Business Innovators Radio - Ep. #21 – Professor Damian Hughes – The Big Success Podcast with Brad Sugars

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to the Big Success Podcast, cutting edge conversations on business and personal success, as well as how to level up. Here's your host, number one business coach in the world, Brad Shogers. Wow, that's all I can say. The Big Success Podcasts today, Professor Damien Hughes, his podcast is on high performance. You imagine the number of people he's interviewed that are amazing performers around the world. Now, not only is the professor of organizational behavior, and studied this stuff.

Starting point is 00:00:33 Comes from a boxing background. He'll tell you a bit more about that during the whole thing. But being the coach of many sporting teams, like he's been on the coaching staff of England rugby, England Roses, Scotland Rugby Union. He's done a whole bunch of things and performed at that high level. His best-selling books, so many of them. I love this one.

Starting point is 00:00:53 That's my favorite, the Sir Alex Ferguson, how to think like Sir Alex. But he's written books on boxing greats. He's done the whole thing. studied success. When we get to his answer on what is success and how it works, when we get to his answer on how to scale up, the guy has formulas beyond formulas of how success happens, how high performance happens. So tune in, go right through this thing, take notes. He gives so many formulas, you're going to want to write them down. This is the big success podcast, and this is

Starting point is 00:01:25 Damien Hughes. And we have the Damien Hughes, the Liquid Thinker, the Professor of performance. Damien, how you doing, buddy? I'm good, Brad. How are you, mate? You know, I'm doing fantastic and I'm really intrigued, given all the people you've interviewed on high performance, how do you see success? Like, what's success to you? Yeah, it's a brilliant question, Brad, and I think it's one that I've reflected on a lot over the years. And I think my summary of it is a three-word answer, which is doing the best you can with the resources you've got in the moment you're in. And the reason I think that that captures what my version of success is, is because things change all the time. You know, the resources you have might be different now

Starting point is 00:02:09 than it was when you're in your 20s. The moment that you're in is obviously different, depending on your age or your circumstances. So continually just asking that question, am I doing the very best I can in this moment with the resources I have to me? If you can answer yes to that more frequently than you can answer no. that defined success. So has that evolved over time, do you think? Was it something that you started with or how's that shifted for you? No, it's a good question.

Starting point is 00:02:38 It's certainly evolved over time. I think when I, so when I was younger, so my background is I grew up in a boxing gym. So I was constantly around guys that was striving to go off and win titles or Olympic gold medals or to make a fortune in the sport. So I was very much around that sort of the extrinsic measures of what success looked like, which is a valid and obviously an important factor of it. But what was really interesting over the years is then seeing the guys that maybe didn't achieve

Starting point is 00:03:12 the success in terms of a title or a medal, but actually came away from it feeling that they'd done the best that they could in that moment with the resources they had. And I think that started to shift my perspective on it significantly. Yeah. Yeah. So where in life then, was there a moment? Was it a gradual thing? When did you choose success? Yeah. I think, I think, so that leads us into origin stories. So my origin story was that I grew up in a boxing gym. And if any of your listeners might have a mental model of what they think of boxing gym is, they often assume it's in some gritty inner city. at a deprived area. And my story fits that stereotype.

Starting point is 00:04:01 So it was in Manchester in what was categorized as Europe's third poorest district. So that gives you an idea of a lot of the sort of social difficulties or problems that we experienced. And when I was growing up, we sort of,

Starting point is 00:04:17 there's two things that shaped me. One was being around high performance from a really young gage, people going off and going on to aspire to those goals I just described earlier. But what I also became very aware of is the power of community there as well, that it was a place where you didn't have to step up through the boxing ring to feel that you could come in there and be respected and valued and recognized for who you were.

Starting point is 00:04:42 You had to comply with the behaviours, which was about coming in and being respectful and hard work and consistent. But it was very much around that. Now, I always presume my career was going to go down the route of going into sort of boxing, whether that was as a coach or a participant. But my dad was really keen that I pursue an academic angle because he wanted me to, he felt that that was more sustainable

Starting point is 00:05:08 than a far healthier and safer career path. And I was lucky enough, I got a scholarship to a really good school. So that was seen as the way out of those kind of circumstances. And then I nearly squandered it, Brad. So I got there and was like a fish out. of water and got myself into a fair amount of trouble and scrapes. And I ended up getting expelled from this school for predictably enough fighting.

