What would you do if you found out you had dyslexia? For Lee Povey, a celebrated entrepreneur, former real estate pro, and coach for U.S Olympic cyclists, it was a late-life discovery that didn't stop him from achieving remarkable feats. From the UK to the USA, Lee's journey is a testament to resilience, determination and the power of a positive mindset.
Lee's unique insights go beyond his personal story, extending to the intricacies of sports and business. Joined by Michael and Derek, we explore the pursuit of excellence in both worlds, and discuss the power of clear expectations, accountability, and effective time management. Lee provides a blueprint on building and leading high-performing teams, the critical role of positive feedback, and the importance of self-awareness, survival adaptations, and environment in our quest for success.
But our conversation doesn't stop there. We delve into Lee's experiences in the competitive world of cycling, his ethos of asking for help, and his transformative journey of personal growth. He talks about authenticity in success and the valuable lessons that can be learned from coaches and athletes. Lee's perspective on embracing adversity, defining success, and the impact of self-reflection on others will leave you inspired and enlightened. Prepare for a conversation that is as engaging as it is informative.
Thank you for listening to today's episode. Please follow at @everydayjoes.tv on all social media and podcast platforms
What would you do if you found out you had dyslexia? For Lee Povey, a celebrated entrepreneur, former real estate pro, and coach for U.S Olympic cyclists, it was a late-life discovery that didn't stop him from achieving remarkable feats. From the UK to the USA, Lee's journey is a testament to resilience, determination and the power of a positive mindset.
Lee's unique insights go beyond his personal story, extending to the intricacies of sports and business. Joined by Michael and Derek, we explore the pursuit of excellence in both worlds, and discuss the power of clear expectations, accountability, and effective time management. Lee provides a blueprint on building and leading high-performing teams, the critical role of positive feedback, and the importance of self-awareness, survival adaptations, and environment in our quest for success.
But our conversation doesn't stop there. We delve into Lee's experiences in the competitive world of cycling, his ethos of asking for help, and his transformative journey of personal growth. He talks about authenticity in success and the valuable lessons that can be learned from coaches and athletes. Lee's perspective on embracing adversity, defining success, and the impact of self-reflection on others will leave you inspired and enlightened. Prepare for a conversation that is as engaging as it is informative.
Thank you for listening to today's episode. Please follow at @everydayjoes.tv on all social media and podcast platforms
We sitting down with Michael and Derek. Michael and Derek, you gotta be talking about how you getting your hustle on Getting that price at that gym. You understand me Hustle on, hustle on, hustle on Hustle on Everyday Jokes, everyday Jokes. Let's go. Everyday Jokes, everyday Jokes. Wake up and go, yeet it. Hustle can't come in it. I'm just a wringer. Lurk out to up, no, up on a million. Everyday Jokes, everyday, everyday Jokes.
Speaker 2:Stank and DC. We out here with Everyday Jokes. The podcast that introduces Non-traditional paths to success and deep diving the adversity and anything that has led to the successful path in life, whether that's financial success or just overall family success or life success, they define it. What's up, derek? How you been, man? Good, how you doing today, mike, good, good, I'm good. I'm excited to introduce our guests. I know Lee's excited over there. Derek, why don't you introduce our guests?
Speaker 3:for today. Yeah, we have Lee Povey. He's originally from the UK. He moved here over six years ago. Over the course of his career, he's been involved as an entrepreneur and owned multiple companies. He's also started off his career in the real estate, where he spent over ten years in that field. Lee's also been involved in the cycling world For most of his life and has coached the US Olympic cyclists For over five years, where he's also founded the Olympic Development Program. In addition to all that, he's also doing coaching today. That involves leadership and more on a relationship and personal level With the show Lee.
Speaker 4:Hey Derek, hi Mike, can I just shout out Mike's podcast voice? Wow, that was awesome when we just chatted offline To kind of choir and chime and it was like boom, in came the podcast voice.
Speaker 2:Exactly, you have to hit him right away. With the punch. I appreciate it.
Speaker 3:You just witnessed him getting in the zone.
Speaker 2:Yes, exactly.
Speaker 3:Awesome. Well, welcome to the show. I know that was a lot as far as a quick bio. I know I hit a lot of bullet points. Is there anything that you would like to, right off the bat, shout a little bit more lay down.
Speaker 4:Yeah, so one interesting thing that we might get to today is dyslexia. So I'm dyslexic, quite severely dyslexic. I didn't discover that until three years ago, so I'm fifteen now. I discovered it when I was forty seven and, for the kind of the theme of your podcast, that has absolutely affected me and I've had ways that I've had to overcome that. And when I was at school I was the generation before we even knew what dyslexia was and we didn't adapt For learning at school. So I had very interesting time At school being as dyslexic as I am. Wow.
Speaker 3:What kind of challenges have you encountered Throughout that process? I mean finding out about it Later in life.
Speaker 4:I imagine there's probably a light bulb that went off eventually when I look back now I know I was a bit different from other people in school and I learned in a different way. I kind of attributed to that as there was something wrong with me, as in, I wasn't as intelligent as I thought I was and I got a lot of mixed messages. So I often got told at school that I was very gifted and I was lazy. And I'm not lazy. So if you look at the rest of my career Elite athlete, started multiple businesses, created a program for USA cycling that didn't exist, went and found a funder Because I could see we had an Olympics coming up and we had no way of finding talent for that Olympics. I'm not a lazy person and nobody has ever as an adult called me lazy.
Speaker 4:I got told at school all the time I was lazy and what it was is I just couldn't learn. The other classmates could. In that, especially back in those days, the chalkboard writing stuff up, reading way of learning just didn't work for me. I learned by talking. So we talk about something. When I get stuck With a word or a phrase, I have to ask you what do you mean? You'll tell me in different ways until I get it. Then the light bulb goes off, then okay. Another thing I noticed about my learning was I was either the dumbest person in the room or the smartest person in the room, so until I could get the concept I was very stuck. Once I got it, I'd get very frustrated that nobody else could keep up. So my learning was never linear. There's very kind of strange learning that went quite slowly and then went very rapidly.
Speaker 2:Wow, that's a lot to deal with Throughout that your whole life, especially since you just discovered that Three years ago you said, to piggyback off of that, what was kind of that aha moment or pivotal moment in your life when you turned on the gas, I guess you could say, because most people with situations like that you really have two ways to go. You got one way to continue down that path Of being constantly called lazy, or you know and then just think that you're lazy, or you take it to that next level, kind of what you did with your career, and kept pushing yourself. So do you remember when that pivotal point happened?
Speaker 4:Yeah, I think the reason I got called lazy at school Was because I couldn't do my homework, so they attributed that to laziness. It was that I didn't understand how to do homework, so I didn't understand how to take stuff home, read it, work on it and bring it back. That kind of learning didn't work for me. So when they were calling me lazy, they were calling me lazy because they didn't understand me as a person, not because I was lazy. I do know, though, that a big pivotal moment for me Was I was dating a woman who was older than me. She was eight years older than I was, and I lived with her, and I was, at the time, trying to be a professional cyclist and I wasn't quite good enough. I was good, but I wasn't going to go and be an Olympian. I was that next level, down from that, and there was a point where I realised that and the training, everything I was doing I just wasn't quite as gifted as some of my contemporaries. And we broke up and I went back home to live with my mum. I was 21 years old and I was like, oh, I don't like living with my parents again. I've been living with my girlfriend for two years I went back home to my parents and, don't get me wrong, I love my mum. My dad's a different subject, we can get to that in a moment but I love my mum. She's an awesome human being. But going home at 21 I was like, yeah, no, this isn't for me. So I applied for 20 jobs. In one week I got three interviews with real estate agents. I had no interest in being a real estate agent, especially in the UK. There's a big stigma for it. It's kind of one of the lower professions, but still, I had these interviews. I went to the interviews. It's the kind of job you do if you're really smart, but you don't have an education and I didn't go to university, so it was appealing. They offered me a ton of money for a very entry position and they promised me that if I was as smart as I said I was, that I'd have rapid advancement. And that's what happened.
Speaker 4:So I worked for a corporate company for six years, ended up becoming an area manager and a sales trainer, was earning a lot of money and I hated it. I sat there when I went to work and I just For me, because of my dad Lying is a real I just can't do it. I hate inauthenticity, I hate lying, I hate grifters. So there was just a number of people in that profession. In the sales profession, they lie to get sales, whereas I always did the opposite. I was completely honest and that's why people trusted me and that's what made me very good.
Speaker 4:So I thought opening my own real estate company Would be the way to go. I could then choose who I worked with. I did that for six years and then I just got to that point where it was just not the right profession for me. It wasn't hitting the fulfillment bonds anymore, so I sold that company in 2007, december 2007. Well, guess what? A property crash happened in the UK, not that time, january of 2008. So I sold it a month before it was worthless. I was somewhat fortuitous and also I could see it was coming, but I got very lucky. I love that the dog is playing in the background.
