Five Steps to a Winning Mindset by Damian Hughes
“Great coaches don’t amass such a record by spending their time talking. They spend most of their time watching and listening.”
3 Main Messages:
Make your messages simple, memorable and effective.
It’s all about relationships - what can you do to help nurture connections and create a culture?
Train your players to think differently.
Many years ago I had the privilege of thanking Damian Hughes after he spoke at our Headteacher conference. I knew little about him before he spoke but I loved his genuine stories and his passion, warmth and humour. He told a story about Sir Alex Ferguson’s expectations which changed my daily behaviour and resulted in a shared approach which positively affected every member of staff and student in my school. He shared how Manchester United players were told that, once they had crossed the white line into training, that there were non-negotiable behaviours which they all had to adhere to in order for the whole team to focus fully, give their best and become a winning team.
He relayed this to his own life and how he had to impose a white line for himself to ensure that he was fully focused and engaged in the correct behaviour both at work and at home. I can remember his story about introducing the ‘Disney Daddy Homecoming’ to switch between the working week and being the best Dad. I loved this, shared it with my staff and one of them actually put a physical white masking tape line over the threshold to her classroom which had a significantly positive impact on the behaviour, engagement and learning of her pupils.
For many years I remembered and retold the ‘white line story’ but had forgotten where it came from. It didn’t matter - as long as I had remembered the message. Then years later I was introduced to The High Performance Podcast by a friend and was delighted to be reintroduced to Damian Hughes and his wonderfully witty and northern approach to sharing life’s lessons.
The Five Steps to a Winning Mindset takes lessons that Hughes has learned through being raised by a boxing coach father and throughout his work in sport, organisational development and change psychology and delivers them as simple messages, with entertaining and insightful stories to drive his messages home.
Hughes knows that the key to making your messages memorable is to tell them through stories and to keep the messages simple, punchy and practical. He gives the wonderful example of having a high probability of being able to catch one tennis ball thrown at you and a good chance of managing to catch two but, if you have 5 balls thrown at you, you won’t catch any. It’s the same with our messaging: we just need to share the main idea. We need to find our core message - our North Star - and be able to deliver it in a memorable way with the “Bottom Line Up Front” (BLUF).
There are many lessons to be learned from the world of sport which are easily transferable into business and education. The stories about José Mourinho’s attention to detail and love for his players, Mohammed Ali’s mindset and mental discipline, Sir Alex Ferguson’s observations and arrow-sharp messaging, and Sir Clive Woodward’s team mental preparation, are all insightful, inspiring and incredibly relevant in all areas of leadership, management and coaching.
The five steps are Simplicity, Thinking, Emotions, Practical and Stories. Hughes expands on how to ensure you share just one key message at a time, how to “violate people’s expectations”, harness emotions in order to be able to focus and succeed, and to make sure that messaging is practical and told through stories.
Every culture has its own fables and legends and we learn and remember core messages best when they are told through stories, as evidenced by Hughes’ white line story told all those years ago. He tells us that we need to “contain and entertain, then explain,” which is precisely what successful film-makers, authors, teachers, politicians, coaches, advertising agents and religious leaders have been doing for centuries! He reminds us that stories should be unexpected, simple and have a practical message. It is through these stories that we develop the connections needed to build new cultures.
The core message of this book however, which comes up again and again, is that the best coaches are loved and trusted by their teams, because they in turn, love and are trustworthy. The best coaches are hard working, pay attention to detail, watch and listen more than they speak and, most importantly, genuinely care about their people. Hughes reminds us about the way our brains are wired to return to core survival traits of ‘fight, flight, freeze and flock’. We all just want to belong. He tells us that “People work hard for a team. They work even harder for a team that truly feels like family.”
Hughes and his co-host, Jake Humphries, are doing this on a significant scale with their High Performance Podcast. It is an uplifting and inspirational listen that I enjoy on a weekly basis. Both hosts are honest, open and genuine and ask brilliant questions. I can’t recommend highly enough: read the book, listen to the podcast and take their lessons into your own leadership.
