Ben part 2
[00:00:00] Sam: [00:00:00] Hello, and welcome back to the growth mindset. Outcast with me, Sam Harris. Today, we're going to have the second part of the interview with Ben hunt Davis, the Olympic gold medal rower. That I interviewed on the show last time. 
We continue the story from where we left off. After winning the Olympics. And then we had to do afterwards. Kiss, most people kind of plan for  the goal. And then once you achieve it, Yes, she has to get on with the rest of your life. And. He had quite an interesting situation  not really having any qualifications in anything and having to work out how he could be useful to the world and make a living. 
Besides just doing rowing.  It's really fascinating. Interview around the mindsets that you then learned. The skills that you learned in Marine and how he was able to apply them. Elsewhere in his life. And I think that's going to be a lot of useful things for people.  I feel like we all kind of search for what is the point of our lives and how are we going to be our best selves so it's a great [00:01:00] set of lessons and you've got some top tips for everyone.
 We rejoined the interview. Or I ask him about how he balances family life. And trying to get married and things around the whole olympics at the same time

 
Ben: [00:01:14] We got engaged 1518 months before the Olympics and we planned to get married through exhausted, so I had quite a big month. 
 So we can Australia after racing for the rest of them because we can England . Going out, having fun and seeing friends, family you can pass   than a week in Italy.
Vaguely trying to help preparations is, and my mother in law had done it all. Then we got married, then we went backpacking for three months. I think it's fine. Packing around India and Nepal. Tibet came back. My wife was pregnant. I had no job. We were living with my dad and it was time to kind of grow up and get on with life.
Sam: [00:01:49] Yes. And it's funny cause you think like so then the gold metal is probably the name, what they're doing with their life. 
Ben: [00:01:55] I had no plan past my wedding day. I thought that I'd stopped competing after [00:02:00] Sydney, and as soon as I crossed the line, I knew that was it. But what came next? I had no idea. And at that point, I was 28 I'd never had a job.
I had no qualifications. I dropped out of two university courses. If I hadn't lost then I really did. We'd have nothing going for me. .


And I. Came back and worked pretty hard on getting a job and it took five months to find a job and, and then I got on with the next thing.
Sam: [00:02:25] it's pretty important. Like if you want to do something sort of like public speaking and stuff, they say you should always have a story to tell. That's obviously winning an Olympic medal is pretty good story, but do you think you maybe could have worked out a different story if you had one of these catching?
Ben: [00:02:37] So I didn't want, so tell a story. I didn't want to do speeches. I joined a training company. Cool, excellent group. And they had, we call ourselves performance coaches. I mean, we were kind of, we ran these training courses, these mindset behavior change training courses. And then there were a few people who did speeches [00:03:00] who weren't sports people.
They just did speeches about mindset. And they were really good at that. But I didn't want to do that. I wanted to be a, what we call ourselves coach. So. W, which was effectively running training sessions and for turn off. Yes. And there was some groups I spent probably.  eight days where those, but over a number of months and by the time I'd finished the six or eight days with them, they would think that I was enthusiastic row, but they wouldn't know anything about the fact that I'd been to the Olympics or not because I just didn't want to talk about it.
I wanted to be good at the job for being good at the job rather than what I'd done before. All the other coaches I worked with, there were 15 or service in the company. None of them are sports people. They'll look, come from different business backgrounds and they would just really, really credible and good because they were good and I wanted to be credibly good at doing my job because I was credible and good, not because I had history.
Remind me. 
Sam: [00:03:54] makes sense to that. Not have the easy option to kind of go with like your whole base to then be able to work on that and get [00:04:00] back to like your original, like what worked with them, what kind of thing is. It would've worked if you'd said like, I'm an NPM, but then you'd never have got that far.
She's even two weeks and the other aspects you're going about to like everyone, everything 
Ben: [00:04:12] we, we had these, these training calls. Knowing the content was obviously really important. Being able to kind of challenge and coach and facilitate was important. Being able to,  entertain and engage people was really important.
That kind of presentation style. There were loads of bits that I, just wanted to be. It was a great environment for me actually, because I was quite competitive and I went into this place and I want to say 15 or so other coaches and they were all really good and I was rubbish. It was very clear. I knew nothing and my competitive instinct came out, but rather than trying to beat people, it was about any of that.
You can't compete against people in terms of running courses. But I wanted some self-respect to going, you know, I want to be as good as these people. 
Sam: [00:04:54] Oh, so what? Yup. Like biggest lessons as a coach. Then how to like facilitate things, [00:05:00] how to, Catch people and deal with the things that I asked them.
