One of the World's best-respected Sports Psychologists Bill Beswick| Full Interview

i prefer to be the kind of person who steps up and faces the challenge than the kind of person who stays below the line and avoids the challenge what kind of person do you want to be what do you want how badly do you want it how much you wanted to suffer those three questions our high performers face every day it's jordan mulligan from the mulligan brothers and today's interview is with bill besick one of the most highly decorated sports coaches in the uk from coaching teams like manchester united football team england football team england

basketball team he's coached olympic gold medalists and he takes a sports psychologist look he's just released his new book before that i just wanted to say a massive shout out to molyneux.com the sponsor of the video where you can now buy the not a journal from mollymothers.com it's linked down below all of that helps support these projects before that let's jump into this interview with bill bessette for people who who don't know just introduce yourself on what you do well my name is bill besik i'm an applied sports psychologist which means that i work with

athletes teams and coaches to improve their performance by helping them overcome mental and emotional barriers to performance yes i'd love to know what what different sports have you worked in as well like just give us a list i know you said a lot earlier but many different sports from equestrian to american football to basketball to netball to you name it because i've always believed that some of the performance issues that i deal with cross all sports and of course cross business and education as well because the human being when called upon to perform it's something

that's challenging faces all the mental and emotional barriers that i was talking about before so i think my work applies across all aspects of performance lovely i think we'll we'll definitely touch on that as well a little bit a bit later but um early days for yourself uh we have a large american audience how would you describe your childhood the area that you grew up in well very working-class manchester man youngest of a family of six circumstances but had two great breaks which changed my life one was i i passed the 11 plus from my

primary school to go to grammar school grammar school brought me very much a middle-class sort of upbringing and the second one was at the age of 14 i joined the manchester ymca which introduced me to a lot of people who'd been educated experienced and i learned so much from them so i had a limited home environment but a very much better environment outside the home and then so early on first sports was you say basketball was one of your early things was that what you played with straight away or was you into other sports well

when i joined manchester umca they have 56 sports they're over six floors and i went as a 14 year old small thin with a plastic bag with some kitten and walked around all 56 sports and nobody spoke to me and i didn't know what to do and i was in the gymnasium and there was basketball practice and the polish coach of the team came over to me and said do you want to join in and those words have created my life i i can't re think about how important those words are to me and that's

been my motto in life to say that to other people as i've gone through life do you want to join in and he kickstart which was an amazing career so did you start playing at a high level with basketball or i was very limited as a player i'm afraid i i i dreamed about playing a high level i love the sport i still love the sport but it became clear to me that my physique wasn't matched for the game so i made an early transition into coaching and found my delight that i loved coaching manchester

basketball i don't know if i've got this right john amichy is that is that yes john amichi would become an american superstar or mba and uh college star yes i have an interesting story about john amici when i was playing basketball early on i actually i sent him an email saying really i'm trained to be in the nba can you offer any tips or help and he sent me through this whole program to go over over the summer and i did it every single day and i think just like you said with that coach is

like those inclusive inclusive moments for people like to reach out and help somebody else um what's your thoughts on children and especially young adults nowadays getting involved in a sport and maintaining that i think it's so important i think it's so important it's an activity which demands a level of commitment a level of courage focus concentration determination resilience and i think a lot of the present generation of young people have had life a little bit easy they've been brought up in reasonably good circumstances by parents who really love them too much done too much for

them and so they're not very resourceful as a generation but you step into the world of sport and you've got to face up to some realities and i think sport can help society by teaching children all those great qualities what are those lessons that you learn when you're when you join in sport and well the first thing is commitment when you join a team you're committed and then the second thing is to get on with other people you've got to move from me to we you've got to stop being selfish and start being selfless you've

got to pass the ball to the person in the best position or they will tell you you should pass the ball to the person in the best position and then you've got to learn to have self-belief and and when you're playing in the arena stepping up in the arena you've got to take responsibility for your actions you've got to have resilience when you get beaten or get dropped from the team you've got to bounce back so a lot of great human qualities which will help them throughout life are embedded in the learning of sport for

yourself as a as a young athlete was there any particular moments that you remember that taught you any lessons i think there was there was quite a few um i think the the lesson of self-belief was a big one i i i have each person has two selves their real self and their performer self and my real self is different from what you're hearing now this is my performance self in action my real self is quite shy quite quiet quite introverted and that's what i first of all brought to the basketball court and it didn't

work so i had to develop a performer self i had to inject myself with confidence and assertiveness to go out and dictate and lead a team and that was a big lesson to me because when i became a teacher which was my first job i was able to walk into the classroom my real self build blessing quite quiet guy but step up into my performance self and become bill bessette the teacher okay children this is what we're going to do today so it was a great lesson to me that you can really be who you

want to be what was that moment of transition from playing to to coaching what was the biggest attraction about getting into the coaching side of things well to be honest it was determined by my fellow players they decided i'd be better as a coach than a player so i okay um but the transition for me was fairly easy i i think i've got a teacher type personality i love to share i love to share knowledge to share information see people do better so i'm very much a people person so coaching fitted my natural instincts my

normal personality and of course there was no where i could go for advice at that time in this country there was no coaching profession so information from america was very limited at the time so i had to really write my own script but i loved it i loved it and the players responded really well in fact my first team my very first team still meets every year as a reunion and that's that's lovely that's about the good things in human beings um what's the progression then from so was it basketball initially with the coaching like

