I’m rather partial to a good podcast, particularly when I’m driving to one of the seemingly endless sporting fixtures my children have on the calendar.
It’s usually a good opportunity to listen to something interesting while negotiating the English country roads.
This week’s listening was rather different.
I put on an episode of The High Performance Podcast, featuring Lewis Moody, someone I had the pleasure of working with during my years in professional rugby and for whom I have enormous respect.
And I found myself trying to negotiate those country roads through tears.
Lewis is living with motor neurone disease (MND), a progressive condition for which there is currently no cure. Much of the interview concerns his diagnosis, the extraordinarily difficult conversations he has had with his wife and children, and the uncertainty of what lies ahead.
It’s difficult listening at times, particularly when he talks about telling his children. But what also struck me was the way Lewis spoke about what he wants to do with the time and influence he has. He was very clear that he wants to make a meaningful difference to MND research, helping bring about treatments that could significantly slow the progression of the disease.
He spoke about the importance of remaining positive, making an impact and holding on to hope, whilst being entirely realistic about the challenges he faces.
I found that combination of honesty, determination and hope incredibly moving.
For those of you across the pond who might not be familiar with Lewis, he was part of England’s 2003 Rugby World Cup-winning side, a former England captain and one of the most ferociously committed players I’ve ever watched. His nickname was Mad Dog, and if you ever saw him tackle somebody, you’d understand why.
I remember being at a match when Lewis suffered a particularly nasty injury to his eye. After the game, he actually came back out onto the pitch, his eye completely black, seemingly entirely unbothered by the whole thing. The rest of us were looking at him in absolute horror, while Lewis appeared to be wondering what all the fuss was about.
I mean, who does that?!
Well, Mad Dog Moody, apparently.
But amongst everything Lewis shared in the interview, two observations about professional sport particularly caught my attention.
The first concerned the strange way professional sport can keep people young, sometimes at the expense of their personal development. The second was about his decision to stop doing after-dinner speaking, and what audiences actually wanted to hear about his career.
Both brought into focus something I’ve observed throughout my own years working in sport.
Before I go any further, though, there’s something I should probably explain.
NDA in my DNA
One of the things I’ve found quite strange about writing publicly about professional sport is the expectation that, having spent so many years working within it, I should have endless stories to tell about the people I encountered along the way.
And, of course, I do.
But by the very nature of the jobs I held, discretion wasn’t simply a professional courtesy. It was an essential part of the work.
I knew things because people trusted me to know them. I was present for conversations because it was my job to be there. And I witnessed moments that were never intended for public consumption.
Leaving professional sport didn’t suddenly make any of those things mine to share.
I suppose I’ve got NDA in my DNA.
And the truth is, I think there always will be a level of confidentiality that I impose upon myself, regardless of whether anything exists on paper.
It’s an interesting position to find yourself in when so much of today’s content culture encourages people to share everything. The people they’ve met, the conversations they’ve had, the things they’ve witnessed. Proximity to someone well-known can become a form of social currency, and a private experience can become a public story remarkably quickly.
But I’ve never been particularly comfortable with that.
The fact that we have a story to tell doesn’t necessarily mean it’s ours to tell.
And knowing somebody, or having worked alongside them, shouldn’t automatically become an opportunity to establish our own credibility.
Which is why I thought carefully about writing this article.
Lewis has chosen to speak publicly and openly about his experiences, and there’s an enormous difference between sharing somebody else’s private story and reflecting on something they’ve deliberately put into the world.
I’m interested in the latter.
Because what he said about professional sport raised some questions that go far beyond rugby.
The extraordinary world of professional sport
Professional sport is a peculiar environment in which to spend your adult life.
From a relatively young age, athletes enter a world built around helping them perform. Their days are structured, their training is planned, their physical condition is monitored, their meals may be prepared, their travel organised and their professional development managed by an entire collection of people whose jobs exist to help them succeed.
At the highest levels, almost every aspect of an athlete’s working life has been considered by somebody else.
And there are very good reasons for that. The demands of elite performance are extraordinary, and the purpose of the environment is to give athletes the best possible chance of meeting them.
I’ve watched players operate under pressures that most people will never experience. They were expected to make decisions in fractions of a second, manage intense scrutiny, cope with physical pain, deal with selection and rejection, and accept responsibility when things went wrong in front of thousands, sometimes millions, of people.
Nobody could reasonably accuse them of lacking responsibility.
But the responsibility was often concentrated in one very specific area of their lives.
Outside the training ground, the dressing room and the stadium, a great deal was being taken care of for them.
And that creates an interesting contradiction.
You can become exceptionally capable in one environment without necessarily developing the same independence outside it.
Lewis put it rather neatly when he suggested that professional sport has a way of keeping people in a childlike state. Wonderful in some respects, but potentially limiting in others.
I think he has a point.
Because one of the great contradictions of professional sport is that we ask athletes to take extraordinary responsibility for their performance while simultaneously removing responsibility for so many other aspects of their lives.
