Intro

SPEAKER_00 0:07

Hello and welcome back to the Slice of Pie podcast, where the pie is the psychologically informed environment, and the mission is to try and further our understanding of what that might look like in sport, in business, or in any environment where performance and well-being are hot topics. Now it's the third episode of 2024, and it's with Dr. Duncan Simpson, Director of Personal Development at the IMG Academy on the west coast of Florida. Duncan joined IMG from Barry University in Miami in 2017, providing mental conditioning services for tennis, golf, soccer. Originally from England, he received his PhD in sports psychology from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. He's a certified consultant with the Association of Applied Sports Psychology, or that's ASP, for those of you who are familiar with it, and has been conducting mental skills training with athletes and coaches since 2005 from a range of sports and varying in talent and ability from beginners to professional and Olympic athletes. Most recently, Duncan, along with his co-host Dr. Greg Young, have originated the Performers podcast, dissecting the autobiographical accounts of famous athletes, coaches, practitioners, and performers, including Dan Carter, Andre Agati, and most recently, Bubba Watson. As of this recording, Duncan and Greg have produced 18 fantastic episodes decoding the tips and tricks of high-level performers using their knowledge of sport psychology theory and practice to connect the dots. The link to the podcast is in the description and I would highly recommend listening to it. In this conversation with Duncan, we talk about the podcast, as well as his experience leading a team of mental performance consultants at the ING Academy, a private school based in Florida, as well as his insights and observations of what makes a psychologically informed environment tick, along with a few good book recommendations to boot. So stay tuned for those. We'll dive into the conversation and then come back up for air at the end for a reflection on the interview. So let's get into it with Dr. Duncan Simpson.

Interview

SPEAKER_00 2:32

Good stuff. So I'm very pleased and honored to have Duncan Simpson from the IMG Academy, who has also launched his own podcast recently, which we can talk about a wee bit later. But Duncan, thank you so much for giving your time up today.

SPEAKER_01 2:48

Yeah, thanks ever so much, Pete. Really appreciate the offer for me to join your podcast today.

SPEAKER_00 2:53

Awesome. Yeah, really looking forward to it and getting stuck into it. Now, a recent change I've made to the structure is to make sure that people can promote what they're up to in the upfront. So we don't have to wait until the end of the podcast to find out all those great things. So yeah, first and foremost, I know you've got the new podcast that's out. Is there anything else? Any recent papers or initiatives, social handles? Where can people follow you and what are you up to recently that might be of interest to the viewers, viewers? Sorry, the listeners.

SPEAKER_01 3:25

Yeah, I'm on Twitter, like like a lot of people. So uh at Sportsite Dunk. I'm also on Performance Pod, which is the the podcast that's on Instagram, and and I'm on LinkedIn, so if people want to follow along there, you know, those those are probably the main places to find me. And I know that we'll we'll perhaps touch on the podcast. So yeah, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, or X as we call it now, those are the main places, Pete.

SPEAKER_00 3:51

Yeah, we'll we'll definitely get into the podcast because I think it's a really interesting blueprint that that you and your your co-host are using to dig into biographies and then provide reflections based on those. And I really want to to talk about that. But but first of all, IMG Academy, that's where you're based currently. The listeners can't see, but you're you're wearing the stash at the moment, it looks great. What what is the IMG Academy to people that are maybe not familiar with it?

SPEAKER_01 4:24

So IMG Academy, it's on the west coast of Florida. It's essentially a boarding school, a high school, and we have about 1,500 student athletes and now nine different sports, but it started back in 1978. It started with a legendary tennis coach, Nick Bolittieri, who's a Hall of Fame coach, and it started with a few tennis courts on some on some tomato fields, and it's it's grown to an absolutely massive campus. Uh, it it's it was renowned for tennis to start with. We had the likes of Andre Agassi and Maria Sharapova train here over the years and continue to produce some very good tennis players. But like I said, now it's really proliferated into nine different sports, 1,500 plus student athletes, really most of them are high school age, so we're talking you know, 13 to 18 years of age. We have a few postgraduate uh students as well. And we also host you know events. We have pro teams and college teams come train here. Uh it's it's a you know, 365, never stop, 24-7. We have about 50% international students, and it's a it's a wild place, never two days, no two days of the same. It's uh you know, it's a great place to work. And it really is, if I boil it all back, it's a it's a developmental academy. So most of our student athletes are going on to a next stage. So the next stage for a lot of them will be college, and for a uh a few, it might be straight into professional sport, but most of them are aiming to go to college either through academics or a lot of them want to go on sports scholarships.

SPEAKER_00 6:02

Enjoy your use of the word wild to describe your environment. And I cannot imagine what 1,513 to 18-year-olds with all the associated hormones that you get with normal teenage life, let alone adding in or folding in goal-oriented ambition as well. So I can yeah, I can imagine. Well, actually, I can't imagine how how uh how interesting that environment would be. So, how does mental conditioning or performance psychology, however you want to define it, how does that kind of fit into this environment then? How is it integrated? What does that kind of look like on a kind of day-to-day, month to month, year-to-year basis?