Starting point is 00:05:36 And what happened was, and I knew that I'd really squandered the opportunity and it was a teacher that came along the evening I'd been expelled from the school. And he knew that I was from a good family, but I was a little bit out of my depth in terms of operating a context had never been before. and he came and spoke to my parents and said that he was prepared to go to the school and stand up for me and offer a testimonial. But I knew it was literally the last chance saloon. And that was the moment I remember that evening that night thinking,

Starting point is 00:06:08 I don't think I'm particularly bright, but I know that I can work hard. I know that I can learn. I know that I can commit myself to any tasks that I put my mind to. So I'd describe it. It was when I reached about 15 was the moment that I knew what I needed to do. to go on and be as successful as what I could be. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:06:29 Yeah, it's interesting. You know, when you look at success, whether it's chosen for you or there's a moment or that sort of thing. Since then, obviously, you've developed that. What's your model for how success happens? How do you find that success works? Well, I mean, what you described there, so that incident I described from my own childhood,

Starting point is 00:06:51 I was really intrigued years later to discover that, Sigmund Freud described that as the golden seed moment. Yeah. He says for everybody that goes on to achieve success against their own parameters, they always have a moment where somebody somewhere believes in them and so does that seed of what they think they're capable of. And that was certainly the case for me. So I think for a lot of people,

Starting point is 00:07:15 that happens, that golden seed moment, whether it's a parent, whether it's a teacher, whether it's a priest, whether it's a local person in the community, goes and does that. So I think that can often be a trigger for it.

Starting point is 00:07:29 But I think in terms of how when I work with people or teams, I suggest that they can go on and define success. I do a really simple exercise that is bad success leaves clues. So what I ask them to do is, say, you tell me the parameters of what success looks like for you. If you're in the sales team, it might be your best customer relationship. it might be the best quarter results you've had.

Starting point is 00:07:54 If it's a sports team, it might be the best result you've ever achieved. And then we do a forensic analysis of what that successful moment look like. And there's three things that I find follow from that analysis. The first one is it's an inclusive exercise. So everyone will have an opinion. And secondly, what leads from that is everyone feels they can speak freely and be included in it. But the third and most significant factor that emerges is that confidence is then

Starting point is 00:08:22 built upon the evidence. So you're not asking people to do something that they're not capable of. You're demonstrating that you've already done it. And what we're now trying to do is more of those successful behaviors that lead to more successful outcomes. And that's where I always start because I think there's a danger in trying to come up with a formula, like a lift and shift method that says this work there and therefore it'll work here. I think it's always got to be organic.

Starting point is 00:08:50 And that to me is the best way into the. those conversations. Yeah. So when someone's confronted with that, you'd use the word confidence there. What gets them to really act on it? What's your experience on how do we get them to take action on that knowledge? Yeah. So again, that's, I mean, it's a really incisive question. And I think what, what often leads them to take action is if you can start to like drill it down into certain and specific behaviors. So if I use my own example of, say, the boxing gym, one of the behaviors there of the success leaves clues

Starting point is 00:09:27 was about the behavior of discipline. But what does that mean? So one of the rules that we had in the gym was that you weren't allowed to use bad language. Because to use bad language was a sign of ill discipline, that if you couldn't think of anything to say to fill the silence or a moment other than a swear word, that indicated that you lacked discipline to be able to hold your tongue.

Starting point is 00:09:48 So it wasn't a moral thing. It was seen as linked to the behavior of discipline that in the environment of a boxing gym, discipline was one of the core tenants of what success was going to be like. So I think what is important is to boil it down into a really specific, controllable, and replicable behavior. So then people understand that that gives them a way into the conversation or a way into that action. So I'll give you an example. We recently interviewed James Kerr,

Starting point is 00:10:17 the author of Claire, James Claire, the author of Atomic Habits. And James Kerr was talking about this idea of doing one press up doesn't make, like doesn't make you fitter, but doing one press up is a vote for the person you want to become. It gives you a way in to want to be an active, healthy individual.

Starting point is 00:10:36 So I think that resonated with me because of the examples of what I was saying of not using bad language in the boxing gym. It didn't make you a better person, but it gave you a vote for the person that was regarded themselves as being disciplined and able to hold their tongue. Yeah, I love that word. It gives you a vote for it.

Starting point is 00:10:55 So let's flip it over then. How do we learn success from our mistakes or from our failures? Yeah. So that to me is married up with a word that I think gets misused an awful lot in our modern world, which is the humility. That I think people think that if you say that, oh, I'm humble, I'm down to earth. I'm just like you.

Starting point is 00:11:17 That automatically confers that, that virtue on you. And I think humility isn't saying you're humble. It's a mindset and it's a mindset that I see. We're developing three stages and it's those three stages that then allow us to learn for mistakes. So the first stage I often talk about when we refer to humility is peak idiot stage, where you have high levels of confidence but low levels of knowledge. So you have an opinion.

