The Coaching Model That’s Changing the Sports World with Cody Royle

I'd like to ship you a free copy of my book, Habits of High Performers. If you come and join the 2026 goal setting workshop, I will ship you one of these today. The link is in the notes. Please come and join me to set up the very best 2026 you could imagine. If you've set up goals in the past or New Year's resolutions and they haven't substantiated, I'm here to help you across all the key pillars of your life, nail your goals. I'll see you there. Welcome to the Lead On Purpose podcast. I'm James Laughlin, former seven time world champion and now coach to entrepreneurs, CEOs, professional athletes all over the world. This show is for people who refuse to settle, people who are driven, people who want to grow, who know that there's so much more to learn and want to learn from the world's best. Each week I bring you insights from a special guest who's at the top of their game with whether they're in Formula one, whether they're a billionaire, whether they've started a company from scratch, and Ticket to the Top. I bring them to you so that you can rewire your mindset, take action and lead a life of purpose. Let's get started. Today's special episode is with Cody Royal. He's known as the coach of head coaches. He helps the world's top rugby coaches and sport coaches refine their skills. What he teaches us today is transferable into business, sport and life. The Lead on Purpose podcast is sponsored by NZ Mortgages. Learn more at nz nzmortgages.co nz. Cody, a huge welcome to the Lead on Purpose podcast.

James, thanks for having me.

Oh, such a pleasure. I was sitting with a friend about a year ago and very, very well respected head coach of multiple teams. Now he's the head coach of a national team and he said, james, Cody Royal. Have you had him on the show? No. You need to. So you came very warmly, very highly acclaimed and spoke about. So I thought I need to look into this Cody Royal guy and I realized really quickly that your uniqueness is that you're the coach of head coaches and I love that because often people think the goats don't need a coach. You know, the greatest people, they have it all figured out, but actually the greatest come to you and there's a reason that they do. And we're going to talk about that reason, but I want to just name a few teams. For example, Chelsea, Team Canada, Arsenal, Maple Leafs. The list actually goes on and on. But you've been involved in some way with lots of the world's leading teams and brands. So I want to get tactical. I probably want to zoom in before we zoom out. Reason being, I think people really love some of these kind of tangibles. So first up, so what do you believe about high performers?

Well, my core belief about high performers is that they're human. And I think part of that has been forgotten. You know, my.

Stated mission is to help rehumanize coaching. And so I look at high performers as a group of head coaches, right? They're elite level leaders, they're the CEOs and the four star generals and the, you know, the top of the tree at what they do. A collective of, you know, in, in the North American sports, there's only 30 of them that do what they do in the world. And so to get to the top 30, as you know better than anyone as a world champion, to get to the top handful of people.

Requires a lot. But we've really kind of gone into believing there's process and like high performance has taken on a bit of a buzzword. And it's been about the process of. I'm about the human of high performance and that's where my work really starts and ends. And you know, even the idea of coaching head coaches, most of what I do has nothing to do with the sport that they're in and more to do with them as a human or the human beings around them.

That's beautiful. I love that concept of rehumanize. And it's interesting because we look at films like Whiplash Now I'll talk about that because obviously I'm a drummer and we look at this like aggressive, angry, abusive head coach essentially. And sometimes we paint the picture of that's what you need to be to get results from your team in sport, business, music or whatever it is. But you and I both agree, I feel on the fact that you can be a good human, you can have really strong values, high standards and treat people with care, including yourself, and get great outcomes. So why do you believe that? Why do you hang your hat on that? You know, what's so important about this human side of leading and high performance?

Yeah, that idea of that coach, the yelly, you know, and in the sporting world it's often, you know, in soccer it's, you know, the pacing up and down the sidelines, screaming at the team for 90 minutes and it's everywhere in front of us. And we kind of got a bit of a myopic view of that. As that's what leadership was and that's what good coaching was. And unfortunately, still to this day, it's quite prevalent in a lot of areas that that's what it looks like. And coaches that are trying to change the game. You mentioned Chelsea earlier, and like, Graham Potter was one who. He came in for a lot of criticism for not abusing the umpire or the referee after Chelsea gave away a penalty. This is like the national news for multiple days that he was calm and collected and refused to use anger as. As an outlet there. And so again, I think when we look at. When we look at it through that small lens of what we're capable of in coaching, that's really small, that's very myopic view of, like, this gets performance and this is the only way to do it. And when I look at the magnificence of humanity and what we're capable of, it's so far removed from just that one small view of, like, this is what drives behavior change and elite performance that I think we're selling ourselves short when we only use that small portion of it. And so my interest is in really investigating and developing, you know, those craft skills of like, I'm a human and I'm capable of all these things, and I'm capable of being soft and emotive and emotional and connective with people, and I'm. I'm capable of being a bit harder and driving standards and driving my team and everything in between. That's a really good coach.

I have to agree. And we see them from time to time, and it's rare still, but I think that the true test is what happens in the sheds. What happens, you know, Monday morning after a big loss. What happens when nobody else is looking and they've got an underperforming team member, how they talk to them, how they treat them. So for you, where did this come from? Like, I'd love to know a little bit more about, you know, where your passion for sport and then, of course, coaching came from.

Oh, sport's just an obsession. Like I write in one of my books, I forget which one I tell this story of. I was the kid in the. In the front yard. I would write down both teams. I'm from Canberra, so rugby league was my first sport. You know, I'd write the 13 names down on both sides and I'd play back and forth. I'd be both teams commentating the whole time, like, you name it, just completely obsessed. And that's continued on to just the rest of my life. It's really the outside of my family, like the one thing that I still care about the most. And.

So that's the sporting side of things. And then from the leadership perspective is I got into coaching very early. I was 23, which in Australia is quite rare because, as you know, from our part of the world and even, even in Ireland is you tend to play for your. Your club until you're about 40, right? Until you, you can't play anymore. I kind of opted out of that and started coaching young. And so, you know, despite the fact that my beard still doesn't join up, you know, I'm. I'm now 40 and I've got, you know, 17 years of coaching experience and, you know, ended up coaching the national team here in Canada, worked in the pathways in Australia. I've coached men and women. I've coached number one draft picks. I've coached people that literally just showed up off the street and said, what's this sport?

And so the passion stems from that.

Or the passion particularly for head coaching. And the one particular role stems from my own experience. And then I wrote a book called the Tough Stuff that shot me into this work. It was completely unintended. I wrote a book about the emotional toll of head coaching, which came from my own experience. And I started getting daily messages from other head coaches saying, I need to speak to you, I need to work with you on what you've written about. And so that, I think feedback fueled it even further. I was just putting out some ideas and, hey, this is my experience you might find some solace in. And the response was quite overwhelming, which is both.

Not a good thing. I'd rather people not be having that, you know, feel the emotional toll of it. But also I think the fact that people have started to acknowledge that that's something that we can address and get help with and work on is a huge benefit to everyone as well. So that's further fueled my passion.

We need to talk about this. So whether you're a head coach, if you're listening right now, you're a head coach of a sport team, or whether you are running a small team at work, whether you're the CEO, whether you're a board member, whatever it might be, or you're a father or a mother of a family, you're the head coach, right? There is tough stuff that come with it. About a year or so ago, I had Sir Steve Hanson. So for those that are not familiar with Sir Steve, he's former head coach of the All Blacks, took them to be the most prolific and unbeaten team in rugby of all time, winning the World cup of course as well. But I had him on a stage at our annual high performance event. And towards the end of the conversation I said, steve, you've had all this incredible success. What kind of impact over the years has that had positively or negatively on your family? And Cody.