Speaker 4:Hey we keep it natural here, so yeah, so I got very lucky there, and that then kind of allowed me to move to the next part of my career, which was sports coaching.
Speaker 3:Very nice. Was that a natural transition, or did you have some leg time in between as you transitioned to coaching, or how did you get into there?
Speaker 4:Yeah, great question, Derek, I realized that to set yourself as a coach it helps.
Speaker 4:If you are doing well, Stupidly, it doesn't matter. You don't need to be a good athlete to be a good coach and actually the skill sets are incredibly different, which is why I now coach some elite coaches, because most of them were athletes that turned to being coaches and they don't get trained in leadership and communication, which are the big skills for being a good coach. But I knew that to sell myself, I needed to be doing well. So basically I became a professional cyclist again, won some Masters National Championships so that's 35 plus and as soon as I won that, everybody wanted to be coached by me. It was just, it was instant. So I win that and everyone now wants to be coached. That's amazing. The first two athletes I coached became national champions themselves Age group young kids, so they were 15 to 16 year olds and then I got a reputation about being able to find young talent and then develop it and get them onto the national team in the UK and that was kind of the first part of my coaching career.
Speaker 3:So how you get into the coaching and obviously leading by example, it sounds like are there certain like books or mentors, that you have that kind of cultivate, that leadership in you, or I guess, where do you pull as far as your mentorship? Yeah, I love that.
Speaker 4:I'm lucky that I joined some men's groups when I was younger, so probably the best way to describe this is go a little bit further back. My dad was a narcissist and a clinically definable sociopath, so he didn't care about anybody but himself, and anything was an extension of him. So he loved that I cycled. That was his sport. Never came to watch me do any other sport. I was called rugby captain. I swam for my county, didn't care about those, so to get attention from my dad, I did cycling.
Speaker 4:What this meant, though, is I didn't have any decent male role models in my life. He didn't really have any friends. He was only interested in women, chasing women. So I didn't know what being a healthy man was, and I didn't really understand what leadership was. So in my early 20s I got a friend recommended me to get into therapy, and, after much protesting because men in the UK did not go to therapy at that point I eventually relented and started going to therapy, which was amazing and super helpful. My therapist was this wonderful, wise, older man, and he introduced me to men's groups, and from that I then got this cohort of older men. I was the youngest man by some way in the group and I just got this wise mentorship, older male energy that I've kind of always been searching for and, interestingly, I kind of became the de facto leader of the group.
Speaker 4:So I think for me, leadership has always been in me. People have always looked to me to lead. I've always felt more comfortable leading than following. I feel very comfortable about taking responsibility. I have a huge amount of personal responsibility. So I think genetically I'm predispositioned to be a leader and then I had to learn the skills to be a really effective leader and I can tell you guys now I have done it wrong every single step of the way of being a leader. I've been a terrible communicator. At times I had a terrible habit of giving feedback that people were not ready to hear and in a format that really pissed them off.
Speaker 4:I was you know, as a cycling coach, I'd go up to people and I'd say why are you doing it like that? Why?
Speaker 4:don't you do it like this instead, like you'd go so much faster. And it came from a place of love, because I really you know my kind of values are leaving things better than I found. It is the number one value to me and that's how I express my love. Helping people be better versions of themselves, helping systems be better that is literally how I express my love, but I was so clumsy with it. It was embarrassing when I think back now about how clumsy I was. So I actually run workshops on giving feedback now. Because I did it so badly, I had to go and study it and go. Why am I so ineffective? Because I can see it. I've always been very perceptive. I can see patterns. I can see how people are doing things. I'd walk into a velodrome, even at the world championships, and be able to tell you how most of the athletes could be more optimized, but my delivery was so poor that people couldn't absorb it. So I had all of this knowledge and wisdom to share, but my delivery was terrible.
Speaker 2:That's a lot to uncover right there. I mean one thing that's curious about working with Olympic coaching techniques that you've done and everything that you've gone through with your cycling career I know you've talked about in the past about bringing in Olympic coaching techniques into the boardroom. Could you elaborate on how those techniques translated into the corporate world? Because Derek and I both have worked in the corporate world and I know both of us are college athletes as well. We're just interested to hear more about that.
Speaker 4:I'm going to stay being the guest here and ask you guys a bunch of questions about what college sports you do, because I'd love to know that We'll talk about that too, so let me answer the question and then we'll come back to that.
Speaker 4:What I saw in high level sport was an unrelenting drive for the truth in the very best. So the further up the ladder I went and the better quality coaches I was working with and the better quality athletes I was working with, there was just this drive to be better and to understand things and there was a directness in the way that those people would communicate and a lack of defence about how they would communicate. That was just to seek the truth. How can we do this better? How can we be better versions of ourselves? And I didn't always get that myself in the corporate environment. I mean, I was lucky. The real estate company that I worked for my era director was brilliant and very direct, very kind and very direct, and he mastered that really well. He was a great role model for me.
Speaker 4:But I don't often see that, especially in America, people are very afraid of upsetting somebody. Often, when I go into companies, what I find is there's a desperate hunger for feedback, but people don't give the feedback at the level that they want to receive the feedback themselves. So nobody's really given each other decent feedback because everyone's like well, I don't want to offend them, so I'm not going to give you the feedback that you really need to be a better version of yourself In high level sport. That's not the way it works. In high level sport, people are brutal. Here's what you did wrong. Here's how we need to do it differently. Like we want to go and win gold medals. We're not going to mess around here.
Speaker 4:In the corporate world, people concern themselves more on being liked and getting on with their colleagues, and I have to help them understand that. You'll actually like people more and you'll have better relationships with people more when you can be more authentic with them and when you can hold each other accountable and point out the mistakes, point out the gaps, point out the failures and even start going and seeking it and saying, hey, I need help here, hey, I'm struggling here. And then when we start to get to that level and we're communicating at that level, that's when real magic happens. I don't think that is typically how most companies are set up. In the experiences that I've had so far, I'm curious how that resonates for you guys, for your corporate experiences.
Speaker 3:You're definitely preaching the choir for me.
Speaker 3:I work for a recruiting firm that's nationwide, so we've got offices all over the US and in every major city, so our work culture is different than other corporate America type places that I've worked for. I've been a corporate recruiter now for about seven years and one of the top ones in the state of Wisconsin, so my experience is closer to what you're talking about with the coach, my account manager that manages me and my book of business, very much like how you're talking about with sports. We have a very good relationship where it's very unique, where we're able to give direct feedback. We've been working with each other for over seven years, so a lot of times we're able to go into a room and go okay, take the human aspect out of it, but this is what you need to work on or this is what we need to have to keep driving our business forward. And I think for us and the way we work together over the years it wasn't always perfect. There's been a lot of wonky times, but having that good relationship and that good understanding that the criticism that might be coming is not from a place of like I'm attacking you as a person, this is what I see to help you be the best that you're trying to be, because she understands my goals and my skills and interests in my job. So my experience now is totally drastically different versus other sales jobs that I've had, where I totally feel what you're talking about, where, yeah, you're going to give me a little bit of feedback. You don't want to hurt my feelings because now we're in an HR nightmare the possible lawsuit so it's very plastic Pollyanna is what we used to call it very on the surface and stuff like that.
Speaker 3:And kind of going back a little bit to give you a little bit more background about me and Mike, we actually grew up together, same town, wausau, wisconsin, really in the middle of the state, went to the same high school. We met in seventh grade. We've been really good friends ever since. We really met each other through sports and football and we had a really good, well renowned throughout the state of Wisconsin football coach that we really bought in. He was really good at connecting with the athletes and our school won multiple state championships and so we kind of bought into the team aspect and really developing ourselves at an earlier stage.
Speaker 3:From there we continued into junior college, played a year of basketball there and then from there I ended up transferring to another college, dropped out for about seven years and moved to the big city and decided I don't know what I want to do with my life yet, but I like having fun, I like to work at a good work ethic. And then I started a landscaping company, did that for about five years, worked a lot of odd jobs along the way, and then shortly in my early thirties I ended up getting divorced, had a young child, so I had to go back to college or university and then finish my degree and basically restart my life over with a young child, work in third shift, trying to put myself through that, some out of necessity, some out of I wanted bigger things for me and my son, so we kind of put ourselves through the rigmarole at that point.
Speaker 3:Good for you, Derek, and I won't tell Mike's story, but he's got a pretty good but also kind of similar story.
Speaker 2:Yeah, kind of similar, but we won't go. We'll say that for another day. We'll do that more. But, lee, you know, one thing that Derek and I have done together throughout the years is exactly what you're talking about is what people are afraid of in the corporate world.
Speaker 2:Because, see, a little bit about my background is I was in the United States Army for five years.