Starting point is 00:11:44 you've always got a judgment. There's nothing that you don't know. So it's like when you go to a sports games and you see somebody sat in the stand declaring that they'd have done a better job than the athletes out there. Or you watch the talent programs on TV where somebody says, I want to sing like Mariah Carey,

Starting point is 00:12:00 then they sound like a cat being strangled. It's peak idiot. They're almost, they're deluded to the point they don't know where they are and what the capabilities are. So the quick you can get over yourself in that regard. You enter what I'd describe as the Valley of Human. And this is just characterized by being curious.

Starting point is 00:12:18 Like what you like you demonstrate on this podcast, you know, asking questions, listening to answers. And like we interviewed a guy once called Nims Perger, who's incredible. He grew up in Nepal and he joined the Gurkhas soldiers regiment. Then became a member of the British Special Forces, the first Gurkir to ever do it. And then he decided that he wanted to climb mountains. Now, there's a documentary on Netflix on this. guy called 14 peaks, where he scaled the 14 highest mountain peaks in the world in a record time.

Starting point is 00:12:51 Now, for context, the previous record was seven and a half years and Nims Purgey does it in six months. And he had this great line that he was talking about that he says, he says, your ability to be world class at anything depends on how long and comfortable you are at being shit at it for. And that to me was such a great line because it was always like, because that's where the learning is. That's where the failure is. but if you fail and then you go through,

Starting point is 00:13:15 but you're humble enough to reflect on it and work out, what did I do? How do I do it better next time? And you ask all those great questions that you teach, the longer you can spend in that zone, eventually you get to stage three, which is the hill of knowledge, the hill of success,

Starting point is 00:13:30 the hill of whatever achievement you're trying to get. But you're never afraid to come back down that hill into the valley to pick up more information from other people that you can then take back onto that hill and allow you to go and keep your, repeating that success on a consistent basis. So I often talk about that you can often see people that, and ask them, what stage are you are you in the mindset of humility?

Starting point is 00:13:54 Are you giving out opinions all the time? Because that indicates you at stage one. Or can you get over that and get into that value of humility quickly? And that's what I've seen repeatedly and consistently, Brad, is that the consistent sustained high performers are constantly in that state of value of humility or they're in that stage of delivery and then coming back down and doing that review on a regular basis. Love it.

Starting point is 00:14:21 You're on the big success podcast. We will be back with the Liquid Thinker, David Hughes. We're going to talk about how to think like Sir Alex Ferguson. We're going to talk about a whole bunch of things on winning when we get back after the break. When it comes to attracting customers, the only difference between your company and Microsoft, Ford and Coke is great advertising. In Instant Advertising by Brad Suggers, you'll find everything. you need to create killer ads that won't break the bank.

Starting point is 00:14:46 And way back, I'm Brad Sugar's. This is the big success podcast. Damien Hughes, the high performance guy. But as a professor of this subject, it's quite, I'm very intrigued to get your thoughts. How do you succeed at high performance? Yeah, well, I think the first definition of that, Brad, is to define what high performance for you. So on the podcast that I co-host with Jay Cunfrey, that's the opening question we ask everybody. And what's interesting is in nearly 200 episodes, we've yet to receive a consistent answer

Starting point is 00:15:21 to that. And that to me is almost that that first of all, threw me a little bit until I stopped to reflect and I went, actually, that's, that is the answer that it's, everybody defines it differently. For some people, high performances related to their family, some it might be related to their careers. For others, it might be related to the financial wealth. And I think until we have a clear definition of that for ourselves, we can't go after it. We find ourselves caught up in the rat race, chasing other people, getting into competition for prices that we don't necessarily want to win. So I think that's, that's a question that I've reflected on an awful lot. And then, but when people say, oh, chase your purpose, not your passion and phrases like that, that's a

Starting point is 00:16:08 great line to use, but what does it mean? And what I'd like to help people do is to answer that question of, well, what is success for you? I use four questions that come from the work of a guy called Dan Bootler. So Dan Bootler is a journalist for the National Geographic, but he wrote a brilliant book called the Blue Zones, where he went around the areas of the world where life expectancy outstrips the rest of the planet. And what he was asking the question, of was what makes these people live longer. Now, because it was so diverse to regions, geography, diet and things like that played a certain part. Of course he did. But what he found is they all had at their heart what in one Japanese culture called their ikigai, but it translates as a sense

Starting point is 00:16:58 of purpose. And what Dan talks about in his book is there's four questions that help us identify our ikigai. The first one is, what do we love doing? The second one is, what are we? we're really good at. The third one is what does the world really need from us? And the fourth one is, how can we use this to generate wealth? So I think when we ask those questions, and that allows us to move somewhere closer to identifying what our sense of purposes and what our definition of success really is. And I think it's a really great way in to then help people ask the question then, are you structuring the rest of your life to be able to facilitate you, you're getting closer to your definition of it?