Difficult questions. Kind of get the most out of someone. Like how did you learn that skill? 
Ben: [00:05:08] Slowly, I think I've, I read or listened to quite a lot of stuff. `I've, you know, a few courses I've learned a lot from watching other facilitators. I think that. Being willing to ask. The difficult question is really important, and there have been some situations where I have asked a question being quite sure that it would leads to me not being engaged with that client again.
But I think you've got to be honest and you've got to say what you think and you've got to ask the right questions. I think straightforwardness and honesty are pretty important and yeah, but job of a coach of acilitate was to make people aware of. What's happening, either what they're doing, all the other stuff that's going on around them.
And sometimes that means people learn stuff they don't, they didn't think they wanted to hear, but if you got more information, you can make better decisions. So having [00:06:00] an ability to ask a questions and the courage to ask them sometimes I think is quite important. 
Sam: [00:06:04] That's funny that a lot about that, like doing the podcast and it's been quite useful.
Sometimes I get people that I maybe don't want to interview that much, but because I'm not so bothered, I'll be a bit more ballsy just asking difficult questions that ends up making it like a really good interview, even though I wasn't expecting anything. Whereas if it's someone I know really well and is famous, I'm a bit like, ah, you know, harder to be like really cool about it.
Okay, so where do you see the field of. Coaching in general going and like in five years time. Do you think that's going to be a bit of a shift in the way people do it and like what businesses are focusing on to get the most, 
Ben: [00:06:35] so I think 20 years ago no one was coached in a business environment. 15 years ago.
It started to grow. 10 years ago it was going absolutely berserk. I think that now if companies are paying for coaching, they want us to be far, far more business focused. And they've gotta be very, very clear business outcomes. I think businesses have been through phases of trying to teach staff internally to bit to coach individuals better, and I'm not sure how successful that's [00:07:00] been.
I think being a, as a manager or a leader, having a certain coaching capability is good. I think there's a huge move to learning, being more computer-based. They're all things you can learn digitally. And when it comes to people skills, it's gotta to be human interaction. So I think coaching and kind of learning and development, I think more of it will become digital, but there is still a massive need four.
Human interaction, but it's gotta be more closely tied into businesses and they've got to know they're getting good return on investment. Are you 
Sam: [00:07:34] guys working to deliver more digital stuff and to do them more like specific outcomes from your face to face 
Ben: [00:07:40] work? So digital, we're going to look at, and Second half of 2020 , we've looked at a couple of times and we're gonna have another look.
and we are really outcome led. And we will continue to be so, and we will work to measure it even more effectively. I think that teaching somebody some leadership [00:08:00] skills, it's totally pointless unless they have the opportunity. To actually do something with it. I think people are so busy at the moment, the skills for the sake of it, no one uses.
So actually it's gotta be tied into your specific situation. So the application of learning is, I think is critical. Yeah. That knowledge for the sake of it 
Sam: [00:08:19] is lovely. People ask you that, what's the best book to read? And you're like, roles and what are you doing right now? Because if you read the right book at the right time, it's like insane.
If you read like a book just for knowledge and it's, our practice is 
Ben: [00:08:29] pointless, you don't, don't hear with it. Knowledge for the sake of it. In some situations might be useful, but in terms of a corporate development, I think knowledge has got to be specific. It's got to be totally applicable. So we spent huge amounts of time with people working on how are you gonna apply it?
That was kind of the understand practice apply bit. Yes. You want to learn about bullshit filters or bounce back ability. Now I can teach you all areas that you need to know in five minutes. but that doesn't mean you can do bullshit filters.  And it doesn't mean you can do resilience. [00:09:00] It means you might have some knowledge about it.
And actually the only thing that matters is being able to do it. So all our theory is really simple theory. To try and give people a maximum opportunity to apply it. 
Sam: [00:09:11] Can you explain what they are? 
Ben: [00:09:15] Bullshit filters. So focus is really important, but there are so many things that distract us. People telling us how we can do, we shouldn't do this.
You should do that. Yeah. There's so many different distractions. And when I was rowing, we came up with this thing, bullshit filters about kind of these imaginary or defenders, you can Mark them up to maximum deflection and the bullshit just wouldn't get through. So when people that were telling us that we couldn't do it, that we weren't good enough at that we weren't strong enough, we couldn't do this.
It was bullshit. It just wouldn't get through. We wouldn't listen effectively. We'd be going, LA, LA, LA, LA. I'm not listening to you, because it wasn't, if the goal was about boat speed, people telling us we couldn't do it wasn't going to help us achieve that. Therefore we didn't wanna listen to them. 