SPEAKER_01 6:42

I'll go back and credit Nick a little bit with this. So Nick had the foresight, you know, when he's established the academy on the importance of psychology in tennis specifically. And I think one of the first people to work at the academy was Jim Law. And Jim's written a lot of books, very famous performance psychologist in the US and had his own institute. But Jim was one of the first to work at the academy. And then over the years, psychology, performance psychology, mental conditioning, sports psychology, whatever term one to use, has been part of the fabric of the academy ever since. So I have to credit Nick. It's the model of delivery has changed over the years. You know, back in the day, probably even going back 10, 15 years. I know some of my colleagues who still work here, it used to be very much an a la carte. So the students would come, they would do their sport, they'd get some strength and conditioning. And then if they wanted any additional services, it would be an add-on. So they'd basically sell one-on-one packages to work with the athletes. So they'd be calling parents up and trying to sell them on these things. And then eight to ten years ago, that business model shifted. So then it was an all-inclusive plot price. And within that mental conditioning, the term at the time was mental conditioning was integrated into the services. So that did a couple of things. It meant that one, that all the athletes got access to it on a regular basis and a consistent basis. And two, you know, obviously the staff then didn't have to sell it and didn't have to kind of justify it. And it was therefore more integrated in, accepted, and you know, part of again the fabric of what we do, along with strength and conditioning, making sure the athletes are taken care of with sports medicine and making sure that they're eating right with our performance dietitian. So malperformance, as we call it now, is integrated in. So there's a lot of benefits, and we feel incredibly lucky to have that system and structure in place.

SPEAKER_00 8:37

Yeah, I like the use of the a la carte versus the yeah, the the kind of the the integrated, the integrated menu that that you now get. Now, useful again, useful, very useful context. What I'd be really interested to understand is with the cohort of athletes that you then get and and at the age that you're uh uh talking to here, do the the kind of the issues, the challenges, the the topics of conversation, the things that you're working on, do they differ to what you would work on with yeah, kind of older athletes? I suppose there's a cohort here, a lot of on the younger age are still kind of learning their sport. And so I suppose the the onus could be a lot on the issues around even just kind of skill acquisition.

SPEAKER_01 9:25

The the reality is that some of the the psychological principles we may talk about, you know, don't differ whether you're you're dealing with young athletes or dealing with older athletes, you know, adults or pros, but the reality is how you deliver that work and the age appropriateness of the examples, the terminology, the way you're going to go about it, you have to have consideration for the age of the athlete. You know, a 12-year-old tennis player is not gonna be the same as an 18-year-old American football player, just the contexts are very different, their life experiences, their emotional and mental maturity is there at different stages, as well as obviously we have gender differences. So we do we do try and take that into account with regards to delivery. But some of the the principles and some of the you know mental skills we're gonna talk about are the same things. We're gonna talk about things like you know, self-talk and pre-performance routines. That that doesn't an imagery or visualization, those things don't change, but how we deliver them certainly we will change. So maybe that gives a little bit of that kind of idea. We do have a we use a mental performance assessment, which is a validated and reliable tool that we we worked in partnership with a university in the US, and we use that as the as the starting framework to develop what we would call mental performance plans or curriculum. And that that kind of being data informed, not data driven. So we're we're data informed in the work that we do, but we also work with the coaches, work with the athletes, recognize our own experiences, and you know, a lot of observation and trying to understand what that group and team needs at that time of the season as well, as well as the data to inform the work that we do.

SPEAKER_00 11:07

So that's interesting that the the tool that you've worked with the university to create provides a bit of a consistent foundation across across ethics. Can that can that tool work for teams as well, or is it mainly an individual?

SPEAKER_01 11:20

It can. So what we do is every student athlete will will take the assessment on three different time points, and we really look at you know exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, we boil down to five key factors that work for, and this was for our student body, and what worked for us, we had you know thousands and thousands of data points because we have 1500 student athletes, so we didn't take it a lot of times, and they hated us to start with because it started out 150-something questions, and we had everything thrown in.

SPEAKER_00 11:50

But athletes love answering surveys, don't they?

SPEAKER_01 11:53

Yeah, yeah, they loved it, and the staff love delivering them because the athletes were looking at the staff like, what the hell are you you're making me do here? But we ended up boiling it down to uh this the statistics, our statistician. We we ended up with five factors, which are commitment, confidence, focus, resilience, and handling pressure. Um, and again, those are really, you know, pretty broad characteristics, probably nothing that would surprise anybody. Those are the five factors we base our work around. Uh, and again, there's a lot of flexibility within that, but that that's a starting point. So, what we'll do is we we have an athlete management system. So our athletes take it, we aggregate scores, the the athletes get their individual scores. We can look at the data in a number of different ways, whether you want to look at an individual compared to team, team over time, uh, different groups, different ages, gender, however, you want to split and look at the data and where you may land. So we're looking at that, and you know, over time we're developing, you know, potential benchmarks for okay, well, this is what uh this age group, this is kind of some of the profiles of some of our athletes. Again, that's a that's a long-term, that's a long-term process, but it gives us a starting point. So when you mention kind of a group or a team, you know, what we can look at is a you know, a U15 boy soccer team and say, okay, based on based on the uh data, where where are we looking? What are the factors where we're a little bit stronger at? What's an area that we need to develop in? And and that's a conversation starter working with the coach. Hey, we're we're lower on handling pressure, but it's right at the beginning of the season and they're not playing tournaments for another five months. So that might not be our focus. Handling pressure is might be something, yes, we will work towards, but maybe hey, we we actually want to work on some early season, some commitment and some goal setting as a skill to support that. What are the things we we want to reinforce? So again, we really try to be data informed on it and not just be purely driven by the numbers, but it's it's been very helpful to put a framework in place and also to give athletes a sense of some objectivity with something that I think in in the past has been very subjective, like, oh, that that kid's really confident, or that kid's great at focusing. Now we we actually have some objectivity around it, and we also recognize some of the limitations with you know self-report assessments, of course.