Speaker 2:So I did 24 months in Iraq, overseas, where I led troops to and from Iraq, and a lot of leadership techniques and one of it is accountability, because when you're overseas you don't have time to mess around, you're in and out of meetings in a prompt time and you're holding every single person accountable because it's somebody's life at stake. However, in the civilian world, you know if you miss a meeting, if you show up five minutes late, it's not really impacted that much. You know it might impact a little bit but, however, every little thing you do impacts the next person and that relationship. So you know you might upset that person because they took a lot of time into it or you're afraid to give feedback. So calling somebody out in that more direct approach I love that you talked about that. One thing I wanted to talk more about was? Were there any effective strategies for building and leading high performing teams, that to push and hold each other accountable, that you kind of discovered throughout all your life experience?
Speaker 4:Yeah, the first thing is setting really good agreements. So often I find when I go into teams there's lots of expectations but there's not good agreements. So an agreement is something where it's clearly defined and everybody has said yes to it. So you know. Example might be school uniform, so you might have an expectation of what a school uniform is. It might be written down, but usually not that clear. Kid goes into school and the teacher says, well, this doesn't meet our code. And the kid says, well, it meets the code that's written down here. So there isn't an agreement between the child or the children and the school and to what actually is the dress code. And it's the same thing in the corporate world. You know you talk about meetings.
Speaker 4:Some places I've been to being five minutes late. People are like that's no big deal. Other places, you're a second late yes, that's a big deal. Usually, though, there's no agreement about it. There's not a setup.
Speaker 4:So when I ran the Olympic development program, all we actually did was we had a code of conduct and I wrote it with the athletes. So, instead of saying this is how it's going to be, I asked the athletes how would you like this to work? What's the environment that you would like to be in, and then we also set some penalties for that. That the athletes themselves self-regulated. So what happens when somebody is late to a meeting? What does that mean? They decided if you turned up late for something, you didn't get to do it. So if you turned up late for a training session, you sat the training session out. You know what's the worst thing for young athletes? It's not being able to train. So that, for them, was the biggest punishment.
Speaker 4:I very rarely had to actually implement those things. One because the kids were motivated, they wanted to do well, so they did the right things. And we also picked people wisely. You know. We picked on physical aptitude and emotional aptitude. We wanted people that had a good teamwork and a good ethos.
Speaker 4:But then the athletes kept themselves accountable for each other. They would look out for each other, they'd remind each other of time schedules, and if somebody was late, the athletes would enforce it and say you're sitting out today, I wouldn't have to do that. That's the kind of partnerships that I help leaders create, where the whole team is thinking like leaders, rather than you have a leader or a manager that's telling people what to do. I know, I know this is typically how it works in the military, mike, where everybody is holding each other accountable and you are. You have everybody's back because you know you're in this together and you can absolutely create that in a work environment and you know a little bit of psychology yes, when somebody's late to a meeting, it's very rarely going to be life or death.
Speaker 4:That's not how some people experience it, though you know some leaders will experience you or some people run in the meeting will experience you being late as a threat on them and in our base survival mechanism, our kind of subconscious, we can interpret that as a threat. So it does have quite a big impact. It's amazing the impact that timekeeping has and it's amazing how many people aren't aware of the impact that timekeeping has, the relational impact that timekeeping has. So I think you know.
Speaker 4:The first thing is just making really good agreements so that everybody knows how they should be behaving. Like what means on time? You know from my ODP, ten minutes before anything was on time and that was because you know you turn up, you forgot something from your backpack. You have time to go back to your room and get it, whereas if on time is on time you don't have any. But for this, no time. And then late was one second after the agreed time. If you turned up one second after the agreed time, the mini bus was going, because everybody else got there ten minutes before they were in the mini bus. We're waiting till the time when we go and that didn't happen often, but it happened one or two times. Those athletes never, ever turned up late again.
Speaker 4:I love that story and I didn't do it. I wasn't angry, like I wouldn't drive away in a half, I wouldn't shout, I just go right, that's it. That's the time we agreed. We're leaving, we go.
Speaker 4:I know one of my colleagues in the GB cycling team left an athlete at the junior world championships behind because they didn't turn up in time for the semi-finals so they didn't get to race the semi-finals. Lots of people wouldn't have had that ability to do that because they'd have got. Oh, it's the semi-finals at the world championships, I've got to go to do them. But what he said was well, if they don't learn it now, what's going to happen when they get to the Olympics? Are they going to turn up late for the semi-finals Olympics because the bus at the Olympics isn't going to wait for them. It's on a set time schedule. The TV program at the Olympics sets a schedule. They're not going to wait for you. I'd rather they learn at junior world championships, which for me doesn't really matter, it's just a stepping stone and they'll never forget it. That athlete was never late again for the rest of their life, probably. So I think you know it's.
Speaker 4:It's set in expectations and then moving them into agreement so everybody's very clearly knows what, what is expected of them and how they should be behaving, and then it's realizing that as leaders, you don't have to have all the answers. So I think there's an expectation that the higher up the tree you get, the more you should know, and actually I find it's the opposite the higher up the tree that I see really talented people. They try to know less, ask more, listen more, because they're looking to get people together. They're looking to empower people around them, to have their voice heard and to feel like they're part of something. And they don't. They know they don't have to have all the answers, and I see this in good leaders in sport and I see this in good leaders in the workplace they do not have an ego about having the outside so now, obviously, working with Olympic athletes those are the people that are the, the top or echelon like they want they want to be the best of the best.
Speaker 3:And then working with more, more people that are in the corporate world I encounter a lot of people that will, you know, tell me all the lip service that I want to hear. As far as I want this, I have a why I'm ambitious and then and then after a while they kind of reveal themselves as not. I guess how do you help or motivate or work with people as far as leadership aspect outside of just like the top athletes? Because I get it with top athletes, like they put a lot of time, money, effort and energy and life into this, but how does it work? And with with people outside of that? Because I get frustrated with it a lot myself yeah, I get that in some ways.
Speaker 4:I'm lucky and I'm also choosy. The people I tend to work with, and the people that are tend to drawns to me, are usually pretty highly motivated individuals. I tend to work with the smartest people, the smartest person in the room. They tend to be frustrated, like you, derek, with others not working as hard as them and not able to keep up with them cognitively, and I help them understand how to meet those people and inspire those people. I'm a firm believer you cannot motivate anybody to do anything. Motivations intrinsic, it comes from within. But what you can do is you can create environments that people will feel more motivated in. So you know, if we look at the workplace, for me there's three things that really matter. You are paid fairly, so you get good compensation compared to other people doing a similar role to you. The company has a strong mission and you know what the company's mission is is clearly defined. Everybody then knows what they're there to do, and then you as an individual know what you're there to do and you get regular feedback on how you are doing it, and that feedback needs to be both positive and constructive.
Speaker 4:So things I often see in corporate environments are a lack of good positive feedback. Analogy I like to use is imagine somebody's energy levels are a cookie jar and you got this cookie jar and it's full of these nice delicious cookies. That's a healthy individual that has loads of energy and is going to be motivated and productive. Every time you give them observational or critical feedback, you reach an end. You're taking a handful of cookies and taking it out. Every time you give them positive feedback and acknowledgement, you're putting cookies back. In. Many leaders, managers, they take all the cookies out of somebody's jar. Somebody doesn't have any cookies left. They have no room for constructive feedback anymore and they're going to be demotivated. So I teach people that when you're giving feedback, especially acknowledgement, praise, compliment it needs to be as specific as your critical feedback would be.
Speaker 4:So a lot we see, especially in America in corporate environments, is good job. Thanks for being here today. I really appreciate the work you've done great. What did I do well? Why was it done well? Why do you appreciate me being here? You know be really, really specific with people. The more specific you are, the more you fill their jar up.
Speaker 4:The best leaders get around 50 50 between these positive acknowledgements and this kind of observational feedback and even the very best struggle to get to 50 50, you almost can't give people enough positive appreciation. I used to come from the school of thought that if you give them too much positive appreciation or get lazy, the data shows completely the opposite. The more positive appreciation you give people, the higher they perform. So that old model of the tough coach that stands on the sideline and shouts at you and motivates you, psychology just doesn't support that. Most people don't survive well in a fear based system. Like they can survive in it for a little while, but eventually they'll get really burnt out. We survive well in supported systems that recognizes our talents, stretches us, invites us to grow, gives us things to grow into, but recognizes who we are and where we are to that was really, really impactful.
Speaker 3:As you were talking, I was thinking of like five different leaders I had over the years, both positive and negatively, and I totally agree with you. If you have more of that positive, that's motivated me more, like I don't need to be padded on the back constantly, but, like you said, if it's direct and pointed as far as what you're doing well versus. I had a. I had a coach in a different sport early on in my life that it was constant negative and I was literally thrown up on the basketball court and it just shut me down and did nothing for me. So totally, totally like that. What are your thoughts, mike?