what was the progression for your career well basketball and then so my career was parallel i had a career in in education so i went to college as a trained to be a pe teacher started teaching in manchester went from teaching to lecturing at college um and pursued a career in education as a as a teacher and a professor and uh finally a president of a college but i had this parallel career as a basketball coach who coached the club level and then got lucky enough to be asked to coach england had five exhilarating years

with england traveling the world playing international basketball and then uh finished because my two sons demanded my my time to that coach them they were 10 and 12 and then came back into sport unexpectedly so this is something you probably wouldn't do naturally but you have a quite a long list of accolades in some of the sports you've been involved in some of the teams you've been involved in could you go through some of them and specific to some of the teams as well um well basketball um we won the commercial gold medal which was

the first medal that england had ever won basketball it was very good uh still still talk to my captain every week um football started at carlisle lovely carlisle loved it loved it more sheep than people um beautiful place nice people went to derby county um then manchester united then middlesbrough's assistant manager became the first non-football person to become assistant manager in the premier league then to england i worked with the england team um and then on to fc 20 in holland uh at the same time i was working with i think i've worked with nine

national teams of different sports so quite a journey what's what's for you like the thing that you latched onto the most like in terms of your career like that you enjoyed the most and you wanted to push and work towards i i think the initially it was wanting to be a good teacher to help children and help students and um and then it's become a fascination with sports psychology i think it's so important because i see how much it helps people and i've become fascinated with the process and it's interesting coaching and psychology are two

of the things you can never master you can never master them coaching is evolves all the time and and psychology is is so deep so wide that you i feel it's only only touch the surface and there's so much more which is why my age i'm still doing it working because i'm actually interested in what i'm finding out how would you describe sport psychology to somebody who's never heard of it before well it it's it's about maximizing on yourself it's about dealing with your own doubts fears and anxieties about letting the positive you defeat the

negative you because really psychology is a is a battle of you versus you we we think the opposition's over there in the other dressing room but actually it's in here who am i going to be today am i going to be my best self or my weaker self so a lot of my psychology with teams and athletes and coaches comes down to fighter versus victim we have a choice there's a good story clint eastwood was playing golf and his partner this last year's partner said clint how old do you he said 88. he said 88

on monday and his partner said wow it's wonderful what are you doing he says i'm starting a new movie he said how did he do it he said i wake up every morning and don't let the old man and that's life we wake up every morning and make a decision who we're going to be i've got parkinson's disease so getting up in the morning is not so easy for me getting dressed is not so easy i have to make a decision am i going to be a fighter today or am i going to be a

victim and that's what fascinates me with motorcycle and i suppose in a nutshell sports psychology is deciding whether you're going to be a fighter or a victim that's so applicable as well to everybody in life like you say like yours isn't based on sports so like in terms of other people waking up each morning deciding you know what how how they're going to be there's going to be a positive outlook or a negative outlook is that something can we take those lessons and apply them to our lives absolutely my latest book takes 20 lessons from

sport where i've dealt with somebody in sport some quite famous athletes but they've got a mental and emotional problem getting in the way of their performance and i explain how together we dealt with it overcame it and they went on to become what they were capable of but then i draw it parallel to everybody i mean in a sense we're all high performers we all step up every day to earn a living to maintain relationships to take the responsibility of owning property to raise children we're all high performers so the lessons of my high performance

in sport carries carry across into life is there anything in particular when initially when you were seeing athletes that you would draw a commonality like there's something in in common with the athletes that was stopping them from performing or issues that they were having i tend to ask athletes three questions when they come to see me and i i've had a lot of distinguished athletes come to see me over the years and my three questions are what do you want how badly do you want it and how much you willing to suffer and very often

everything revolves around the first question what do you want because a lot of people are unclear what they want from life they don't sit down and think through we are writing our own life story every day and yet we don't think about it what what who do we want to be where do we want to live what life do we want to lead when we finished our life come to the end of our life and look back what do we want to say that we've done so what do you want is a very powerful question

and then if an athlete says i want to be the best bill fine how badly do you want it because it's going to you've got to pay a price to be the best the best payer big price you've got to work harder you've got to commit more you've got to take more responsibility you have to deal with more ups and downs and if this if we can deal with that question how much are you wanting to suffer because i work with gold medal champions and they suffer every day they work enormously hard they sacrifice enormous

things in order to get that success so we were speaking about this before the we've been following two the two strong men the stolten brothers and one of them just one world's strongest man and one of them is trying to win world's strongest man this year and the closer and closer he gets to it the more of the the price he's paying the more pain he's going through the more sacrifice is there a point where you with your athletes that you worked with that they took it too far the is there a point where you

have to tell them to stop or like what is the boundary the the line that's that can't be crossed the boundary online revolves around physical and mental well-being so i would be very careful not to take somebody to the state where they were injuring themselves mentally or physically where obsession with a goal overcame common sense understanding so there are points where i i'm also part of my job is to be a truth teller many athletes are surrounded by people who don't tell them the truth as indeed many people are a good friend is is somebody

who tells you the truth that helps you more part of my role is to tell athletes the truth and one of those truths may be i think you've got to face up to the fact you've not got the ability to go any further you run your race now relax enjoy you did really well you maxed out on what you were capable of doing so if they're not as long as they're not pushing up against that and it's not creating a mental straw they're allowed to sort of extend themselves through pain and i think you use