Starting point is 00:17:44 Yeah, love those four questions. I'm going to go read that book for sure. So let's move that then to a team aspect. How do we, the high performance culture, how do we instill that? What's some of the steps to that? Well, again, it's a really good question. I think when we talk about,

Starting point is 00:18:00 I often encourage people that maybe run teams don't talk about culture, because culture is an abstract term. It doesn't mean a great deal. So if we went and asked 20 people for a definition of culture, I reckon we'd get at least 20 different definitions of what that means. And there'd be some overlap. So what I prefer to do instead is to direct them and say, what type of culture do you want?

Starting point is 00:18:22 And that leads us into some really quite fascinating research that was done in the early 1990s in Stanford University. There's two billion professors there called Professor Barron and Hannan. And they used to lecture that culture could be a competitive advantage for a team. And everyone would say, yes, I agree. Where's the evidence? So these two guys got funding, went into Silicon Valley and explored this topic. And then after 25 years of it, they produced a paper that said, what happens is,

Starting point is 00:18:50 when you put any group of people together to achieve a common objective, a culture will emerge. But it's a specific type of culture will emerge. And what they said is commonly, there's five of them. So the first type of culture you can have is a star culture where you go out of your way, you recruit the best talent you can, pay them the highest salaries you can afford, give them the best facilities,

Starting point is 00:19:12 and you sit back and wait for all those talented people to deliver. Now, what was interesting in the Barron and Hannan study, Google was one of their companies they studied. So people get distracted and think that Google, therefore, the star culture is the one that works. And what the evidence says is,

Starting point is 00:19:28 it can work and when it does, it'll be spectacular. But far more frequent, it'll go wrong. And when it goes wrong, the failure will be just a spectacular. So I once interviewed a football coach that had worked at Real Madrid.

Starting point is 00:19:42 They have this galactic whole culture in soccer. And he had this great line that said, the trouble in a star culture is everyone wants to be the headwaiter and nobody wants to wash the dishes. And it's often that lack of respect, that discrepancy that will undermine it. The second type of culture you can get is an autocratic culture. And this is where it's around an individual.

Starting point is 00:20:02 individuals sets the tone my way of the highway. So it's almost, it might be the founder of a business or his charismatic chief exec, but it's basically that fiefdom. And now what the trouble there is, is when they start making flawed decisions or when they start taking their eye off the ball or they surround themselves with an echo chamber, that's where the culture can often be dragged down the wrong pathway. The third type is a bureaucratic culture. And this is where you have lots of policies, procedures, rules, regulations. It's almost like you have a perma thrott layer of middle managers. So everything has to go through that.

Starting point is 00:20:39 So it's not agile. It's not responsive. Decisions are often made by a committee and consensus. The fourth type is an engineering culture. Now, don't be blindsided by the name. An engineering culture is where you recruit people based on technical expertise. So what happens there is you recruit somebody because they might be great as an accountant or somebody who's great as a markete,

Starting point is 00:21:02 but you don't worry about how they behave or how they fit into the rest of the organisation. So one of the obvious consequences of that is you can get lots of office politics, people developing their silos and not necessarily sharing ideas. And that then leads us to the fifth culture, which is what's called a commitment culture.

Starting point is 00:21:21 And a commitment culture answers two questions at the heart of it, Brad. The first one is, what are we here to do? What's our mission? And then the second one is, what are the behaviors that everybody has to subscribe to? So all you're asking is, what do we do and how do we do it? But you're transparent and explicit about that. Now, what the evidence from Baron and Hannan told us is that the one culture that thrives

Starting point is 00:21:45 over a sustained period is a commitment culture. And when they measured this against all the traditional metrics of a business, share price, market, share, speed to market, what they found is commitment cultures outperform those other four types on average by around 22%. Wow. So this is where you get really interesting because then when you then say to people, what have you got currently and they might identify? I go, oh, we've got an autocratic place.

Starting point is 00:22:12 What do you want? The answer is often, how do we do a commitment culture? So then you help people structure it because what can often appear like a clash within an organization? We often ascribe it to personalities. we go, oh, they don't like each other. Yet, whereas when we look at it through the lens of a cultural model, you can often see that a clash might be an autocratic culture

Starting point is 00:22:36 coming into conflict with a bureaucratic culture. And there can only be one dominant culture in an organisation. So that's where I often, I find that's an easier way in for people to be able to go, ah, right, now I know how to create a high-performing culture. What they're effectively describing is a commitment culture. and then you start to look at the ways in which you do that. But you start with those two questions about sense of purpose and what I call the non-negotiable behaviors

Starting point is 00:23:06 that everybody has to adhere to. Love it, love it. So let's go on, you mentioned sustainability. And Sir Alex Ferguson, I loved your book. Thank you. It's interesting because it's like, did you live with Sir Alex for a period of time? How did you get inside his head like that?