SPEAKER_00 14:13

Yeah, what what's the the EP box quote? All models are wrong, but some are useful, and it you know, it's sometimes well, in my experience, oftentimes actually it at least putting the effort into start trying to put something down that we can work around or work towards is is better than the alternative, which is to have absolutely nothing, and and that can be a challenge sometimes, not just with sports psychology, but a lot of other kind of businesses that I've encountered, and advertising is definitely included in that, which is you know, tell tell me what it's doing, tell me where it's kind of you know, where it's having the impact. So being able to kind of put these things down, I can see is incredibly valuable. The other thing that I've written down here is a tool like this, its ability to position the field as something that can be proactive as well as reactive, because it in my you know limited experience, I've only been doing um sports psychology bits um for a few years and only just been chartered this year. But in my limited experience, a lot of it can be quite reactive. I've got this problem, can you help me with it? And what I can see here is using this this tool, it means you can kind of be quite proactive with it. You can go, right, handling pressure, but they're only going to be playing tournaments until the end of the year. Do we pause working on that that aspect until close to the time? Is is that a challenge? Do we need to work out how we can bring more aspects of pressure into training? And and it creates, I suppose, kind of proactive conversations around these areas opposed to waiting for it to be reactive. I don't know whether that resonates with with you or I guess you're right.

SPEAKER_01 15:51

And what we encourage, we we're lucky we have 13 mental performance coaches who have been here and are at different levels of experience. So we encourage and we actually have in place a support and mentoring process within our staff so that once once our mental performance staff start developing out their plans, they're they're working with other other peers who will question and challenge and provide feedback on well, why are you going down this path? You know, what's your rationale? So we'll have that mentoring place, as well as, like I mentioned previously, we'll have the conversations with the coaches. And what we're also trying to look at with the reality is is that as we're a developmental academy, we're working on an athlete development model that that's inclusive of you know strength and conditioning as well, and performance nutrition, all our support services, so that when we're taking a long-term athlete development view on it too, recognizing that if an athlete is in the soccer program, for example, we have don't quote me on this, I think we have 250 or 300 males, boys in the program. So there's three teams just about at every level. So the practitioners within that program also thinking long-term, if if one athlete, if we just do something, you know, for one U6 team, and then invariably the athletes change teams, they'll move up and down during the season based on needs, they may even play up in age group, just the content that they're getting so that it it actually flows and it makes sense so that they're not hearing conflicting messages based on they're switching teams, and they might actually be end up working with a different mental coach. So we need to make sure within our programming, there's a little bit of a long-term development uh process. I I worked a lot in tennis, I work with our other mental coaches in tennis to say, hey, we've got four levels here, which were foundation, development, competitive, and elite. What does our structure look like within here? And what are the tools we're trying to equip them with at different stages of their development? And it's not perfect, but it's we we need to have a conversation around long-term athlete development and what's appropriate at certain ages to kind of go back to your previous question. So it's it's individual and team focused, but we're also trying to marry a put that frame against a long-term development perspective and with the recognition that athletes may change teams and work in different groups and move up and move down. And let's make sure that their experience is central to it. Like, let's make sure that they have a good experience with the mental performance work that they do.

SPEAKER_00 18:27

Widening the lens to it being a long-term development process, and how do these tools, how do these people, how do these processes fit in to a longer-term roadmap of someone's development as an athlete, but also as a person. And I suppose the you know, the continuity aspect of an athlete becoming familiar with that and becoming familiar with the people that are are helping with that is is obviously great. But I suppose you you also have to at points review whether that you know those that set of processes and and that that framework is up to date with the the literature, is uh up to date with advancements in in the field. How do you strike that balance between having that continuity of allowing something to run over the long term but not fiddle with it too often? But on the flip side, not letting it run for too long, then it be kind of almost becomes out of date.

SPEAKER_01 19:26

Yeah, I challenge our staff, I put it on our staff's shoulders that we're not going to be incredibly prescriptive in the work that we do. And what I mean is that we we have the assessment and we we have a framework in terms of looking at these five factors, but we're constantly looking because we have so so much data now that in a year or two is there a way to improve and and you know advance this assessment, does it still fit our needs? We'll continuously look at the assessment part, but at the same time with our staff, they they come from different educational backgrounds, they come from different philosophical stances. You know, we challenged them recently to work on their consulting philosophies and how they go about their work. So we don't get down to the the moment-to-moment, the the how how they're interacting one-on-one and what those what do those group sessions look like, the delivery looks like. So they have a lot of autonomy in terms of how they do that, and we're constantly pressing on making sure that it is evidence informed. Let's make sure that hey, we're working through this framework, we're working on resilience. Like, what does the research say on this recently? Like, let's make sure when we're when we're putting it together, and that's kind of the mentoring is to ask the question, challenge the staff. And we we also to kind of guard against that, what I'd say is more fixed mindset, we do a lot of CPD and invite guest speakers to come in and speak to the staff, whether it's in person or virtually, to just hear different perspectives of how work's been done and to get them to think in different ways. We recently had Dr. Matt Condi from Australia um visit us. We're lucky to have him. We've had, I know who's a guest on your show, Mustafa Saka, who's who's done a virtual session with us. So we've had several staff, uh several professionals in the field kind of speak to the group and make them think a little bit differently and throw things out that they kind of challenge their thinking so that we're not you know just stuck in one way of doing work.

SPEAKER_00 21:29

Tell you what, Duncan, it sounds like a fantastic place to work. CPD and guests guest speakers, peers challenging and and helping you with your own your own work. Hats off to you. Sounds like a really great setup for people working in your department there.