the word obsession then obsession i mean you see in athletes all the time that's okay to have an obsession with a goal obsession is a difficult word for me because i think focus a focus on a goal is a better word it's more controlled more legitimate so i think obsession means you lose control of the process focus is more you're more in control of the process as long as i feel the athletes in control of what they're trying to achieve i'm fairly happy with that it's when they start to lose control and they lose their

their reason why because very often an athlete continues into the pain barrier because of the people around them they don't want to let people down they themselves would be comfortable stepping out and say that's it i've done enough but they they persist because of the pressure of their their support group obviously you've worked with a lot of athletes what is when you say about pay the price the pain that they go through how does that look for somebody like a gold medal winner it looks like an everyday commitment where you wake up every day and

say just like clint eastwood you say today i'm going to be a champion i work with adam peter the gold medal swimmer and he gets arrives at the swimming pool at six o'clock in the morning and before he goes in he stops and says today i will train like a champion and he trains for two hours like a champion nobody in the pool can get near him he works so hard and he comes back again at six o'clock in the evening and he stops outside the arena and says tonight i'm gonna train like a champion

and he trains like a champion i i gave a talk some years ago when adam was a bit younger about attitudes to training and i said there's various types of attitudes to training there's the just turn up so that you get athletes who just turn up it's training tonight i just i'll just turn up you get athletes who turn up to compete or turn up to train sorry turn up to train they'll turn up they'll do the requisite amount of work but that's it athletes will turn up to compete they put a bit more effort

in they try they try to be the best amongst their group then there's the athletes who train to win they train every day every session so they win on match night and then i remember saying to adam's group there are just those very few players who train to dominate they train so hard that winning is inevitable on race night and adam said that clicked with me i decided i was gonna train to dominate so he said when i go into the olympic final i know i know i'm gonna win i know i've done more than

anybody else i feel so good that's giving me goosebumps at hers that's amazing so i think as well as as a non-athlete non-professional athlete we see the athletes and we think a lot of the psychology is based around game day you know it's race day whatever it is so how much is based on the consistency of showing up 360 days a year whatever it is and having the right psychology in those moments everything everything race day should be inevitable when it should be inevitable that's the price that athletes pay race day is fun because there's

a crowd there's cameras there's your family your friends and it's nice to do that what they don't see the people in the arena don't see is you on your own at six o'clock in the morning working out sweating struggling and that's what makes champions the ability to motivate themselves to do the work on their own that leads to success in the arena what builds an athlete up so we've got the training aspect of it but there's so many more like meticulous little bits like in your experience what goes into creating an athlete including like diet

sleep like all these things that they're thinking about well there are four main elements there's the physical element you've got to take care of your strength speed stamina nutrition sleep health there's the technical element each activity has a skill base so you've got to develop the skills so for adam petey it would be skills swimming stroke turning diving in turning and then you've got to develop the tactical intelligence to compete follow a plan know your position on the field uh know how you relate to the members of the team know how to deal with certain

situations in the game one nil up or one no down and then there's the mental element that's building the confidence and belief that you are a champion that you can do this is so it's it's that indeed that changed from being in the dressing room the comfort zone to being in the tunnel before a big game breathing in to going on the field and believing and having the confidence to do what you do well okay so let's take a step back how did you get into the football what was the pool to get for to

switch sports to football well it was by accident really i had this i had finished coaching england and i'd had this really growing interest in sports psychology but i was a principal of a college and i we we hired some of our facilities to the football association for coaching courses and a chap called mick wadsworth came along and summer other we finished up having a cup of tea together and we got talking and he he became fascinated and when he held the course in the summer at lillyshore for 200 youth courses his coaches he invited

me to speak to what they could learn about what sports psychology could do for football and that was it really because in the audience it was steve mclaren a young under-17 coach for oxford united and he went on to become a famous coach and i went on his journey with i went to mick with mick to carlyle first and then with steve mclaren on the journey to man united england middlesbrough fc 20. so it sort of happened it's one of those nice things in life where you know i had reached the age where i wasn't

looking for anything i thought i had a pretty good career i was fine but i had this interest and i quite liked sharing it and those i met some good people who allowed me the opportunity to share it with football players and actually they took to it quite well in a general sense in sports um just across the board is sport psychology still overlooked or is it is it becoming like more of a thing at the moment it is it's on its way it's going to be very big um i think there's a generation of

coaches that going through that don't know a lot about it and perhaps a little bit intimidated by it because the word psychology can be frightening um but there's a young generation of coaches coming along who i'm far more familiar with it and far less threatened and they will involve i mean it it's hard now to to think of somebody a superstar athlete who wouldn't have a sports psychologist on their support staff because the stresses and strains that they're putting i'm thinking about young miss radicanu who's just won the american open tennis at 18. the world

has changed for her with one victory the media can't get enough of it the commercial opportunities she's won one tournament she's 18 19 now i think she needs help i mean she's a very sensible girl a very intelligent girl but i still think she would benefit from having a sports psychologist on her team so have you seen young athletes like that go through that kind of burst onto the scene like if you have what kind of work do you have to do for them and what the kind of things that they will face along like