Starting point is 00:23:26 But the sustainability of success, what are some of the key factors to sustaining success? Yeah. So what I found is I thought there was three things that Ferguson did that often gets overlooked in terms of sustaining it. The first one was that he saw things in four-year cycles. So he viewed this whole, the trajectory of his team as a four-year cycle. and whereas most people were being in that reactive or responsive six to 12 month cycle. So what he would do is he would view that over that longer term period. So he would recognize that he needed to get rid of somebody, say,

Starting point is 00:24:09 in the second year of that four year cycle, rather than wait to the fourth year so he could start to recruit. So he was just thinking far longer term than I think most other people do. So that stopped him getting too high on his successes, but too low on his defeats. I think the second thing he did was he managed upwards brilliantly. So there was a period in his first five years at Manchester United where he didn't win a trophy where the team were hemorrhaging cash,

Starting point is 00:24:39 and yet not delivering success. And yet when I was looking enough to speak to some of the people that were responsible for maintaining faith with him, what they said was he was fantastic at constantly communicating up to. to us, what he was working on, why he was working on it. So one of the interviews I did with one of the board said, if we had sacked him, the next guy that would have replaced him would have taken a year to work out where he needed to be directing his energy.

Starting point is 00:25:10 And it was exactly the place that Ferguson already was doing because he'd explained to us. So I think managing upwards is often a really underrated virtue of coaches because we assume it's about the cult of their personality, whereas they have steps. stakeholders to manage. And then the third thing that I think he did really well was he, he refreshed his own coaching and support staff on a regular basis. So if you compare his next,

Starting point is 00:25:35 his next comparable rival, Arsson Venger at Arsenal, in the first 21 years of each of their careers at Manchester United and at Arsenal, Arsson Venger had one assistant for that 21 year period. Ferguson in that same period of time had sex. And I think that's significant because some of these guys were leaving to go on to pursue careers themselves. But what Ferguson was doing was recruiting people to plug his gap in knowledge. So when he had a young crop of players coming through, he recruited Brian Kidd that was an expert at nurturing young talent.

Starting point is 00:26:13 When he had an experience crop, he recruited a Portuguese coach called Carlos Kierrez that was more savvy than him tactically. So he was constantly open to new ideas and new ways of learning that allowed him to stay fresh and not get stale in terms of what he was doing himself. Yeah, yeah. So let's go then the winning mindset. You teach a lot on the winning mindset. I think your take on that is really unique. Can you share with how that has evolved or how you came to that structure and how people can succeed at having that mindset? it.

Starting point is 00:26:50 Sure. Well, thanks for the feedback. I think what I did was I was lucky enough to go around the world, going into elite environments and meeting coaches predominantly from sport. And I was looking at first principles, Brad. So almost like forget the outcome. What were they doing that was consistently present at the very start? And what I found was there was five things that regardless of the sport or the context

Starting point is 00:27:14 they were operating in that tended to be consistent amongst elite coaches. and I gave it a simple acronym called steps to help people remember it. But the first thing was they were focused relentlessly on simplicity. Now, that's an obvious point because nobody likes complexity. But I'll give you an example from Ferguson. He shared an example once when I asked him. I said, what's the difference between a good and a great coach? And he took a tennis ball and threw it to me.

Starting point is 00:27:41 He said, catch it. Now, that was an easy task. So he took two and threw them both in the air the same time. He said, catch both balls. I managed to do it, but it was harder, so he did it with three, and then he did it with four. And finally, he threw five balls in there at the same time, and I struggled to catch one.

Starting point is 00:27:56 He said, that's the difference. He said, what lots of people do is they throw five balls in the hope that some of that information might stick. What the best coaches do is, they, before they walk into that meeting or that session, they ask the question, not how many balls can I throw, but how many can you catch? And that there forces you to prioritize your information in the order that you want people to remember it. So that's what I mean by simplicity.

Starting point is 00:28:21 The T-bit is around creating environments where people can think. So this was almost like a hidden superpower. I saw, Brad, that what these coaches were focused on was not having the right answers, but creating a space where the right questions could be asked. Because they understood that when people are asking a question, there's two things going on underneath the psychological surface of that hand being raised to ask the question. The first one is that I're giving you the opportunity to demonstrate

Starting point is 00:28:47 trust, you're building trust in the relationship. How you respond to that, whether it's respectful or you act with integrity or sensitivity, either builds or erodes trust. So Eddie Jones is the Australian rugby coach, had this great phrase. He said, nothing you do is neutral as a coach. Everything you do either enhances or erodes the trust in the relationship. So that's what the thinking of moment does. But the second factor is you would create psychological safety as well for people to be able to think.

