On Christmas weekend, I visited my sister and parents, who I hadn’t seen for a number of months due to touring with the Indian cricket team. I had asked my sister, Nicky to arrange some different or interesting activities around the Stellenbosch/Paarl area where she lives. For the first morning‘s activity, I was told me …
‘Exposure’ was one of the significant events that rolled into town with the covid circus. The carpet was pulled back to expose things like pre-existing leadership ineptitude, business weaknesses and relationship flaws. Unhappy employees became unhappier. Unhappy couples separated. Unhappy clients cut ties. The character of political leadership was revealed. Two areas of exposure that …
It was almost exactly a year ago that I was struck with one of those aha-moments in life! It happened at the beginning of lockdown and during a mental coaching conversation with the captain of a national sports team. For the umpteenth time in my life, I found myself discussing the concept of our ‘A-game’.
Part three: Ideas for winning the long game. Psychologists who study survivors say that people who are rule followers don’t do as well as those who are of independent mind and spirit. Navigating our way through the many unknowns of the current ‘pandemic’ feels like we’re building a new ship and sailing it at the …
However it did bring out some of my best work.
“Unlock Your A-Game” was birthed out of a time of struggle and deep introspection.
I recently went on a fishing trip that had some mates think I was mad. The explanation reveals the sanity behind the insanity, which I’m moved to share here… First, the trip. We set off one Friday afternoon on a two hour drive up the East Coast from Cape Town. Our destination was a remote …
It doesn’t matter what your trophy or triumph looks like, as long as you have a goal that inspires you to action..
Beginning in the early 1980’s, Australia hosted an 875km endurance running race from Sydney to Melbourne, which at the time was the world’s longest and toughest ultra-marathon. Only the best-trained athletes participated, most of whom were around 30 years old, professionally equipped and had back-up support for the race that usually took seven days to complete.
Virat Kohli recently revealed that in England in 2014 he felt like it was the end of the world, admitting the he “just didn’t know what to do, what to say to anyone, how to speak, how to communicate”. It was only after Glen Maxwell and other cricketers had the courage to admit their mental ‘struggles’ that Kohli admitted his, saying that he didn’t do so earlier because of how this might have been interpreted.
There is a lot written about what we can learn from how the best in the business go about being so successful. But what about learning from what they get wrong? I recently spent two weeks in Taiwan, watching four World Champions being crowned in a sport that is not much known in India, but …
Jinzung Harbour – The Springboks recently took the rugby world by storm, dominating the best of the best to emerge as world champions. On an entirely different sporting canvas, the same nation’s athletes are taking their sporting world by storm, in what the experts are calling “the South African cyclone”. For the past five years …
New dawn of SA surfers are making waves across the world Read More »
South Africa is a country of rich and poor, beauty and litter, generosity and greed, enlightenment and ignorance, Mandela and Zuma, education and illiteracy… and lots in between. Whilst born in that country, I’m fortunate that the work I do across continents allows me the choice to live pretty much anywhere in the world. I’m …
When it comes to the highest level of most sports, there is a popular assumption that success lies 80 percent in the mind, in the six inches between the ears. Although nobody seems to be able to trace the origin of this 80 percent urban myth, almost every expert I’ve spoken to in cricket agrees …
Sport is so much about winning, especially at the higher levels of the game where results are so consequential. For example, the top team in this year’s IPL received a Rs 20 crore winning bonus, while the four teams that did not qualify all responded by firing their head coach. I am one of them. …
Research in the United States suggests that of the 40 million children who play sport when they start school, 28 million (70%) give up by the age of 13. When asked why, it was not the sport that kids didn’t like, but rather their experience in the sport, with the main culprits being their coaches …