He choked up, his eyes welled up, there was silence and I mean, we had a couple of hundred people sitting in front of us and I just sat with that silence and you could feel the pain. And he reached for the glass of water and it would have been 20, 30, 40 seconds of just him continually choking up and welling up. And he went on to talk about the tough stuff. And yeah, he was the head coach of arguably the best rugby team that the world has ever seen. I'm a little bit biased.

But he talked about the impact it had on his family and the divorce and the relationship with his kids. And you know, there was lots of positive things too and lots of opportunities that his family were afforded because of this. But also there's a lot of pain that came with it. And I just seen that as being such courage, his vulnerability in sharing like that. And you know, Steve is known for being a pretty tough, you know, staunch human. And to see him do that, I just put him up in this massive regard that he could do that. So we all suffer from the tough stuff, we all experience it, but there's obviously ways that we can navigate it more smoothly and perhaps find this balance. So Cody, what was your tough stuff? What was the stuff that when you look back on it was actually quite painful. There was suffering.

Well, most of it. You.

Just, in the, the day to day of what I was doing and who I was coaching, I was a national team coach as well, which sounds weird in Aussie rules football, but you know, every three years everyone except Australia gets together and plays tournaments. And so, you know, we were.

Representing our country here and everything that that means. And, and that's a unique thing into itself in that, you know, young men and women get to strap a big red maple leaf on their chest and their families get to represent this country on the international stage. But that also means that you're telling young men and women that they're not going to be doing that as well. And so, you know, the deselection process was the heaviest of our three year cycle all the time. An opportunity to represent your country is just unlike anything else. Club, club doesn't match, you know what it means to represent your country, basically. In any sport. And so they were kind of. There were intermittent things like that.

The biggest thing for me, which really led to writing the book was, you know, I had a player take his own life. And so, you know, I was talking about starting early. And I was 14, 15 years into coaching. I'd won at every level, like I had success. I knew that I could coach, I knew that I could get teams through finals, grand finals. I knew the systems worked, they'd worked at club, they'd worked internationally.

I had all this kind of coaching validation. But then this one instance was thrown at me that you kind of have to step back and say, this is a human experience. To go back to that idea, I don't know how to handle this. I don't know how to help 50 young men grieve and to have to call them one by one across the country and sit there and cry with them on the phone. That you know, one of some of their best for some of the group, their best friend.

And so, you know, that that's the whole gamut, right? The, the kind of. The daily details of coaching a national team, selecting and deselecting and.

Just everything that comes with athletic performance, right the way through to literally human life.

You know. And then the reason that I wrote the book was I started calling around to some friends for some help and asking how other coaches were doing and they were struggling with the same things. You know, we've quickly forgotten. At the start of COVID we thought that every major sports league was going to collapse within a couple of months, right? The money was going to dry up because it wasn't on tv. So every, every coach was sitting there in their backyard kind of staring up into the blue sky, thinking, well, who am I? What am I good at? You know, this is the only thing that I can do. I maybe don't like being at home and that's why I'm in the office in the training facility all the time. You know, like all these really quite deep human things were coming to the fore and those are heavy. And we all had to grapple with them at the same time. And so whilst again, that was tough as a, as a collective, as a group of coaches, I think now that's opened the door for us to really be able to address them. And look at, this is one of the first things I do is can we better map what a head coach actually does on a daily basis, both from a detailed perspective, but also from an emotional perspective and really look at the duties and responsibilities and the toll that is on them so that we can better.

I'm going to use the word manipulate better manipulate their environment for them so that it's high performance for the coaches as well as the players. Because we hadn't really done that, no one had really looked at it and paid attention to it. And so that's often a good starting point. But I think that collective trauma that we went through in 2020-2022 opened the door for that.

Yeah, there's some beauty in that. There's always a bit of a silver lining in these darker moments. It's interesting, you know, I think of a couple of examples that come to mind. Ian Foster, obviously former head coach of the All Blacks. And so if there's people listening, not from New Zealand, that's our national rugby team. And he suffered a lot as a head coach and the body that essentially employed him, New Zealand rugby didn't support him and were publicly and through media essentially saying, we're going to fire him if he doesn't win this game and that game. And I really felt for him and felt for his family, you know, his partner and his kids and his friends and I just imagine it would have been incredibly lonely. I'm seeing it again at a more provincial level. So Canterbury Crusaders, it's our local team here, got a new coach, Rob Penny, incredible guy, incredible coach. First year last year, obviously they didn't win, but the media had an absolute field day and they poked and prodded and forced him to say things that he regrets saying. But it was quite ugly. And people that are head coaches are expected to literally be politicians, to be fathers, to be motivators, to be skilled experts in every component of strategy and tactic in the game. And I just don't think it's all possible. So when someone comes to sit with Cody, say, I'm a head coach, doesn't matter what sport it is, but where do we start? Like what's going to be unique about that journey? That you could help me as a head coach get great results. At the end of the day, I want great results whilst still having self compassion, while still having an intimate relationship, if I'm in one with a partner, while still being a decent dad, if I've got kids or where do we start? What's the starting point?

Hey, James here. I wanted to take a quick moment to let you know about something. Look, I get asked to deliver keynotes and workshops for teams and companies all over the world, from London to Antarctica, from America to Australasia, from armies to small businesses to large corporates to sports teams. But I go in and deliver keynotes around the mindset of high performers, around the habits of high performers, about how we navigate change. If you would like me to come and speak to your team or speak at your conference or deliver a bespoke workshop, please get in touch with my team. Carolinejlochlan.com will be able to help. I'll also make sure that we put that in the show. Notes.

Yeah, I start with the same three questions and they're not particularly revolutionary. They come from coaching, just like all my experience.

But, you know, you can really ask yourself these. You don't even need a coach to start with these questions. And the first one is just goal orientation. It's like, what are you trying to achieve?

And it sounds ridiculous, but you've probably experienced this too. A lot of people actually don't know what they're aiming for or it's quite poor. Right? Like, it's a bit. A bit too flippant and not meaty enough. And in sport, the one is, I'll just win a championship.

That's not really.

It's fine, but everyone says that. Can we. Can we start to really understand what that means, though? And have you appreciated the steps that you need to go through to get there? So the first question is, what are you hoping to achieve? And that's different for a lot of coaches. The second question that I ask is, who do you want to be while you achieve it? Which touches on the second part of your question, which is, whilst also being a good father, whilst also being this. And you can go really deep into that and talk about all the different people that are going to be impacted by you as a leader whilst you're achieving that. So it can be your staff, it can be the fans, it can be the board of the club, it can be the media, it can be a whole range of different things, but that's an identity piece. And so now I've got a goal and we've got an aspirational goal and an aspirational identity. And then a third question is, what's in the way right now? And that's really the progress question. And coaching is nothing else if it's not helping people progress. Like literally the word comes from Stagecoach, helping someone get from point A to point B in an easier way than on horseback. Right. So progress is what coaching is all about. And often I find leaders are stuck, they're stationary. And you and I both know that's not a place to lead from when you're stationary. Or you feel stationary. And so.

By understanding your aspirational goal, your aspirational identity, and then what's a big rock that we can potentially move that can get you some forward momentum towards those things? That's the starting point. And then that's put against the backdrop of what I talked about previously around. But what are the realities of this environment? And this is something I learned from the military about how methodical they are about studying.

Where they're going. And a Green Beret told me this story about he was one of the first people to parachute into Afghanistan. And he said, we knew the coarseness of the sand and we knew the coarseness of the sand because it impacted the socks that you wear and the goggles that you might need. And so if they can do that level of detailed work about where they're going, I think we can too. We can kind of really look at sport in particular, where there's a lot of predictable elements about how hard it's going to be. And it could be the hardest thing that's ever been done, but we can still have a better plan for it. And that's the work that I do.