When the structure disappears
One of the things I’ve always found interesting about professional athletes is how quickly the world around them can change.
For years, everything has a purpose. There is a match at the weekend, a selection to earn, a competition to prepare for, an injury to recover from or a season to complete. Even the difficult periods have a recognisable structure.
Then, one day, that structure disappears.
Sometimes retirement is planned. Sometimes it arrives through injury, deselection or a decision made by somebody else. And sometimes it happens long before the athlete feels ready.
Lewis spoke openly about how difficult he found the end of his playing career. Having spent so much of his life at Leicester, he was told his contract would not be renewed. There was the fallout from the 2011 Rugby World Cup, and then the shoulder injury at Bath that ultimately brought his career to an end.
What struck me was his admission that it took him years to reconcile the way it had all finished.
He had dedicated his life to something, and then found himself having to work out what came next without the environment that had previously given so much of his life its direction.
I think we sometimes underestimate the scale of that adjustment.
We talk about athletes retiring as though they’re simply changing jobs. But for someone who has spent most of their adult life in professional sport, retirement can mean losing far more than an occupation.
It can mean losing the routines that shaped their days, the people they saw every morning, the shared purpose of belonging to a team, the immediate feedback that told them whether they were succeeding, and the identity that had followed them since childhood.
For some, there is also the unfamiliar experience of having to decide what they actually want to do.
Not what the next fixture requires. Not what the coach expects. Not what their contract demands.
What they want.
And that isn’t necessarily an easy question to answer when you’ve spent years being exceptionally good at answering a different one.
I know how consuming the world of professional rugby can become. Working at a club, day after day, is relentless in ways that are difficult to explain to people outside it. There’s always another match, another problem, another deadline, another season. The calendar never really stops, and neither does the expectation that you’ll be ready for whatever comes next.
I eventually reached a point where I needed to do something different. Not because I’d stopped loving rugby, but because I wanted to discover what else I could do beyond it. And even from my position, without the identity and public recognition that comes with being a player, stepping away from that familiar world required an adjustment.
So when Lewis talked about the strange way sport can keep you in a particular state of development, I understood something of the environment he was describing, even though our experiences of it were very different.
The stories we want to hear
There was another part of Lewis’s interview that particularly interested me.
He spoke about his decision to stop doing after-dinner speaking. He had spent time on the circuit following his retirement, telling stories about his playing days, but eventually became uncomfortable with what audiences wanted to hear.
The silly stories. The incidents. The things that happened away from the pitch.
He felt that repeatedly reducing his career to those moments was beginning to make a mockery of the professionalism with which he had approached it.
And I found myself thinking about what a strange contradiction that is.
One of the peculiar things about working in professional sport is how differently the people inside it experience the world from those watching it.
Supporters remember the matches, the victories, the extraordinary moments and the personalities. Those of us working behind the scenes remember plenty of those things too, of course. But we also remember the ordinary Tuesdays. The routines. The repetition. The enormous amount of work that nobody would ever consider particularly interesting.
And yet, without those Tuesdays, there would be very few extraordinary Saturdays.
We spend years watching extraordinary athletes perform extraordinary things, and then, when we finally have an opportunity to hear from them, we often want to know about the least extraordinary parts of their lives.
We want the drinking stories, the dressing-room antics, the practical jokes and the things that went wrong on tour.
What we don’t particularly want to hear about is the Tuesday morning in February when it was freezing cold, somebody was carrying an injury, nobody particularly wanted to be there, and they still had another two hours of training ahead of them.
Or the hundreds of hours spent practising the same skill. The repetitive drills. The conditioning sessions. The recovery. The preparation. The endless cycle of doing something again because it wasn’t quite good enough the first time.
And then doing it again when it was.
Those are the things most of us never see. Not because they’re secret, but because they’re not particularly entertaining.
Yet those are precisely the things that make someone like Lewis extraordinary.
Not the ability to produce one remarkable performance, but the willingness to do the unremarkable work required to produce remarkable performances consistently.
We admire exceptional performance, but we’re often less interested in the behaviours that produce it.
And I wonder whether that’s why we so often misunderstand what high performance actually looks like.
We associate it with intensity, excitement, big moments and extraordinary acts of determination. But so much of it is monotonous. It is repetitive, uncomfortable and, at times, thoroughly unglamorous.
The extraordinary thing about an elite athlete isn’t simply what they can do when thousands of people are watching.
It’s what they’re prepared to keep doing when nobody is.
Which makes the after-dinner speaking circuit rather interesting. We invite people to tell us about their extraordinary careers, then encourage them to talk about almost everything except the things that made those careers extraordinary.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with enjoying a funny story. But I can understand why Lewis eventually felt uncomfortable with the expectation that his professional life should be remembered primarily for its entertainment value.
And perhaps there’s another consequence of that expectation.
