The really important thing there is as a leader or as a head coach, you need to know yourself. When we're a young coach coming through, we think we know everything and we think we can do everything. And the longer you coach, the more you realize, know your strengths, coach to your strengths and then bring other people in that compliment, supplement and add to the team environment. Eddie Johns, welcome to the show.
Nice to be here, mate. Really glad to have you here. So why you write a book on leadership at all? Do you want the world to have better leaders in it or are you trying to synthesize what you learned?
What was the compulsion to do it? Well, on the back of the last book, Macmillan approached me during the lockdown to do a book on leadership and I'd always thought, there was a couple of books when I was growing up as a coach, learning my trade that I really appreciated the help I got from. One was from Pat Riley, the LA Lakers, winner with him. And the other one was Bill Walsh from the San Francisco 49ers, which I think scored winning each.
And I thought, well, maybe if I can put down some of the thoughts that I've had in my career, it might help some young aspiring coach coming through to help them in their difficult way of learning how to be a coach. Why do you think it is such a difficulty? Why is leadership such a fine skill to attune? Well, I think coaching, as I do for a living, it appears easy, but it's such a complex, convoluted, ever-demanding profession where you're dealing with young athletes who increasingly want to be more individual, which is the way the world is.
And you're trying to put them together into one team and do the same thing in a period of time and extract from them effort that they don't normally want to give. Does that suggest that it's becoming a bit more difficult to be a leader or be a coach now? It sounds like people are becoming more individualistic, which is making coordination more challenging. Look, I don't think it's become more difficult.
I just think there's more parts to it now. You have to take into consideration a lot more things than previously you had to. Just for instance, within coaching a team, you have to take a lot of consideration into the learning environment which you create for the players. Whereas previously, if you look back 20 or 30 years ago, you could stand at the front of the room and say, this is what we're going to do.
And everyone would say, well, how hard do you want us to do it, coach? And now you have to explain why you have to do it. You have to make sure you have the right number of messages. You have to have the messages in the right way.
You have to have the right sort of visual presentation for the players. So all of that's become more challenging to extract the maximum effort from the players. How do you balance that need for team members to listen to your instructions, but then to also come up with their own solutions? I think you've got a story in the book about when you presented one of the players with sort of a, here's a problem, you need to fix it.
But also the players still need to listen to your words. How do you find that balance? Yeah, well, increasingly, Chris, it's more about the players finding their own solutions. I think coaches are more facilitators now.
And what we need to be really good at, though, is setting the standards of performance and making those performance standards very clear for everyone, but then guiding the player to where they need to go to achieve those standards rather than commanding the players to build. That's interesting. When do you think that you're at your best? Are you at your absolutely best now as a leader?
Well, I think you never get there, mate. I think you're always chasing it. It's like a lucid dream. It's that pie in the sky type thing where you're always trying to become a better coach and a better leader.
You know, we had Roy Hodgson come and visit us during the last Six Nations, and Roy's 72. He's coached, I think, four different countries, most of the top football clubs in the world. And his opening statement was, oh, boys, I'm still trying to work out how to be a good coach. And I think that's so true, that you're always chasing to be a little bit better because there is no finite state in sport, and there is no finite state in any high-performance organisation.
There's always what's coming next, who's chasing you, who's trying to do a little bit better than you. What are the values of a good leader to you? You break that down into a sort of a big five. How do you go through courage, hard work, discipline, eye and will and curiosity?
Well, I think all of those things are important, and they're all important at various times. I think, as I spoke about in the book, there's a cycle of performance that you need to go through where you need to build up the team. And particularly at the start, when you take over a team, I think you need a lot of courage to come up with a vision that's probably higher than the players have ever wanted to achieve. And then you've got to sell that vision to the players.
You've got to make sure that they're prepared to work hard to achieve that vision. And that message has got to be fresh all the time because the more you can repeat the message, the more chance you've got people are believing it. That's the one thing that's very consistent. We were lucky enough recently to get Doug Lemoff in, who's a schoolteacher in the USA.
And he started a number of schools called Uncommon Schools. And he's basically set up schools in the most underprivileged areas in the cities of America and created this fantastic learning environment where kids are doing significantly better than the norms for their areas. So we got him in to create, to get our coaches to learn more about being better teachers rather than just being coaches, because that's what it is now. It's teaching the players, guiding them, sometimes telling them, and most of the time trying to create the environment for them to learn by themselves.
Is there an insight that was surprising to you when learning what he does? Or was it something that you realised that you were doing incorrectly? It's not as severe as that, but what it is, it's the nuances of getting the message through. Like he did this presentation on rugby, and he doesn't know anything about rugby.
But he did this presentation, and our coaching team sat there in awe about his ability to capture the information succinctly, put it into a way that that most people can remember it. So it's that understanding of how the brain operates, understanding then how you create that right message for the players so they're able to remember what you're doing. And just some of the things, you know, like if you want the team to do a tactical, if you want a team to follow a tactical area of the game, the need to practise that at least four times during the week, the brain won't take that in unless you do it four times. And if it's more of a message, if you haven't repeated that message at least seven times during the week, the chances, again, of the players being able to remember that message is not great.