Starting point is 00:29:22 So this phrase psychological safety is, I know you're aware of, but for your listeners, it originates from the work of Amy Edmondson, an organizational psychologist at Harvard, where her origins of her work came from was that she went into hospitals in the Boston state area, looking at what made a great successful hospital. and what she found didn't make sense that the best hospitals had the highest near misses and recorded accidents

Starting point is 00:29:49 and cock up rates but the worst performing hospitals had the lowest rates and when she looked at that on the surface she thought how can that make sense and when she dug deeper she found that the best hospitals had cultures where people could admit errors

Starting point is 00:30:03 and mistakes in a safe environment so the learning could happen at a far more accelerated pace so that's the T-bit of creating a space for people to think and ask questions. The E part is just around emotional intelligence. So I'll give you a neat story.

Starting point is 00:30:20 When I went into Detroit, I went to the boxing gym there called the Crunk Boxing Gym. And that's regarded as a greenhouse of talent. And I was writing a book at the time about one of its alumni, a guy called Thomas Hearns, who was a five-weight world champion. And to get to the gym where it was based at the time was to go into some of the poorest projects in the Detroit areas.

Starting point is 00:30:43 So the experience was quite intimidating in terms of the gangs, the drugs, the crime that was pretty endemic. But the head coach there was a man called the Manuel Stewart and he couldn't have been kinder or nicer to me. But when I walked into his gym on the first day, he said, Damien, he said, how do you feel? And I thought he was being polite. So I gave him a polite answer. I said, man, he's great to see you. How are you? What he did next?

Starting point is 00:31:06 Blindsided me. He went, how do you really feel? And I found myself just with verbal diarrhea. I was just talking. I know you're busy man here can go. Come back another day if you're like. And he said to me, that's fine. He said, you stay with me.

Starting point is 00:31:21 And when I got to know him a bit better, I asked him about that first visit. And he said, everybody gets the second question. He said, when I saw you turn up in my gym, I saw this nervous looking white English guy stood in front of me, telling me how excited you were.

Starting point is 00:31:34 And he said, the words and the pictures didn't align. He said, so that led me to one or two conclusions. You were either a liar or a sociopath. So the second question speeds it up. And the second question, how do you really feel? And my answer to that time told him that I was telling lies to mask my own nerves, which is why he then took me under his wing. And he said, but I do that with every kid that comes in this gym. That's, if you want to know the success, it's the emotional intelligence to read somebody's emotions

Starting point is 00:32:03 and respond accordingly. So that was a big learning for me. The P part was around of the steps acronym, was around keep language practical and inclusive. Don't use jargon. Don't use sort of inside a language because you exclude people from the conversation on that. So that's a pretty simple one. But then the final lesson on the acronym was around telling stories.

Starting point is 00:32:26 So what I would often find is I'd be traveling back from these visits. And when I was writing down my notes, they were all story form. They were all, and that eventually made me realize that these guys were passing on knowledge through the power of stories.

Starting point is 00:32:41 And when I went and explored it, there's some brilliant work by a psychologist called Gary Klein, who wrote a book called The Power of Stories around this. And what he found is when he worked with sort of like, like emergency crews, like ambulance staff or firefighting staff or people in the army,

Starting point is 00:33:00 what he found was that storytelling was the best way of passing on learnings and lessons within those environments because it offered context. but there was a kernel of truth at the heart of it. So that's what I discovered that these great coaches, when they were developing this winning mindset, were consistently keeping things simple, creating space for people to think and ask questions,

Starting point is 00:33:23 being emotionally intelligent, making sure their language was practical and accessible, and constantly searching for stories to re-emphasize or to illustrate their point. And so that's sometimes what I do when I work with coaches. That's almost like the acronym, am I having my head to work out if they're not getting the results they want. I find it's like a useful inventory to work out where do they maybe need to sharpen their focus.

Starting point is 00:33:50 Love it. You're on the Big Success podcast. We have the genius of high performance. Damien Hughes, the professor. We'll be back in a moment. We're going to talk about scaling up. Damien Hughes is a bestselling author who combines his practical and academic background within sport organizational development and change psychology to help.

