The Power of Character in Sustained Success | Paddy Upton | TEDxIIMBangalore
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCIwtAf7ER4 Video ID: dCIwtAf7ER4 ============================================================ Awesome. [Applause] [Music] So, how does deepening the roots of your character translate to professional success? When Gary Kirsten and I joined the Indian cricket team as coaches in 2008, we set two outcome goals that we hope to guide the team towards and two process goals that we believed would give us the best possible chance at achieving those. Some 3 years later, at the end of our tenure, there was one of those two process goals we never shared with anybody. We kept it as a closely held secret until well after our time with the team had finished, by which time they had achieved those two outcome goals of becoming the number one test team in the world for their first time and winning the 2011 World Cup. That process goal we never shared with a team was we wanted to make people better or the cricketers better people for our interventions. Now there's two reasons we kept that as a secret and never shared it. Number one, we weren't paid to make the cricketers better people. We were paid to make them win cricket matches. And number two, the perceived level of arrogance. Who did Gary Kirsten and Patty Upton think we were as people that we could make other people better people? Were we even good enough ourselves? And in that particular team, there were some iconic players. Section Tendulkar, Rahul Draad, Anil Kumblé, Surf Ganguli, MS Joanie, Vera Kohli and more. But I was convinced then and I'm even more convinced now that being a good person directly translates to first achieving and then sustaining success at the highest level. Some three years later after starting the team we found ourselves here in Bangalore in this very city preparing for the opening match of the 2011 cricket world cup and in that team we had a player by the name of Sachin Tendulka. Some of you have heard of him. Satch was in his 21st year of international cricket and it was his sixth World Cup he would be going into and we planned a session to tap into that expertise. section agreed to sit in what we called the king's chair at the front of the team room and players were asked to bring whatever questions they had for him. There would be only the players and support staff and no recording devices. So Sction was free to speak openly. One of the young players Ravi Jade I remember asked Satchin what was the most significant moment of your career and Saxon said that moment happened when I first played cricket for my country at the age of 16 years old. And I remember sitting there in the room thinking, well, that's pretty obvious. Anyone who plays test cricket for their country at 16, that would be the most significant moment. But Saxon's answer took certainly me and I think many others by surprise. He said it wasn't when I played for my country that moment happened. It happened when I returned from my first test tour and one of my closest 16-year-old friends came to me and he said, "Saxction, can I speak freely and I speak on behalf of the friendship circle?" And he said, "My friend told me that we all recognize you're a better cricketer than us, but since you've been picked for India, you're behaving as if you're a more important person than us, and we don't like it." And section said, "That was the first time I realized what I'm doing as a cricketer and who I am as a person are different, and I need to work on being the best cricketer I can be, but I also need to work on being the best person I can be." And that would turn out to be a very insightful gift given the amount of hero status and demigod status he would get for the next 23 years of his career and beyond. He went on to say and tell us that evening he said I went home and I spoke to my dad about this and my dad said to me throughout your career your results will go up and your results will go down and when your results go up and you do well people will love you and praise you. When you do badly, people will criticize you, but the impact you have on them as a person will last a lifetime. Now, that's a pretty cool story of a significant moment that helped drive Satchin to be the great cricket he was and the great person he also was and is. But how does that how does being a good person translate to first achieving and then sustaining success at the highest level? And there's two important words there. Success and sustained. When it comes to the word sustained, there's some very public examples of highly skilled, highly successful athletes whose careers and legacy has been cut abruptly and unnecessarily short. Probably the poster boy example of this is Lance Armstrong, the greatest cyclist and one of the greatest athletes ever to have lived. He won seven tour to Frances, was a cancer survivor, and held a cancer champion with his Livstrong campaign. He was also the ring leader of the world's most sophisticated sports doping program. He cheated, lied, and bullied his teammates. He intimidated witnesses. He lied to hearing panels. And for that, he got banned for life. That fall from grace was a direct result of a rot in the core of his character. It had nothing to do with his cycling ability. Mike Tyson, undisputed heavyweight champion of the world. He earned around $300 million in his career. Despite that amazing success, he was also jailed for three years for sexual assault, jailed for drink