So those little things are really important. Yeah, the value of repetition from someone who doesn't have a clue about rugby, but was able to come over and give people who spent their entire lives doing rugby some new news. Yeah, and it's a value of repetition without having repetition. Yeah, that's the important thing because if we keep repeating the same message and you keep saying it the same way, people get bored of it.
You know, and particularly in the day society where, you know, if you haven't got something new on your podcast, people don't come back to it, do they? You know, because there's always something new they can go to. You look at, you know, soft drinks or drinks in the shops now. Like 30 years ago, you had Fanta, Coke, lemonade and water properly.
And now you've got, you know, each week there's a new flavour, a new sparkling, you know, lemon, yuzu, whatever it is, juice coming out. Because people want new things. And it's the same when you're giving messages to players now. You know, if you keep saying the same thing, they won't listen to you.
So you've got to present the same message in a number of different ways. So it's that idea of having repetition without repetition. It's the same as coaching on the field, you know. The importance of fundamentals in any of the games we play, whether it be football, whether it be American football, whether it be rugby union, the fundamentals are the bit that gives you the beauty of the game.
But young players don't want to do the endless drills of passing the ball without thinking. So you've got to be able to create those drills that are repetition. But at the same time, the players think they're doing something new all the time. So there's an element of novelty that delivers the same message that you want you to get across to them.
100% right. Sounds about beautiful. And am I right in saying that you said for physical activities, you're looking at four times a week? And for what does messages mean?
Is that more kind of like philosophies and theories? Seven times? Yeah, or the message about how we're going to play, just that key tactical message that you want to stick in their head. If you're not repeating that seven times during the week, the chances of the players remembering that is not great.
That's interesting. I wonder whether the immersive element that you get when players turn professional or when they go to an international stage, I'm wondering how much more of a benefit those players are seeing because they're living and breathing it. Think about the step change between a club level player who maybe is only with his team, what, once or twice during the week? And then again on game day.
And then as this young player works up and up, not only does he get better, but his ability to get better increases so much more because he's starting to hit his critical mass of messaging opportunities with the coaching staff that he works with. Yeah, I also think it's the ability to learn. And yeah, you see the players who go from one level to the next, their ability to learn quickly is one of the most distinguishing factors. Like I know in English cricket, they had a theory that if a player went from counting to test cricket and within the first three innings of test cricket, he wasn't able to get 50, the chances of him adapting and being a really good player is quite low.
And I think that's so true in most sports. You see when a young player goes up to the next level, if they adapt really quickly, and that's their ability to learn, if they're able to do that, their chances of getting successful players far higher than the player who's slated with that. That's interesting. So it's like a stress test at very, very high levels of pressure.
This person's put into a new environment, new stress is put upon them. How do they adapt and grow and learn? And that adaptability is a scalable insight that works out how effective they're going to be over time. Yeah, and the other part of that is that they've got to have an open mindset.
They've got to be open to learning, and they've got to have an element of curiosity, and they've also got to be humble, mate, because the hard thing for players particularly is to understand sometimes they think they've made it, they've got to the next level, so why do I have to improve now? And if you're humble, you always want to improve. And you see with the really great players, you know, you look at Federer, he's 40-odd now, and he's still got a tennis coach because he wants to improve. And every time he comes back for a new season, he's got a new stroke or a variation of his stroke.
Imagine if every team's ball player had that approach to their game, that every off-season they develop a new part of their game by themselves and come back with a new string of their bow. And the really good players do that, and not-so-good players think they've made it, and they don't think they've got to keep improving. Is there a tension between the hard work and the iron whale and the discipline and the curiosity that those first three are to do with kind of drilling and iterating on what you already do, and the curiosity is on growing, so you kind of have this exploit and then this explore element that there's two things going on. Is there a tension that you find between those?
Yeah, it's a constant battle, mate. The way you've said it is right, and there's this constant battle in terms of coaching, whether you're supporting or challenging the player. So you've always got this, and with your environment, you've got the constant battle or tension between being comfortable, because you need them to be comfortable sometimes. You know, you keep pushing all the time, they get too uncomfortable, but then when they start sitting comfortably on their chair, then you've got to make sure you make them a bit more uncomfortable.
So, you know, in terms of high-performance environment, that's one of the things you're constantly appraising, that support challenge, that comfortable, uncomfortable, that sitting and moving, you're always appraising where you need to be and trying to find the right way to keep moving forward. How do you avoid burnout, both for yourself and for the players? I know you've got someone who in the past has, how do you say, pushed the limits of this to what it's absolutely peak. Yeah, well, I think the first thing is you've got to keep loving it.
You know, if you really love something, it means a lot to you, you don't get burnout, because the passion's there, the desire's there, the enthusiasm there, and I never feel like I'm doing a job. I always feel like I'm doing something I love doing, and that's why I'm still able to catch it at 61, because it's not a job to me, it's something I love doing. And I think the mistake I made when I was a younger coach was that I expected everyone else, players and assistant coaches, to have that same desire to want to be like that all the time. But as I've got older and got more experience, I've understood that, you know, everyone's got their own way of doing it, and sometimes it might have manifested itself in this strong desire, but they've still got the desire there, so it's having more empathy about the way other people do their job.