Starting point is 00:34:09 organizations and teams to create a high-performance culture. He is the author of eight best-selling business books, including Liquid Thinking, Liquid Leadership, How to Change Absolutely Anything, How to Think Like Sir Alex Ferguson, and The Five Steps to a Winning Mindset. His latest book, High Performance, Lessons from the Best on Becoming Your Best, has become a number one Sunday Times bestseller. His work has been translated into 10 languages. He has also been nominated for the 2007 William Hill Sportsbook of the Year award for Peerless, his biography of Boxing Great Sugar Ray Robinson. In 2009, he co-authored a critically acclaimed biography of boxing legend Thomas Hearns in Hitman, the Thomas Hearns story. In 2013, his latest biography, Marvelous Marvin

Starting point is 00:34:55 Hagler, became the UK's best-selling sports biography. He was appointed as a visiting professor of organizational behavior and change for Manchester Metropolitan University in September 2010. He is co-host of the high-performance podcast, an acclaimed series of interviews with elite performers from business, sports, and the arts, exploring the psychology behind sustained high performance. He has served as a member of the coaching team for England Rugby League, England Roses, Scotland Rugby Union, and a wide range of international and national sporting teams. To learn more about Damien Hughes, visit Liquidthinker.com. We're back on the Big Success podcast. It's scale up time. It's not. It's not.

Starting point is 00:35:37 level up time. I mean, I have to ask, you've worked with so many people that have done amazing high performance. What's the difference between good and great or good and amazing? Brilliant question. I think if it was to sum it up in one word, I think it's consistency. I think that it's not just showing up on your good days, it's showing up on your bad days as well. that I'll give you a neat example of it from again relating to my own origins. I worked with a guy years ago that was, he was probably one of the most talented British boxers of the last 20 years, but he was the sort of guy that he would get up to run when he woke up.

Starting point is 00:36:20 He wouldn't wake up to run, if that makes sense. So he wouldn't set an alarm clock, but he was great. He was disciplined at doing the run, but he would never go with the extra yard and set his alarm clock for an hour earlier than he needed to. And when he ever he turned up in the gym, he was always five or ten minutes late.

Starting point is 00:36:36 And what he was a master at doing was, he'd have some funny remark or he'd make a big entrance and he'd distract you from the fact that actually he was late. And what I think happens is eventually these kind of practices like that, that consistency of just being late, of never having to go to the well, never having to find the resources to get up when you don't want to get up, then become inculcated in what,

Starting point is 00:37:00 in your mental inventory of the type of person that you think you are. And what happened for this guy was his talent was enough that he got all the way through to fight for quite a significant title. And in this particular fight, it was nothing about ability. It was down to consistency. So for the first six rounds of the fight, this guy on his talent was winning it easily.

Starting point is 00:37:26 But in the last six rounds of the fight, it was about being able to find. that resolve, that resource, that, that, that grit to stay in the fight even when it was difficult. And because he'd never practiced it, he'd never had it as part of the consistency of what he did every day, he didn't have the resources to be able to cope with it. So what was significant was, his focus for the first six rounds was, how do I win? His focus for the last six rounds was, how do I not lose?

Starting point is 00:37:54 So he wasn't imposing himself and showing up like he had done. He was holding on and then he was clinging on. and there was a desperation to what he did. And the result went against him at the end. And I remember when we were in the dressing room, sort of he was crying and he was bitterly upset and he was blaming the referee and everyone else. And I remember his coach saying to me,

Starting point is 00:38:13 he's not lost that fight tonight. He's lost that over the last 10 years. Wow. Because the consistency of what he's done, it wasn't consistently high habits. It was consistently average habits that eventually become inculcated. So I think this is one of,

Starting point is 00:38:30 the things that you see repeatedly with elite performers is just showing up even when they're on a bad day, they still go through what they have to do rather than just show up when things are going well. So that leads me then to thinking, what's the difference and what's your perspective on the difference between someone who sets, you know, the million goal versus the billion goal or the be local champ versus world champ. What's what's your mindset on how that goal is different? How how does a person go to that level? Yeah. Again, I think what I've seen is there's two, there's two things that, that separate them. I think one of them is the idea of setting those goals is really important. So the brain is teleological. We need to have a target to go for.

Starting point is 00:39:24 Tileological. Explain that word to me. Well, it means that the, the, the, the, So like a missile needs to have a site. We need the direction and a sense of it. So teleological means that as humans, the frontal cortex of our brain needs to know the pathway that we're doing. So you can set a million pound goal. You can set a billion pound goal. The brain still likes the fact that you've got a target to go after.