in in those moments well i think they it is it's very difficult for a young athlete suddenly to get a multi-million pound contract or become a celebrity um because it affects them and it's effect it affects the people around them the people around them change because they've suddenly instead of just being friends with this kid who's good at sport they're friends with a superstar who can who's rich can introduce them to things can do things and it becomes a very heavy mixture i remember talking to david beckham at man united about being an ordinary person

with an extraordinary talent so i would say to him david you're an ordinary person with an extraordinary talent you have got an extraordinary talent he was a lovely player lovely man by the way a lovely player but you're an ordinary person when you've got this training ground make sure you stop at those red lights you're not that extraordinary you can go through red lights so it's about keeping balance what do you want do you want to be a celebrity or do you want to be the best player you can be if you want to be

the best player you can be forget that concentrate on your training so with someone like david like how would you what was the process of work like how much was based on performance and how much is based on the outside world because i mean someone like him like it's this constant thing he steps outside and he's surrounded by paparazzi and fans and stuff like how much works based on each thing well the work is based on his sporting performance the outside thing only gets included when it affects his sporting performance so he was actually very

good at dealing with it um because he he was one who evolved much dramatically quickly because of his his wife um but he was good at dealing with it but you learn to see the signs of change so for example i remember being fc 20 with an 18 year old boy who was very good and he was a humble boy a nice boy he came used to coming to the training ground in an old beat up volkswagen which was rather nice um and he got his first contract which was i think a million euros or

something like that and the next day came up in the biggest shiniest car you've ever seen and that triggered my thinking oh my goodness me my goodness me there's going to be a problem and he was out to the game in two years wow so can that be a thing too much too soon for these for these young athletes it is unless they get good advice it's still the best thing that an athlete can have is two good parents so if you're if you were to try to convince a coach or even an athlete to

take up sports psychology how would you explain it to them well i would explain to them about demonstrating the power of the mindset on performance because if if i say to a coach is it your own aim to create excellent football players or rugby players or basketball players or whatever the coach is coaching and they say yes so i said just describe to me give me words that describe an excellent player in your sport and they'd give me a page of words and i'd say let me just do something and circle the words leave some

uncircled circling words and i said what's the difference between the two and one the circled words would be dominate the page that and they said the circle words are all mental attitude let's say there you go so if you describe cristiano ronaldo you finish up with a page of mental attributes courage to perform whatever so that's the way i convince them so how much do you teach the three words that are not mental and how much we teach the mental well we don't teach the mental there you go wow so yeah i mean if i

was to think just then when you said about an athlete i would most of them would be mental yeah when uh someone like myself or a normal person thinks of an athlete we think training in the gym practicing reps whatever it is but that's just such a small percentage it's so interesting and as we were saying before this was interviewing a sports psychologist recently it just blows my mind and it's just it's just interesting to see athletes starting to work with them you know in the olympics and the olympic athletes would you say that 99

of those guys are working with sports psychologists not 99 but a lot more a lot more um i've worked with british swimming now for the last eight years since london which was a very disappointing olympics i was brought in immediately after london to create a winning environment to change the environment and we went to rio and had the most successful one and then we went to tokyo an even more successful one and i think that some sports are now far more familiar with sports psychologists and they've got them embedded in the system one of the

things that this was on the website um your own website was the word psychology we just spoke about this can be off-putting for people so you like to use the word stretch and stretching performance what do you mean when you say stretching performance well psychology for many people means shrink and and that's an unfortunate connection that's i found when the newspapers first got some understanding of what i was doing so my first headline in the newspaper was shrink talks to football players so i i i don't see myself as a shrink at all i see

myself as a stretch because i'm only focused in their performance what can i do to help you perform better so i might stretch it one or two percent which at the highest level is is quite significant i i actually think it probably is more than that but you never know you can't tell you can't measure it can you well that that's something that i was going to go into next is that extra one to two percent it is an extra one or two percent but how much more in like how important is that extra little

bit it it can be everything it can be everything but i think what what it is an extra one one or two percent on the surface but underneath what what happens when a sports psychologist works with an athlete is we change the way they think we give them another language so that when they're faced with something when they're not with us they have something to go to a sort of language like fighter or victim so many many athletes who i've worked with in the past who see me now and lovely in the chat say i

find myself just in life dealing with the kids or whatever at home and i'm going am i a fighter or a victim so it it actually creates a framework for thinking more positively about life how applicable is it to people like entrepreneurs business owners um you know all these people people in education the the work that you're doing with athletes very applicable because as i said before we're all high performers and some of those people have got very high performance jobs and some of them are entering very i mean i work in the challenge industry

there are a body of people in this country who avoid challenge stay below the line don't take any responsibility work for somebody else live in somebody else's property and they they don't risk the challenge but the people i work with step over the line every day and face challenge they can fail they can be embarrassed they can get hurt so that challenge industry extends across business education and sport and life and so i work with people who have faced many negatives and i help them change reframe those negatives into possible positives so i think i've

often thought we're talking now about national health service being burned out i think they need coaches in hospital coaches who look at the people not just look at the systems everybody in hospital is concerned with systems making patients better but who who looks after the people who are doing that a coach coming into a business would look after the people in the business that could make a massive impact on the business if you're enjoying the video guys please consider going to mullenburg.com where you can now buy the not a journal and the inspire change t-shirts