It wouldn't work for everyone to have your approach either, right? Let's say that you are the bazooka or you're the hammer that sees everything as a nail. You don't need that. Sometimes you need other people that are more creative, that are more relaxed.
I know that you've got a lot of women that are contributing as parts of your coaching staff now that also add a total different perspective into this too. Yeah, well, I think, you know, the recent period of time has shown how important diversity is in life. You know, not that anyone thought it wasn't, but I think that's really reinforced. And I think in the sporting environment, it's become even more important to understand how important diversity is and that respect's almost more important than harmony in a team organisation.
I think having the respect of diversity, respect of different opinions, respect of people's backgrounds, respect of gender, all of that is just so important to an environment now. Well, the bottom line is it's not diversity for diversity's sake either. The reason that it works is that you get an effective outcome, that you have a team that performs better, that's more effective. Oh, 100% because everyone thinks the same way, everyone behaves the same way.
You know, you don't get any new thoughts, you don't get any creative conflict. You need to have that diversity to keep the ball moving. Talk to me about when you arrived in England in 2015 then. How do you begin changing the direction of a team when you're a brand new leader?
You're this fresh behind the face sort of guy that no one has an existing relationship with, but many people may have preconceived ideas about. Where'd you go? Well, I probably learnt the most by just telling a little story about how I approached it. Being a casual teacher or being a supply teacher, as I called it in England.
I did that for the first couple of years and I became a teacher because there wasn't any full-time jobs. So I'd go to a school and I used to go to my old school and the classes you got were always the tough classes because teachers don't take days off when they've got the top students. They take days off when they've got the rat bag. So I'd have the bottom classes of year nine boys, you know, when hormones are pumping through their bodies, they know everything, they don't want to control anything by a teacher.
And I quickly learnt out, you know, when you have those guys maybe four or five times a day, you've got to quickly work out, right, who's going to, who's going to be difficult for you and you have to find some way to establish a relationship. Who's going to help you? And again, you have to find a relationship with them and then you have to make the content of your lesson interesting that makes them want to be part of the lesson. So when you go to a new team, it's no different.
You've got to try to find the players who you think you need but maybe going to be difficult and find a way to establish a relationship quickly with them. Work out the players who are going to be with you from the start because they're driven. Make sure they understand your philosophy and where you want to go and then create a training program that's interesting that makes the players want to be there. And so you do that process, you know, and when you're with an England side, you've got five days to do that before you play a game.
So it's, you know, you've got to get on your horse and you've got to do it quickly. Talk to me about how you bridge the gap between the difficult ones and how you encourage and utilise the motivation of the driven ones. Have you got any strategies around how you approach that? Yeah, well, you've got to fill the difficult ones.
The difficult ones are difficult usually for a reason. They're either really high-performing players, which most of them are, or they're players you've got to get rid of. So you've quickly got to make it. You know they're high-performing players, they're difficult for a reason, so you've got to try to find out what they really value, what drives them.
I think I've spoken before about James Haskell who's always been this muscular player, but never really performed for England. But I've met him a few times especially before that in Japan and I knew that he wanted to be loved. So, yeah, some of the most overtly ostentatious out there type players are the players who are the most insecure. So I immediately had a conversation with him and said, mate, you're going to be so important for this team.
You're likely to be our starting seventh for the Six Nations. So you do these one or two things for me, you're going to be there. And that immediately made him feel good. So he wanted to be part of the team.
Then for the other guys, it's giving them roles I think is going to improve their rugby. So you're looking to each player quickly to establish a personal relationship, trying to understand what's the important value for them in terms of their sport and in terms of their endeavour, and then create that link with them. So with the difficult ones, you're looking to either bridge that gap or get rid. And with the guys who are driven, you're trying to give them responsibility that allows them to take ownership and move forward.
Yeah, and also show them how much you care about them. The big thing about any team is that the players want to know two things from the coach. Firstly, that they can improve them. And secondly, that they care about them.
So you've got to have the knowledge of rugby, particularly for those driven guys. They want to know that you've got the knowledge to take the team going forward because they want to be part of a successful team. So you've got to quickly assess in the team. And I think you see this in football all the time where coaches are able to come in or managers are able to come in a short period of time and turn the team around.
They're able to work out quickly how they can improve the team and therefore how they can improve the individual players' chances of being successful. So you've got to work out what that is very, very quickly. And for England, it was quite easy because they've always been a strong defensive and set-piece team. So I just focused on what they were good at previously and then gave them a picture of where we could go potentially.
It's interesting as a non-professional athlete looking at these pros because from our perspective, these guys just look like athletic titans, right? Just these immovable objects that go on the pitch and completely work to what the tactics say that they're supposed to do. But you're right. The only reason that a manager or a coach is able to step into a team, whether it be football or rugby, and make a quick change, they're not changing the skills of the players.
The players haven't acquired some new move or something within the space of one day or one week that this coach has been there. It's about the communication. It's about how they're framing that player's role. It's about how they're talking to them.