Starting point is 00:39:51 One of the nicest ways that I've seen that this has been adopted, Brad, is there's a really nice technique of setting goals called the Xander letter. that is named after a guy called Ben Zander. He's the head of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra. And one of the things that used to frustrate him when he taught appreciation of music was that his students were more focused on the grade that they would get rather than the craft

Starting point is 00:40:14 that they were supposed to be learning. So one of his ideas was he used to say to them, write a letter to me dated 12 months into the future as a retrospective of what the year's just been like. So write down everything you've achieved, all your successes, what you're proud of, and write it as if you've already lived that experience. Now, what that does is that opens your brain up to the possibilities rather than the

Starting point is 00:40:36 probabilities, the opportunities rather than the threats, gives you the chance of focusing on where you want to go rather than where you don't want to. So a Xander letter can be a really effective way of setting these goals, whether that's for a million or a billion. But then what seems to take it to that next level, which great performers do is, they then conduct, once they know where they're heading off to, they conduct what's known as a premortem. And this is a phrase from a guy I mentioned earlier, Gary Klein, a premortem says, now I know what the year ahead is going to be like. What could stop all that happening? What are all the

Starting point is 00:41:09 things that could kill me along the way? And you work out what are the five things that are likely to derail me or trip me or part or take me off course? And then you work out, should they happen, how am I going to handle them? Now what the evidence says is that once you've done these two factors of setting a goal and then you've worked out what can kill you, your resilience to be able to keep going, to persevere and to stay in the fight, improves on average by around 32%. Because you know where you're going,

Starting point is 00:41:41 but you've also know you've got the confidence that you've got the resources to be able to handle the setbacks that are going to occur. Now, 32% is peer-assess research that Gary, Adam Grant was leading in his study at Wharton University. anecdotally, what I found is guys that go after the big goals say to you, it's nothing like 32%. It's far higher than that. So one of my favorite questions that I like asking high performers is how much of your success is down to talent and the resources you have and how much of it is down to the mentality and the mindset you've got.

Starting point is 00:42:16 And the starkest answer I've had back from that was from Dame Kelly Holmes. So she won two Olympic gold medals in the 2004 games. And she described these two techniques of a Xanderlater and a pre-mortem and said, when I was running round that final bend in Athens and the Olympic final, she said, the five women that were running alongside me, we were capable of running that time, point two of a second apart from each other. So the examples she used was she said, you could have thrown a beach towel over us and we would have all have fitted underneath it. So she said, so she said, 20% of that goal. medal was the ability to run fast.

Starting point is 00:42:58 80% of it was the ability to run fast under pressure. And she attributed 80% of that gold medal down to the mentality and some of these tricks. So when I've asked other elite performers, I've yet to hear anyone that comes in with anything less than 70% of it down to mentality. And yet there's a consistency of the idea of setting big goals, but also marrying it up to these premortems, seems to be. a distinguishing feature. Love it.

Starting point is 00:43:28 All right. Let's go to the quick fire round, buddy. Go on. Success. How do you succeed at health? Being kind to yourself. How do you succeed at fun, enjoying life? Again, I'm going to repeat it, but being kind to yourself and looking to spot the opportunities

Starting point is 00:43:47 to deliberately play and have fun. How do you succeed at self-development, growing yourself? Humility, constantly asking the questions. and being curious rather than coming in with an opinion, having empathy instead. How do you succeed at relationships? I read this recently. I think it's the idea of feeling that you're getting the better side of the deal. So that way it makes you humble, but it also then forces you to appreciate your partner.

Starting point is 00:44:17 Yeah, love it. All right. Final question. Go ahead. In life, you've obviously read a bunch on success or got a bunch of advice. What's the best advice or the best quote you ever got on success? It came from my dad. My dad was a very successful boxing coach.

Starting point is 00:44:34 And he said to me once, if your absence doesn't make a difference, that means your presence hasn't made an impact. So it's the idea that in every situation, offer something, go into any situation and look to offer something of value. Because if you don't, when you walk out the room, nobody would even register you were there in the first place. Love it. Brilliant.

Starting point is 00:44:54 thanks to your dad. The Mr. Hughes. Damien Hughes, thank you for your time. Folks, if you're on the Big Success Podcast, make sure you subscribe to Damien's podcast, read his books, connect on all the links that you've got right here, and keep on learning. Success will come. And that's the Big Success Podcast for today.

Starting point is 00:45:15 Hopefully you took a lot of notes. Hopefully you learned a bunch. And hopefully you're going to take action on it. BS, Brad Sugar's Big Success, take action. Check all the show notes for all of the links. I make sure that you have links to every single thing that every speaker has in our show notes. Check them now, click the links, take advantage of it,

Starting point is 00:45:33 and I'll speak to you again next time on the Big Success podcast. You've been listening to the Big Success podcast with the number one business coach in the world, Brad Sugars. To learn more about how to achieve business and personal success, as well as how to level up or listen to past episodes, visit www. bradshuggers.com.

Business Innovators Radio - Ep. #21 – Professor Damian Hughes – The Big Success Podcast with Brad Sugars

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