SPEAKER_01 21:45

I hope they feel so.

SPEAKER_00 21:47

This is where I'm gonna get a flood of emails, aren't I? Yeah, this is what it's this is what it's really like. Um hats off. It sounds like a sounds like a a lot of really kind of positive ingredients there that you'd you'd want um as a practice. Practitioner. Um, just want to pivot now because you know I've I've started listening to um the podcast that you and your your co-hosts have brought out recently. I I think it's really interesting. I think it's I don't think I've really heard anything like it actually, not just in in our industry, but broadly this idea of kind of decoding and almost like a surgeon just kind of surgically kind of piecing through biographies and firsthand accounts of people within our our world, athletes, and then reflecting on that for the benefit of of the listeners. How how did this idea come about? Where did you get to it from?

SPEAKER_01 22:41

Well, I appreciate you bringing it up. I've I've been listening to podcasts probably right from I wouldn't say day dot, but back in the day when I started listening to podcasts, it was you know actually quite a cumbersome process to get them and and using kind of iTunes, and even before iTunes had to even listen to some of uh for the podcasts, like we're talking 10 years ago.

SPEAKER_00 23:03

So is this is this back in the kind of the Ricky Gervais on the Guardian websites?

SPEAKER_01 23:07

Yeah, yeah. I listened to some of those, even some of the very early kind of Tim Ferris podcasts that were were a long time ago.

SPEAKER_03 23:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 23:16

And so I've I've always had the idea, like I really loved the medium of and I actually like long form podcasts. I I I really appreciate them that you know, whether it's on a drive or whatever. But something I'd I'd that resonated with me was I I listened to a business podcast and they were talking about a Venn diagram and thinking about kind of three interconnecting circles, and it was really like, what are you what are you passionate about? What's your expertise in? And then what might an audience or you know, I guess a clientele might want. So, you know, if you're just passionate about something and you have an expertise but no one wants it, well, what's what's the point, right? Um, so so with our podcast, I was trying to think about well, I I've always since well, it really kind of got me into reading was reading sport autobiographies. I grew up. Um, and I know you've had a few Man United fans on this podcast uh with Matt Slater and Jamie Barker, but I grew up a fan. So, you know, I love the you know the Beckham autobiographies and the Alex Ferguson ones and the Roy Keene. So I I always read sport autobiographies and from a lot of different athletes. I've always I've always done that and I've read quite a lot. That those kind of really something that I was passionate about, and then hopefully my expertise is really in the mental performance space. So I've been in this field 15 plus years, and I was thinking, well, what might you know what could be of value? And what I wanted to do was, or what we wanted to do was, you know, perhaps a different format, because I think interview podcasts are great, but I don't know that I could offer something different, a different lens. I think what this podcast will be is like you'll focus really on the pie. I love that, and and you have that niche, but I was like, I I don't have that in my mind. What a different what I could do differently, and am I better than you know Dan Abrahams or or Michael Gervais, or like probably not. I'm not gonna be as as maybe good, but maybe we can offer something different. So trying to look at that Venn diagram, and there's there's actually a couple of podcasts I do need to give credit to because I use them as a blueprint, and and that's the founders podcast by David Senra, and also How to Take Over the World by Ben Wilson, and they do a similar process of breaking um founders podcasts, uh sorry, founders' autobiographies or biographies, and then also you know, people like Ben Wilson's How to Take Over the World, looking at historical figures like Julius Caesar and now they they look at both autobiographies and biographies. We wanted really the spoken word of the athlete, so we really tried to focus on autobiographies to hit that kind of um phenomenological approach of listening to their words.

SPEAKER_03 25:54

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 25:55

So we we took it to autobiographies, and so I always say me, I always say it's kind of same but different. Um, we stole their framework, but it's uh there's a lot of businesses that steal other people's frameworks. We we're stealing their or we're borrowing their framework, but very much applied to performers and and not in a business domain. So I I do have to give a little bit of credit to those two podcasts, um, but same but different. So matching our passion, our expertise, and hopefully what the audience might want.

SPEAKER_00 26:25

It's interesting. In in the the marketing world, there's a thought leader that I've been following for a number of years called Farris, and his blog back in the days of the the good old web 2.0 blog was called Talent Imitates Genius Steals, which I think was a quote that he actually stole from someone else. And now his his consultant, his nomadic consultancy is is called Genius Steals. But there's you know, there's something in that I I presented to a client in a very kind of cheesy classic marketing plan away, a Mark Twain quote yesterday around how new ideas are normally the combination of of old ideas that are mashed together to make something new. So so I mean I'm I'm I'm very much enjoying them. So I'm interested to know in your kind of your first phase of releasing the podcast, what you're what have you learnt so far? What has kind of stuck out to you after the first, I think it's what you've kind of got kind of dozen episodes out at the moment. What have you learned so far in the process?

SPEAKER_01 27:29

Well, I've always challenged our team around you know content production. So I've been passionate about this, whether going back to you know, putting out research articles or whether being a guest on a podcast or writing kind of more popular articles. Not that I'm positioning myself as an expert beyond anyone else, but I consume a lot. So I'm I I consume a lot of other people's stuff and I really value it. And or I've told people for a long, I need to, I need to be able to put out content. And um, if there's something of value for people, great, but it also enhances your own ability to articulate and understand your content when you challenge to put it out. So what I have, what have I learned? A huge respect for people who have been doing podcasting for a long time and have had success and really put out consistent value. I think consistency is the biggest challenge in any content-producing space, whether whether it's a podcast, whether it's a YouTube channel, whether it's TikTok, people can belittle those things, but it takes a lot of work and it takes a lot of time. And I just have, you know, going through this process, which probably the most consistent I've been, is it just it takes a lot of work. We're we're digesting a full book recording, editing, and doing a whole podcast in two weeks. It's it's a lot of work on top of I have a full-time job, and so is my co-host, Dr. Greg Young. So, one respect for people who put themselves out there, there's a vulnerability to it, and there's also a lot of work that goes on behind the scenes. So that's that's been a good lesson. We've had unfortunate lessons around you know, a couple of the a couple of the episodes, the audio hasn't been as good as we've wanted.