It's about making them feel comfortable, confident, secure within their position within the team and giving them responsibility to drive them forward. I've never thought of it like that before, but it makes so much sense. That's the only way you can turn something around that quickly. Yeah, 100%.
Well, you look at – it's one of the most interesting things for me is watching how other coaches operate. And having seen Rannick coming to Manchester United, every time he talks, he's very clear about what he wants. Like, this is how the team's going to play. We might not play like that now, but this is where we're going.
He wants players with a strong mentality. It doesn't matter how talented they are. They've got a strong mentality. And you can see, you know, every time he talks to a media conference, he's talking to his players.
So he's reinforcing – you know, we said about reinforcing the messages. He's constantly reinforcing the messages he'd be telling within the team room. He's saying that to the media. So they're hearing that, right?
So we know what this bloke wants. For us to be successful, if we're going to do this, we've got to do these things. And at the same time, I'm sure he gives them enough freedom to impose their own personality on the team. I reckon that's another important point that, you know, a team generally wants to be like the personality of the coach.
But at the same time, the coach's skill is being able to not delete the player's personality from that. So you want the players to be themselves, but you want to be part of a group that plays like the coach wants them to play so they get on the same page. But at the same time, for the players to be able to be their own personality. You see this in businesses as well, right?
The owner or the director or the CEO or whatever. The culture is just a trickle-down, little microcosm of whatever it is that they do. In any case, you see elements of their personality borne out in the company culture. It is just like a little projection of how that person operates.
Yeah, 100%. And then the individuals are able to add to that. So they're continuing adding. Like we had a sports site come in between 2018 and 2020 for England's side.
And one of her great quotes was that, remember, every conversation you have with the player or with the staff member, you're either adding to the business or you're taking away from the business. You never – no conversation is neutral. And it's so, so right that every conversation you have, whether it be passing a guy in the hallway, you can either add to the team business that day or take away from the team business. And your ability to keep adding to the business is the key thing.
Talking about James Haskell, you said that he was an important part of like lighting the dressing room up, being kind of the life of the party, so to speak. Are there some other support systems that a leader needs that might not be so obvious at first? You wouldn't think that in a high-performing sports team that having a life of the party or someone that lightens the load would be in there, but it seems like it's quite an important role. Mate, it's really important.
And again, it's that diversity of character that you need. So you not only need that in the players, but you also need a staff member that's able to do that. So we had a guy called Scott Wiseman, who coached with me in Japan. I've already known him once for the last two years.
Like he was a sort of like, honestly, he's 50 now, and he's still got the same pair of board shorts he had when he was 21. And they tell this story about New South Wales. They're driving to training. They see this guy on the board shorts on the skateboard with his cap backwards, pushing along on his skateboard, going to training.
This is one of the most important assistant coaches. So having a guy like that who's good at his coaching, but also can add a bit of frivolity, a bit of humour. Like humour is such an important thing in the sports environment or any competitive environment that you have that balance between seriousness of the job and that humour to get people to feel good about themselves. It's funny to think that a lot of bad leaders that I've spent time with, they want other members of the team to be exactly like them.
But as you said, we're not going to get that diversity through that way. And especially whatever it is that you have, having more of that isn't what you need. It's more of the things that you don't have that are then going to spread out that creativity. Yeah, no, that's right, Chris.
And I think the really important thing there is as a leader or as a head coach, you need to know yourself. Because when we're a young coach coming through, we think we know everything and we think we can do everything. And the longer you coach, the more you realise, know your strengths, coach to your strengths and then bring other people in that complement, supplement and add to the team environment. I'm fascinated by the idea that the coach can use opportunities with the press as a chance to communicate to the players.
I think that that, I mean, you've had some pretty advanced media strategies over the last few years, the way that you went out and attacked the All Blacks in advance of your game with them. And then there was the sort of the V formation that you guys formed around the Haka. Can you explain sort of the plan behind that that whole week? Yeah, well, New Zealand are the darlings of world rugby.
You know, everyone loves them. And they should because they're the most successful team in the world. And they've got this mystique about them with the black jersey, doing the Haka. And having lived in Japan, I know how much the Japanese love them.
So with a guy that's worked with me for 20 years now, David Prembroke, who's one of the brightest people I know, he always at the start of the week will send me some lines about where we think we should go. So firstly, we wanted to put the New Zealand media on call, that we wanted them to stir them up a bit. So they'd ask Steve Hanson, who was the head coach, some questions. So we came up with that line of they're just fans with keyboards to stir that up a bit.
And then we wanted to make sure that New Zealand understood we were coming after them. So we used some language at the start of the week about how we're going to chase them down the street and all these sort of things. And the busiest person in the New Zealand camp would be the sports psychologist who was well-renowned and one of the most successful. And then we had this idea, right, that's all well and good.
But once we get to the ground and they start the harker, the whole crowd gets in chance by them. And then they become, the crowd supports them. So what we wanted to try to do was get the crowd to think about something else. So we came up with this idea that we'd encircle the harker, so we'd make a circle around it.