let's hop back into the interview you're just talking about the certain type of person who takes that step over the line every day um something that i feel like we've noticed a lot with some of the people who watch our videos and some of the people who have struggled to succeed is the fear of failing is so immobilizing that they won't even try they'd prefer not to try and find out i mean is that something that you you've seen and if it is how do people deal with that i think that's very common i think

when faced by challenge the mind skips into the future and says what if i fail what if i am embarrassed what if i get injured what if i and i have to give them a different way of thinking and the thinking is i may get fail i may get embarrassed i may get injured but i can deal with it because i'm strong and because i prefer to be the kind of person who steps up and faces the challenge than the kind of person who stays below the line and avoids challenge what kind of person do

you want to be what do you want how badly do you want it how much you wanted to suffer those three questions our high performers face every day one of the things i think again with athletes is that it's like they're this special type of person i'd be interested to find out if that's the case like you are born a certain way your brain ticks in a certain way so you you can become a high achiever even in in other realms is that the case that takes a special type of person or can everybody step

into high achievement and pushing it to a different like pushing the boundaries of different places there's a great phrase genetics deals the cards environment plays the hand so genetics uh and you your background does influence your disposition to success in various activities but environment the opportunity and i talked about my environment in manchester mca do you want to join in that was a major major influence on my life those five words um so environment just does give opportunities to people to maximize themselves i'm a great believer in that anybody can change at any stage of

their life we're writing our own story our own life story but there's no reason why we can't stop have a mental time out and go what do i really want and start from that moment on rewriting your story by facing the challenge achieving for yourself and putting your fears and anxieties to one side so i i i i would never give up on somebody never how do they have those type of people i think because the automatic response i see on some of our videos because we what we do a lot of videos of elite

elite athletes and high achievers is well it's all right for them you know it's okay for them that this is the comments we'll get it's okay for them they he's got genetic decent genetics where it's all right for him he's from an affluent background or it's all right there's always something that you know they have that i don't have and that's why i haven't got it how would you initially work with somebody that to like flip that mindset around another great thing i wrote once was there's a thousand excuses but not a single reason i

did that with bristol bears rugby last season they loved it when you step into the challenge zone the number of excuses for getting out backed into your comfort zone from there multiplies i'm too tired it's too difficult i'm having a bad day nobody likes me uh and so i would teach them to face up to those excuses and refuse to be a victim and teach them a fighter mentality about all those things may be there but i'm still going to do it i'm going to deal with it so a thousand excuses but not one reason

not to achieve and even if you don't achieve at the highest level you may not have the same genetic disposition as somebody else but there's an awful lot of players playing in the premier league football in this country who and b for talent not quite as genetically superior but a for attitude and attitude is something anybody can have anybody talent is something that may be a little bit god-given but attitude is anybody's you can decide to improve your attitude any day okay so just to emphasize on that point because i think that is is really

important to this is if you've got that previous position to have a negative mindset and a defeatist mindset you can switch it around to have the positive attitude that could take you if you're a young person to becoming a high achiever in sports or high achieving business you're in control you're in control of your mind it's your mind so you you decide what you think we're not stuck we're not stuck with the mindset we've got no no it's just it's the mindset that's with us for certain reasons we've got to change those reasons we're going

to decide we want something different and then we can develop a fresh mindset if he was looking at an athlete um i know it's it's there's so much that goes into the psychology but how would you have them work on themselves to start off with like what's the first few things they'd start to look at what do you want how badly do you want it how much you're going to suffer with the what do you want is there any exercises they can do like write down goals is there anything that you recommend personally there's an

exercise in in in my latest book which says uh who am i and it is a written exercise you write down i mean it starts with a dream if you if you don't have the dream then you're not really going to go anywhere but you have a dream and then i have to help them translate the dream into commitment and then to translate the commitment into belief into action into challenge into resilience into fight of it fighter mentality so it's a process but what there are many exercises many exercises but they're all the same they're

reframing your thinking from negative to positive they're all saying i remember doing an exercise with the indian women's soccer team and they were guilty of negative self-talk they talked themselves down so i gave them an exercise where i was give them a negative and they would have to shout out a positive we're not good enough we're great and the best one was we're never going to win today and the answer came out we're going to win because we're the meanest [ __ ] on this field today and i just cheered and clap them that's oh

well that's a that is a powerful piece right when we're talking about dreams i think for me um there's like i think when you say the word dreams it's like um not a negative view on it because i have loads of dreams but i think when i speak into a sports psychologist like is it all right to use the word dreams is it okay to have dreams like is that important to have a dream absolutely absolutely his young children have dreams and i i aspired to be a great basketball player when i came into basketball

i was going to be michael jordan of england it didn't turn out that way um but when you maturity is about understanding that dreams cannot always be fulfilled but the exercise of committing to them and trying for them has been excellent have been worthwhile ways of life and then you divert your dream i diverted my dream from being the best michael jordan to be in the best phil jackson the best coach basketball coach so i love dreams it's just about interpreting dreams into reality yeah i think that i think that's where the negative connotations come

from is that peop is not having the material like like putting structure around them making them into something that is actually achievable it's like just left up there to to not have anything to target towards when i speak to children in high school local high schools which i do i'm happy to do community work when i speak to them they'll say how many of you dreaming of passing your a levels to go to university well let me tell you this it's a great dream i love it well done but the only way you can fulfill