That's beautiful. I love that, like hyper focus on the detail and really controlling all the controllables that you can. Not relying on luck, not relying on good fortune, but actually going, hey, there's certain things I can think back when I was leading my team building up to the World Championship, like, people might have seen me as obsessive with detail. And I would be like, okay, you're in the World championship arena. You're six minutes into your seven minute performance. The BBC cameras are right there, the pressure's on, $250,000 on the line and you're outdoors and a bee or a wasp lands right here on your cheek as you're performing. What are you going to do? How do we respond? And it's like these kind of things happen. Or your drum head explodes. It's made of Kevlar, so the Green Berets would be familiar with this. It's made of Kevlar. They stretch this bulletproof material till it's a real high tension. That thing blows up because it's middle of summer, the heat has hit the rim. What are you going to do? Because people have won the World Championship with a burst drumhead before, but they had to do specific things to do that. How are we going to respond? So I spent a lot of time almost looking at the 0.1% events, and I feel like the great coaches that I'VE sat down with and the great military operators like you're talking about as well, they explore the possibilities of things that most other people aren't willing to or even think about exploring. What kind of mindset do you think those type of coaches need? When you think of a coach that's willing to look at the socks and look at how we tie our shoes and boots, what kind of mindset do they have?

Well, I think they have an innovative and competitive mindset. I think that's a mindset of.

Someone who, if they were redeployed somewhere else in a bank or something like that, should probably be running the innovation department.

And in my world, like, we.

We're not in the football industry, the rugby industry, the soccer industry, we're in the competition industry.

And people forget that very quickly.

Literally. In my, In Team Invasion sports, there is an opponent that has the same amount of preparation, the same access to information, the same everything. Right. Like the CBAs now dictate how much we can train, how much contact, how much time we can have with the players. So they've flattened that and so we've really got to look for these details about how we can get ahead because it is competition and they're innovating as well. And even within a game they're changing. So we have to counter that and then they get to counter that and then we have to counter that. And so I think having that mindset, whilst it can certainly be described as obsessive and can certainly be taken to a degree which it becomes unhealthy, I think it's a mandatory now in my world that you carry some of that mindset with you because there's just no other way to remain competitive unless you're consistently innovating. But what I see is a lot are spending far too much time trying to catch up rather than go past.

An example would be if you watch any of the 20 teams in the Premier League play right now, they play exactly like Man City. And so that's. So you think you're going to beat Man City at that game over the long run. And that would be my question to that group is, okay, well, you're in the competition industry, you're going to play the exact same way as a team who's just won six of them. Where do you think you get the competitive advantage from? And could some different thinking. Could some vastly different thinking or small minute details actually suit your particular circumstance a little bit better?

Yeah, I think that innovation piece is crucial. We can see it in all sport I mean, the Chicago Bulls, great example of innovation. And then people then looking to them going, how do we be like them? People spend the next five years trying to copy them while they're then innovating for what tomorrow looks like. They're all blacks. I keep coming back to that, but they were always leading the pack, doing things differently. Even their sevens teams operating in a very different way. Now they're at a point where they've got to innovate again, and they've got the right guy in there to do that. So innovation is key. And I want to bring it back to you, Cody, because you actually walk the walk. Your approach to helping people with their craft is unique. It is yours. It's proprietary to you. And I see in the coaching world, whether it's coaching head coaches, Whether it's coaching CEOs, it doesn't matter. I see people regurgitating the same crap day after day. And they've read it from a book that was published in 1987, and this is gold standard. But the world has moved on. Expectations of leaders has went through the roof in terms of their eq, their iq, their spiritual leadership. All of it has moved a lot. So when I seen your approach, I was really blown away by how unique it was. And I'd like to talk about a few of the things that came up. So from memory, you had personal craft, organizational craft, a locker room craft, and game craft. So four really crucial areas that you've got to be a craftsman in to get the best out of your team, out of yourself, out of the whole thing. So if we could just go into each of those for a second. When you talk about personal craft, what does that entail, and how do you help them? Absolutely. Nail it.

Yeah. So the craft model, again, it came out of necessity, and it was really my response to what I see as a failed coach education system in that. Oh, I'll rephrase that. The coach education system is failing head coaches. It's creating really good assistant coaches. It teaches you how far apart the cones need to be and how to design a training session and all these kind of things. And.

For a head coach, now, that's not the job at the elite levels. And so the craft model that I built kind of came out of. What do they actually do? That question I talked about before. Can we map what they do? And so the craft areas that you mentioned are kind of broad buckets and the personal one, they all kind of describe themselves, but really, this is you and your beliefs about coaching and leadership. Who you are as a human being, how you think about.

Yourself as a performer. What raw human skills do you possess that can be deployed against coaching?

Just your beliefs about the world and the way that the world interacts both with you, but also your understanding of different groups and different societies and just human beings in general. And that's what I mean in terms of craft is it really is a craft in a sense that craftsmanship is really about creating one of one. And otherwise you go mass produced. And so we're not trying to create Ikea, we're trying to create craftsmanship where a one of one head coach. And it's their beliefs and it's their beliefs about the world, and it's all the different things that they've interacted with in their life that can come to life through them to help young athletes.

Have the best experience or win a world championship, or just be in a team and learn what teamship is about so they can go into the world and do other things. But it really starts with that personal craft. And that's the one that I'm most excited about because I think it has the most still to give back to us as we explore who we are and what it is that we really believe so powerful.

There's a couple of things that come to mind for me. So one is that often when we go from one career to a different career industry, or even a different team or a different sport to another, there's often this idea that, God, what do I know? Like, what am I going to be able to do? I've got this view, but I shouldn't share that view. You know, I've, you know, for example, a top head coach that I interviewed a while ago. He was into horses and horse racing and left that came into professional sport, became a head coach eventually. And they had a guy, one of his top players, getting injuries after injuries, after injuries. And he said to the physio, like, hey, what weight is such and such? He's 98kgs, whatever it might be. What was he when he wasn't getting injured? I was 96, okay. He said, I had a horse who had the same calf injury when they were slightly overweight. Put him on a diet and let's see how he goes. And right enough, put him on a diet and lost 2kgs and the injury disappeared. So there's this idea of bringing with you your life experiences, your personal experiences, your beliefs. I love that that's a key component of what you do and also this personal side of it. We cannot give what we do not have. So as a head coach who's trying to like really impart knowledge, motivate, inspire, direct, strategize, we can't do those things and give our best unless we have the knowledge, unless we have the well being ourselves, unless we have the calm in our lives outside of sport, our personal lives, our financial lives, whatever it might be. So that personal part, I love that you start there. What's the one thing, if there was one question someone's listening right now, who is a coach or a leader or a parent, what's the one question in that craft area that you would like them to explore or ponder?

It would be what do. What would be possible if I thought of myself as a performer?

What would be possible if I thought of myself as a performer? So particularly for leaders, we with this was not the original intent of, of the idea, but.

Just this constant kind of servanthood has probably gone to like a damaging level where it's about, it's all about.

Like over serving, over serving our kids, over serving kids in the classroom, over serving our athletes, being 24, 7, available to our athletes. And um, and it's driving a lot of this burnout that we're seeing in coaching, but just in, in leadership in general. Uh, like we're having heads of state step down from burnout, we're having head coaches step down from burnout, we're having CEOs leave the industry, right? Like there's a mass migration away from leadership because of burnout. And so the question is, you know, what would be possible as a parent, Maybe if you napped while your child napped, like if you were seeking more emotional control.