But that was the coach's idea. So I gave it to Owen Farrell, the captain, and I said, mate, this is my idea or our idea. But then you talk to the team and you do what you think's right. So they came up with the idea that they'd make a V and stay within the distance I was supposed to stay, which I think you know that over half a play line.
But unfortunately, we've got a bloke called Joe Marley who doesn't tend to listen to most people. And he kept going. So we ended up with this quite confrontational V and you could hear the buzz in the crowd. All of a sudden, well, we're not here to just watch the All-Blacks.
This is a proper game and it's on. So we got that right approach. But yeah, you do that in other games and it doesn't work and you look like an idiot, mate. The video, if anyone wants to go and watch it on YouTube, you can see the referee or the linesman sort of trying to pull Joe Marley back and saying, no, no, you're on there, half of the pitch you need to be and your half of the game hasn't even begun yet.
But again, that's a good example of diversity because Joe Marley, he's completely his own man. Is he one of the most unique players that you've coached? 100%, mate. But one of the best players I've coached to do.
A great team man, really respected within the team. But yeah, he's got his own way. He wants to be portrayed and we give him the freedom to do that. And as a result, he keeps wanting to play for England.
He's retired two or three times. He's got five kids under 10 at home. So he's got plenty to do at home. But he's a great fellow, great fellow.
He's so entertaining to watch. It doesn't surprise me that he's a fan favourite. And then when you find out that he's a player favourite too, I guess Haskell's probably something similar, right? Just that pure character.
It sets the... People sometimes forget when we talk about high performance that although sport is about winning and about performing effectively, it is an entertainment. I know that you've got some problems at the moment to do with the ball in, ball out of play time, which although partly that's to do with how the game's played and the dynamic, it's also to do with how enjoyable it is to watch. So if you've got a character on the pitch with his crazy hair and his mad after-match interviews and the things that the referee's mic picks up as he's like Joe Marley's giving the referee a slap on the arse or whatever it might be, that kind of makes for a spectacle that people want to watch.
And it goes back again, you don't want to be annulling the player's personality. You want them to have their personality. And the crowds want to see that. They want to see players with personality.
And as professional sports got tighter and tighter, particularly, I think it's been harder for players to be their own person because the academies want players who behave themselves. They don't want players who are difficult who want to do their own thing. So those players have to work really hard now to come through. Is there almost a sense of deprogramming that when it gets to the top level, that you go from being a wild young kid, you need to show to the academy usually, you know, if you've got some academy coach, my housemate's the ex-physio of the junior academy at Falcons and now the junior first team, and I think that they want kids that show that they can listen to discipline.
They want kids that can do the thing, but then you get to the top flight and actually you're now trying to bring, you're almost trying to deprogram that. You're trying to bring some of that individuality back out again. Yeah, I think it's a constant battle that we've got that we want players, particularly I think in the media, to be their own selves. Yeah, obviously there's a team line we want them to follow, but we want them to be able to tell stories.
We want them to be able to entertain the people who pay, you know, ultimately the crowds pay for the players to play the game. And they need to be able to entertain. Yeah, I think that's just such an important part of sport going forward. And you see, the American teams are probably best at doing it, aren't they?
You know, I remember seeing that Cam Newton for, I think he played for Carolina Panthers, you know, a real character, the way he used to dress coming to press conferences. And people remember that. Did you watch The Last Dance, the Michael Jordan documentary on Netflix? What were you thoughts about that?
Oh, again, I reckon that's a great example of a coach knowing what the team needed. Like when Rodman, having Rodman there with Pippen and Jordan, he had the right balance in the team. When Jordan was out and it was just Pippen and Rodman, Rodman's force within the team was probably too strong. And there wasn't enough ballast in the senior player group to manage his ideosecances.
Because if they were able to manage it, he was a force for the team. But if they weren't able to manage it, then he became a negative force for the team. So I thought that the way Jackson was able to manage that, and you didn't hear much from Jackson in the series, but you could see his influence on the team. And the way, the other bit I really liked was that, you know, in NBA, it looks like in the lead up to the finals, it's all about attack.
But as soon as you get to the finals, it's all about defence, which is the same in most sports, you know. What do you mean by that? You've got to be a good attacking team to get to the finals, but to win the finals, you've got to be a good defensive team. That's interesting.
I wouldn't have thought that that would be the case. Yeah, well, that's the thing that stood out to me how hard they played defence in the finals. Like Jordan in the finals, his defence was incredible. And you think you're going to see the same, or you do see the same pattern come across in rugby as well?
Oh, 100%, mate, totally. Because they're tight games, you know, and they're 50-50 games for the team that generally makes less serious wins. Yeah, that's an interesting one. So what about your habits for leadership?
What about your routines and the non-negotiables that you have in your daily existence that make sure that you're performing as well as you can as a leader? Yeah, well, I think you've got to have a routine as a leader. I certainly have developed that over the years. I've always had quite a strong work ethic.
So I've always worked long hours, but I've become much more effective in working more effective hours. The book that I read and got a lot out of was a book called Deep Work by Cal Newport, which is about understanding when your most profitable periods of the day are. Make sure you do your hardest work there. Make sure you cut off all the distractions you have and do your best work then.