Speaker 2:yeah, I mean, obviously, we've had a lot of impactful people in our life and one thing that Derek and I with Derek and I, we follow a lot of people that inspire you, you know in pot, other podcasters or other, you know entrepreneurs, motivational speakers. So one of our favorites is Gary V and in the last, I'd say about year and a half, probably two years, ever since COVID, he really doubled down on his positivity and talking about how positivity in life and relationships is key. I've even joined his text group because he'll send out like random texts of positive quotes and one of his recent sayings is give them your, give them your their flowers that are due. So, like, as you say, you know, like with relationships, whether it's men, women or whatever you know, just saying hey, I appreciate, you know the work that you do because of x, y and z and being personal, is giving them their flowers versus just saying hey, good job, thanks for that report, I appreciate it. You know it builds that trust a lot more and then that coincides and motivates them in return. So that's that's my thoughts on it, you know. So we really appreciate that.
Speaker 2:Let's take a little sideways off the coaching aspect and ask you a little fun question. So if you could have dinner with any historical or sports figure in your life, who would it be?
Speaker 3:oh man, living or dead, mike, or living or dead.
Speaker 4:You want me to narrow this down to one one go on it's.
Speaker 2:It's a tough one.
Speaker 4:I mean you could go with a classic Michael Jordan like mine, you know oh god, no, I bet it'd be horrible to go to dinner with way too self obsessed. You know, somebody I'd really love to meet is Victor Frankel. Really, do you know who Victor Frankel is?
Speaker 2:I do not, I would.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I would love to hear more so Victor Frankel wrote a book called man search for meaning and I strongly recommend you guys read it. It's a two part book. The first part of the book is describing his experience being a Nazi concentration camp in the second world war. So Victor was a German Jew who was a psychologist, so not only did he have his own experience of being in the concentration camp but he also observed how everybody else behaved in the concentration camp. So the second part of the book is his kind of observations on humans, based on how he saw people link the most challenging conditions that humans can basically exist or not exist in. And kind of the crux of the book is that we get to reframe and interpret our situation and choose to find joy in it or not find joy in it. And he said, the people that survived in the concentration camps well, the ones were able to find joy even in the most stressful, miserable, tough conditions that human beings can live in. So I think it'd be an incredibly fascinating person to talk to talk to about that experience.
Speaker 4:I mean, I remember reading this back in the UK and I really missed these. I used to love having a bath after I'd trained in the evening in the UK when it was cold outside and I could get in a nice warm bath. We don't have baths here. I can never find a bath. I fit in here and the UK had a bath that was six foot two. I had a bath that was six foot long and I could fill up and like complete is a merge myself in. I've never found one here. I know I remember sitting in the bath reading this book and just crying to myself like hearing these experiences that people went through. But you just can't even believe that other human beings did. So yeah, I think he would be fascinated to talk to and then kind of hear how he made his judgment and vision for how humans behave based on what he saw.
Speaker 3:Interesting. Yeah, I'll have to find that book. I totally relate to you on the baths. You can't really tell on here, but Mike and I are pretty tall as well. I'm six foot six. I think Mike's around six foot four. So I haven't taken a bath since I was like eight years old. I mean, I shower regularly but I haven't been able to fit in the bath.
Speaker 4:I'm glad that you show regularly there.
Speaker 3:Derek. So does everybody else I guess I got a question for you here. This has kind of been on my mind. It kind of goes in with leadership a little bit. But what is your opinion on self-awareness, and do most people have it, or is that just something that I've seen more in the elites and people that are striving for more?
Speaker 4:Help me out by defining what you think self-awareness is.
Speaker 3:I guess for me and I don't know the Google definition off or the Webster's dictionary, but for me self-awareness is kind of like self-regulation, like as I'm going about, whatever task I'm doing or whatever my goals are, if I veer off the path, I can recognize that okay, maybe I'm too cold to people in my methods of speech and talking and I need to kind of get back on track. Or if I've fallen off my goals and not put enough effort in and I hate trying to put some tangible things here. So it's not entirely that thought, but essentially I look at it as like a compass. Like if I'm veering off my path or who I am as a person, I can pull myself back in and constantly have these checks to myself to go okay, you're out of line, you need to. As far as health, like I ate too many cheeseburgers this week now you need to get in work out more. So that's, I guess, my third grade level definition of it.
Speaker 4:Okay yeah thank you.
Speaker 4:I would say most people have that level of self-awareness. That's not what I would describe self-awareness as. So to me, self-awareness is knowing your personality traits, knowing the survival adaptations you've made through growing, through your family system, your school system, your environment that then limits you from being who you want to be. So I think most of us have an appreciation for I've eaten too many cheeseburgers. I probably shouldn't eat that too many cheeseburgers, or something doesn't feel right, but I'm not quite sure why it doesn't feel right. You know, kind of to go to your kind of off the path. This is my play field. This is where I love to work with people. So some of the work that I do with the leaders that I work with is we do this thing called essence and survival mechanisms. So essence is establishing what your genetic personality traits are. So when you came out of the womb, we're all born with some genetic personality traits. So, quick aside, when I was growing up, my mum fostered 100 high-risk kids in a 10-year period.
Speaker 4:Yeah, so my mum and my auntie lived together. They did this. My mum went to university at 50, got a degree in law and accountancy. This was after she spent with my dad really turned her life around. I have so much admiration for her, and how she afforded to do that was fostering these high-risk kids.
Speaker 4:So I got to see the nurture versus nature debate, and then I've studied it more and more and more. I used to think that a lot of it was nurture and a lot of it is nurture. We are, though, born with certain personality traits, which is why you can see twins that have differences, and you know kids that are born in the same family system that have very distinctly different personalities. So establish that who are you, how does the world find you, and then we put that to five words, so that you have a really strong feeling of who you are at your core. Then we look at the survival mechanisms. So these are the shields that we put on to get through our childhood. So my survival, so my essence, words are brilliance, play, vision, connection and presence. So I'm smart. I've always been smart. I've always had an understanding of how things work. I'm very playful, I like humor, I like playing sport, I like bringing play into what I do. I understand things so I understand concepts, understand patterns. That's the vision I like being in connection.
Speaker 4:I used to think I was a grumpy British bloke that didn't really care much about other people. Then COVID came and I discovered that connection vitally important to me when I wasn't overwhelmed so I'm slightly introverted, I have a limit to how many people I can deal with. At the time I was working in the Velodrome six days a week. Lots of people needing me, needing my attention. How should I do this coach, what should I do? And overwhelmed me.
Speaker 4:Once that went and I kind of got a baseline back, I realized connection vital to me. I started a bunch of men's groups during COVID for my friends. I have regular scheduled calls with various different friends so that I can keep that connection going and, like you guys, in a relationship you've kept going. That's vital to me. And in presence I'm able to sit with people and really basically stare into their soul. Some people can find that intimidating because I will sit with you and I will know what's going on for you. Often people will cry around me. I'll just sit next to someone and say how are you doing? And they'll start crying and then be like I don't understand why I'm crying. I'm like, well, let's talk and we'll find out. So I've always kind of had that gift to really connect with people and be present with people, and then you know some of that as I've gone through my childhood.
Speaker 4:I've had reflections on it. The brilliance thing I adapted to my dyslexia by having a reaction of having to prove I was smart the whole time, because the message I got was you're smart but you're lazy, and what I internally perceived was am I really as smart as I think I am? Because there's some things I can't do and that makes me feel dumb. So now I overcompensated and I tried to be too smart or tried to throw my smartness in your face, which I don't need to do. So you know, coming back from that, letting that go and realizing I don't need to prove how smart I am, play when I'm struggling to feel connected with people, I can start to tease too much. You know partly British humour anyway, which is much more teasing than American humour. But come here and be really teasing and people get offended by it or people get shocked by it. So kind of knowing what's the appropriate level to play at to get what I want, which is connection. So when we're talking about self-awareness, it's understanding who you are at your core and then understanding these survival mechanisms. So with my coaches we put names to these things and this is what I do with my clients. So one of my survival mechanisms is tyrannical Einstein.
Speaker 4:So to survive in my family system with my father, I just stepped up to being completely in control from a very early age because he was pretty absent in both the family and my life. So I just became a tyrant and I controlled everything. Well, guess what, as an adult, other people don't like tyrants and they don't like somebody trying to control them and everything around them, and that's what made me feel safe. So that doesn't work well in relationship with other adults. So getting that self-awareness around it through being coached myself and my health therapy, and understanding that when I'm stressed, when I'm tired, when I'm worn out, this is how I tend to be to find safety and the impact that has on others.
Speaker 4:Now what I know is when I start behaving like that I then think well, I'm a playful person, let's be playful. You can't be a playful tyrant. So if I think about being playful, that just completely disarms that kind of tyrant. Another one's heartbroken head shock for me. So I can be a bit prickly to begin with to kind of protect myself, because my dad broke my heart continually, let me down continually, so my way was to kind of get a force field around there, be a bit prickly with people when I first meet them and people used to say to me all the time you're really intimidating. When I first meet you You're a bit standoffish and then when I get to know you, you're the softest, most loving person I've ever met.