driving and drugs, confessed drug addict, married three times of seven children, and by 2003 he was bankrupt. In his own words at the end of his career, he said, "My whole life has been a waste. I have been a failure." Again, his fall from grace was a direct result of flaws in his character. Nothing about what he did in the boxing ring. In recent years, social media has shone a huge limelight on players careers, not just on what they do on the field, but also on their character and who they're being while they're playing on the field and also on their personal lives. And this has had consequence. There's more and more sports coaches and selectors in team sports particularly who are adopting a policy of not choosing or even dropping high-erforming superstars who are known to have flaws or questionable personalities. Kevin Peterson, the England cricketer, was famously dropped from the England cricket team because of his so-called disruptive personality. And this happened at a time when he was not only the best batsman in the England team, but one of the best batsmen in the world game. And being dropped for his personality flaws, that signal the end of his international career. Sponsors these days are not just endorsing athletes based on their sporting prowess. They also strongly considering what kind of character, what kind of person is this athlete. And this is particularly off the back of Nike having lost repeatedly between five and 12 billion dollars as a result of the Tiger Woods uh scandal. They also ended up withdrawing sponsorship from Lance Armstrong for his doping, from Kobe Bryant for alleged sexual assault, from Oscar Ptorius for murder, and from at least six other athletes who brought their reputation and brand into disrepute. And alongside those sport coaches, selected sponsors, there's increasing narrative in the business world today to hire for character and teach for skill. I would go so far as to say that next to our health, character is one of our single most important assets to set up for a successful experience in life. When it comes to the second word success, how does being a good person actually translate to success in the first place? In 2003 in the South African cricket, they identified 15 young cricketers who were earmarked as the next best probables to play for the country. And I was asked as mental coach to do one-on-one sessions with each one of them individually over the offseason to help them prepare for potentially playing for the country. I asked these players to please come to the sessions and bring whatever questions they would like to discuss about their mental game and going forwards in their career. I remember there was one of those cricketers who he wanted to talk about philosophy and spirituality and life and ego and how these things related to sport and all of life and they were fascinating conversations but we spoke very little about cricket. I had never seen this particular individual play, but the experts of the day were saying that he probably wasn't going to make it in international cricket because he had two fundamental flaws in his game. Firstly, he had a technical flaw that he refused to change and that the experts said he was going to get exposed at the higher levels of the game because of that flaw. And the other reason, he was very unathletic. He was not fit. He was not fast. He was not agile. And there were people who are saying he's probably just an affirmative action selection which meant at the time he was selected based on his skin color to satisfy a policy by the South African government to have a certain amount amount of players of color in each squad. Still the conversations were great and I remember arriving at the last session and I asked each of these 15 players bring whatever your one or two big questions are. Let's discuss it because there probably there's chance we won't get to see each other again. This particular individual walked into the room and he said to me, "Patty, I just have one question. If I make who I am being as a person a priority in my life, do you think it will compromise my chance of playing for my country?" And I remember thinking, "Wow, it's a hell of a question for a 20-year-old." And I thought about it and my answer was I don't know. And he stood up. He said that's the only question I had for today. He thanked me for the sessions, shook my hand and he left. And I remember sitting there looking at my watch with 58 minutes still left of the 60-minute session and feeling really disappointed in myself. I thought surely Paddyy, you could have come up with something better than I don't know. I really wanted to help this guy. I really liked him, but that was the best I could offer. This player continued with the so-called technical flaw in his game and he remained unathletic. He also went on to be the first South African cricketer in history to score more than 300 m runs in a single test match innings. He was the fastest cricketer in international one-day cricket history to reach a total of 2,000 runs, 3,000, 4,000, 5,000, 6,000, and 7,000 runs. and he captained his country. His name was Hashim Amla. And the reason Hashim there's two superpowers that got him that was number one was his preparation. He prepared with more intensity and attention to detail than most batsmen in international cricket to the degree that he would often back just with a thin round cricket stump while someone hurled fast-paced golf balls down at him. His other superpower was his mindset. the