And then the other periods are more lighter periods of work. So that's really helped me a lot, that book. And I was lucky enough to have a Zoom with you. You know, any aspiring coach or any aspiring leader should read that book.
Yeah, he's been on the show about A World Without Email, which is his new book that he is trying to turn people's worlds upside down with. There's one thing I'd suggest that you might really enjoy. It's a book by Stephen Kotler called The Art of Impossible. So you think about how someone like Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi or Cal Newport, they come at flow from quite a psychological perspective.
Stephen comes at it from a biological perspective. So he looks at the biological prerequisites that cause a human to be in a flow state. And that book, that book's really, really impressive. There's something nice about having someone that's like spitting sawdust around what you need to do in order to prime your body, to prime your own peak performance.
But given your daily routine, which I know you tend to work on a morning, right? You get up sort of early and then you crack it out. That aligns, interestingly, that aligns really, really closely with what Stephen talks about. And he's done some of the most advanced flow research on the planet.
He owns the Flow Research Collective, which is this big group and blah, blah, blah. And it's funny how people that maybe don't know the neurology of why it's happening, they just arrive at an effective strategy simply by trial and error. Yeah, no, I read that book, mate. That's a good tip.
Good man. Good man. So talk to me about some of the new additions to your team. We've spoken about the fact that we've got women on board and you've touched on this as a media person.
You've got a guy who used to speak to psychopaths and stuff and you've got all manner of different team members. Who are some of the interesting ones? We use a forensic psychologist now and she used to assess psychopaths in one of the jails in England and basically to see whether they were going to kill again. And if they were going to kill, they had to stay in a high security jail, obviously.
And if she felt they could move to a more less secure, or tell us a story about how she'd sit in the jail room with these psychopaths having to try to analyse them. So we've got her on to work with the coaches. That's the first time we've had a psychologist with the coaches. Oh, so she's not just working with the players.
You've got her working with the coaches to assess their mental state as well. She's working with the coaches to improve our collaboration as a team and also to improve our language and our communication just as we spoke about before. Just the power of language now. It's always been important.
but i think it's even more important now so she has a her name is nashabar the soul hem and she's written a book called pin code and basically she's got you know the approach of how you should prepare for every conversation your advanced preparation the way you use your body and the way you approach your conversation is just so important so she's been she's been fantastic for us that's i'm gonna steal that and i'm gonna ask you for an intro too yeah that sounds really interesting um it's still it's still fascinating me the level of um intricacy that you're seeing with rugby i don't know how this compares with other sports but like i say i've watched my housemate from a front row seat move through um the layers of you know a top level club and what one thing that struck me from that is that there are uh different groups and i imagine this must understand most elite sports but specifically within rugby um you know he's part of the physio team but the physio team needs to coordinate with s and c but s and c also needs to coordinate with coaches and everybody has their own uh priorities so it feels to me like the physio team are kind of erring on the side well look we know how long this injury may take to come back the coach wants the guy to be on the pitch the s and c person wants to deliver the player to come back on the pitch so it makes sense that coordination and communication between you guys and really really getting that right and not causing rifts and politics within that coaching community even before you can get to the players it makes a lot of sense that getting that right is pretty crucial oh it's absolutely crucial mate and it's having that holistic approach to the player that there's you can't treat the player for just one thing that everything's connected yeah so their their physical state is is uh connected to their fitness level which is connected to their ability to play the game so we do a lot of case studies on the players and get all the all the particular people involved making sure that that the approach we take to the player is the right approach and again then it comes back to the language of how you approach that um so the language involved in that's just so important and because rugby rugby is a reasonably complex game um that's not won by individuals it's won by a team and that's why in rugby you don't tend to get huge superstars because it is it's the ultimate team game like missing in rugby would be hard to to have because because he can't do that without everyone else doing their job because it takes at least eight players to win the ball before it gets delivered to him there's no Ben Stokes on the rookie pitch no there's not and it's difficult difficult for those players to actually survive in the game because it's such a complicated game and our job as a staff is to make it simple yeah we've got to make this complicated game simple for the players because we know the neurology of the brain if the players are thinking all about this they can't perform on the field so our job is to make sure we keep that simple and the communication between all those departments has got to be so uh concise and so much on the same page because you imagine now a player comes into a new player comes into a team yeah we've got 22 staff members so they've now established 22 relationships with 22 staff members yeah that's a hell of a lot of work to do so if each of the staff members telling them a slightly different thing then you can imagine how confusion can come into a young player's head so our ability to make sure that the messages are clear and concise and simple and and and driving the player to the to the one goal um is just is just massively important for us do you try and restrict the number of people that communicate sort of strategies and tactics to the players in order to reduce that degree of freedom as well 100% mate so we uh we're breaking the down breaking the team down a little bit like nfl uh that there's four groups of players each have a a head coach so to speak for that group and we want most of the communication to go through that person yeah particularly when the players going through a difficult stage we'll try to channel all that information to the right person what about during halftime or you can imagine that this would be any uh high pressure time sensitive communication opportunity have you got some principles that you go into that with or