Speaker 4:Now I'd much rather be the softest, most loving person you've ever met when you first meet me, so I can kind of lower that shield. So that's the level of self-awareness I want to help people to get to, and the reason is because it just gives you so much choice. You know, as you were saying, recognizing when you're off path and then going the level below that, recognizing what has pushed you off path and why have you reacted and the way you've reacted, and then saying, right, okay, I understand that reaction. Now how would I like to choose to behave?
Speaker 4:Instead, most of us stay in a fairly reactive state. You know, somebody cuts you off in a car. You get angry, you flip on the birds instead of going. I wonder why that person cut me off. I wonder why they didn't notice me. Are they in a hurry? Are they stressed? Have they just had an argument with their partner? Are they rushing to hospital to see somebody? Most people are not moving around the world trying to cause harm to other people. However, their clumsiness can have the impact of causing harm, just like your person turning up late in a meeting. They're not deliberately trying to do that, they're just unaware of their impact. So a lot of the work I do is helping people understand the impact that they have in the world, how they move through the world, and then giving them more choice about the impact that they'd like to have instead.
Speaker 3:That's a lot. There's a lot of great little nuggets there.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, I loved it. I loved it all. One thing, lee, I wanted to discover more is your athletic background. Obviously, in the background you can see some of your accomplishments and everything like that. Can you share a memorable moment or lesson from your cycling career that you've applied to your like coaching practice or anything in life that would benefit some of our listeners?
Speaker 4:Yeah, I think this is what I said to you guys when we first met each other. When I reached out to you, I broke my shoulder in 2010, so I will tell a little story. Picture the day. It's the rare sunny day in the UK, so it's a beautiful sunny day. I'm competing outdoors, so it's an outdoor velodrome, so that means it's a tarmac velodrome. I just qualified. So my event, the sprint, is you do a qualification and from the qualification you get seated and then you race fastest against slowest. I qualified with a lifetime PR. I'm in incredible shape, like I feel just fantastic. I think I qualified third fastest and that was one of the oldest riders there. In the first race I'm doing, I'm in second place young, good athlete in front of me that I know I can beat if I do the job right, and another guy next to me that I just beat in the year before in European Championships in the final of the European Championship. So we mean this guy raced each other quite a lot over the last few years and in the final of the European Championship he actually got disqualified against me for doing a dangerous move. So we have a bit of history.
Speaker 4:We're coming into the last 200 meters. So we 200 meters to go to a track sprint event. You're pretty much at full speed, so we're probably doing about 40 mile an hour. The guy behind me is trying to overtake me. We're riding side by side, which I want him to beat because it means he's going to have to ride further to get around me. I'm trying to keep a gap in front of me to the guy in front so that I can accelerate into his slip stream and then catch him and overtake him at the line. So I'm trying to manage this guy behind me, manage the guy in front of me.
Speaker 4:While we're going flat out, the guy who's next to me bumps into me, loses control, falls into my front wheel, completely obliterates my front wheel. I just go straight up in the air and then land straight down. So I didn't slide at all, I just landed, bang straight down. All of the energy from going 40 mile an hour went straight up and straight down, landed on my elbow, dislocated my shoulder and then landed on my shoulder, which was now dislocated, broke forebones in my shoulder, jumped up. I have a really good tolerance to pain so I just ignored the pain, put my arm back in the socket, which you should not be able to do. That should have been the first warning sign that things were bad because it's pretty fucked up.
Speaker 4:If you can put it back into your socket yourself, so put it back in. And I'm showing I want to get back on my bike, I want to do the rerun, because if there's a crash they usually do a rerun like I want to do the rerun. One of my friends, who's a doctor, ran on to the field and just went no, and I'm arguing with him and I'm like I want to race and he's just got hold of me. He's like you are not racing and I'm showing it him. I mean, later on I had to, after the adrenaline and what I had, to go and find him at apology I said because I'm showing it him and he's like no, and he just stopped me. Then it hits me, then the pain starts and I'm like oh yeah, this is not right.
Speaker 4:And then my arm is basically just on the verge of falling out of the socket. The entire time I go to the hospital, get x-rayed. They say can't find, we can't find any breaks. Clearly you've damaged it, but we don't know exactly how bad. You need to get an MRI. The doctor, while he's examining it, grabs my arm, pulls it out of the socket, dislocates it again, leaves me and runs away and I'm like what the hell have you done? And he literally turns around, walks off the nurses kind of holding me back. Because I want to kill this guy because he's just dislocated my shoulder again. I have to put it back in again myself. I can tell you it hurt even more the second time. So I leave the hospital, I drive home. I drive four hours home by myself. I don't ask for help. I get home and the realization hits me that I'm in a bad shape. I go and get an MRI and a CT scan. Two days later I get called back by the specialist. This is a week before the national championships and the defending national champion. As I said, I'm in the shape of my life. I get called back by the specialist. He said Lee, bad news, you cannot compete the national championships and I need to get you in for surgery. You really.
Speaker 4:I had to have two surgeries to reconstruct my shoulder. I just obliterated it. The ball at the top was completely smashed. There was bits of bio everywhere. It was an absolute disaster. So I go to the hospital to have my first operation. I asked one of my friends hey, can you take me to the hospital? He says why don't you just get a taxi? So I do I just get a taxi.
Speaker 4:I realize, as I'm sitting in the hospital, I'm completely alone. I chose I was able to choose when I had the operation and I chose where my girlfriend at the time was on holiday and when my mum was on holiday the two like biggest kind of caretakers for me and I chose to have the operation while they're away. And then I asked one of my close friends to come to hospital with me and he was like no, I get a taxi, mate. It made me sit. I'm sitting in the hospital and I realized that my life is about helping other people and being their savior. I do not know how to ask for help and people don't know when I need help because I just don't share it, or I don't share it in a way that they can understand it. And that moment is the most pivotal moment in my life because I sat there and I went. Is this how I want the rest of my life to go?
Speaker 4:where I'm alone when I need help. I'd. I've been dating that girl for four years. We were split up within a month because she just didn't know how to cope with me being in need or me being a victim. Our relationship just she just doesn't understand it. And I thought well, is this how I want my life to be? That whenever I'm in need, this person doesn't understand how to be with me? So we broke up and I looked at all of my relationships. I renegotiated some of them and said right, our relationship can't be this way anymore. I cannot be your hero and savior. I need equal relationships in my life. I need to be able to rely on you, I need to be able to ask for help and I need to learn how to ask for help. I can't be the person that feels good about other people being in need and me being perfect like. I just don't want to do that anymore. So I renegotiate some friendships. I ended some friendships.
Speaker 4:It eventually leads to me leaving the UK and coming to America. I met my wife, who's a therapist. I would not have been able to meet her and be able to communicate with her in a way that she needs if I couldn't have had that kind of openness and ask for support. She's the first romantic partner I've ever been with that can meet me at the same level and give me the support I give her, and now my friendships are very equal. I don't want to be in friendships of people. You know I didn't want.
Speaker 4:I was single for four years after this because I didn't want to date anybody that needed me to be the hero, so I would only date people that could meet me on the same level emotionally. And I waited four years to meet my wife and and I didn't jump back into relationships is, which is what I would have done in the past. So it completely pivoted to and changed my life. Now, in the moment when I'm having it, that's not what I thought was gonna happen. You know, I just had this really bad shoulder that didn't work and I just remember pivotal moments like I was walking down the road with a friend and I'd never felt this in my life.
Speaker 4:I thought if somebody mugged us, I couldn't protect us right now and I'd never even thought about that before, but because my arm was in a sling and I couldn't use it, suddenly this was like the feeling of what it meant to be vulnerable and meant to be less equipped. And you know we're big guys. Usually you don't think about that and it really gave me an idea of what it's like to be somebody who's more vulnerable and it gave me a lot more empathy and it made me easier for me to connect with other people as well that was suffering, because I'm like now I get it. Now I get what you're going through. So without that, I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing now and I wouldn't live in America and I wouldn't have a wife who's a therapist and he's awesome love.
Speaker 2:That. That's awesome. Well, we, we, we've discovered a lot about you. Is there anything that you wanted to ask Derek or I on the show? It's a you know, we, we want to open it up to you as well, if you have any questions for us?
Speaker 4:I do. I have two. The first one would be what's led you guys to do in a podcast?
Speaker 3:oh, how much time you got.
Speaker 4:I mean the wife's out with a friend we can keep it.
Speaker 2:We'll keep it short and sweet, but we can always turn this episode into a new part episode.