that dream is what you do today you can't just hope it's going to happen you've got to make it happen so you have a dream in three months time you're going to pass your examination for university so what you have to do because you have to be excellent on that day you have to be excellent today you have to study hard today and then you have to study hard tomorrow and then you have to study hard the next day and you know what that dream is coming to you you're not chasing it it's coming to

you and if you're excellent every day i guarantee you'll be excellent on examination day and you've achieved your dream i think a scary thing for some people about dreams is because i was the same i was going to play in the nba that was and i wholeheartedly believe that's what i was training for every single day and i think and i failed i failed um didn't make it i'm here but it's worked out for the best and it's like looking back i can see how those paths happened how do you convince somebody to to work

towards goals without that promise of success and to also can not convince them but to let them know that it will lead you to where you need to be anyway i've just spoken to a coach for american girls soccer team today and they've been beaten in the playoffs and she's upset the best word i can say devastated but i explained to her that in in the national championships all but one team will journey will end in defeat it it's it's okay if it ends in defeat it's it's it's not as nice as winning but it's

okay because what you understand is it's the process not the outcome it's the process of sport that makes it so meaningful and valuable in life it's the things you learn on the journey the the key things in your life that help you be a better husband father friend granddad some people will go all the way and win and fantastic brilliant but many people 90 percent of people in the challenge zone will only go part way but it's still rewarding because it's the process that gives you the benefits the outcome is just cake on the end

of the meal with um some of the athletes that you've seen who didn't make it all the way the they obviously they had lessons learned for sure like in that whole process of trying to become a professional athlete you're going to learn lessons is it always the case that those lessons are taken away those that knowledge is taken away or does it sometimes slip out from these people you know i i think from my experience and the feedback that former clients have given me the way of thinking when we're working on them as an athlete

becomes integrated in their way of thinking as a person so i think that the the introduction of sports psychology to an athlete you not only you can't just deal with the athlete you're dealing with the person as well and there's a crossover if i teach the athlete how to avoid victim mentality how to slip into vitamin how to transfer to fighter mentality they're going to have that in life when i got diagnosed with parkinson's disease i was driving back from the hospital with my wife and actually rang my my second son philip in london and

said philip your dad's got parkinson's he's he's gone into victim mentality and i heard this booming laugh at the other end of the phone and he said i'll ring back in 10 minutes and he'd rang back and he and his wife haley had googled parkinson's researched it and said dad will be up this week it was thursday and he said we'll be up this weekend with the boys we have a family action plan meeting and handling parkinson's and that was straight back into fighter mentality so there's a very big crossover between situations in sport and

situations in life i'm just going to go through some of these chapters just the what i can see here the lessons okay well this one's interesting straight away i'm probably going to say that for each lesson taking responsibility um what's the importance of that lesson one well i've talked a little bit about crossing the line leaving your comfort zone of letting everybody take decisions for you and then begin to take decisions for yourself facing up to the challenge of life and sport and everything begins with taking responsibility if you take responsibility the number of excuses

diminishes because it's your responsibility if you don't take responsibility it's always somebody else's fault you've always got a way out of the issue and i've dealt with teams who didn't take responsibility it was always his fault so you'd say what happened he did it and that's the death of a team so you're looking for people who go okay it happened i will deal with it i will learn from it i will move on so taking responsibility is is the start of controlling your mindset and your life's journey i guess that's why we start with it

on lesson one um i'm not gonna do all of them because i do i do genuinely believe it'll be better for us to promote from right doing the book is it on audible by the way okay fantastic that's that's brilliant we can link that all through as well lesson four though is set no limits and believe in yourself many many people suffer from i did from my upbringing um my upbringing on a rather poor estate um placed me in a certain place in life and gave me certain inhibitions about who i could be and who

i couldn't be but going to grammar school and going to the ymca raised my limits because i met other people who'd done other things and they felt i could they became supporters my cheerleaders and so i became the first person in my family to go to university so i i think one of the things support psychologists is is find out if an athlete's got self-imposed limits and find out why are you limiting yourself to that level of achievement you could do much better than that so we're breaking through barriers it's really interesting because that really

closely matches up with a motivational speaker who we used to speak to friends of ours called inky johnson he was a he was american football player and he had a life changing injury where he lost the use of his right arm and he it was just before he was drafted for the nfl he was like one of the draft picks for the nfl and his is exposure and belief and i think he's a similar situation was from a poor background and his coach had taken him out into the world places and he'd seen steak dinner

for the first time and that gave him that exposure to the world and what was actually capable like these levels that are above where he was um how important is it to get out of our surroundings and like for you grammar school was obviously a big one like to try and get that exposure it it's absolutely essential because you don't know what you don't know and you can restrict yourself in life because you don't know there's no other kind of life there's other options available one of the things that has changed about that from my

time is that television and film bring in the world to your front room so kids in a in a slum area a poor area can actually see there is another way of life and i think that's one of the reasons we have so much issues with immigration now because those poor people are looking on the television and saying wow look how these people live i would like to live like that which is quite understandable and and making tremendous efforts to to to achieve that yeah very interesting point i think yeah tv youtube now like people