that you tell the coaches to go into that with they're trying to have one thing that they speak about are there some underlying rules yeah no most most two things at most absolute most you know so those all you know on any given sunday type speeches don't happen anymore mate it's one or two points um and we know that the more stress the player is which they use the out half time they got physical stress they're not a tactical stress uh that their ability to absorb information is less so we need to keep that information so concise so one or two messages we're trying to get through at the very most nice what about when you notice in yourself is there something that you detect if your balance starts to go off if you find yourself becoming less effective or just you're getting you're straying away from the principles is are there any um warning signs that you find in yourself on that something uh well i've deliberately put another guy on a guy called neil craig who's who's an afl coach um previously in another life of sports science so he's basically he's a bit older than me um and he sits there next to me all the time and everything we do and and keeps giving me feedback about about what i'm doing um so that if i'm do straying away if i'm doing too hard or too soft or not talking enough or talking too much he's giving me that feedback so every morning we'll have a coffee at half past seven go through it and i heard another story from a strange friend of mine who case the boomers at the last uh olympics and they won their first medal ever and he went and visited the milwaukee bucks and he said you know he had a good good relationship with a head case so he'd see that he was there for 10 or 12 days he said there's this little bloke every day running around with his name pat you know and he didn't know what he did because no one spoke to him he didn't have no one introduced him but he had a role anyway about the ninth day he said who is that little bloke that's writing these things down and the head case says he's the most important bloke in this in this uh organization he says he writes down everything i do well he writes down everything i don't don't do well and at the end of the day he gives it to me straight and and you need someone in that the organization to be doing that all the time i just like having a truth teller there but someone who's who's not afraid of being absolutely honest to make sure that they're picking up things when you're moving away from what you should be doing it's like an external impartial conscience yeah yeah the situations are so highly charged and emotional especially when you're getting toward game time right we've got the world cup coming up in less than two years now your ability to judge your own performance and remember what you said and what you did is basically zero like you're the worst you're the worst witness to your own mind but to have someone there who's on your shoulder what do you call that person is he the coach's coach what is he uh well we just call him craig he doesn't have he doesn't have a role mate but everyone knows what he does okay because he's because he's seen as being neutral he's also acts as a source of uh that any of the players all the coaches can talk to because he knows nothing about rugby knows absolutely the best way you know so they have very honest conversations so he only not only acts as that for me but he acts as for the coaches and some of the senior players as well what's the story about a samurai sword in a kiwi oh that was just like yeah because the players have so many meetings we're always trying to come up with novel ways of reinforcing the theme as we're talking about so we had as we said in new zealanders we had that we had that thing we're chasing we're after them you know we're after this week they're not coming after us we're going after them anyway i'm a half japanese so i always wanted to have a samurai sword i always thought of myself as a samurai you know if i was born 700 years ago i would have been a samurai i don't know how many fights i would have lasted but anyway we're down in miyazaki this tiny little coastal town um for a week and i asked the interpreter uh who'd worked with me for a period of time to go and try to buy me a samurai sword so she chased me around miyazaki and found this tiny little shop and only one person could go in the shop it was that small and there was this man in there about age 80 and he'd been collecting these samurai swords so i had this collection of samurai swords and the one the one that that we bought um was about 300 years old like we had the papers that said it was a legitimate samurai sword so that was like that was like a childhood dream to have that so i thought now how am i going to use this and i thought well we can't use we can't use it on any of the players uh because it might be a nasty cut so i thought i will kiwi fruit so the night before i got some kiwi fruit up in my room i was practicing chopping this kiwi fruit up so you know we've had the deep meeting gone through all the tactical stuff and i said boys this is what's going to take we're going to we're going to chase him down the street we're going to chop him in half and just cut up some kiwi fruit and it was a bit of fun you know everyone's laughing and yeah everyone wants to see the samurai sword afterwards so it's just a way of um of reinforcing the message i want to see the room service assistant that arrives at your room with dinner that night as you've got a samurai sword this half japanese man's got a samurai sword in his like shorts and vest whacking seven shades of shit out of a kiwi on his desk yeah i'll probably get arrested mate i wanted to bring the samurai sword back to england but i think i'd get arrested if i brought it back dangerous weapon yeah i heard you say um i was watching one of the many uh eddie jones press interviews uh compilations that exist on youtube and you said i never worry about things i can't control how do you avoid being swept away in those uncontrollable concerns and stuff like that how do you notice when you're getting outside of your domain of competence and control uh again uh reflection is a big thing i think at the end of every day and i'm not as deliberate as i should be uh and i go through phases um but i'll try to reflect very clearly on the day what i did well what i didn't do well i've used like a high performance journal there's about well i use just a little book like this sometimes and i'll just write things down and i try to be as as deliberate as i can about reflection each day i think yeah that's one of the most important skills as a case you need to have is that ability to reflect uh record write it down if you haven't done it well write it down if you have done it well again that reinforces the message that of what you're not doing well or what you are doing well so reflection is the most important thing and i'd have i said coffee with uh neil craig the other one talk to me about dealing with public criticism yeah when you're young it's hard mate it's hard uh when i was a young coach coming through i felt i felt all the criticism that was that was that was uh directed towards