SPEAKER_00 29:11

There's oh yeah, been there, definitely been there.

SPEAKER_01 29:14

It's just one of those, and I I joke with my co-host and the audience is hopefully been in the mental performance field 15 years. I've been in podcasting like three three months. I'm an I'm an absolute rookie when it comes to podcasting. So you have to you have to kind of you know torture yourself like you would to one of your athletes, one of your clients, to just say it's okay, it will get better. You know, if I'd been doing this 10 years and I still had those issues, I'd probably I should be upset with myself. But right now, I have to give myself a little bit of grace that we're gonna have some dud audio issues. You know, I I picked I picked our favorite autobiography for our very first one, which was Andre Agassiz, open. Yeah, and I'm like, oh, why did I do that? Because I wish I'd done a better job on it, because it's my favorite book. So I'm gonna I'm gonna have to go back and do Agassiz again at some point when I know that I'm better than I was day one.

SPEAKER_03 30:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 30:06

So it's those kind of things the vulnerability, making sure that you give yourself a little bit of leeway and a little bit of grace, you're overcritical with yourself, but a huge amount of respect for for people at yourself and others that have been doing this way longer. Um, it's not it's not easy. And I'm very careful to to criticize any anyone that does content, it's not easy.

SPEAKER_00 30:28

Yeah, for sure. Yeah, a lot of that I can I can uh can resonate with. Yeah, the consistency aspect is is an interesting one. There's a a a YouTuber that I was following for a number of years, he was kind of one of the first kind of fitness YouTubers. He's uh I think he was called uh Jeff something, and and his uh YouTube name is Athlene X. And his big thing was he was the physical therapist, I think, at one of the New York baseball teams, I want to say the Mets, and he started putting out YouTube videos on you know, really simple stuff around how to kind of treat lower back issues or how to kind of strengthen you know certain areas of of your body. And his early stuff was so rubbish, and he he he put out a video a few years ago just talking about the journey that he'd been on um in terms of content production. And he said, you know, I I look back, my voice was so monotonous and the quality was so bad, but you can only get to where you are now, having been on the journey from where you you were. And the you know, I think the good thing about content production is you know, no one's going to kind of judge you on that first episode that you put out. It's normally the kind of the latest one that people are interested in, and you know, like anything, you want to get better at it as you go. And maybe we can borrow a couple of cheesy adages from Silicon Valley. I remember the Google adage of get going, then get better. Yeah, is always one that I like to subscribe to. I think it also there's enough reasons not to do stuff that if you go into over planning, it you just don't end up ever starting versus just get going and then get better.

SPEAKER_01 32:10

No, no, I have a uh a kind of anecdote to that. Uh you know, I'd been talking about hey, I'm gonna do this podcast, I'm gonna do this podcast. And literally one night I was in bed with my wife, and she she just said, Are you gonna do this or not? Like bloody talking about it, and actually, like, what do we need to do? And it was literally okay, well, let's let's Google YouTube, like, like, how do you set it up? How do you, you know, the hosting? And she was just like, Let's do it, I'll help you. And and I needed someone to just be like, stop talking about it, do it, put something out there, and it'll get better over time. And and of course, you know, if you're a little if you're in your career, you you know, you want everything to be perfect, and it just it just isn't, and you know, but hopefully, hopefully you can provide enough value along the way that when people do find you that that there's enough there. And I think a lot of people also recognize, you know, give people some grace that it it's you know, they're putting something out there, and it's like you said, it's hard work, and um that that that's kind of the an essence of what we're trying to do. We're trying to learn from we're trying to distill lessons from the best that have ever been there, and you know, and and share those lessons with other people. And we're not asking for money, we're not asking for anything, just hey, that there's some there's some information here that you might be able to learn and apply to your own life. And we also look at in the podcast that what are the things that you can avoid? There's lessons in all my performers that that kind of adage that you know avoiding stupidity is easier than being a genius, and sometimes the the stories of Andre Agassi and and Mike Tyson and every performer there's like, hey, you can avoid this, just these are some things you can avoid, and it's not just being an athlete, it can be about being a coach or someone in business. So, again, it's useful because I have to remind myself that you know we're we're we are complete beginners on this path, and um, yeah, I appreciate you giving me an opportunity to talk about it because it is something we're passionate about.

SPEAKER_00 34:12

The Andre Akasee book is my favorite ever sporting book, including biography. So I'm glad you you brought it up. And so, yeah, I think that's a great idea picking that book up again and doing another episode in a year's time or or whatever to implement some of your your learnings. I think it's uh can be a bit of a personality thing. I don't know whether you you have this same thing when you're learning a board game for the first time. I prefer to just start playing immediately, and then I want to learn the rules as I go along. I really I think there must be an ADHD side of me where I'm I'm sat there in five to ten minutes and someone reading out the rules from the the board game and we're we're listening to the rules, and there's just this this awful impatient child inside of me that's just saying, right, let's get going, let's start playing, and then we'll learn the rules as we go. And I think that whilst that's maybe a kind of bit of a childish and impatient side of my personality, I think applied to content production can be quite a useful skill. Get going, make some mistakes, improve over time, and and hopefully you you get better.