Sam: [00:09:52] So is it like having a really good mission statement would be a bullshit filter if you always go back to your mission statement going, Hey, is this going to make the company get to this?
And if you're like, [00:10:00] Oh no, then it's a distraction 
Ben: [00:10:01] than a distraction, therefore I'm not going to engage with it.  I'm not going to listen to you telling me that I can't do it. If you're going, you know, I think you need to work on this or this or this, or you've got these weaknesses now that's helpful information that'll help me achieve that.
 but if you're just telling me I'm rubbish, that's just not helpful. So that's bullshit. Filters 
Sam: [00:10:16] stuff 
Ben: [00:10:17] invariably will get wrong at various times. How do you make sure you get back on it as soon as you possibly can and it's not forming? Because if your deflated, demotivated, pissed off, frustrated, feeling lethargic and flat, you're not going to be performing very well.
So your results aren't going to be very good and you're unlikely to achieve a goal. So when stuff goes wrong, how do you learn from it? Pick yourself up, dust yourself off so that you can get back on to performing well to give you a chance to getting results. And depending on how bad the setback is, will probably take time, different amounts of time to recover from it so you can be firing on all cylinders again.
Sam: [00:10:55] Is there anything that I should have asked you that I haven't asked you about? 
[00:11:00] Ben: [00:11:00] I don't think so, no. 
Sam: [00:11:01] and then on the subject has the, when I was asking you what's the most difficult thing to ask you, what do you think might be the most difficult thing to ask me? If you were coaching me.
Ben: [00:11:08] I have no idea, Sam. I'm afraid. I just don't know enough about you. I don't know what you're trying to achieve. Having had a five minute conversation beforehand, I'm afraid I'm not a good enough coach to be able to know exactly what the right question is cause I just don't know you well enough. 
Sam: [00:11:22] Okay.  how do you think I could have improved 
Ben: [00:11:26] this entity?
So I've done a few podcasts before. This is an observation rather than, this is what you should do, cause I don't know the answer. A lot of people come with a more structured approach. Whereas you've come with a pretty open approach. You've made loads and loads of notes as we've gone through, which you've kind of referred to, and that's kind of led to the next question going on.
So the people I've done podcasts with before haven't made notes in the way you have done. So I'd say that's kind of really good thing. The. Possibly knowing more if you know more [00:12:00] to start with, then does that shape her? And 
Sam: [00:12:01] she goes, my issues, and I find sometimes with my guests, especially when it's someone who is kind of famous, I'm less likely to ask difficult questions if I know them really well kind of thing.
Right. I'm not sure. What if I had sort of read your book, I was like, wow, I'm going to be banned. This is amazing. I might have been a bit scared to like be me. Whereas if I just like, I meet this guy, I don't really know who he is, 
Ben: [00:12:19] maybe on the other hand,  if you had. Read something, then maybe you'd know which different questions.
So then the bit about being worried about asking the difficult questions. I would say that, you know, maybe that's something you should think about cause why should you possibly, people are worried. 
I don't know what the worst that can happen but probably not that bad. You know, people approach things in different ways, so, and I don't know what works for you.
I guess I would say preparation. Is that something that would help? I don't know. That's for you to figure out.  it's a bit about kind of asking difficult questions about what, what's to stop you asking different questions because the person, the other end can always just say, no, I'm not going to all answer something completely different, but unless you actually, I have the courage to ask it, you'll ever, you just haven't got a [00:13:00] chance to get into the answer.
Sam: [00:13:01] I guess I tried to find the right balance. Interesting. And like what kind of point in the interview you hearing and stuff, it's like, I'm not sure what, what's really appropriate and like a difficult question cause I could ask you like what your favorite sex position is.
so just to explain why I said such an out of place thing. Sometimes I have this issue where my brain comes up with like a bad idea that it shouldn't do, and normally I just ignore the bad idea, but then sometimes it's such a bad idea that the rest of my brain, it starts panicking that I might do it and it will like be screaming at me like, you mustn't say this out.
Just don't do it. Never say this thing. But the problem is then that I kind of run out of brain space. I like, I've got this one option. If something to say. And the rest of my brain is occupied just telling me to not say it. And it's just like I go into like this blue screen of death and I can't really think of anything until I say the stupid thing that I thought of, so that could actually get my brain back.
