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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hi there, welcome along to another episode of High Performance. It's a Wednesday, so it's myself and Damien sitting and chatting. Hey, buddy. Hi, mate. You all right? Very well, thanks. So we've got a bunch of guests who we're going to hear from, previous High Performance guests. We'll share some interesting clips from them. And they're all around a similar theme.
And the theme is, why the world's best athletes stop trying to be the best. And it's not just us talking and not just us hearing from former guests. We're actually going to be joined by someone and you're going to speak to a man who can give us so much richness and depth and information in this space.
I suppose, first of all, you should tell us why people should stick around to hear your conversation with Ben Crow.
Well, we're coming up for Wimbledon, Jake, and this is a man that Andre Agassi recommends. This is somebody that Ash Barty worked with before she won Wimbledon. Steph Gilmore, the eight-time world surfing champion, credits him with transforming her career. He's an Australian performance coach. His name's Ben Crow and he's never told any of his clients that they're the best.
Now, there's a couple of parents who spend their lives telling our kids they're the best and they go and do great things.
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Chapter 2: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
That kind of seems counterintuitive or... It's not the kind of thing we hear a lot when it comes to trying to get others to reach their own version of high performance. So why does he not tell his clients that they're the best?
Well, he helps them separate who they are from what they do. Now, I know that might sound simple, but most athletes, most people have never actually done that. You know, think about... One of the first conversations you'll meet when you meet a stranger is, what do you do? Not, who are you? Do you know what I mean?
And the cost of not doing this is exactly what we're going to talk about with Ben today.
Okay, well, before we get on with the episode, just to tease you excitedly, whether you're walking the dog out for a run or driving the car, here is what you can expect from Ben Crow a bit later on. Here's a little teaser.
Talk about this idea in your billing book about separating what you do from who you are. Why do so many of us find that such a difficult thing to uncouple?
In recent times, yeah, the world's have gone so external and extrinsic, money, fame, status, and recognition, rather than internal and intrinsic to get to know who we are, the human being that is, not the human doing. So we learn, unfortunately, that we believe if we do something and achieve something, we will be someone.
Well, before we hear from Ben, we're going to hear from three tennis players who've been on the show. Boris Becker, what a conversation. Joe Conta, one of my favourites. And Colin Nyland, who might not be a name that trips off the tongue, but the conversation we had with him was fascinating.
All of them talking about the struggle of professional tennis, what it actually feels like from the inside. And then, of course, we'll frame our conversation with Ben as the antidote to that struggle, because that's really what he's there for. So where shall we start and why, Damien?
Well, why don't we start with Boom Boom himself, Mr Boris Becker. We went out to Dusseldorf to meet with him. Do you remember when he walked into the room with us and his charisma, his sort of force of personality and just his strident views on the world sort of filled the space, didn't he? He was a force of nature. But it was interesting to listen to him reflect on
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Chapter 3: Why do athletes struggle with their identity tied to performance?
I get to do it. Just that one change of a letter. frees us up and liberates us.
And I love the fact that she ended up putting those words on her grip, play, love, power, focus, because we haven't heard from him yet, but those were exactly the things that Ben talks about with you. I know we'll hear from him in just a couple of moments, but she'd kind of found the same solution. She'd found her... beyond the results of that tennis match.
Let's hear from someone else now, Conor Nyland. And I think this is a particularly interesting one, Damien, because if you say Johanna Konta, people would be like, yeah, I think I've heard of Johanna. She was a great player in her day. If you say Boris Becker, they've definitely heard of Boris Becker.
Most people wouldn't have heard of Conor Nyland, but it's a reminder to us that sometimes the guests that you haven't heard of on high performance can carry so much value.
Yeah, his book, The Racket, was brilliant because I didn't quite appreciate the context of what... 99% of the world's tennis players operate within, going on the challenger tours, having to fund the way around it, often arriving jet-lagged and having to get up the next morning and find a practice partner. The demands of that world, when you read the book, are relentless, but also almost like...
I couldn't find much joy in it. You've got to really genuinely love your craft to want to subject yourself to that. It's almost like a rite of passage for all the world's tennis players to go through. Let's listen to Conor describe what he describes as almost like that sense of purgatory of what that world can sometimes feel like.
I guess, and that was one of the things that I felt a relief when I finished playing was the self-analysis, the constant self-analysis when you're a tennis player, probably with every sport, kind of went away. It's the 24-7 nature of it. It's tied to who you feel like you are. If you're winning, you're happy. As I said earlier, when I'm losing, I'm not.
so yeah that self-worth it was absolutely tight and it always makes me laugh when i when you hear the top players um when they say they've won one wimbledon they say it's the greatest moment of my career they never say it's the great greatest moment of my life and i don't know whether they're trying to do some sort of a psychological trick with that wording as if
their career and their life are very separate. Like clearly winning Wimbledon when you're 23 has to be the greatest moment of your life so far, but they're quite keen to show, and maybe it's a little bit of a posturing that this is only the greatest moment of my tennis career. It's not the greatest moment of my life. So I find that, I always find that wording quite interesting.
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Chapter 4: What insights does Boris Becker share about burnout?
He asked them to understand who are they beyond what they do to separate their identity from the results that they get. And he asked three questions that I think are really powerful. Who am I? What do I want? And how do I want to get there? And what comes out of the process has been proven to win numerous Grand Slams. There's also a nice moment where he asks you a question.
Make sure you stick around for that as we hear Damien Hughes talking to Ben Crow.
We'll be right back after a quick word from our partners. When you and I were growing up, Damien, expectations used to mean things you can control 100%, right? Like I can want the sun to come up tomorrow, but I can't. control it. I can't guarantee it. There's no expectations that the sun will come up.
But today, either because of greed or focusing on what other people think, expectations today loosely has been defined as something we can't control, and yet we still want to control it, which is also the definition of pressure. So today's definition of expectation is also today's definition of pressure, which is why you'll always hear those two words,
use together when you're watching sport on the weekend, they'll always talk about there's so much pressure, there's so much expectations, because we've kind of bundled the two words together, like these two nasty cousins that follow each other around. And once you realize that, you can't uncouple it, you can't unsee it. So whenever I hear the word
pressure, almost always the person has an unhealthy or unrealistic relationship with what is expected of them or what isn't expected of them. So the quickest way to remove pressure from your life, like right this very second, is to reframe what is expected of you and I and what isn't expected of us. And thinking we have to live up to someone else's expectations is not our life task.
Like that's not our responsibility in life. Like we can't control what other people think about us. So believing we have to, or expectations of outcome that creates outcome pressure. So once you can identify that and you reframe expectations as things I can control, you actually remove pressure. And it's quite extraordinary when people have that kind of aha moment.
And so it's been almost a journey for me to kind of identify where the distractions are coming from.
So if we use the example then, because there's a very clear before and after with this word expectation in the world of Ash Barty, would you describe your work with us? And we'll start, if you wouldn't mind, Ben, telling us about that collapse at the French Open. What did you see happen?
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