity comes together. We know that when a team first comes together, everybody behaves. Everybody does what they're supposed to do. Everybody's happy. They don't tread on other people's toes. They don't push boundaries. And so what we see is a false spike in performance. And we know that. And we could see that when the team first came together in preseason, everybody was on a high. Everybody was being communicated with. Everybody was being respected. Everybody had a hand in where that team was going. And so our performance rose. Instead of us being able to consolidate that, we got sideswiped. The organisation came in and said, This pathway that you're on is taking too long. Ditch that, go back to forcing the outcome. And we plummeted into the storming phase. And in that storming phase, everybody was storming. It wasn't a splinter group or just the players. It was everybody, coaching staff, support crew, players. Even players' families were contacting us and saying this was going on. They were unhappy because their partner was unhappy. It was falling apart really quickly.
You can only go on so long in that scenario. We were no closer getting to normalisation, which means performance was way too far away. The CEO of the organisation came in and replaced the head coach. When the head coach got replaced, and interestingly, the replacement coach and his coaching staff and support crew came in and fared no better because the management team didn't invest in progress. What they invested in was results. Now, I love results. I'm highly competitive. I would gnaw your leg off to beat you. I would always want to win. But interestingly, I see winning as a byproduct of process. I see winning as a byproduct of building a great system that feeds the athlete, that allows them to be the best versions of them. Individual athletes need to know what they need to do to be the best version of themselves, because when they're the best versions themselves, everybody benefits. Then how do you bring that group of collective people together who have different skill sets, different processes, different preparations to be able to be one single unit. And that comes down to having a very clear identity of who we are when we do what we do. The second you sacrifice that identity, people don't know where they fit.
There's an interesting analogy we draw to ants. And when ants are the most efficient and effective, and they're going from their nest out to get food and home again, they follow the direct path, and they lay a pheromone path. And you'll see those ants going in a straight line. They'll collect their food and they'll go back to the nest, they'll drop the food, they'll get back onto that line and go and collect more food. That's the most highly efficient process for those ants. When that line gets broken, a twig drops on it or something breaks that pheromone path, ants break into three different groups.
One group and the first group return straight back home. They give up on the mission, they go straight back home. The reason being is they want people back there to start again, to go and look for a new food source. What essentially they've done is they've given up on that first plan because it had been broken and people need to eat. They'll go back and they'll go, Right, I'm going to go look for some new food source. So that makes sense.
The second group of ants will run around and look busy. And the whole idea of that is they're designed to be food. Fodder. So any predator that's in the area that sees this collection of ants will go after after the ones running around in a circle. The whole idea of that, the purpose behind that is it gives time to the third group of ants that are looking for a solution to that broken pathway. Now, they might go around it, they might go over it, they might go through it, and then a new pheromone path. Everybody has a role to play. Either their first job is to go back and look for a new food source just in case they can't fix this current problem. Some just become food fodder and a distraction for the predators. And some look for solutions.
If I apply that same methodology and thought process to what was going on in this team, you could see some of them would just put their hands in the air and said, Right, I'm out. They left. They went and found another team that was going to listen to them. In hindsight, they did the right thing because we didn't fix the problem as a group. So they went and they got themselves new jobs and new teams straight away. There was certainly a group that became incredibly vocal, were outraged that the plan that we had built wasn't being stuck to. And they did become fodder. They were fired. And then there was a third group, and what we tried to do was look for a solution here. How do we get that result as quick as the board wanted while still following the protocol that we had built? And I think we came up with a strategy, but it wasn't implemented.
So ask yourself, which ant are you? Are you the ant that goes, Yep, this isn't perfect. I'm going to look for a different pathway. Are you the one that runs around with your hands in the air saying, Tell me what to do. I don't know what to do. This is not what I planned. Or are you solution-orientated? No one size fits all. No one strategy is the optimal strategy.
The solution option which I took taught me a lot about me. I didn't have the influence that I needed in that situation. What I chose to do was speak to the people on the coal face, the coaches, whereas what I should have done was speak to the board and say, Look, this is what we're doing. This is the cost. If we choose to take a rug out under everybody's feet right now, what we will see is a capitulation, which is what happened. Yet the mistake I made was not communicating that with the board members. Now, do I think they would have listened? Probably not. But they can't unhear it. That should have been my strategy. I should have done that. That's my lesson.
What do we do? What do we do when we go to bed at night and wake up the next morning and the goalposts have been moved? Be that in this situation, no longer are they following a growth mindset. They want an outcome, and they want an outcome next game. So goalposts will often be moved, particularly when you're looking at a high-performance environment. So having that behavioural flexibility to go, You know what? I can change. What is it I'm going to be? What ant am I going to be here? Do I turn around and decline the opportunity because it doesn't fit? Do I run around and wait for somebody to tell me what to do? Or do I look for a solution? The choice is always going to be yours. Yet it needs to fit a purpose. And it needs to be fit for purpose. And recognise that every single time that there's a major change, you will go through the forming, storming, norming, and performing process. I see this with teams when people get injured and key players get replaced. There's a very short period, if it's done right, where you go back to that storming. Now, how do we work together here? What is it you're going to say? What do you need from me? How do I communicate this to you? What do you need to hear from me? That's all strategic storming phase, working it out in the moment. It's critical and vital to that. Once we get to normalisation, this is how we do what we do, then we can see performing. That's where we were before the goalpost got moved.
I learned a lot during that contract. I learned where my skill sets lie. I learned where my vulnerabilities are. If I had my time again, if I could jump in my time machine and go back and do that again, I would have just communicated earlier.
What have we learned during this podcast? We've learned that once you set a plan, doesn't matter how great that plan is, it can change. A actual fact, there's something in motorsport, which I think is a really good saying, that everybody has a great plan until turn one. After turn one, it's a free-for-all. It doesn't need to be, yet that seems to be the mindset. Having adaptability and recognition of what's working and understanding how you double down on what's working to expedite the process can be done as long as communication is good communication, and the players and the team are on board. We've also learned that forming, storming, norming, and performing is an ongoing process. It happens all the time, whether it's big goal movements or small staff changes. We've also learned that having a plan and communicating it, works. Having everybody on board and understanding the identity and what we're there for and what we're looking to achieve collectively works.
Maybe the biggest lesson in this was when something is working, we need to stick with it and follow the process rather than reacting to what other people around us think the outcome should be and should be right now.
I hope you got a lot from this. I'd be interested to hear how this represents itself in your world, and I'd love to see in the comments below your thoughts. Until the next episode of Brain in the Game, train smart and enjoy the ride. My name is Dave Diggle.
Thanks for listening. I hope you found it useful. The principles used in this podcast were developed through the SmartMind, the number one resource hub to learn the cutting-edge techniques and mental skills used by world-class athletes and coaches to achieve podium finish every time.