More ability to deal with their crying.

Perhaps a nap might be the difference there. Perhaps a nap as a coach allows you to see the footwork is wrong on the player that you're about to train. So if I thought of myself as a performer, what would be possible?

I love that this is really, it fascinates me because I see how much resource and time and finance goes into the players, the elite players, the massages. They get the perks, they get the incredible nutrition. And then I look at the head coaches, I'm like, you are run ragged, you are knackered. You are not getting any of those perks. A massage, the last time you had that was in Bali on the family holiday. Like, you're not treating yourself as a performer. You look at yourself as literally, I'm here to serve you. You guys are the priority. But everything rises and falls in leadership. So the Head coach has to be equally looking after themselves. So when you talk about looking after yourself, I've seen one of your proprietary models called the Energy Map. What's the Energy Map about?

Yeah, so the Energy Map comes off the back of that idea of really looking at, can we better map what a head coach does? So again, it comes from this idea of need. And I just couldn't find anything about what do they actually do and what is draining those resources from them. And so.

Then what you get to do once you understand what that environment is like, the Green Beret is going, okay, well, we're going to use these socks and we're going to use these goggles because they are better fit for, for that coarseness of sand is we can really look at what detracts energy from a particular coach, which is going to be different in every instance. It's one of one, but also what gives energy to a coach. And so where can we find opportunities for potentially more on a given day, more activities that they can do that give them energy, or before a game or after a training session, or when they need it. And all of that is to really get into a practice of understanding your own energy and how to pull the strings of, okay, there's an opportunity there for me to have a nap, sit in silence, read a book, go to Sumner beach and jump on my surfboard and sit out in the ocean and ride the waves.

Right? And so this starts to create a better performer. But you've got to, you've got to map it what it is that you're doing. And you've got to map energy and then pair them together. And it's not to say that, you know, most leaders can't just do what gives them energy all the time. It's not about that. If I were to add, you know what it's not about.

You don't just get to pick and choose all the things that you like doing and farm everything else off. But what this is doing is giving us the ability to manipulate our performance environment when we can and get better ready for the times that are going to be tough, where we are working 20 hours a day, because that might be part of your environment. It might be unavoidable. And.

Me or you aren't going to change that because there's a game on Wednesday and then there's a game on Saturday. And so there's going to be hard work, but we can still get ready better for those, those difficult times.

I totally agree, totally agree. And it's interesting, I hear this in elite leadership fields, you know, I just want more work life balance. I says, well look, you're in the wrong field if you want work life balance like, I don't know, go to Bali and be a yogi. But in the real world when you're a leader, I think the thing we should be after is counterbalance, not balance. It's this realization that, God, I have done five 20 hour days, we have played three games this week. You know what, I can see that, I can feel that. What can I do today? What can I do in this next hour to reset, recharge, Whether it's a NSDR kind of, you know, pseudo sleep, practice meditation, go for a run, hang out with my loved one and have coffee, whatever it is. There's this idea of how do I just counterbalance it and go to the well being side or the connection with loved one side. And Cody, your work, your work, the reason I resonate with so strongly with it when I look at high performance, I would define it as consistently exceeding norms whilst maintaining healthy relationships and well being. The important part there is healthy. Not perfect, not just spot on, but healthy. They're going to function, they're going to be ups and downs, but in the large part you're healthy, your mind is healthy, your relationships are healthy. Everything that you do takes that kind of definition, so to speak. So I had a burnout specialist, a psychotherapist from Aussie Gordon Parker. He's a legend and he's Australian of the year. He said, james, you had burnout and that's why you quit drumming and that's why you stopped going to the world championships and that's why you got divorced. And I said yes, 100% agreed with him on that. He said, james, your definition of high performance is wrong. I said, what do you mean? I'd love to be challenged on that. And he said, high performance is just winning, that's it. And I says, well, Mr. Parker, I beg to disagree. I was like, how many of our high performing leaders and athletes are taking their own lives? That is not high performance. What high performance is is on field and off field is doing the mahi, doing the work and having a life with people that you love and having a body that reflects that. So I feel like him and I are on a different page with high performance. But I feel like you and I are very similar in that we can win, which is high performance whilst also winning in the soft stuff, the important stuff.

Of course we can. Yeah. And again it goes back to that rehumanizing is. That's the rehumanizing part is that there is a body and a mind and a human being there. And, you know, we're not just an inanimate object that achieves things. You know, there are all sorts of ramifications for our behavior or lack thereof, and the things that we leave behind. And.

You know, one of the examples I use in the tough stuff is from an NFL coach and he talks about, you know, he got fired, I think, for the second time and locked himself in his basement for a couple of weeks and didn't come out. And he was, he gave an interview and he was talking about how his. His winless win loss record was going to be engraved on his gravestone. It's like, what a shit thing to have on your gravestone. Whether you're Bill Belichick or you've just been fired for the second time. It was like, regardless of whether you've won or not, that's not what should be on there. And I think that lines up with what you're describing there around. There's got to be more to it. There just has to be.

Yeah, there really has to be. And Cody, I'll be honest, I was in a pretty shit place when, you know, people might go, oh, he's won seven world championships and he's won like 12 national titles in a row. And yeah, it might look high performance from the outside, but actually I was a wreck. And I was so worried about my next loss. And everybody around me that I was leading felt that pressure, felt that intensity. And I acted in a way that put so much pressure on them that I imagined their wellbeing and their relationships suffered. And so I wish I knew back then what I knew now because I believe we can win and also have a sense of flow and a sense of counterbalance. This idea of personal craft for you personally.

What are some of the habits, like if we go into a day in the life of Cody, what are some of the personal habits that you're like, James, that's non negotiable. Those things in the morning. That's what I do.

Well, I think.

I have a little bit of a different take on some of this in that.

For instance, the kind of mindfulness.

Epidemic maybe that we're going through, which is great. And self awareness and mindfulness are long overdue on the. The kind of stage of things that need to be prominent. But when, when you look at.

Mindfulness, whether it emerges from.

Asia, which is the one that people typically gravitate towards, the Buddhist Version or Japanese version. Whether you look for, through like indigenous Australia and the versions of mindfulness, which is kind of in the dreaming and like their creation story, whether you look at the mindfulness that emerges out of Africa, which is similar, connectivity comes through. It doesn't stop at you as an individual. It's not about you. In fact, it openly eschews you. It comes out of collectivist societies because there isn't you, there is only us. And so to answer your question is, I actually think it's the connection piece.

That is the non negotiable. So in terms of habits, I think the habit is connectivity rather than. I think what we're doing is we're gravitating towards all these individual habits. I'm going to go and meditate, I'm going to go and go for a walk. I'm going to go and do this. But the reason mindfulness and meditative practices are.

So good at helping individuals is because they're connective to other things. And that can be, you know, that can be everything that exists, that can be everything that has energy in it. Right. That's actually what allows you to have an understanding of how small perhaps your worries are.

When you think about all of the things that are connected and interconnected in the world and that you're connected to them. I'm watching an airplane behind me. I'm connected to that airplane in some way. We exist in the same world. And you know, so I know we're getting a little bit cosmic with, with that example, but.

I actually think the non negotiable for human beings is connection. It is our story, it is why we are good at anything. The only thing that we're unique in the animal kingdom is our ability to connect and to work together. And I sense that a lot of that is missing and that we try to solve problems individually. Perhaps too often and certainly in the Western world, we go into ourselves more than we try to connect. And so that's what I've been endeavoring to do more of, is find ways to connect, whether it's spiritually to that airplane or whether it's with my family or just send a message to my friends or tell my mum that I love her.