So you shouldn't really say things like that if you can avoid it, [00:14:00] but I can't confirm. That if it does sound awkward in the interview for the next minute or so, that's because it is. I was totally out of line saying something like that and we both didn't really know where to look. I basically wanted the grantee eat me somehow.
I did my Skype, the interview back on track, but trust me, I was rather beating myself up the whole time and you shouldn't ask a member of the order of excellent British empire about their favorite sex position, obviously. Anyway, enjoy the rest of the interview. And my heartfelt apologies to Ben, but like, I don't know how I can ask you a difficult question as such is in maybe I feel like going into what you'd have done with the hadn't one was kind of interesting.
Then if I was 
Ben: [00:14:44] difficult with all the such, 
Sam: [00:14:46] what do you think was the biggest thing you've put wrong in life? 
Ben: [00:14:49] I'll trace it a few people really badly. I think I've been a bit of a Boston to a couple of people and I really regret that. Do you think there's 
Sam: [00:14:55] anything you can do to like fix that now?
Ben: [00:14:58] Well, I haven't had the courage to anyway. 
[00:15:00] Sam: [00:14:59] Yeah. Let's put it like that. If I said like your number one goal for the next few weeks is to fix that, what do you think you would do 
Ben: [00:15:06] on a figuring out how to get ahold of them, I guess, and still I feel bad about some relationships I've had and just don't do anything about it.
Do you think 
Sam: [00:15:14] there's lessons you've taken away from that which you've helped you now that you changed the way 
Ben: [00:15:18] you are? Yeah, I think so. . 
Sam: [00:15:19] Can you give an example of how you show up in life now 
Ben: [00:15:22] because of this? I try very hard to treat people well. I'll try very hard to, and as a business owner when we have to make difficult decisions about people and we try very hard to do the right thing and to treat people really well.
In fact, at any point, we work really hard to treat the people who work with us decently, properly, fairly openly. I think it's really important. 
Sam: [00:15:47] ` . You seem that you came across like that. I was a bit surprised when you said that you treated people badly. It was not all the things I thought you said 
Ben: [00:15:54] got wrong.
Well, that's what I regret most is I think it's really important. Aspire to grow what I grew up most. 
Sam: [00:15:59] It makes no [00:16:00] sense. What's your earliest memory ever from childhood? 
Ben: [00:16:04] Oh, this memory from childhood is Hassell lived in Hong Kong. Both memories from a kind of first time I went to Hong Kong where I must've been three or four or something.
I've got kind of vague bits of memory about a swimming pool, about the house. I was in the kind of the vague bits of memory. 
Sam: [00:16:21] What's the kindest thing someone has ever done for you? We 
Ben: [00:16:25] had a team of volunteers, riders. You all gave up huge amounts of time and energy. To hell. I mean, there've been people who have been incredibly kind before the Olympics.
We needed to, three months, four months, but we needed to raise some money to buy a new boat, right? To a whole lot of complete strangers who a number of coughed up all the money. And, and since then, I've had, there are people I've asked for help and they've given it all people who have just said, you know, can I do this for you?
Or, you know, who give time and energy? So I think people have been incredibly con. 
Sam: [00:16:54] Cool. 
Ben: [00:16:56] Let's push it then. 
Sam: [00:16:57] Pretty good to have you on the podcast. 
Ben: [00:16:59] Thank you. That [00:17:00] 
 
Sam: [00:17:01] Well, wasn't Ben that such a nice guy. If you want to hear more from him. You can read his book with it, make the boat go faster. Or you could contact his consulting agency where they'll come and help your business be really sensible and stuff. Um, and I just really happy to be able to revisit this interview. 
Because I find that. Doesn't matter what I do in life. I always look back at myself and going, wow. I used to be so stupid and now I know things better. And when I revisit interviews from before, I feel like I often completely missed half of the lessons that I'm being told. And later I'm like, damn, that was the truth. Why did they not get that then? 
And, uh, that's certainly happened with this interview. Where. I acknowledged spends points around me being a more organized person and thinking more, , Analytically about my life and being prepared for stuff. And it's now really been biting me in the ass lately, and I really do need to start doing this better. 
I'm like, okay. [00:18:00] I am organizing my life. I am planning my days. Properly regularly. Been replaying my weeks because of I'm just doing way too many things. And, , it's just making a mess of stuff by lack of planning and like my business. , my podcasts. Everything. So. Thanks Ben. I'll be doing that better now. 
And then the bullshit filters also directly relates into the whole planning scenarios. And the phone's going off appropriately. So that's time for me to stop the podcast and go and answer it. Uh, Thank you so much for listening Goodbye