‘There's a shift in wanting to do sport differently’

Yours was a really great keynote presentation this morning, here in Edinburgh. You talked about your book, The Long Win: The Search For a Better Way to Succeed, and you demonstrated some of the issues that can arise when thinking about success through a binary 'win/loss' lens, or an outcome-only focus. You also talked about sports psychologists expanding their job titles, being critical to creating cultural environments. You used the phrase 'cultural architects', and I think this could potentially be quite a scary prospect for some people. To break it down a little bit, how do you think sports psychologists could go about achieving this?

I think all of us are cultural architects, and we have a role beyond whatever the job title is – to contribute to the environment, and to contribute to the experience that others have, as well as our own experience. I don't mean to put any particular pressure on psychologists, but the skills required to be aware of the influence you have on a culture are skills that are inherently part of your training… an ability to listen, to tune in to ways of thinking, behaviours, interactions, to understand concepts like psychological safety. All of those things are what we're talking about.

Everybody in that sports environment – coach, athlete, volunteer, equipment manager, psychologists – are responsible for creating the culture together. And that's the bit that we haven't optimised in lots of sports environments: to the detriment of everybody involved, to the detriment of performance, but also wellbeing and a bigger positive social impact that could come through sport. Sports psychologists could be helping lead the way more in that process of us all waking up to our responsibilities and the opportunity to create better environments within which to pursue sport.

I guess there are some good examples… within football, for example, looking at some of the work that people like Pippa Grange and Ian Marshall have done with the England men's senior football team.

Yes, absolutely. It's moving from perhaps a slightly old-fashioned view of a psychologist's role, which is just one-on-ones with an athlete who has maybe got some issue, to working more systemically, through leaders, and head coaches, and really seeing your prime job as supporting others to be literate in creating cultures where we can perform and thrive. We're perhaps rebalancing the priorities and ways of working in a psychologist's role in order to increase the impact.

You also talked about the three C's for redefining success – Clarity, Connection, Constant learning. I wondered whether there were any sporting environments that you feel are at the forefront of embracing this approach, from the work that you've done?

The one that comes to mind would be the Lionesses with Sarina Wiegman and their sports psychologist Kate Hays. Kate Hays is someone I've worked with earlier in her career and I love the way she works. She's not doing one-to-one work primarily, if at all these days. She is working to create that broader environment. She's working through and with the leaders, and looking outside of ourselves and how we interact rather than looking purely internally. That, to me, is the bigger game, that's 'the long win'. That's the bigger picture. Yes, we have to address some internal issues within us. But really, it's then how we bring who we are to the group.

I see other local examples of it within sports. You need some good leadership – a coach who sees that this is their prime objective. They've no interest in a medal or a result at the cost of human damage. They've got leaders who support them in that, and then a team, including the psychologist, who are working collaboratively to do that. That collaboration becomes inherent, rather than siloed into different roles.

What about environments where you have people from different cultural backgrounds, values, belief systems… how do you create that shared sense of clarity and purpose?

Whatever collective endeavour we're engaged in, whether it's a sport or another organisation, the challenge and opportunity is always to create a shared sense of clarity and purpose across different backgrounds and beliefs. I see it as an ongoing activity – this isn't something we do at an away day, and then it's done. It's something we're building in the course of everything we do. It's that underlying mindset shift we're thinking about… how do we come together over time and learn through the good times and the bad, make sense of those together, and over time develop a shared language and culture?

First of all, it is literally sharing what you're bringing to the group: who you are, what's important to you, where your values are, your strengths, where do we initially align? Over time, that alignment grows, through having moments of misalignment that we're learning from. That also enables people to leave the group, or come into it. It's a real-life experience that's going on all the time. It's just often the one that isn't written down on the training programme, or captured in metrics.

Essentially, we're saying that joint story we create is part of why we're here. We don't know what that story is going to be like. It looks very different in different scenarios – sometimes people will very quickly coalesce around something, for others, it takes longer. It doesn't matter how slow or quick it is, it's the very act of being interested in finding out that is where we grow together as a community. So it is a clarifying mindset, you're always thinking, 'what am I going to learn today that I didn't know yesterday about myself or the people around me, and the impact we can collectively have on others in our community?' Whatever's on the training programme that day, you're always coming at it with that lens.

Something else I've been thinking about, and you touched on it during your talk, is just about how we still have this sort of pervasive kind of narrative that comes through within media coverage, of athletes across different sports. And so, thinking about, obviously, the majority of our audience here today, who are sports psychologists, how can they go about challenging these kinds of media narratives?

The first thing is to make sure that the athletes, the coaches and psychologists, everyone involved, has a sense of their story beyond what's reported. If we do no work in that area, then we suddenly feel defined by what the external lens is. The external lens will never know us as well, and the media have got other intentions. So the first thing is to be clear on the stories that we tell, that we tell others outside our environment and choose to share with our friends and family, and that we are developing within in the environment.

Although media narratives can be very restricted, we actually now live in a world where it's much easier to tell your own story through social media: athletes are able to share their stories in lots of different ways. With podcasts, for example, we start to hear a more in-depth version of a story. So we can say 'we'll leave that there, it's deeply imperfect, but actually, some of the really shallow stuff is selling less newspapers in print media, it's not increasing in influence, even though it can feel very present at certain points'. Instead, let's think about the areas that are within our scope to influence more, to make sure that at a very local level, we are sharing our story with the local schools or the youngsters in our club, that we're connecting in those spaces. What's the story I'd like to tell, rather than fitting into a pre-existing story. That's where the work of a psychologist is beautiful at saying, 'Well, what else matters beyond winning a medal? Who do you want to become on this journey? What do you want to be known for?' I found that sort of question very helpful in rethinking why I was part of an Olympic rowing environment beyond trying to win medals. We build that story, we amplify that story. And over time, that's the one that people remember, whenever they come into contact with it. They don't actually remember what was in last Sunday's newspaper. It's also a powerful story that helps us reach our best performance too.

Final question: what's next for you? Where are you taking this this work?

I've revised my book The Long Win for a second edition that comes out in May 2024. When I started writing it, I wasn't sure what the impact would be. I do think it's come at a time where there is a shift starting to happen.  For example, after the Whyte Review into the mistreatment of gymnasts, culture clearly is becoming a greater priority. A number of sports have had crises, and there are more coming up all the time. So there's a shift in wanting to do sport differently. I feel very grateful that The Long Win has been part of that conversation.

When I started writing, it felt super radical, heretical, and I feared I'd be ostracised. But it coincided with more athletes opening up about their real experiences, feelings of emptiness when winning, a lack of fulfilment from their sporting journey. And people want help thinking this through. There's no prescriptive formula, it is an exploratory 'How do we create something in a very different emergent way?' The Long Win's 3Cs of Clarity, Constant Learning and Connection help us focus on the human environment within which we pursue sporting excellence. It's about thinking more and practising how we develop and this 'culture space'. Although we understand more now that it matters, the skills of leaders in sports environments to understand what's required to create a culture isn't always there. That's probably why I am spending more time now thinking about what The Long Win culture looks like and how to help others put it into practice in their context. Psychologists are so well skilled to support that developing crucial area and to support leaders and colleagues to play their part.