Speaker 2:I'm only joking because Mike and I have a lot of history yeah, you give them the short version because I'll make it a half hour conversation, just because I go off on 25 tangents exactly so basically, derek and I've, we had a lot of inspirational leaders, as we said, college or high school coaches, college coaches that kind of led us down that path of leadership, motivational listening to success books, audio books, reading some books, going to professional speakers like Eric Thomas, that type of stuff. So we've it's. You know, we consumed over 25 plus years of leadership and consulting and relationships and we really realized that we're not the only ones that have had nontraditional pasts of success mine, military, college, some adversity throughout life and finding a post career after the military and going to college at a later age, like Derek, derek and all his adversity. So we realized that there's Joe Rogan is a huge podcaster and he brings on a lot of guests that basically are very similar to you, that have had very high six set rates of success and very some of them, unfortunately, are very unachievable.
Speaker 2:Some of them, you know, like ultra marathon runners, like you know your average person might not even run around the block. You know like at least you know so with Joe Rogan, a lot of his episodes are hour long and they're. It's great, it's deep dive conversations and everything else. But we wanted to get the root of things, where people, everyday people, your everyday Joe, that essentially has had some type of adversity and how, like you, you can relate to them. So then our listeners can have like one or two little life nuggets that they can apply to their life in the workplace or relationship and with their wife or significant other or, you know, even their best friends and stuff like that. So that's why we started the podcast.
Speaker 4:I love that guys so much.
Speaker 4:I'm reasonably similar journey to you. We just being super curious about how human beings work. I had to be curious from a young age because of the way my dad was to protect myself and then I turned that into being a passion. So, yeah, I like you, I listen to so many podcasts. Every time I walk my dog I've got a podcast on.
Speaker 4:When I used to drive to the velodrome, I used to actually enjoy my commute because, great, that's podcast time. Yeah, so, you know, dealing with my dyslexia, I read, but it's a bit longer for me to read and I sometimes need a bit of help with that. So podcasts have been such a boon to me. I love them and what I've discovered is a lot of the podcast I really relate to are the ones where people are most authentic. So the ones where people come on and, as you say right, I'm an ultra marathon runner and I can run a hundred miles without stopping. Fantastic, that's wonderful.
Speaker 4:Tell me about when you were 50 pounds overweight and what it took for you to get to be in here. That's the bit that I'm interested in. So I really like that shepherds podcast where he has celebrities on and they actually really talk about their lives and what's happened to them, and one of the things that comes through for me is there's a lot of luck in all of this. You know you're talking about people being successful. There's a lot of luck. I get really frustrated when people say I'm self-made or I got here because I worked harder than somebody else. That's just not true. One of the hardest working people I know is the cleaner for our building. We live in the condo building. That cleaner works so hard and then probably only $50,000 a year, if that.
Speaker 4:You know, cleaning apartments in the wealthiest place in the world pretty much so. You know work ethic counts. Yes, we want people to have a good work ethic, but there's so much more to it than that. I think there's been authentic. There's following, actually figuring out and following what really means something to you being of service.
Speaker 4:Many of the really successful people I know and I probably look at success differently from other people, even though I work with millionaires and billionaires Success to me is when they feel good about themselves. It's not the money, it's when they look in the mirror and go I like that human being looking back at me and I feel like I'm doing a life of meaning, I'm giving something. So what really motivates me, as I said earlier, is leaving things better than I found them and then Finding people that can help me amplify that. So I go on podcasts so I can get your listeners and hopefully they'll pick a few things up that's going to make their life better. That's what.
Speaker 4:That's what I want to do the world. That's why I work with leaders that work with companies, so they make the companies better. I'm very choosy about the leaders that I work with. I want their companies to be doing something positive. I don't tend to work with, say, the financial sector, for example, because I want to work with. Things are really making a big difference in the world that aren't just driven by making money, so that's what kind of might have worked me. So I really love what you say and resonate with that guys.
Speaker 2:I love that, lee, if somebody wanted to get in contact you, whether via social media or Anyway, your best point in contact, what's the best way to get a hold of you? Via email or social media?
Speaker 4:Yep so just Google me, leap over. You'll find me pretty easily. Have a reasonably unique name and, as L, double a POV EY, I'm just doing a big rebrand, so I've got a new website being launched. I'm fully next week of the week, after which will be povy performance. At the moment, you'll find me at maximize your potential. I'll talk to anybody, I'll help anybody as best as I can and if I can't help you, I'll point you in the right direction.
Speaker 4:One thing we didn't speak about I I also work with elite sports coaches, so you know you guys have mentioned it a few time I've had an, an incredible coaching experience and I actually ended up. This guy coached me as a junior. His name is David Lagrange. He was a national team coach in the UK. That experience was so positive for me I kind of consider him really more my father than my father Ended up becoming my best friend with best man at my wedding and we created a business together 15 years after he coached me. When I first started cycling coaching, we had a joint business running training camps. I also had a terrible coach, so my first coach was a Paul in Went to the junior world championships, came back and said no British athlete will ever win anything. Well, 10 years later, the British team was the most dominant cycling team in the world. So what the hell did this guy know? So I coach sports coaches.
Speaker 4:I tend to work with fairly high-level sports coaches, and what I do is I support them. Exactly the same stuff as a leadership it's I support them have been the best versions of themselves, and the reason I do that is because I think sports coaches are some of the most influential people that young people meet. You know, when I had my national team program, when I set out my vision for it, the first thing I wrote down above Find Olympic champions was everybody leaves this program better than they found it. So that for me, has always been the most important thing the coaches that I resonate with, of the coaches that have that attitude and the success is a byproduct of making really good human beings, and I strongly believe that's how we are successful in life.
Speaker 4:Be a great human being and things will happen for you. Help create other good human beings. Good things will happen for you and good things will happen for them. You know, sporting success is just a byproduct of that, and in 2018 I I won a national championships in the US and the UK in the same year, first Masters races. I first 35 plus racer to do that in two countries in the same year and the thing I enjoyed the most about it was racing with my friends and seeing my friends Like the actual titles I've got the jerseys here because my brand-in person told me I need these so that people know what I do and I love it.
Speaker 4:And my wife my wife made them for me. She did this as a birthday present. Before she did this, there was nothing in my apartment where you would know I was a cyclist. It was all in a drawer. All my jerseys or my meadows were in a drawer and she's really helped me enjoy celebrating that more. And these branding people have as well. They're like people love that you've got it, like people are gonna talk to you about it, but it's been difficult for me to really kind of appreciate it, reflect on it and talk about it like hey, I'm actually really proud of that and that's something I worked hard to achieve Well, so kind of enjoying that success kudos to what your wife did.
Speaker 3:Tell her that we said great job on the framing. My mom used to run a framing business. She's framed all kinds of stuff and I that was the first thing and I saw was is that Jersey in that frame? And she did a great job. So make sure you tell her oh, she didn't.
Speaker 4:She didn't do it, she paid for it to get done.
Speaker 3:We'll cut that out. As Mike would say, she was the project manager on that project.
Speaker 2:I'm like, hey, okay, what do we got to get done? A to Z I'll. If we struggle with C and D, let's overcome it. I'll just keep moving the project.
Speaker 4:The way I look at this and this is what I teach the leaders I work with many of them struggle to let go of doing things themselves is what's your hourly rate, and is it more cost-effective for you to do this or for you to pay somebody else to do it? And I learned this when I was moving, and Moving by yourself, without paying a moveable firm, is an idiotic thing to do. It's incredibly difficult. It takes forever. The next time I moved, I paid a moving firm and I was able to just work all the way through it. They packed everything, they moved it and I unpacked it when we come to the other end. So I think understanding the value of your own time is one of the really good gifts about moving yourself on and getting other people To support you absolutely.
Speaker 3:I know and, yes, I love my wife very much and she did a crackage.
Speaker 2:One question I had. This is kind of Related to your sports coaching and everything like that, because I believe sports coaching is More prevalent now, in 2023, than ever, just because Derek and I are older. So we've kind of hit that Derek just celebrated his 40th birthday. When Derek turns 40, I basically turned 40.
Speaker 2:I turned 40 in January but his birthday was in July, so we're like six months apart.
Speaker 2:But it's one of those things where you know we've seen so much technology and Relationship and the way like today's generation interacts. I know recently on ESPN, matt Stafford, a professional athlete, quarterback coach for the Los Angeles Rams, basically Said like I don't even know how to relate today, today's guys, because After coach, after meetings and whatnot, back in the day they would go and play with the deck of cards, kind of like what my grandma taught me and you know, just have real depth, in depth conversations. But now nowadays when they get out of meetings they go right and go right to your phones, their heads are down and they're just like in in, just overall In clips than that phone and so Involved in that technology that they just need to know what's going on and they're in that world. So With your professional experience, have you had to deal with any of that? And like overcoming, like the notifications and anything else like of today's world that compared to like the early 90s and that's in that environment.
