Editor:
Today’s guest is Simon Hartley, a performance coach and sports psychology consultant who spent nearly 30 years working with elite athletes, teams, and organizations around the world. He’s the founder of Be World Class and co-founder of Success Engineers, and has helped everyone from Premier League footballers to Olympic gold medalists unlock their potential. Simon is also a bestselling author and keynote speaker known for turning big ideas about performance into simple practical steps that anyone can use to raise their game. Simon, thank you so much for joining us.
Simon Hartley:
Thank you. Very, very happy to be here.
Editor:
Well, maybe we could start by asking you to share how you transitioned from sports science into performance coaching at a global level.
Simon Hartley:
Yeah. I studied sports science when I was at college and at university. And whilst I was studying, I was also working in elite sport. I was very, very fortunate that, at the start of my second year undergraduate, I was working with elite rugby league players, England Cricketers, and that gave me a platform to go and work in elite sport as I left university. And very quickly… I mean, sports science is quite a wide discipline. It includes physiology and biomechanics and psychology, all sorts of things. At university, I knew that I’d become very, very interested in the psychology of sport and performance. So I narrowed my studies down into that. And as I started becoming a practitioner, I also became more of a practitioner in psychology than any of the other disciplines within sports science. And that really sort of set my path. One of the bizarre things… I’m going to call it bizarre because it probably should have occurred to me a lot sooner.
I always described that I worked in sports psychology, but the truth is I worked in human psychology.
And it took me quite a long time to realize that sports psychology is a misnomer, and what I was doing helped anybody. We were talking about how to get the best out of our minds really.
And it doesn’t matter whether you’re an Olympic athlete, a salesperson, a doctor, a consultant, whatever you are, the same stuff works for everybody.
So then, I realized it was really performance psychology and that what I was doing was coaching performance psychology. It’s what goes on between our ears, and making sure that the stuff that goes on between our ears helps us rather than hinders us. And if we can start to engineer our mental game, as I call it, we could actually start to achieve much more.
Editor:
Well, during the introduction, I said you are a founder of Be World Class. For our audience, anyone who’s listening or reading this, maybe you could tell us what does Be World Class mean in practice
Simon Hartley:
Yeah. As well as working in elite sport and in the field of performance psychology, I’ve always been really curious to understand how the very best in the world operate.
So, I set myself a little mission. And after working in the Olympic programs for a few years and working in elite sport, I wanted to know whether, “If I studied the best in the world outside of sport, would I find the same characteristics at work? Are they driven by the same stuff? Have they got the same going on between their ears as the athletes have?”
So, I studied some individual world-class performers, including people like a Michelin Star chef, head of a world-leading science and medical research institute, a World Barista champion, mountaineer, polar explorer, all sorts of people. And actually, I found, yes, there were some common characteristics that drove all of these world-class people.
Simon Hartley:
And it was part of my curiosity to understand not just how the best in the world operate, but also what can we learn from them and, “Is there a way I can distill that down and help other people adopt those principles?”
So really Be World Class is a combination of my studies, my work with world-class performers, but also my passion to turn that into meaningful insights that people can actually use, principles that they can adopt, so that they can drive their own performance and become great too.
Editor:
Could you give us maybe a quick insight? What would be maybe the key thing that you think that we should all do to Be World Class? Could you share something with us?
Simon Hartley:
Yeah. I think there’s a foundation, and I used to describe it by saying that world-class performers were fueled by passion. It’s partly true, it’s a version of passion. It’s curiosity. If I think about my own journey, I actually describe it as following my curiosity. I’ve sort of described to you how I saw athletes at work. I wanted to know why some athletes were consistently better than others. And then, I was curious about other world-class performers. And over time, that’s led me to also look at world-class teams and leaders and organizations.
Actually, I find the same at work in world-class operators, whether they’re individual performers, whether they’re leaders, whether they’re CEOs or captains of a sports team, whatever they are, they’re usually driven by curiosity. They just want to know, “How can I be better? What can I do differently? How can I improve?”
And I’ve heard that articulated in all sorts of different ways over the years.
So, a mountaineer, a friend of mine, Alan, who’s climbed all of the 14 8,000-metre peaks on Earth, there are only a handful of people who have, and he was one of the first.
He described it by saying, “It’s not necessarily I want to climb a higher mountain,” because he climbed Everest quite early in his mountaineering career, but he wanted to climb a harder mountain.
And he said K2 was the biggest mountaineering challenge, but the north face of the Eiger is a huge mountaineering challenge. That’s a real tough one.
So, he wants to know how you climb these. And James, who’s the World Barista champion, was always curious about how to not just make better coffee, because you don’t win the World Barista Championship just by making the best cup of coffee, but, “How do you serve the best cup of coffee?
How do you create an experience for somebody, and help them enjoy drinking that cup of coffee more than they would somebody else’s coffee?
And that curiosity drove him to find the answers, to put them into practice. Usually, you go through that process of you have a little light-bulb moment where you think, “Oh, wow. Yeah, I think I understand it now.”
You put it into practice, and it doesn’t quite work the way you expected. So then, you have to reshape it and go again, and reshape it and go again and learn. And there’s this, I call it, yellow brick road of questions and answers.
They probably don’t even realize that there’s a point at which they really do stand out and can be classed as a genuine world-class performer in their field, that they’re probably not even aware of that because they’re so busy finding the answer to the next question in their mind, that they look back at some point and go, “Oh, wow. Blimey, they’ve just handed me a world championship,” or “I’ve just become one of the handful of people to climb all 14 8,000-metre peaks.” They’re not usually chasing a goal because their curiosity is not goal-orientated, but they’re just following their passion, their curiosity…
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