fact that he made who he was as a person a priority in his life, even a higher priority than playing for his country. And as a result of his high self-esteem, he did not suffer from two of the biggest mental obstacles to success in sport. And I would hazard agree in all of life, pressure and fear. How does this work? Pressure and fear are closely related to each other. They arise from me being here in the present moment and my mind dwelling on a result at some point in the future either success or failure. And that gap in time between where I am in the present and my mind is in the future is sometimes called the pressure gap or the anxiety gap or the fear gap. Pressure arises in direct proportion to how much value I place on winning or on a result in future. So the more important it is to do well like in a world cup or an Olympic final the more pressure increases. Similarly fear arises from how scared I am of things going wrong in the future like a fear of injury, a fear of making mistake, fear of failure, fear of disappointing someone, fear of embarrassment. The thing about pressure and fear they are not real. Pressure and fear are mental concepts we create for ourselves in our own mind. And we do that to ourselves based on how desperate we are to win or to not lose. And the thing that drives that mental activity for every one of us to get our mind focused on a result at some point in the future and get stuck there is ego. Every single one of us in the room here has an ego. And it drives every single one of us to want two things. It drives us to want to look good in the eyes of others. And if we can't look good, it drives us to not want to look bad. Here's the rum. The more insecure we are within ourselves, the lower our self-esteem, the more important it is to win so that I can look good and feel good. and as a result the pressure increases. Similarly, I don't want to make mistakes or things to go wrong because then I look bad and feel bad and as a result fear or nerves increase. And we know that pressure, fear, nerves tightens the body. It tightens the mind and that causes performance to be compromised. In contrast, the more secure we are within ourselves, the higher our self-esteem, the less attached we are to results. The less we identify who we are as a people with results. In the case of Hashim Amla, sure, he wanted to do well, but he wasn't desperate and he didn't want to fail, but he had no problem and no concern about failing. And because he wasn't attached to success or failure in the future, it freed his mind up to be fully focused on the task at hand in the present moment. He was able to fully express himself in the act of batting, one ball at a time, largely unattached to the result of that act. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what it means to focus on the process and let the results look after themselves. We are always maximally effective when we are focused in the present moment on the task at hand. Not worrying about what happened and not worrying about what's going to happen as a result. Let's have a look at how this exact thing plays out at the highest level in one of the most mentally challenging sports in the world, chess. Well, that game is all in the mind. I spent probably over 30 hours helping 17 and then 18year-old Indian chess grandmaster Gesh prepare for the chess world championship match. It would be 14 games in 18 days against reigning world champion Dingen from China. Through those conversations, Gesh got to fully accept that over those 14 games he was going to lose. He was definitely going to make mistakes on the chessboard that would hand the advantage back to his opponent. He also knew he was going to win games and he knew his opponent would make mistakes that would hand an advantage to him. And because he fully accepted things were going to go wrong and things were going to go right, he wasn't scared of making mistakes and losing and he was in no rush to win. His job was to remain fully focused on the chess board as it was set out in front of him, not worried about what had happened before and not worried about what might happen afterwards and make the best move available to him in that moment. 18 days later, over 50 hours of chess, after over five hours into the 14th and final game, the scores were still tied on 6 and 1/2 6 and 1/2. By the end of that game, Gesh was going to have focused on the board only one moment longer than his opponent. And in that one moment, his opponent made a mistake that Gesh was able to capitalize on to become the youngest world chess champion in history by four years. Subsequent to winning, as we all know, Gesh's life has changed fundamentally. There is so much agilation, celebration, admiration that is being heaped upon him. Not just within India, a country of about 1.4 billion people, but beyond that, his life has fundamentally changed. Gesh the person is exactly the same person he was before that game started with the same value system and the same level of humility. And the message I want to share today is separate yourself from your results. Who you are and what you do and the results of what you do are different. Yes, put full effort on developing your professional attributes on growing as a professional and at the same time but separate to that work on being the best person you can be. And in this way, ladies and gentlemen, deepening the roots of your character give wings to soar to the lofty heights of sustained professional success. Thank you.