SPEAKER_01 35:20

I absolutely agree with that. Be patient with yourself and and get better over time. I think the other thing, and you might have had a different experience, Pete, that the podcaster you don't actually get a lot of feedback. Uh, it's not like a I found like when I do a presentation and you sat in front of an audience, you can get that, you know, tangible feedback. You can you can see the audience, you can feel the energy, or you know, there's other forms of medium where you can perhaps get some feedback. I I felt like podcasting, you know, we have had feedback off certain people, and I guess the amount of listeners is a form of feedback, but you don't get a lot of feedback. I find you you put it out and and it's like, is this hitting? Is this not hitting? Um, so I think it's consistency over time, and I guess if it's growing, that that's a form of feedback. But feedback's a tough one because you know, where in the work that we do, it's it's a lot about feedback. If you're an athlete or performer, you're just in in the world of business, you get constant feedback. And sometimes doing something and you're not getting that tangible feedback, um, except for a few friends and and family members who are like, Oh, I really enjoyed it. You're like, Well, I appreciate it, but um, you know, you'd you'd probably say that it was terrible.

SPEAKER_00 36:29

No, I I completely agree. And here we are. Let's let's try and make this this part of the podcast useful for the for those who are still listening at this point. I think it's about 50 to 60 percent, according to my analytics. Um, so for those of you who haven't dropped off at this point, go and listen to one of Duncan's episodes and then go and give him a bit of feedback. And while you're at it, give me some feedback as well. So there's a little call to action um for those that are still listening. Um very finally, uh, the psychologically informed environment. It's obviously something that I like to ask people when they come on to the to the podcast to talk about. Do you have any perspectives on it? Uh what it is or what ingredients go into one. You've you've been in this this environment for a number of different years. So I wonder if there's anything that you've learned or reflected on over the years in terms of the environment you're working in and and the ones that your athletes go on to perform in as well when they turn professional.

SPEAKER_01 37:27

Uh yeah, and as I mentioned, I I love this show because you you've niched down on this area and and really you know appreciate some of the guests that you've had on, you know, uh met Mustafa a number of times. I think he was number one. And you know, Matt Matt Slayer and Chris Hartley and Jamie Barker and people like that. I thought I thought gives such such unique insight here on this area. And for me, it's really that kind of pie is about a setting or really an approach of how do we consider the psychological needs and the well-being of individuals within it. So for me at ING, it's like thinking about how do we create a supportive, inclusive, but also a productive environment that fosters high performance. We're not going to ignore high performance. Like that's performance is part of it. But for performance to survive and to thrive, for athletes to thrive, they need to feel a sense of belonging. They need to feel supported, they need to have positive interactions that also promote that positive mental health. So ultimately, what we're trying to do at IMG is to think about athletes and how do we support athletes in thriving both on and off the field of court. So we want to, again, to use Mustafa's kind of framework that that challenge support. It's a challenging environment that we have here that we've intentionally created, but we also have incredible support around it. Now, it's not an environment that is conducive and works for everybody. But if you come here, you are going to be challenged, and there's a lot of support. So we kind of think about it through that. But there's also, and we can get into actually some of the practices, but how do we integrate that psychological understanding into you know the practices that we do both on the field and off the field, but also the interactions, the support mechanisms, the systems in place to create it to make it an effective space for people to develop? Ultimately, it's about creating that environment, and then you know, there is some individual agency within that space. Like you we can't force people to do certain things. We can create, we can do our best to create an environment, and we haven't got it perfect. It's constantly evolving at IMG, and it is a unique situation, but we're constantly challenging ourselves how do we make it, how do we hit the psychological needs? And we can talk about like how do we like how do we do that? Because I've got a couple of examples I wrote down, but I'll I'll pause there for a minute, Pete.

SPEAKER_00 39:59

I am very interested into getting into the houses. But my main reflection on what you've said there, and I think it's completely fine to make high performance the goal of your organization. What is ringing around in my head is the the discussion I had with uh Kath Bishop on how high performance and success there can be unacceptable uh success versus acceptable success. And I I love that way of thinking about it. And I suppose if you're breaking down what acceptable success is, then you get to some of the ingredients that you were talking about in terms of inclusivity, productivity, supportive, thinking about Mustafa's elegant two by two framework with challenge and support. By by focusing on those things, you you increase the chances of getting a level of high performance and success that you deem to be acceptable because the journey to it is one that you would want someone to have, versus you know, uh the accounts from some athletes. Um, not naming names, but there's lots and lots of examples out there of of those who have found lots of objective and and quantitative success in their fields, but but don't necessarily feel like the journey that they took to get there was one that in hindsight they would do again. So I really enjoyed the way that you you broke that down.

SPEAKER_01 41:17

Yeah, and I I would credit leadership at the academy. We've had some fantastic leaders in in place since I've been here. And I think the outside perception is that of the academy, which I understand is like that this is all about elite sport. Well, the reality is when you're actually here, we really are focused on development. Of course, there's a an elite element to some of some of the performers that are here. They they are some of the highest of a high school age, you know, some of the best junior tennis players in the world or best baseball or basketball players. Yes, but it is, and it's from top down, that it is a developmental academy. We have a full range in 1500 athletes. We have a full range, and therefore, our duty of care is about development. It's it's development and performance. So they're not mutually exclusive. We're still dealing with young people who are not the finished product. So, how do we create that environment that fosters development while supports performance at the same time? So I think that's where we talk about kind of being, you know, psychologically, you know, a kind of informed environment. And I and I I kind of alluded to some of the the ways that we go about it. So I can I can dive into some of those that might resonate with the listeners.