If we only ever ask athletes to revisit the characters they were in the dressing room, do we make it harder for them to become somebody different when they leave it?
Growing older isn’t necessarily growing up
I keep coming back to Lewis’s observation about sport keeping people in a childlike state.
Because I think it captures something that is easy to miss when we talk about high performance.
We tend to assume that excellence in one area of life indicates maturity in others. We see someone who has achieved extraordinary things, handled enormous pressure and demonstrated remarkable discipline, and assume those qualities must translate naturally into every other part of their life.
But why would they?
The skills required to succeed in a highly structured environment are not necessarily the same skills required to build a fulfilling life outside it.
And this isn’t unique to sport.
It happens in organisations where people become so dependent on established processes that they struggle when those processes disappear. It happens to people who spend decades climbing a career ladder without stopping to consider whether they still want to reach the top. It happens to founders whose businesses become so closely connected to their identities that they cannot imagine who they would be without them.
We become very good at operating within the environments we’ve built around ourselves.
Sometimes so good that we stop noticing how much those environments are making decisions for us.
And perhaps that’s the uncomfortable question Lewis’s observation raises.
Are we developing people, or are we simply developing their ability to perform within a particular system?
Because those are not necessarily the same thing.
What happens to the person underneath?
Professional sport gives people purpose, belonging, structure and opportunities that most of us will never experience. But it can also become so all-encompassing that there is very little space to discover who you might be outside it.
And perhaps that’s the part we don’t talk about enough.
We spend an extraordinary amount of time helping people become better at what they do. We build environments around their performance, remove distractions, create routines and give them every possible advantage.
But how much attention do we give to helping them become people who can thrive when those environments are no longer there?
How often do we encourage independence alongside excellence? How much space do we create for people to develop interests, relationships and ambitions that have nothing to do with the role they’re currently performing?
And how well do we prepare them for the possibility that the thing they’ve spent their lives working towards might one day be taken away, or simply stop being what they want?
These aren’t questions that should suddenly become important at the end of someone’s career.
They matter while that career is still happening.
And I don’t think the answer is to make professional sport less supportive, or to suggest that athletes should somehow manage everything themselves. The support is there for a reason, and much of it is essential.
But perhaps we need to think more carefully about the difference between supporting someone and making them dependent on the support.
Between helping someone perform and helping someone develop.
Between preparing someone for their next match and preparing them for the rest of their life.
The lesson beyond sport
Listening to Lewis, I was reminded that growing older and growing as a person are not necessarily the same thing. Nor are achievement and fulfilment.
You can spend years becoming exceptional at something without ever stopping to consider whether the life you’re building around it is one you have consciously chosen.
And that’s not just a lesson for athletes.
Most of us have something that defines us. A career, a business, a title, a reputation, a role we’ve become very good at playing. Sometimes we’re so busy meeting the expectations that come with it that we forget we’re allowed to decide whether those expectations still belong to us.
One of the things that struck me most about Lewis’s conversation was his willingness to examine those expectations.
To acknowledge that the end of his rugby career had been difficult. To recognise that he didn’t want to keep entertaining people with stories that no longer represented how he wished to remember his professional life. To admit that it had taken time to establish what mattered to him beyond playing.
And to speak about those experiences without pretending he had always known the answers.
There is something important in that.
We often talk about high performance as though it’s a process of continually adding things. More discipline, more preparation, more resilience, more achievement.
But perhaps part of growing as a person is learning what we no longer need to carry.
The expectations that belonged to somebody else. The identity that once served us but no longer does. The belief that because we’ve spent years becoming something, we must spend the rest of our lives being it.
What I took from Lewis wasn’t simply the importance of finding purpose after sport. It was the importance of recognising that our purpose is allowed to change, that our achievements don’t have to dictate our identity, and that we can be immensely proud of something without allowing it to determine the rest of our lives.
When I think about the people I worked alongside in rugby, I don’t simply remember what they achieved. I remember the people they were when there were no cameras, no crowds and no particular reason for anybody outside the building to be interested.
Perhaps that’s why Lewis’s observations stayed with me. They were a reminder that professional sport can give people an extraordinary life, but that the person living it matters just as much as the performances we ask them to produce.
Perhaps the real measure of a high-performing environment isn’t just what it enables people to achieve while they’re in it, but who it equips them to become when they leave.
And perhaps the real measure of our own success is whether, when the roles and expectations fall away, we’ve built a life that still feels like ours.
There is so much more to Lewis’s conversation with Jake Humphrey and Damian Hughes than the aspects of professional sport I’ve explored here. His honesty about living with MND, his family and the challenges they face deserves to be heard in full.
Lewis also speaks about his determination to make a difference to MND research and his hope that treatments will become available that can significantly slow the disease’s progression. I hope you’ll take the time to listen to his interview and, if you can, learn more about the work being done to support people living with MND.
Listen to Lewis Moody on The High Performance Podcast or buy Lewis Moody’s new book Fronting Up here