That's beautiful. Thanks for sharing that, Kurti. And it's interesting you brought up that kind of African connection. So I spent probably the last 10 years really going deep on Nelson Mandela and the leader that he was and how he changed and evolved. But this one term came up. So when I sat down with his private secretary or his family chat about who he was behind the scenes. The one thing that kept coming up was Ubuntu. And I'm seeing more and more sports teams and even corporates take this theme of Ubuntu into what they do. And I guess the overarching thing is like, I am who I am because of you. I achieve what I achieve because of what we do together. It's this idea of like, it's we over me as opposed to the other way around. And I love the idea of mindfulness. We actually had the mother of mindfulness on the show, Dr. Ellen Langer. I'll send you the recording. I think you'll enjoy it. So she brought mindfulness to the west. She's in her late 70s, early 80s now. She's in her very final year as a professor at Harvard. This is the last one. And it was fascinating getting her understanding of what mindfulness is. And she's like, it's so it's not meditation, James. It's like just being. And it's connecting and it's being aware and. Yeah, so what you said fully aligns with her deep research. I love it. Now let's have a look at organizational craft. So we've looked at personal craft. Let's take a look at organizational craft. What is that? And, you know, how do we, how do we get better at that side of things?

Yeah, well, again, my group that I'm most interested in is head coaches. And this is a particular challenge for that group because in a relatively short amount of time, we've kind of gone from being the organization.

To having to operate within one. You know, we're still in a time where a lot of the coaches, the older coaches would have operated where it was them and an assistant coach, full stop.

No full time doctor, no strength and conditioning, no analytics, no this, that nutritionist, no full time staff outside of them and an assistant coach. And we're talking about, you know, an example that I wrote about in the tough stuff was from about 2006 in the NHL, that was still the case. So in a relatively short amount of time, we've gone to.

Some staffs having, you know, not just departments, but those departments chock full of PhDs.

With, you know, 20, 20 people in the analysis department pouring over data from all over the world. All of those departments having different objectives and different ideas of what a successful season looks like, the flow of information, having to go through them to get to a game day or to get to a piece of information or a player injury and a return to play methodology.

It is so far removed from that. Hey, it's me and you, James. What training session are we going to run today? And so for my group we have a lot of learning to do within this in that we used to be the system and now we need to understand how to operate within the system and a lot are struggling with that. I keep a roughshod kind of chicken scratch tally of the major topic of each conversation I've had since I started coaching coaches and organizational dynamics is like off the charts, number one, off the charts insurmountable within the next couple of years if I was to never talk about organizational dynamics again. Wow.

So we're talking about like the, dealing with the CEO of the franchise, dealing with expectations of corporate sponsors, of marketing of analytics, of SNC expectations. Is that what we're talking about?

Yeah, yeah. Run, running. Being the face of an organization, being like you mentioned earlier, the person who, whilst you don't necessarily do the work on the analytics and the deep analysis and.

Don'T prepare the reports and you don't do data visualization, all these kind of things. A journalist gets up and asks you about it and you have to respond instantaneously and then when you go back to your desk, that analyst comes into your office and says I've got an offer from the competitor.

Because I want to advance my career and I don't feel like it's. And then there's a player at the door waiting to get in and then you've got to run to a press conference and then there's a sponsored dinner and then you've got to go home and leave work at the office and. Right. So we're operating in these organizations that now are connected more than ever and the, the hot thing in sport right now is multi club ownership and Liverpool is owned by the same group that owns the Boston Red Sox that is owned by the same group that owns the Pittsburgh Penguins. And so it's not even just football clubs.

You're operating within that entity and understanding what Fenway Sports Group does. Right. And so you're a piece of that puzzle and you're the public face of that puzzle. And so.

And there's probably pluses and minuses to that, right? In terms of like anyos or something like that. I think it's Man United and Mercedes, Mercedes Formula one team and maybe. Yeah, so it's like, I guess there's negatives to that in terms of. Well there's a lot of expectation, there's a lot bigger system. I've got to operate within. But also there's pluses in that, hey, we can share ideas and data and I'm sure there's probably a bit of both.

Yeah, exactly. And just really, you know, the kind of stereotypical things that people are working on is the idea of managing up. Right. Like we still use Alex Ferguson as this, like, bastion of leadership. Well, he didn't really have to manage up. There was no managing up. He was the one that made the calls. And, you know, David Gill maybe had some hand in some of those phone calls. But outside of that.

No managing up, no educating someone who owns the team that never shows up on why you should keep your job or why things are going well or what the outlook is. And certainly not, you know, hundreds of staff that whilst you might not directly, they might not directly report into, you can walk into your office at any given time and say, I want to talk about my career. I want to do this, I'm leaving this, I'm that.

Yeah. So for my group, the organizational craft is really just the understanding of the fact that we're in massive organizations now and coaches have typically shunned any sort of care or responsibility for that. And that the avoidance behavior is not the way to solve the problem.

It's actually to be a participative part in a huge organization because it's not like they're going away and they're certainly not getting any smaller.

Yeah, 100%. And within that craft, the organizational craft component, if there was one question you would like the head coach to ponder that might help them, what would that one question be?

What does this organization do to make money?

And I'll tell you why that's the question. Because most coaches don't know that the organization is a real estate company.

With a facade of a sports team.

Tell me more about that. Why do you see it like that? You've got so much more depth and experience in seeing how the bigger picture of it works. There might be others out there going, what do you mean? I guess the McDonald's is an example. It's a fast food chain. Why go there for burgers? But then when we learn more about it, it's a real estate company. So tell us more about that same idea.

And so.

A lot of it kind of driven out of North America and salary cap rules and equalization is there's money from each organization that generally goes into a centralized pot and gets redistributed so that people can compete with the Dallas Cowboys. But certain things sit outside of that, that idea. And often it's things like real estate endeavors. So if you want to know more about it, I'll go and look at the Dallas Cowboys. They literally built a suburb of which they own the land of the suburb. And it's. A mall has been built there, a hospital has been built there, the training facility is there. And so everything kind of services the football team, but it's also just a suburb, and they make money off every piece of land that exists within that suburb and the business that's on it. So it's your classic McDonald's example. And the reality is, most of these organizations now, because they're looking for revenue streams, and real estate is one that they hold a lot of.

Infrastructure with, is that's where they make a lot of their money. And again, this seems far removed from coaching a football team, but I think understanding how your. The business that you work for makes money is relevant. Whether you work for the bank or whether you work for a football team, you should know it might help you to navigate some conversations that you're struggling with at the moment.

100% in terms of influencing behaviors, influencing others and decisions. I think that's so gold. So let's look at the locker room craft. What is good locker room craft?

Yeah, so locker room craft is really. You're kind of in front of the team, but off the field. So this is your quintessential culture stuff. And, you know, again, there's. There's so many different threads that sit underneath that. But how are you creating a culture that's, you know, modern and inclusive and helps with performance rather than degrades from performance? And what's interesting is there's so many different variations of this and so many different kind of mishmashes of what people think helps. But again, that's what makes it a craft.

And.

Yeah, I think coaches have a general understanding of the impact that a good culture has, but I. I've sensed that a lot. Don't know how far that can actually stretch into areas that.

That still have a big impact. And so there's a lot of cultures with mismatched incentives laden into them. For instance, just an easy example is how often we talk about team first behaviors. And everyone's done their values, and everyone's done their behaviors, and everything's team first. But then the top award is an MVP award for an individual that incentivizes and has benefits to someone to probably display more individualistic behaviors. And so your locker room craft is really looking at all the nooks and crannies of.