you when you weren't doing well and i enjoyed the praise when i was doing well and probably uh coming to coming to England really helped me um i remember one of the first lunches i had was with Alex Ferguson i was lucky enough to meet him and he said mate don't read any of it stop reading and from that day onwards i haven't read it so i really don't know i don't take i don't don't read it at all my wife might mention something or my mum my mum's 96 lives in australia she reads every newspaper so she said they said this about you mum i don't care i don't want to know um so i just don't take any any uh any of it at heart at all so i don't even read it so i don't even know so ignorance is your solution yeah yeah i think otherwise it's i think it's so hard that i heard i heard a play the other day i was watching a documentary on australian swimming and the the guy was saying he was a hundred meter sprinter and he said you know he reads social media he says there's 700 good comments and then there's one bad comment and he says that one bad comment sticks with him and he wants to ring that person up and ask him why does he say that and and i think in in sport if you have that sort of attitude it's very difficult because you're wasting time you're wasting time on that one negative comment um that used to be written on the toilet wall you know you walk in the toilet someone's someone's written on the wall so and so is a so-and-so and all this sort of thing and you know because you'd only be in there for the toilet you sweetly go out but now you know players have players and coaches have to live with this and it becomes a storm and if you if you try to try to at all rationalize why people try to do that all you're doing is wasting time how do you help the boys deal with pressure you know we've got this big world cup coming up there is some expectation after a run of good form recently how are you especially the younger lads that maybe don't have joe mali's five attempted his retirements and all this all this experience how do you help them deal with that pressure we want them to see it as a privilege like it's a privilege of being part of a good team that you that the pressure's there and external pressure is no greater than the the expectation that's within the team and the expectation that's within the individual and one of the things we've started doing with the players is coming up with the concept of a trademark game that we believe that yeah a trademark game is a game where you play at the absolute minimum you have to play but you play with absolute effort and absolute control now we reckon if we have 75 of our players playing at that because that's hard that's hard to do if we have 75 of our players playing at that then we'll win most games so we want the players to concentrate on their effort and what they can control rather than things they can't control so it's again getting back to what can you control in your performance control that you can control your effort you can control if you can control your emotion you have to work on that so they're practicing that trademark game each week trying to trying to get brilliant at that trademark game and if they can do that then the better games automatically come for them so they don't have to aspire to be brilliant every week because that's where i think the pressure comes from oh so you are allowing a release valve you've got a realistic view of that performance that it is going to fluctuate from the absolute perfect to sometimes all of that and to say look it's okay it's okay as long as you're playing with effort and control like there's a young player that we've we just brought in i won't mention his name um but he's he came in on the back of some brilliance at club level came in and played for england had a couple of games and he was brilliant did some brilliant things and now he keeps chasing that brilliance and rather than just chasing play play play hard play control your emotions and that will come sometimes other times it won't come but you can play really well and you can maybe not score goals but you can play really well for your team and help your team win but because there's an expectation of your scoring goals and then if you try to score goals you're creating further pressure on yourself rather than just play hard for the team like be the best player you can to the team control your emotions control what you can control and and ultimately those better performances will come that's such a really interesting way to look at things to avoid aiming for brilliance every single time especially when it's not just you you know you can maybe argue in a sport like powerlifting where your opponent is the bar and its gravity the uh how do you say the degrees of freedom of being constrained right there's no there's no opponent trying to punch you in the face let's say in boxing or in sometimes in rugby and with that having a having an approach of look your best ever game isn't the standard that you now need to try and beat that's just where you can get to and what did you do that got you there and we continue to try and iterate on that yeah yeah and the best example in rugby recently has been dan carter uh who most of his games he was very solid and then occasionally do one or two brilliant things but people would harp on about brilliant things but it was actually his brilliance was his solidarity and that's you look at most things sports that's what it's about it's about being solid working hard then all of a sudden you get the one opportunity and if you're in the right place at the right time you get that opportunity to do something great in england it seems like rugby is still a private school dominated sport how important do you think it is to have players like ellis genge who are sort of showing that whatever normal guys can make it to the international level oh very important because again you know diversity is important going forward um and so we're so pleased we've got guys like genge guys like sinclair come through they're not out of not out of the pathway so to speak they've fought their way through but you know i've had previously guys like mark wilson who went back to university to study yeah those sort of players are really important for us amazing eddie jones ladies and gentlemen where should people go if they want to find out more about the book uh well macmillan macmillan publish this and then i'm sure there'll be a nice book still time they'll be linked in the show notes below everyone will be behind you over the next couple years i'm really looking forward to seeing what the outcomes of all of this these new psychologists and the person that's looked at psychopaths and the guy that's on your shoulder telling you when you're getting it wrong i um i really love to see people take the minutiae and the fine-tuned fine-grained stuff right up to 11 we saw this with team sky in the red racing right you know we saw what happens when you really take a granular view and then you deploy that to a to a team in a way that makes sense so yeah man i'm uh i'm confident going into 2023 all the best luck i really enjoyed chatting to you enjoyed your questions all the best