Speaker 4:That's a really interesting question. I Don't know what it'd be like if I was, say, coaching an NBA team where you've got, you know, very high profile athletes that Needing to talk to sponsors and to agents so much. With my ODP program we actually had a rule that they didn't have the funds with them and they didn't have the funds out when we're at the track and when we're in meetings, because I think being present with other human beings is about the best gift that we can have in life. You know, what brings us the most joy is spending time with other people and, as I said earlier, being of service to other people. So I really highlighted that with my athletes.
Speaker 4:That was one of our code of conduct. Things was they didn't have their phones out at the Trackside, they didn't have them out at the gym, they didn't have them out in meetings and obviously they could go and have time, you know, back in the room and stuff where they could have their phones. But when we were together we didn't have phones out and I sat with them and I followed the rule myself. I didn't have my phone out. You know I have it on for emergency contact, but that would be it and I just sat with them and talked to them and my athletes were 14 to you know, late 20s. I don't have any issue relating to them. I'm a bit older than you guys. I'm 50, so I don't feel sorry for you being 40.
Speaker 4:I still young, you know I just I just talked to like human beings. So I think I think, if you're prepared to spend time with people, I loved hanging out with my athletes. You know I worked with other coaches and you could see they didn't really like hanging out with their athletes. I loved hanging out with my athletes. I really liked them so and they knew that, and you know I do fun things. I'll take them to the cinema and we'd go for meals and we play fun games. We were at meals and stuff. So I always felt like I was part of them and they also knew that I was the coach.
Speaker 4:And when it came to laying down the rules, when it came to selection time, there was no argument I was a coach. And I think that's where I really helped coaches as well is getting their confidence about making those big decisions and realizing that you can have close relationships with athletes and Still make the decisions. And make the decisions based off of data, don't make them based off of emotion, and that's the way to separate those things. I think a lot of coaches get afraid about being close to their athletes because then they're like I can't make the decision and it's like we'll just make the right decision. It'd be okay if you make the decision that's based on data and you tell somebody why they weren't picked or why they didn't get selected. If they react badly, that is not on you. That's an opportunity for them to grow and learn what else they could be capable of, either if they stay in the sport or if they go and pick something else that might be better for them.
Speaker 3:I love that Kind of joking that, yeah, I know we're we're 40 or 50, but you know that I don't know who coined it, but the ages of state of mind, and I Feel that I'm really good at connecting with a lot of the younger crowd and I do a lot of cycling, mountain biking in the summer. In the winter I do a lot of downhill skiing and and generally I I tend to hang out with a lot of people half my age, just because that's what people are doing more often. When I don't have my son, when he's with his mother, like I'm out doing active things. And it was kind of funny this last, this last winter, I was skiing with a 20 year old and he's he almost, you know, fell out of the chair when I told him I was almost 40. He's like you don't, you don't act like a 40 year old, I'm like I just like to have fun and relate to people and and I agree, I agree with a lot of the points you were talking about, word with the constructive criticism and stuff.
Speaker 3:Growing up I used to think, hey, leadership and coaching was a position of power and you needed a command, respect, and now it's almost the opposite. We're all the things that you were embodying and talking about, where now it's. I feel like I'm better Capable of delivering that, that tough feedback and sticking to the data, because I have those relationships and I'm able to kind of take a step back and go. This is what we're talking about and it's not an attack on you and have obviously people, skills and communication around that, but a lot of what, what you've been talking about, it's really resonated.
Speaker 4:Coaching has evolved a lot and the internet is a massive part of that. So there was a point where the coach was the total authority. The coach knew how to do the training. I mean, usually, if we look back now, what they're actually teaching you was wrong.
Speaker 4:You know they were the authority and they had the ideas and this was my ethos and this is how I coach you. Well, now any athlete can come up to you and say well, I just read this study here and it says we should be doing four sets of ten, not five sets of five. But you know, whatever it is right so they can come and Challenge whatever it is that you're doing with them. So if you look at it like you're an authority, you're gonna lose these people really quickly.
Speaker 4:You have to partner with them and especially as the athletes get older and that was kind of how I would do it. The younger athletes you have to be reasonably firm with kind of set the the tone for it, set the expectations, build into what you're creating with them and then, as they get to know themselves more, as they get to understand themselves and the sport more. Now it's a partnership and I want them coming to me and saying, hey, can I try this? Hey, I've read about this, what do you think? And if I didn't know the answer, I would say to him I don't know, let's see if we can find some who can answer it for us, or let's study it together, or will you go and get more information and bring it back to me?
Speaker 4:I would never lie to an athlete and I have a Friend now who was an athlete that I coached for three years. I've got a silver medal in the Olympics in Tokyo and I wasn't coaching at the time while, like coaching Career would end it. He was on team GB by this point. I was in the US and running the US sprint program and he said to me I've got to let you know you're still the best coach I've had. And I said we've just got a silver medal at the Olympics. How?
Speaker 2:can you tell me I'm the?
Speaker 4:best coach and he said you're the only person who really understood me and you're the only person who's never lied to me or tried to bullshit me. He said everybody else, if I take them something, they'll think they have to have an answer and they're like this is it, and this is the answer.
Speaker 4:He said you just never did that. And I don't know if it's just some self-confidence about like I'm not going to lose the athlete, I'm not going to like look weak if I don't have the answer. But I've always felt it's just better to say I don't know if I don't know, and then let's see if we can find it out. And I get curious. I'm like this is great, let's find it out. And if you've found a better way of doing it, my coach and ethos has always been we're doing the best we can with the information we have now. If we find out something today or tomorrow or next week there's better than what we're doing now, we will switch to doing that and not in a fad approach. I know some people are always doing the latest fad. It has to be data-driven. We have to have some actual mechanism and reason why we're doing this. We're not just going to do things willy-nilly, but if we can show that this is going to be better, the evidence is suggested and this is a better way of doing it, let's do it that way. Like I have no ego around a training ethos and I saw that a lot in what I would call mid-level coaches, the you know, the very elite coaches tend to have that attitude, but the level below it tend to get very defensive and protective and it's one of the things that stops them being elite coaches. I have a training ethos and this is the way we need to do it and nothing can break through that.
Speaker 4:I'm sure you guys have seen coaches and worked with coaches like that Any kind of challenge on what they're doing, they take it personally and it's an attack on them and the way that they coach and they're training ethos. Instead of, oh, this is fun, yeah, let's challenge me. I like to be challenged. Am I With my clients? You know when I'm working with them and I'll say you know, I'll give a reflection and say is this what's going on for you? Have I got this correctly? And they'll go no, this is what's going on for me. I'm like great, let's explore that.
Speaker 4:Like, why would I want to stick to something if you're telling me that's not what it is? So I personally love that challenge and what I found is, as I got a better coach and this is so weird you know now I understand why. I understand the psychological mechanisms. But as I got to a higher level of coaching, I have less friends who are coaches in this country and I had more friends who are national team coaches in other countries who should be my rivals, but we're all experiencing the same thing.
Speaker 4:So we got together and I made three friends who are national team coaches in other countries and we would get together and we'd share ideas with each other because we love the sport so much. We just wanted to talk about cutting edge sprint cycling training. So I've got the fastest coaches in the world saying hey, lee, have you tried this yet? They're my rivals and they're saying have you tried this yet? It's awesome, so much fun, because they just loved the sport and they had no ego about who was going to win. They're like I still think I'm a great coach and if your athletes beat me well, they deserve to. So let's raise each other up rather than, as I said, that kind of next level Down was like I'm not telling you my secret and I'd be like but my athlete to be in your athlete.
Speaker 2:What secrets do you have? Love that, Lee. We're kind of at that part of the show where we really ask our last question to the day Before we do that. I am just curious because, like Derek and I have been involved in a lot of athletics and stuff like that throughout your life and stuff. Was there two or three athletes that you met, maybe not in a coaching setting, but whether it was near the Olympics time or your early encycling or even in your later life, that you just kind of met and you were super excited? I know, like for me, like when I meet some of my legends, people I've looked up to, it's pretty awesome and stuff like that. Was there anybody like that that you've met?
Speaker 4:Yeah absolutely, I mean there is a thing don't meet your heroes because they'll let you down. So I think you always have to be a bit careful to remember that the people that we see on TV and the people that we see at competitions, that's not necessarily who they are in real life. However, my best mate in the UK, david LeGris, is an absolute legend in the sport of cycling. He at one point was the fastest man in the world on a bicycle. So you know they do the thing where you get in a bike and you chase a car. He did a hundred and eighteen mile an hour on this bit of motorway that hadn't been opened in the rain. Wow, yeah, he's won 30 world championships, so like was competing into his late sixties.