What is guiding the behavior of these athletes, certainly off the field and how they're treating each other, but also that seeps onto the field, obviously. And are they aligned to what we say they're aligned to?

And if there was one thing or two things that someone could do in this. Coming back to your proprietary frameworks, what are one or two things that, in this locker room, kind of craft that people could do to have more impact in shaping culture?

Yeah, I think.

So. One of the. I won't actually use one of mine. I'll give a plug to a friend of mine. I think most people should read Owen Eastwood's book Belonging. So we've, we've mentioned New Zealand and Kiwis far too often for an Australian's liking on this show. But I'm gonna plug him. He lives in the UK now, so maybe that's the. It's a non, non New Zealand one. But.

Yeah, rather than following my advice on that is go straight to the source. And his. His work is just an exemplary example of the. The level of thinking and.

Detail that you can go into. Some things that you think are kind of general, overarching philosophies that you've covered off. When you read his book, you see the breadth and the depth of a lot of these cultural elements that you can kind of play around with and, and really emphasize to create a sense of belonging, which is really what your locker room should be about.

And this comes through our whakapapa, as they say here in New Zealand, our lineage, our ancestors who came before us, both personally, but also on the team, what previous players and coaches looked like through music, through food, through different rituals. So is that the kind of stuff that you'll get into with your head coaches in terms of how they create unique rituals and sense of belonging within their team?

Yeah, exactly. And again, I.

What I see often is really just that, like we talked about earlier, just copying. Right. And so, you know, the one that I often use is, you know, like the sweep the sheds idea, which, you know, James is a friend of mine, but, you know, like, that idea has been taken by everyone without really the understanding of what that ritual means. So, yes, it's good to sweep the sheds and leave them clean, but the reason it's particularly compelling to the All Blacks or was or has kind of become this.

This really popular idea is because it means something in the culture. There's a deeper level to it, and that's where I like to explore with a lot of coaches, is like, you can do anything, but what does it mean here? I don't care what it means over there. What does it mean here and does it fit here? And often what you find is a lot of things are kind of taken and maybe bastardized a little bit and they end up quite misplaced because they. It is the, you know, square peg, round hole kind of thing. It's kind of a good idea and it kind of fits if you put it at the right angle, but it doesn't really mean anything here.

Yeah, I can see it a lot. I see a lot of teams. I mean, I've read Legacy a number of times, love the book, but I see a number of teams and organizations taking those concepts and they dilute them so much. And by just literally picking, oh, that works from that book. Or I'll grab that from that book and be unique. You know, when you look at. Here's a good example, personal brand. Love him or loathe him. Donald Trump, arguably the most known personal brand on the planet today. And what does he do? He's very unique. He speaks his mind. Sometimes it's horrific what comes out of that guy's mouth. Other times it's like, oh, well, that's interesting. But he's always unique in terms of how he sees the world around him. And what does that do? It creates momentum. Obviously a number of people voted him and he's back in power. This is no different. As a head coach, it's like, do you want to pull from Alex Ferguson and take away thing there from Rassie Erasmus and a little bit from. Or do you want to pause, sit with Cody, work with Cody and go, what do I believe?

What's happened in my life? What did my granddad tell me as a kid about these things that matter most in life, how to carry ourselves? How can I bring that in? I just see that being so much more powerful and reading a book like Belonging, I think is empowering because Owen in there does not say, do this exact thing. He says, here's 25 examples with the Proteas, with NATO, with FIFA. And here's what I did differently in every setting, but I brought in a sense of belonging. So, Cody, I love that you sent. This is not my simple vanilla formula. I've got a framework. I've got almost a holding cell here and we're going to play in here and we're going to figure out what matters most and create uniqueness like these personal brands. Do that succeed in your part of the world? Gary Vaynerchuk would be another one who's kind of Very unique, has a very unique voice, doesn't follow others. And that creates a culture and a following and passion. Head coaching I don't see as being any different.

No, it's. It's really not. And you know, if, if you came to me and we were talking about interview, like a lot of coaches do, they're about to interview for a role that's going to be. My line of questioning is I couldn't care less how your wing backs play or. Or what scrum you're gonna technique you're gonna teach is where are you in all of this, this and why do you believe these things? And yeah, I've done a lot of those recently and I think it's quite a shocking question when someone asks of it, but it also makes you realize or have to think through and observe what you've put down on paper. Like, this is me and my philosophy. But where am I in that is an interesting question and I think it's something that you can ask yourself in.

In anything you do in leadership is where am I? Why do I believe this thing? And have I just taken it on because I've thought that's a good idea or do I really believe it?

You've really. You've beat me to it there. I was about to ask you what's the question that people need to answer in that area, but you've beaten me to it. I love that. And just for the people listening and watching, I'm going to pop these questions in the show notes. So if you want to go down and see what those questions are. Also to all of Cody's books and all of his links to socials, etc. His website will be in the show notes.

In this locker room. I've been very fortunate to be in some incredible locker rooms and in the position as a mental skills coach or as an observer or as a supporter of a leader in there. And I just take notes generally. Listen, watch some locker rooms. It's inspiring. There's this connected energy and there's this momentum and there's a high and low before, during and after the game. There's this real incredible journey of emotions and energy. Other times I go in and go, wow, there's a disconnect and there's a real heavy use of aggression, a real heavy use of profanities. And look, every now and then the F bomb can be really powerful. But I can see this from a mental skills and a psychology standpoint being overused and it's detrimental. So there was a team a few Years back where the head coach was using the C word a lot. And I just thought, this is interesting and what's being achieved here? And I always say, is this useful or not useful? Let's take the emotion out of it. Is this a useful thing or not? I didn't see any use in this. And in fact a lot of the players got offside because of this use of a vulgar word. So in your experience working with head coaches, where do you see language sitting in the importance of getting great results?

Well, as a writer by trade and someone who's kind of written books and comes from user experience.

I think it's extremely prominent. The way that I position it in second set of eyes is like there's three primary coaching skills. There's awareness or like your attention, there's communication and there's decision making. And those are primary skills because they're always active. Whether you're in a one on one meeting, whether you're in the locker room delivering a team talk out on the field, delivering a training session in the office, in a quiet moment with a staff member, you're always paying attention to something, you're always communicating something and you're deciding based on what you've seen and what you've said. And then you know, to zoom in on language.

I, you know, it's from a coaching perspective it really has some significant like prominence in terms of how you impart, what it is that you're trying to impart that that doesn't change whether you're a strength coach at my gym around the corner here and how he uses language to teach me how to lift weights or has a conversation with me while I'm doing weights and the impact that that has on my performance right the way through to how you teach the game, how you impart knowledge, how you take away fear, how you add fear into an environment, how you change an environment, how you change a mindset of a player.

I have this concept that I talk about a little bit on my website. It's like be a comedian. And what I mean by that is not to be funny. It's actually that I think the most masterful communicators on planet earth are stand up comics.

And the reason that I say that is because.

Certainly there's a level of detail that most people don't appreciate in that before it gets on Netflix, they've done it a hundred times in a small little hole in the wall comedy.

Club somewhere in the backwaters.

But also that the idea that a syllable this way or that way makes people laugh or not laugh means that you need to have some serious craft in terms of how you deliver that word.

And this makes an entire show. And you watch these men and women get up on stage on Netflix and it looks all polished and everything. But the arduous nature of, do I lean down while I say this, or do I stand up or.