SPEAKER_00 42:36

Yeah, let's go.

SPEAKER_01 42:37

So I think when I when I've looked at this term and and I was listening to to, you know, I've listened to your podcast for a while was awareness and understanding. So part of that is, you know, with our coaches, our staff, our teachers, let's make sure that they are trained and they're equipped to under to recognize and understand some of the psychological needs. I think some of our coaches who have played the sport and have got a strong coaching background, whether they've gone through coach education, they recognize this. But let's make sure also our teachers are informed about some of the things that our athletes might be dealing with. And that's a quick one with the skills. So I'll give you an example. Recently, we just did every staff member that has a consistent interaction with the student athlete. So we have support staff that don't interact with our student athletes in terms of delivery, but all our teachers, all student life, all sport coaches, all um support staff in athletic and personal development, which is the department we went through. We everybody went through a mental health training um seminar because we wanted to make sure that they're equipped with the skills and the recognition and make sure they know how to do the referral process. That's just a recent and and every staff member did that. So there's a there's an element of awareness and understanding as as we kind of talked about performance. You know, we we're lucky that we have 13 mental performance coaches that are doing the work, but they're doing the work with and heard Jamie say it, you know, with and through coaches, which is kind of a throwaway comment sometimes, but we're working day in, day out with the coaches to support performance and make sure that where you know, where we can impact the performance environment, make sure it's a healthy environment, make sure the coaches, if the coaches have questions, if the coaches need support, or our student athletes have support, they have access to our performance coaches. So that performance enhancement bit is something that we that we emphasize. Obviously, we've put resources behind building out a team of mental performance coaches. We have when we talk about kind of emotional safety, um, and I know that term psychological safety has kind of been banded around and might, you know, probably losing its edge with some people a little bit. But what we're trying to really do is make sure that there's a culture of safety and that student athletes feel comfortable expressing themselves. And why is that important? I mean, as a throwaway, comment it of course it's important, but we have such a diverse student body. We have 50% international students, and our coaching staff's incredibly diverse. So we need to be inclusive, we need to be able to listen to people from very different backgrounds coming from different spaces, um, coming in at different ability levels. Like, we need to be able to listen. So, what does that mean? Well, we make sure our customer success team over the last probably two or three years has done a phenomenal job of opening up communication channels of, hey, we now have, you know, we've we've had athlete council meetings for for a while whereby we have representatives from each sport, kind of the leaders from our student athletes that you know speak to our leadership. We have representatives from each sport, you know, meet on a regular basis to provide feedback up to leadership, both on the sport by sport, but also as a grand level. They've opened up communication pathways so that parents can provide consistent feedback. So we're getting more and more feedback to make sure that we're addressing, hey, is there actually any kind of emotional concerns, social, cultural concerns? So I think if you're you're really open to those communication channels and then really trying to be non-judgmental in that feedback, you know, sometimes you you get some tough feedback from our student. And rightly so, like the you know, they deserve the best. So I think that emotional safety, we we you know, we double down on supportive relationships. One of the areas that probably gets overlooked when you think about the academy is our student life. And and student life is all the staff that live in the dorms. So we have about 80 to 90 percent of our student athletes live in the dorms. So because they're boarding students, and some of them are living, you know, thousands and thousands of miles away from home and they don't have the parents, and you know, the reality is that some of our student life staff, and I don't mean this as a throwaway comment, but they literally are working as uh serving that role as a second parent or a third parent to our student athletes. So, how do we make sure our student lifestaff support our student athletes in the ways that they need to be supported through? You know, it's a it's an absolutely transformative time, you know, making sure that our student lifestaff are trained to be able to support that. And then again, kind of we think about being reflexive and being responsive. It's a big ship and big ships turn slowly, but yeah, how quickly can we be responsive to our student athletes and the feedback that we're getting? So, you know, we we meet, I mentioned those kind of communication pathways, but we meet as a group, we call it a pod. So all the support staff. So if you work in uh boys basketball, for example, all the staff that work in boys basketball, from a you know, a strength coach, uh an athletic trainer, mentor coach, representatives from sport, representatives from school, on a weekly basis, they get together and you know, making sure that those communication pathways uh are open, but we're getting feedback from the student athletes and also identifying where student athletes are having challenges. So we need to make sure that we're addressing and being responsive to the needs, because if we're not responsive, like you said earlier, with the kind of research question, then we can fall behind. The the student body, their needs are gonna evolve and change over time. And how some programming worked last year might not be what the programming, the student athletes need this year. For example, and I know it's not an issue in the UK, but it is here with um NIL, which is name, image, and likeness. Like that's such a big deal here. And now in Florida, they may pass legislation whereby some of our high school athletes can can get NIL deals. So we we need to be able to support them and educate them in that process. We're looking at how do we develop and programming because that field is so quickly evolving. Every single day, something new is changing. I think a big article came out yesterday about NIL in the college space where people can now get paid directly, and don't quote me on that, but we have to be responsive to their needs. And so again, we have to be flexible, we have to be responsive. And I think if we do, you know, a lot of those things I kind of listed off awareness, performance enhancement, emotional safety, supportive relationships, be flexible, be responsive, then I think we're starting to work towards, you know, that term that you've used is that psychologically informed environment. So those are kind of hopefully some tangible ways that we try and go about it. And we are not perfect at all. And we're trying to holistically develop our student athletes through what we call intentional personal development, but we you know, we have a long way to go. There's there's a lot of work still to be done, but we're excited to to go on that journey and to do our best to make this the best developmental academy in the world.