are sharing their lives like which i think is a great tool for people to go oh this is capable for me fantastic fantastic tool um i said i'll leave that on as a lovely one stay positive for your own cheerleader um raising your bottom line that's a really interesting point raise your body right aim for mastery not perfection yes that came from interviewing a a an international player who was beset by anxiety and i didn't exercise with him he was very inconsistent brilliant athlete brilliant but could dip alarmingly and quickly and i discovered that he

was dominated by fear of mistakes so we did an exercise where i i set a top line and said what out of 100 what's your best ever performance best ever he's 95 so 95 say give me another percentage for your worst ever performance and he put down 60 so sixty percent to ninety five percent as i said that's alarming that's alarming what is an acceptable level for trust winning the trust of your coaches and fellow players and he said it has to be 85 bill so we put 85 in so i said instead of worrying

about being the best you can be every game let's focus on making the 85 becoming more consistent becoming more solid that would involve forgiving yourself mistakes on the field and staying in the game staying consistent and that affected his performance enormously because in order to achieve the 85 percent which he had to check in with me about at the end of every game instead of fluctuating because he was consumed with mistakes he began to think more about consistency and making that bottom line raising his bottom line was raised and he's had a very successful career

i don't know you must get extreme satisfaction when something clicks with athletes like you know for him that would have been like an aha moment and he's coming away with it i mean what does that mean to you when you when you figure that person's psychology out well it's quite difficult actually because i deal with intangibles they're non-measurable so it's very hard for me to say i really helped that kid because but i get an instinctive feeling that maybe i i i did help so i think it's hard to for me to say out loud

publicly that i really influenced that athlete's career because their intangibles belief confidence issues like raising your bottom line but i think i instinctively know i did offer some help is what's that what is the goal for you as a psychologist like when we're talking on a one-to-one is that the goal to to get those moments the goal is to make better athletes and better people and i think that's the whole goal we're there to make better athletes the one or two percent we talked about and better people people that are more able to write their

own story in a better more positive productive way uh i will i wasn't gonna do this one but we will and then i think i'll just pick a couple off the back but um this one i feel is something that some people forget quite often is success is a series of small steps yes um the story behind that was i was in my office in derby county and the manager the fearsome jim smith fierce man brought in this rather sheepish looking 19 year old and said bill you've got 21 days to turn this kid round

otherwise i'm getting rid of him and left this young lad with me and i realized that he was a good lad he was a very talented player but his attitude was appalling but he he came from a background where he'd never been taught any behavioral characteristics so he didn't know what he didn't know so what what i did was i decided it was it'd be too much for him to try and change him at once so i decided we'd do one thing a day so i said tomorrow he used to he had to report for

10 30. he used to come in at 10 29 every day so i said tomorrow you've been at 9 30. 9 30 bill i said what if you're not i'm going to pass you back to the manager so he was in at 9 30 and then he came to see me in the afternoon and said right tomorrow you come in at 9 30 you're going to be a haircut didn't actually look like an athlete look like a professional so he came in at 9 30 the next day with very smart haircut the next day you

can come in at 9 30 with your hair smart and you're going to dress smart you're going to dress like you're a professional i don't know how to dress have a word with stefano iranio our italian magnificent man beautiful dresser so he went to see stefano stefano took him out shopping came in the next day looked like a king the next day he had to go when he came in he had to go to see everybody and shake hands with him and wish them good morning look them in the eye the next day was first

on the training field the next day was last time and it whirled on so at the end of 21 days he was a different person because what he found was all those little changes affected the way people saw him absolutely amazing all these chapters we could let's uh i think we'll just cover this one because we we spoke about it refused to be a victim develop resilience from setbacks when you're trying to achieve something in life it's inevitable there was be setbacks if it was easy everybody would do it so it's tough it's tough raising

rising to the top of your career it's top it's tough holding a relationship together it's tough buying a house it's tough being a champion so there will be setbacks so we need a process for dealing with setbacks and we have to develop the resilience to handle that situation there's a great story of kobe bryant the basketball player his first year as a professional his team reached the playoffs and he was the superstar the young superstar and in the last minute of the game he had three shots to win the game for his team and missed

all three and at the end of the game the interview the commentators were astounded this great talent missed all three shots and he was sat down on the bench and his head was in his hands and they were talking about how you must feel he must feel dreadful and when he got up to come off the court they managed to get an interview with him and said kobe he was sat in the bench with your head in your hands he must have felt terrible and he looked at him he said what's feeling got to do

with it i was working out why i missed those shots i now know why i miss those shots and i can do something about it and that's a great coping strategy when you have a setback setbacks knock you emotionally off balance but you've got to you've got to work beyond the emotion to get to why did i have that setback what can i learn from it how i'm going to avoid it in the future and go on i love that that's an amazing story so you know just just whilst we're just on that there's some

athletes that are absolutely fascinating kobe is one of them like the way he would turn up before a game and shoot for hours and hours and end and after sometimes after a game he'd shoot for hours and hours and then what is that like are they like is that just the psychology is on another level like how how are they doing five or six times more than other athletes like what's what's going through them as in in their head and the processes i think some of it's love they love what they're doing they love being

there it's it's the place where they feel at home and the second thing is that for some athletes that's what gives them confidence to go on the court and face the the crowd and the challenge that preparation is the key to confidence if you are in the tunnel at manchester united many of the the players used to tell me if you've done a good week's work in preparation for the game you feel ready to play if you've had a four weeks work you feel less ready and that that can be vital in terms of confidence