Am I walking? Am I stationary? Am I interacting with the crowd? Am I not? What syllable? How am I delivering that? When am I bringing something back to add emphasis and to get another laugh off the back of that last joke and how I construct it? And so when I say be a comedian, what I mean isn't be funny. I mean, like, there's a level of detail in your communication that you can have, including without profanity.

Like, obviously, Jerry Seinfeld is famous, but there's another comedian that just launched, Nate Pagazzi is his name, who just had a special come out on Netflix Christmas Eve, which is prime time on Netflix. He also doesn't use profanity, but gets messages across and leaves you with things and leaves you with memorable things. And so I think for coaches or leaders in general.

Whilst we don't get to practice a hundred times in a small little leadership club before we get to go on stage, we can certainly learn from other crafts about how to do things really effectively consistently by paying attention to little details about how we deliver messages.

That's powerful, Cody. I love that self awareness is just a crucial part of that. So I speak on stages usually one or two times a week throughout the year, different audiences. And when I first started, I say, oh, yeah, I better share that. And hopefully that'll be funny, that they'll appreciate that I'm not a funny guy. Like, I don't see myself as a comedian at all. And I love that you're saying it's not about being funny at all. It's more so about the connection piece and the response. And so now, after literally hundreds of times, I know where to pause. And then it gives them opportunity to give me the feedback, which is often laughter or some kind of, like, gasp or I know where to go down a little bit lower and slow the pace and maybe even sit on a stool rather than stand while I'm telling you this story. And like, I never knew that at the start it was like, wham, bam, let's go. Got an hour to fill, let's do this. And I think coaching's the same. Like, you've got to be testing. And I think, yeah, coaches don't get to go into the locker room and test it Monday through Friday so that on Saturday that everyone reacts the way they want. So I think coaches need to be testing their communication with their family members, with their friends, trying to, you know, to tell stories and themes to people outside the locker room so that when they get that one opportunity, they're not getting the eye roll from everyone going, oh, here we go. Here's Jimmy and his story about such and such. They're like, oh, my God, that was powerful. So who comes to mind for you when you think of a coach that you've worked with that's just masterful as a comedian, as a storyteller, as a space holder?

Well, I write about him in Second Set of Eyes. I think Damian Hardwick, who used to coach Richmond in the afl, they won three premierships and is now the Gold Coast Suns. I think he's like global scale communicator.

And.

Some of his work kind of went around off the back of the documentary that came out during COVID where, because everyone watched everything, right? Um, and so, you know, he has that, that detail, he has the connectivity, but he also, you know, in some of the one on one more delicate communications is like just the right words at the right time and the right messages at the right time and in the right way. And that doesn't mean being, you know, Zen and always kind of not using anger and emphasis and bit of a roar and generating something in your team. But I think that as an mo is, if not gone, it's going out fast because not only is it just not particularly skillful, it just doesn't resonate with the generation that are between 18 and 30 that are professional athletes like.

I deal with 100% now, last but not least, let's look at game craft. This is, I guess, the thing that most people when they think of sport, this is what they think of as game craft. So what is game craft and how do we become legendary at it?

Yeah, this is the game, right? Like, this is kind of a payoff at the end of it. And, you know, a lot of coaches are great at their game craft, or certainly they are. By the time I work with them in that, they've risen to the top 15, 30 in the world at what they do, generally off the back of that. But really, I think.

You know, this is where things like, you know, pedagogy that's kind of come into prominence recently in coaching around what are just some really pedagogically sound ways to teach anything. Right? And the great Thing with, you know, teaching science is that it's constantly being tested in classrooms all around the world. And so we, we can latch onto some of these ideas and we change what the way that we think about the game, teach the game. And I see it as another way that we can really innovate again, because I tell you what, most training sessions look the same, frankly, these days. And so anytime I see sameness, I start to get worried because you'll remember I said we're in the competition industry and whilst sameness might be good for people and it makes them feel good that there's some sort of best practice maybe at play in the competition industry, we don't want to be one of many, we want to be one of one in our team. And we want to train the way that we train. And so.

That'S where I get excited about, really, the payoff here is when we do the work on ourselves and we understand who we're working for and how important, how to organize staff to get them on the vision of what we're trying to achieve. We go in front of the team and we can connect them and help them understand who the human beings are that they're going out there with. Then we get to actually go and do the thing that we want on the field and teach them the game and teach them what the game's about and all the moments in the game that are, that are special, that they can create. And so that's the payoff one. That's why I'm talking in this tone now is because like the, when I mentioned I'm just obsessed with sport is I love this one because.

Yeah, this is where we get to really change lives, both the players and the fans and the staff and everyone. Whole communities change. On the diamond, I'm wearing a. A blue Jays cap. And when they're in the playoffs, man, you should see this place. Right? So that's the impact that we can have in sport, is you change the tone of an entire city.

Yeah. And that's so beautiful. I can see your energy, feel your energy, and I know that the person listening can hear it. Before I get you to pose the question there on that, I reflect back to Christchurch, where I live. I'm obviously not from Christchurch originally, the accent probably gives that away, but moved to Christchurch, been here 20 years now. But in 2011, we had a crippling earthquake and it caused a lot of damage. Essentially flattened the central city, caused billions of dollars worth of damage, lots of loss of life. The stadium of our beloved Crusaders rugby team was destroyed. And so it looked like we'd have to press pause on sport. But what they did is they literally lived in situ, constantly moving, mobile, moving from stadium to stadium, always playing away, never playing really at home. And they had this real campaign around, like, we will. We will do this. It's for us, it's for our community. And the community rallied behind this team and it gave us hope. Because I'll tell you what, that's one of the darkest times I've experienced is a city that's literally been brought to a standstill and I'm contemplating, do I move to Canada, to Vancouver, do I go back to Ireland? And literally, teams like the Crusaders made me feel like, no, no, I belong here. Like, this is home. This will be better again. And it was through sport that gave us hope, and that was the coaches, that was the management and the players out every bloody week fighting for us and giving us something to be hopeful for. So, you know, we don't need an earthquake for teams to be able to bring communities together. But that's something. When you brought that story to life, it brought me back to that and goes, actually, me staying here and still being here, part of it is to do with our local sports team.

Yeah, yeah. It's an immense power and, you know, it's a privileged position to be able to represent those. Those communities. And, you know, this is where, you know, I say the, the, you know, sport is different in that sense, in that, you know, there's. There's kind of a bit of a narrative around, you know, it's. It's not important. And, you know, certainly when you put it up against the people building roads and up towers and, you know, fighting for our freedoms and all those kind of things, that. That is somewhat true. But also, like the people slogging away at work, like, whether.

Whether.

Whether the company pays a bill on time or not doesn't change the entire tone of a city. And so it is important, sport is important, and it's important for communities. And it's a thing that people can rally around and actually build community around. And we've seen that. We've really seen that here in Toronto, very multicultural city that now get together at the baseball or the hockey or the basketball, and you see people, you know, the stat here is 51% of people that live in Toronto aren't born in Canada. So those people get to get together around our sports teams and build community.

Yeah, that's incredible. Really powerful. And in that area, the game craft, what's One question you would love a head coach to ponder that might really help them in that area.

Yeah, well, like, we've gone a little bit off track. I don't think any of that's necessarily relevant to how you would teach the game, necessarily. But I think the biggest question that I've been working on at the moment with coaches in terms of how we teach the game is.

Are you training movements or are you training moments? And what I mean by that is.