Speaker 4:Just an absolute legend and is an incredible human being. So I met him as a young kid and he was unbelievably motivational to me. He really showed me what a coach can do, and he was able and is still now he's still coaches able to just get something out of his athletes that most coaches can't get out of them, because people they like being around him so much that they want to train hard and do well, just to keep being around him, and that is called being an admired leader, and there's lots of data around it and it's how you make people feel in your presence, and I'm still constantly trying to be that and emulate that as making people feel good about themselves in my presence. I think that's one of the best gifts you can give other human beings. And then there's I haven't met her personally, but there's a track sprint cyclist, a German woman, and her name's escaping me now. Oh, I'm so embarrassed.
Speaker 3:Christina Vogel.
Speaker 4:Okay, so she won the gold medal at the Olympics in 2016 in Rio. I think either the next year or the year after that. She crashed, broke her back and became paralyzed.
Speaker 2:Oh, and it was a total crash on the side track. Yeah, her last story.
Speaker 4:Yeah, it's a terrible crash. She was training on the track, she's coming into a flying effort and a coach, without looking, pushed a rider up in front of her. They collided. She would have been going to 45 mile an hour probably and just crashed awkwardly Bad accident broke her spine. And how she reframed that. There's an interview with her.
Speaker 4:She knew when she was lying on the floor that she'd broken her back. She couldn't feel her legs and she was pretty certain she was never going to walk again. And she immediately started thinking what's the next part of my life, instead of feeling sorry for herself, instead of feeling bitter or angry. In second, she went to okay, what's my life going to look like now and how am I going to make the most of it? And she does TV interview, she works in TV and she is just the most vivacious, bubbly, joyous human being.
Speaker 4:Yet she's been through this massive adversity. So I look at that and I think what a role model. And I know myself every bit of adversity that I faced my dad losing our house when we were younger because my mom lost her business. You know struggles with selling my business and how stressful that was. I fired a co-founder when I first started my real estate business because it wasn't working out and that was incredibly stressful. All of these adversities actually allow me to be a better person. So when everyone's working with people and they're facing big adversity, actually get excited and I kind of say to them you don't know it yet, but what you're going to learn from this is going to be pivotal for you. So and I always really admire people that are able to do that and reframe it and go what am I going to learn from this and how am I going to take this forward to be a better person? So there would be two people I think of. That's great.
Speaker 2:Well, I know you, you want to ask them that last question of the day. Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 3:I know we've been kind of dancing around this question the whole time and you've been doing a great job giving us your insight, who you are as an authentic person and who you are as a soul, but really we would really like to narrow it down to ultimately what does success look like to you? It means a hundred different things to everybody else, but what does success ultimately look like for you?
Speaker 4:I think we can't ignore some kind of financial reward. To me it looks like financial freedom. So not sitting there and thinking how can I pay my next bill and that's different for all of us. You know that number is different for all of us, but I think if you can get to a point where you can stop and go, I have enough that is an immense amount of success. So many of the people I work with cannot stop and go. I have enough. And then it traps them.
Speaker 4:I had a friend in the UK, very, very smart guy so when I was in property, owned hundreds of properties, multi-millionaire, and he was getting into the office at four o'clock every day still, and he was in his fifties. He was an ex-professional rugby player, he was overweight, he was out of shape and I just remember stopping him and going why, why are you doing this? And he just couldn't stop his childhood fear about being poor and not having enough money. So I think if you can overcome that drive and understand that and get to that depth of self-awareness of what's driving me why am I driven by it, acknowledging that and knowing that's a huge part to it. And then the next bit is knowing what your purpose in life is and it's taken me until my late forties to get there my purpose in life is to leave things better than I found them in every situation, and I've been doing it. You know I would be on the board of a velodrome and I'd leave it better. I'd help them run the velodrome better. You know I'd coach people. I'd leave them better as humans and as athletes. I was a manager at a sales company. I would leave the office better than I found it. I'd sort it out. I'd sort the systems out. Now I leave people and organizations better than I found them, and now I'm very clear about what that means to me and the impact that I want to have on it.
Speaker 4:I'm particularly drawn to helping men. I think at the moment there's lots of immature masculinity. You've got these young guys following. I hate toxic masculinity because that's not the right term for it. I think it's immature masculinity. But following these gurus that are saying you know, sleep with loads of women, smoke cigars, get Lamborghinis, that's the way to be successful. I know people that sleep with loads of women. I've done it. I know people that you know drink expensive champagne, go to night clubs, have Lamborghinis. Some of them are some of the saddest people I've ever met in my life.
Speaker 4:So it's really understanding who you are, what you want to achieve for your legacy. So a question I ask my clients is what do you want to be known for when you can sit down and write down, what is it you want to be known for when you're on your death bed? Nobody cares how much money you've got, nobody cares how much money you've made. What is it you want to be known for? What's the impact you want to have when you can figure that out? So knowing when you've got enough that doesn't mean you can stop working and you're just going to give up. But knowing when the money is no longer the driver, and then knowing what you want to be known for if you know those, I think you're going to be successful and you're going to look back in a mirror and go I like this person and having empathy for yourself. I fuck things up all the time, for now, and I'm really skilled Like.
Speaker 4:I'm great at difficult conversations. My wife's a therapist, I'm a coach. We can have difficult conversations, but I still mess stuff up and have an empathy for myself and immediately owning it when I mess things up. I tease the client in a group coaching session and she got upset and started crying and immediately I stopped and I said I'm sorry, that is on me, I took that too far. What do I need to do to tidy that up Right now? I'm not going to get defensive, I'm not going to get, I'm not going to get ashamed. I'm a human being. I made a mistake. How can I rectify it? And immediately that kind of shook her and she was like oh, you can be upset. So I kept her to be upset.
Speaker 4:What I said was stupid. It's okay. How do I rectify it? So I think having that level of self-awareness, that's where I want to keep playing this, keep getting that reflection from friends, family how do I keep myself humble?
Speaker 2:Love that, love that and I love that legacy question too, because we've followed professional athletes with high legacy careers and whatnot and legends and hallfamers and stuff like that and world record holders, and the biggest thing for us is that's why. Part of the reason why we're here with you today, lee, is because essentially, someday yes, people still read books in a library and whatnot and everything else but I heard this before through podcasts and stuff like that is now we're moving into that digital world. It's 2023. We got self-driving cars, we got AI technology. We got a lot of quick movement in technology.
Speaker 2:That hate to say it, like Derek and I, we're 40, you're 50. If you're not reading up on what's coming in the world, you're going to be left behind real quick. And the thing is with our legacy is this interview. Maybe 100 people view it, 1,000 people view it, maybe 10,000 people view it, however many people but it will forever be on the internet and we're leaving our legacy. So this half hour hour conversation, whatever it ends up being, we may 20, 30, 40, 50 years from now, when we're in our 70s, 80s and whatnot, we'll be able to pull up this video, see the legacy and the impact that we have. So we really appreciate your time and your energy and your empathy and all that you're doing for athletes and coaching and just life coaching and everything that you're doing for everybody in the world.
Speaker 4:Thank you, mike, I love that. One last thing I'd like to add. If it's okay, yeah, do it. The only person that really matters is yourself and what you think of yourself. So winning Olympic gold medals, making millions, nobody really cares about it.
Speaker 4:A friend of mine just written a book and he's a lovely guy and it's a bloody great book on what we do Leadership Coaching, awesome book and six months later he put this post. He says it doesn't change anything. So he wrote his book, he published his book. It doesn't change anything about how he sees himself. And I've seen this with athletes. They think that winning that title. And I've seen this with founders they think that selling that company is going to change everything. It might financially, but it doesn't change what you think about yourself. So the only thing that matters is you looking at yourself and going do I like this person? That's it. If you can achieve that, you're going to have a good impact. If you like yourself, you're going to draw other people to you. You're going to be able to have good relationships with people. The achievements, they're great, but they're fleeting moments. It's how you are as a human being that really matters and it's the impact you have on others.
Speaker 3:That gave me goosebumps. Hit it right on the head.
Speaker 4:Which is why we see all of these athletes that end their careers and then become alcoholics and lose all of their money because you don't know that really matters and the big scheme of stuff. I'm not saying it's wrong. I love working towards a goal and I love winning stuff. I do go-kart racing now and you bet I'm bloody competitive, but I also know that it doesn't really matter. What really matters is the relationship I have with the people that I do the go-kart racing, with the relationship I have with my wife, how I treat my friends.
Speaker 3:Absolutely. I think that's a great spot to end. You've said a lot of great stuff resonated with us and really appreciate you coming on here and sharing an hour, hour and a half with us and blessing us with your wisdom and your authentic self. So thank you again for coming on the podcast here at Everyday Jills my pleasure.
Speaker 4:Derek, and thank you for staying up so late.
Speaker 2:Yeah, definitely, we really appreciate it. You can listen to more of our content at EverydayJillstv. We're on all streaming podcasts YouTube, spotify, apple Podcasts, google Podcasts you name it, we're on it. So we really appreciate your time, lee, and thank you again for your inspirational words and wisdom. If there's anything down the road that you need from us, we'll do it for you.