SPEAKER_00 50:07

Great. I think listing out the the tangible things that you do in your environment is hugely valuable for people listening to this, because like you you say, some of these terms can be banded around, whether it's emotional safety, whether it's working with and through coaches. But showing and listing out how you do that, I think is is really valuable. And you can see there's a lot of ingredients there. What is valued in the culture itself, what what do people feel is valued within that culture, the processes that are in place, whether it's meetings, the people that need to be in those meetings, the skills that you think are important that people have, whether it's mental health posterity, etc. etc. And then you know, some kind of in intangible stuff. And Niels Federson, who was on the podcast at the end of last year, talking about kind of power within a culture, and so even how the hierarchy works and how that hierarchy communicates, and the fact that you've got processes in place that allows leadership to be fed back to, and that is something that's empowered, is is a really interesting ingredient as well. So thank you very much for for replaying that. Um, final, final question. I've already read the Andre Agassi book. So if there's another favourite book that you would recommend reading within the sports biography or even the sports space, what what would you recommend to me and and people listening?

SPEAKER_01 51:34

Great question. There's a couple that jump out. One one is the Mike Tyson autobiography, because there's so many lessons of things to avoid, but just a fascinating, fascinating story, and incredibly raw and powerful. It's a long book. I I joked, I when I started it, I didn't know it's 600 plus pages. So it was uh it was a mistake. So that that's an interesting one.

SPEAKER_00 51:59

But he's done a lot of living, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 52:01

He's he has, he's he's lived a lot of life since Mike Tyson. But the one that I I really loved was Chrissy Wellington's the Iron Man Triassic.

SPEAKER_00 52:10

Oh, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 52:11

Just the the name of the book escapes me, but I'm sure you can put it in the the show notes. It seems like a lifetime ago that I did it, but Chrissy Wellington's is just such a phenomenal story, and the the psychological tenants that she shows about that book, the the amount of determination and resilience to throw around, just a few kind of adjectives, like it it's amazing. It's amazing what she did, and to go undefeated in Iron Man, just a phenomenal story, and it just a story that incredible humility and everything I've seen about Chrissy is that that's the reality of who she is. But someone who came to elite sport at the age of 30 and was four-time world champion. I absolutely love Chrissy Wellington's book. Um, so those those are the two that that really stand out. Agassiz is still my favorite, but I need to I need to probably do uh do that podcast again, maybe, you know, maybe in a year's time, like you said.

SPEAKER_00 53:12

Is it a life without limits?

SPEAKER_01 53:14

Yes, yes, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 53:16

Okay, I can put I can pop that in the um the show notes for people to to link to. Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for the recommendation. I'm starting to collect these. That's a another new part of the updated, ever-evolving Slice of Pi format. So we'll add that to add that to the list. And look, thanks so much, Duncan. I really appreciate your time again and uh dialing in from the west coast of Florida in the States to impart your your experience and wisdom for the benefit of the people that listen to the podcast. So once again, thank you so much and much appreciated.

SPEAKER_01 53:54

I really, really appreciate the work that you're doing, Pete, and adding adding value to the community. And I think you've really niche down and I I love the love the interview. So please keep doing what you're doing.

SPEAKER_00 54:06

Good man. I'll give you that 20 quid later for the uh for the compliment. Or $20. Sorry, $20. Let's save some money. $20.

SPEAKER_01 54:14

I lost that one. Interest there.

SPEAKER_00 54:17

Thanks again. Thanks again, and have a good one.

Full time reflection

SPEAKER_00 54:22

Right then, another slice of pie in the books, the 30th episode, in fact. And if you are still listening, thank you so much for your engagement with the podcast. It's been four years since launching during lockdown, and since then the show has garnered over 11,000 downloads, which is not bad for a tin pot podcast production based in a bedroom somewhere in Surrey, aimed at a fairly niche audience of sports psychology and psychology enthusiasts and those interested in the psychologically informed environment. So thank you. And what a cracking conversation to mark the 30th milestone. Nine sports, 1500 students, 50% of those from outside of the US. What a fascinating and dynamic environment with which to work. The overriding impression I got from the conversation was the huge amount of thought and effort Duncan puts into ensuring working at the academy is informed, supported, benefiting from guest speakers and held to account by peers, parents, and athletes. The words psychologically informed absolutely ooze out of the conversation and the various frameworks, processes, and feedback loops that Duncan talked about that are in place there. Perhaps a key reason for this is the fact that psychology was an integral part of the DNA of the Academy from the very start, as Duncan mentioned. So the discipline has an inherent buy-in within this culture and integrated throughout. I thought the focus on balancing continuity of learning and content with the variability of practitioner philosophy of practice and style was super interesting, particularly the insight that athletes might switch teams or move up or down squads, move up age groups, and then they work with a different practitioner. Therefore, the framework in place needs to allow for them to transition in these ways through the academy and still get a seamless experience and continuity of information. So that is there's some planning that must have to go into that. Finally, I need to order my copy of Chrissy Wellington's book Life Without Limits so I can wax on about it with Duncan next time we speak. I've dropped the link to this book in the episode description along with Duncan and Greg's podcast, so you can read that and email Duncan your thoughts perhaps. That's it for the 30th slice of pie. We'll have another small hiatus through the back end of the summer, and we'll be back in the autumn with another couple of episodes. In the meantime, take care and make sure you listen to the performers podcast while you're waiting for the next slice of pie. Cheers and have a good one.