to face the challenge i mean yeah somebody i i just i'm shocked by somebody else but this is the i mean we're talking about professionals um but the levels of of it even in professional sports there's a wide gap as well um what does it take to be the best of the best the lebron james michael jordan's cristiano ronaldo's what does it take to be at the pinnacle well you've got to be a great talent a a a really a great talent these these are exceptional physical specimens technical specimens and you've got to be a

grade attitude and they're the gods i've i've been through a long career probably dealt with four of them and these these are the gods these are people who have enormous talent at their disposal but this the attitude to work every day to commit to the sacrifice of being the best going to be a really interesting one then so you've worked with four or five how many had all the ability in the skill but didn't have the ability how many people the attitude sorry how many were there they could have been the gods and and up

there but they just didn't have the attitude for it oh i've come across plenty i mean they're the tragedies of sport you see them on the field in the basketball court and they're brimming with talent brimming with it and you think my goodness how good this kid is but they don't have the attitude so they consistently let you down sometimes don't turn up sometimes leave the fight halfway through i'm having a bad day whereas your athlete with lesser talent b b plus but massive attitude will survive that and go on and they're the ones it's

a pleasure to work with they're the ones the world is full of those professional athletes who've not quite as big as they should be strong as they should be quick as they could be but you love them for their attitude fighters fight a mentality through and through never let you down battle to the end they're the ones who win can i which which ones are the more powerful of the two attitude or well it's interesting you can win with less talent but you can't win with less attitude so resolve that for yourself this is something

that i've we well everybody at mulligan has started doing recently and that is keeping the journal um so keep a journal release your fears and move on so what's that mean to you well sometimes it's difficult to come to terms with the raging emotions in your head your doubts fears anxieties um and so one of the techniques i use is to to get those out onto the page and it's quite relieving actually to sometimes get them out of your head clear your head by writing them down on the page and then on the opposite page

i say once you've written them down write down what you could do about them tomorrow how you could help yourself tomorrow and then we keep doing that and gradually they're developing the coping skills of dealing with them so they're recognizing their own traumas but they're also recognizing by focusing on this i i actually got rid of that so they're recognizing coping strategies so i think keeping a journal is a very good way of taking your innermost turbulent emotions out of your head where it's damaging and putting it on a piece of paper and making an

objective exercise make it a rational exercise rather than emotional exercise and then beginning to read and see every day what's happening to you and beginning to find ways around that coping strategies for and it's interesting when you start with a a player who's in trouble the page on the left goes shorter and shorter and shorter every and that's the nice sign i love it i think practically we've been using journals quite a lot recently something that we're trying to get into more of and for me it's helped loads just writing out it feels like i'm

getting more solid thoughts as well and i'm becoming more aligned with it um that was fantastic what i usually do at the end is to make sure that i've covered everything is ask luke i was going to ask like one question but kind of kind of covered it which is you talk about attitude and talent like can attitude be enough without the talent no well it it it can take you so far but you have to have some capacity to perform in the arena um you can't it you can't just win with attitude it it

will take you so far but in the end you need enough talent to allow you to perform the skills necessary for the game is there anywhere where people can find you or the best place to find you if they're trying to find your work and stuff well if they google they can there's quite a bit and then they can just put bill basket in and they can track down a number of things they've done this is the website there's i'm around so people will find me if they want to i've generally found that to be

the basis lovely and everything from today that we've spoken about is going to be linked down below and um the book is also available on audible which we seem to have fantastic success with with the people who watch the videos yes they love to use the audible so we'll link that down below as well is it really yeah oh that's amazing it was the hardest two days i've ever done i went to a studio in manchester and uh locked into the shooter the producer was outside nice young man and i had to read it but

i had to read it word for word whereas normally i like to expand or illustrate or whatever and uh so i i read the introduction and then he he said hang on and he was waiting and he said that's fine bill we'll go with that so i said what do you mean we he said all this going directly to penguin in london there's six people sat around the table who are checking for the veracity of the audio and uh so it was two days work hard work with my voice but i felt what i really

felt was that i needed it to be authentic i didn't want an actor reading it i wanted it to be me because it was it that book is my life so people say a lot of my old athletes say bill it's utah i can i can hear you it's so anyway it's worked so the audio is quite successful i will i'm going to download that as well i'm not the sometimes i can read a hard copy but we'll we'll um yeah like i said linked all down below thank you so much for your time honestly

it's so appreciated and really excited to share this with everyone and there you go i hope you made it this far because the knowledge and wisdom that bill has is worth listening to um so so often i think we're looking for shortcuts and short pieces of information that can help us get to somewhere and sometimes that's not the case it requires a large body of information and bill has it all and his website his book is all linked down below i recommend go following him go buying the book all that kind of stuff also there's

a main piece on mulligan rivers.com it's more condensed version and also today's video was sponsored by mulliganrivers.com where you can buy the not a journal the inspire change t-shirts there's a link in the description to mulliganrivers.com and that basically helps us take our film crew take myself be able to go interview bill and create these projects with our team of editors and yeah thank you so much for all the support we've been having so far it has been amazing go follow me on instagram jordan mulligan river where you can see what i get up to

on a day-to-day basis guys thank you for watching go share the message have a blessed and productive day and i'll see you in the next one peace