Series 1 Episode 6
How to apply an Olympian’s winning mindset with Ben Hunt-Davis
Episode show notes
With two years to go before the Sydney Olympic Games, Ben Hunt-Davis was part of a team that set an audacious goal with concrete measures underneath it. Two years later, Team GB stood on the podium with gold around their necks.
Ben channels this into his performance training for businesses, sharing the collective winning mindset with entrepreneurs looking to achieve huge goals of their own.
On this episode of the podcast we’ll hear some of the tales from Ben’s rowing career, how their elite sporting principles translate into business, and how to get buy-in from your whole team.
About our guest
Ben Hunt-Davis is a performance expert, coach, facilitator and keynote speaker. He is also Co-author of “Will It Make The Boat Go Faster?”, the story of how the Great Britain’s men’s eight crew won an Olympic Gold medal at the Sydney Olympics in 2000. Ben has spent the last 16 years specialising in leadership and team development and in 2012 he co-founded “Will It Make The Boat Go Faster?”, a performance consultancy which seeks to transform organisational performance through the adoption of elite sport principles and strategies.
Read the bookHighlights
“We’ve spent the last eight years working with organisations to help them get clarity around what's most important, what's their crazy goal? Having that top line goal is great, but actually, unless people understand and know what it means to them - ‘What do I need to do today, what am I doing this week, and does it help me achieve the overarching goal?’ - the whole thing is kind of pointless.”
6:45 - Ben Hunt-Davis
“As leaders we tend to think about a strategy, we discuss it with our leadership team, come up with a plan, we then tell people, they listen, then they go away. If you just hear something once or twice it's very different to actually having discussed it and thought about it. When you're trying to communicate a new vision, if you can get people actually discussing it, forcing them to think about it, it's going to stick better than if you just tell them.”
14:35 - Ben Hunt-Davis
“Doing it all by yourself is hard. They’re simple ideas, but hard to do. So have the right people around you to go, ‘How can we help each other do it collectively?’. If everybody's bought in, you can then collectively get the accountability so that collectively you have the discipline when the individuals don't necessarily.”
38:15 - Ben Hunt-Davis