There'S a lot of teams that are great at movements. You know, you see them do these ball flow drills and there's like unopposed, and they move the ball down the field and there's, you know, maybe, you know, in rugby it'll be like they'll kind of tackle themselves and there's got to be a ruck and then they keep moving it and, and everything looks great. No one drops a pass. And, you know, we, we kind of applauded at the end. Well done. You know, you guys understand what we're trying to do and there's a time and a place for that. But what I mean by moments is the moments are the game, the game specificity. And so a moment has a bunch of different things. It's got a score, it's got a time, it's got numbers on the field, right? Particularly in sports like rugby, this has become increasingly important with how many players are getting sent off, right? And so it's not necessarily a 15 on 15 game anymore. And so how do we navigate those moments? That's what I mean by it is in, in the training environment we're teaching the game, you can't just teach movements, you can't just teach flow of the ideal way. We want the ball to go.

As a template and an understanding. It's valuable. But after that, you've got to add back in the score, you've got to add back in the numbers, you've got to add back in the space, you've got to add back in the time because that will impact.

How players react in certain situations. And the reason for that is because I know we don't train with those things. And you can see it on Saturday when you watch the team play because they'll get themselves into a moment and they have no concept of how to get out of it because I haven't trained it.

Yeah, that's powerful to me. That's a massive narrative and strategic shift because movement is everything and having drills is everything. And in fact, moments are almost like, oh, yeah, there was a moment and it's A past tense thing. Yeah. There's that moment. You see that moment unfold. Whereas what you're saying is, guys train for the moments. Like create the moments, be the moment, rather than reflect on, oh, that was a moment. We missed it or we nailed it. That's huge. Cody. I've taken so much. I've taken so many mental notes. I'm going to go back and take so many written notes, but I've got a few tactical questions before we wrap up. So we've talked about Belonging by Eoan Eastwood. We talked about James Kerr's Legacy book. Apart from those two, what's one book that has profoundly impacted you in life that you'd recommend a listener to go get?

Fearless by Pippa Grange.

Great. And why is that? Why was that so impactful?

Pippa has a way of talking about fear as a topic that me as a.

You know, she kind of comes out of Aussie Rules football and men's sport, so she talks about it through a lens of even some of the more damaging ways that fear has been positioned in terms of, like, men and their kind of athletic performance or their performance that I just hadn't seen before.

And, you know, the. The core idea of fear as a driver of performance kind of comes from always driven a lot by men's sports. And so that as a basis really resonated with me. And then the, you know, her kind of counter arguments to that are just fantastic as well. So I think.

Yeah, you know, just, I mean, she was also central to that English men's national team as well, that, you know, when you're talking about fear and the removal of fear and what that can do to performance is like, that's the central narrative behind that team. And so, you know, to have someone like that tell stories and give her opinion on it is. It's extremely valuable.

Thank you for sharing that. If I was to jump into your phone right now to Spotify or Apple podcasts, what might I see on there? What's one or two podcasts that you would recommend people go check out?

Well, you'd see yours on there. That's how I became aware of you.

That's amazing.

Someone sent me the Steve Hanson episode and I think I told you it's in one of my books as well.

I listen to the Knowledge Project, Shane Parrish. So if you're familiar with Farnham Street.

I just like who he goes in interviews and what he asks them. It's so varied. You never know what's going to come next. And they only come out Every second week. And again, I like that in that it's not, you know, not on a schedule of just trying to pump out episodes. He really takes his time with him. So I listened to that and then.

It'S a great podcast. And Clear Thinking, I think, was his book. It was a phenomenal read as well. Yeah.

Someone that's really diligent with their work and has taken their time with it and probably could have come out with a book way earlier, given his newsletter, but really took his time and it was like 10 to 15 years of writing a newsletter to turn it into a book is some pretty clear thinking. Yeah.

100.

Yeah. So that's. I've kind of been going through that. And then the sports psych show with Dan Abrahams is another favorite. Again, just someone that puts. Puts that world in such a way that you can't help but gravitate towards it.

I love it. What's one practice that you do that really grounds you or centers you?

Sitting in silence.

How often do you do that?

In the mornings and in the evenings?

As much as I can with a three year old and another on the way, but.

Or maybe even just sitting in a contemplative state. Like I often put on a song.

Queen, for instance. And I close my eyes and I just listen to Freddie sing.

And I. I call that like silence as well. Like I'm kind of sitting in silence. I'm not trying to do anything, but I'm just listening to him. I'm listening to In Excess and like listening to Michael Hutchins sing and thinking about how extraordinary it is. And you know, that's. That might take three minutes. And then I get on with my day.

Beautiful. And it's so achievable for all of us. They've got the fast five. Are you morning person or night owl?

Morning. I'm horrible at night.

I'm the same. One word to describe yourself.

Thoughtful.

Biggest fear?

Well, yeah, it's a new one. But dying. Now that I've had children, it wasn't dead.

Why is it here now?

Because I have kids and I want to.

You want to be there for them. You want to see them grow up and. Yeah, yeah, I get it. There's a podcast I'll send to you called Death on the Daily. It'll be a helpful one to listen to. It sounds kind of morbid, but it's brilliant. Introvert or extrovert?

Introvert. How do you.

How do you use that introversion to your benefit?

Writing.

So it's. Yeah, yeah, I can write My thoughts, I can't really kind of talk them out as well. I'm not as good a speaker as I am a writer, so I think that same. I think it comes from that same thread, though.

That's beautiful. Yeah, I love that. And last but not least of the Fast 5, what's your life motto?

Well, life motto.

I think I don't have one, but if I were to try to make one up in the Fast 5, I think it would be to give back.

I love that. That contribution piece. I love it. You're doing that. You're doing that through your work, through what you share, how you show up in the world. Thanks for sharing that, Cody. And before I ask you the very final question that I ask all guests, I just want to say a huge thank you for making this space, for opening up, for sharing it all, also for writing the books that you've written. And as I say, they'll be in the show. Notes for anyone listening or watching, please go and get them. If you're not a head coach, but you know a head coach of school team of a provincial, team of a national, if you know any head coaches, just get the books and send them to as a gift and say, you're welcome. They will love them. So, Cody, last question. I want you to imagine, pretend for a moment that you and I are going to fast forward many years into the future. You're highly aware that it's your last day here on earth and someone that you love dearly. Maybe it's a grandchild by this stage or a great grandchild. They come into the room and they say, cody, how do I go about leading my life on purpose? What would you say to them?

I think the.

I have described that I'm a writer and I like words.

I think the clue is in the phrasing. Right there is the.

Purpose. I would look at that. And doing things on purpose, with purpose.

I think whilst it might not. Might not always lead to the success that you think it will lead to, it will open doors that you can't even perceive. That's been the story of my life, I would say, is I haven't done anything by design necessarily. I've done purposeful actions and doors have opened for me that I've been brave enough to walk through. So I think I would leave that with my sons and my, hopefully, grandchildren in the future.

Yeah, I actually think you don't need to go much further than the phrase leading on purpose. I think you've nailed it.

That's stunning. Thank you so much for sharing that, Cody. And you're a great dad to be able to impart those lessons and the things that you do day to day, the people you sit with, the people you interview and write about, you've got so much to offer this world. So I just want to encourage you to keep doing it, keep sharing it. I can't wait to sit down with you in person, hopefully some point this year. And when your next book comes out, I want you to be the first to get in touch. We'll get you on the show to promote that amazing book, but for now, please look after your good self.

Thanks, gents. It's been an honor, mate. Thank you.

Cheers, Cody. The Lead On Purpose podcast is sponsored by NZ Mortgages. Learn more at nzmortgages.co nz. Thanks for tuning in to Lead On Purpose. If you find this episode valuable, please share it with one person that you think might benefit from it. And if you're serious about leveling up, please make sure you're subscribed to the show and continue to lead your life on purpose.