Ash, Dylan, Dusty: Mindset coach Ben Crowe explains how he makes our best betterHe’s helped Ash Barty, Dylan Alcott and the Richmond Tigers rediscover their mojo. But now an exhausted Ben Crowe – whose trademark is encouraging high-flyers to accept their imperfections – is in need of a reset of his own.
By Melissa Fyfe
Good Weekend
The Age
June 25, 2022It’s an otherwise stunning day in Byron Bay, but things are far from perfect. And, frankly, I don’t need Ben Crowe, Australia’s most in- demand mindset coach, telling me what I should be thinking. I know, I know! Embrace imperfection. Yesterday, after I was bumped off a flight and spent three grinding hours in an airport queue, Crowe texted to say the airport was a “primary location” for his clients to practise “two of the most powerful questions we can ask ourselves”. Can I do anything about it? If so, take action. If not, can I accept it? “Having said that, they do hate those 2 questions haha ,” his text read.
I lack the zen-like mindset of Crowe’s most famous client, champion tennis player Ash Barty. But I accept this setback. This morning I accepted Uber cancelling my 4.30am booking, too. I also accepted being briefly bumped off my 6am flight (not graciously; I did cry).
Finally, after I reach Byron, Crowe and I are riding old bikes to the beach when my voice recorder bounces from the back basket and hits concrete. I accept this, too. But I just can’t accept that my interview questions – printed on three A4 sheets – have also escaped and are now floating somewhere around town like empty chip packets in the breeze.
Madly, I set off, retracing our route on a wonky bike. Crowe, wearing shorts, mint-coloured thongs and a black T-shirt that reads “Embrace your weird”, catches me on his bike. He helpfully ascertains the wind direction and is kind, empathetic and generous (as clients, friends and family universally describe him). Indeed, spending a day with Crowe, 53, reminds me of the 2019 Tom Hanks film A Beautiful Day in The Neighbourhood, which was based on a real-life magazine profile of American children’s TV host Fred Rogers, who disarmed a hard-bitten writer with his kindness. (On the beach later, Crowe says: “Let’s wander back and get you out of the sun, Mel, I’m worried you’re getting burnt”.)
In the original Esquire profile, writer Tom Junod described Fred Rogers’ “unashamed insistence on intimacy”. Within 30 minutes of meeting up with Crowe, fresh from his morning surf, he wants to know my “not-enoughness” or “shame” stories. This is core Crowe philosophy: identifying and letting go of when we’ve told ourselves we’re not “good enough, or loved enough, or smart enough”. I’ve been doing his app-based mindset course called Mojo Crowe, so I’m all for identifying my not-enoughness, but sharing it with an interviewee is confronting and mired in another big part of his method: vulnerability.
Ben Crowe is asking Australians to be more vulnerable, kind and connected. To love ourselves unconditionally, cut ourselves some slack, and unshackle from expectation and shame. He wants us to identify what’s within our control and stop fighting what’s outside it. Find purpose and serve others.
As a happiness recipe, none of this is new. Crowe points out that the Stoic philosophers talked about control and acceptance 2000 years ago. But Crowe, who bowerbirds wisdom from all corners – including investor Warren Buffett, Buddhism, US academic Brené Brown, Dr Seuss and his grandmother – packages these messages in a way that’s finding a growing audience with a deep thirst to listen. “If you believe in his message, it’s really powerful,” says Macquarie Bank executive Nick O’Kane, a Crowe client. “It’s a bit intoxicating and it frees you up from a lot of different things.”
Crowe’s success is partly due to his charisma, communication skills and willingness to be vulnerable himself (although this profile veers into territory he’d prefer to avoid). But it’s also about his ability to use sport to promote emotional intelligence through the hero-power of his athlete clients. These are, most notably, Barty – “Crowey, you’ve changed my life immensely” she said after winning the 2019 Newcombe Medal – but also Trent Cotchin and Dustin Martin, the captain and star player respectively of AFL team Richmond, wheelchair tennis great Dylan Alcott and world champion surfer Stephanie Gilmore.
This alchemy of sport and self-help makes his message more accessible, to men in particular, but it’s also brought a deluge of demand: a mentoring wait list of more than 100 CEOs, senior executives, athletes and teams; 7500 people having taken his app-based mindset course ($240 subscription); offers of “insane” book deals and speaking fees; and approaches from the majority of AFL clubs following his work with Richmond. Now he’s working with the Brisbane Broncos and is on the verge of going global, with an English Premier League team and a US National Basketball Association club recently asking for his help. “I’m just trying to make sense of it all,” he says.
But for the moment we’re not focused on answers, we’re still looking for questions. Riding alongside me, Crowe says: “From a client perspective, Mel, I’d be telling them to ask themselves two questions …” I know! I know! I’ve listened to every podcast Crowe’s done and seared into my brain is his oft-repeated line: “Focusing on something you can’t control but want to control is the definition of anxiety or stress or pressure or worry.” Within a few minutes we find the pages, flat against a sports-ground fence. Huzzah! We return to the beach, where I take out my recorder.
It is unresponsive.
“Do you think this whole interview is more about what it is teaching you than me?” he asks. Perhaps, I say, panic rising. “Well the good news is,” he says, as we sink our toes into the Byron sand, “I can help you with all that.”
We’d started the interview earlier, on the patio of Crowe’s holiday rental, a slick two-storey close to the beach, with fresh white interiors and disturbing art pieces that are half-human, half-bunny. When he’s home, which is infrequently, Crowe lives in Melbourne’s south-eastern suburb of Glen Iris. But Byron is his “spiritual getaway” and he’s rented the house for several weeks, in part to contemplate these new demands but also to recuperate from six months of emotionally heavy client work: mentoring Barty and Alcott through their retirement decisions and supporting Dustin Martin after his father’s death in December. In a few days, his wife Sally Grace and their three sons Harry, 23, Sam, 21, and Ned, 19, will join him for the Byron Bay Bluesfest.
At a table outside, where the bamboo hedge knocks in the wind, Crowe plays music on a portable speaker – Coldplay, Dusty Springfield, radio pop. I already know about key parts of his childhood from studiously watching a video on the Mojo app where he draws his life story (he encourages clients to do this to better understand themselves). In the clip, Crowe draws a long line of shortening stick figures and puts himself at the end: he’s the youngest of six, with two brothers and three sisters (parents Daniel and Marianne Crowe were committed Catholics).
Crowe was resourceful, quite cheeky and liked to cut corners. In musicals at Whitefriars College, his Catholic boys’ school, the gun flautist would often play Crowe’s solos for him, and Crowe would stand up and mime his flute, pretending it was him. For a primary school assignment about the moon, he copied a whole section from the out-of-date encyclopaedias in the family’s Nunawading home in Melbourne’s outer east. “The last line was something like: ‘Who knows, one day man might even land on the moon,’ ” remembers middle sister Louise Crowe. “We used to enjoy teasing him when he got caught out with these things.”
Schoolmate Peter McCarthy says Whitefriars’ blokey culture would have treated Crowe’s current philosophies with some scepticism. But the seeds for his stellar career were evident, even back then. “Crowey was very good at sport and music, he was very social and he ended up being school captain, so it was always natural that he’d go into a leadership role.”
If the family was out and lost sight of their adored youngest child, Louise says they often found him talking to strangers. “He’s got a great gift with people, Ben. You see it now, it’s very innate.” Louise remembers her parents struggling to pay the bills, mostly due to the heft of private Catholic school fees for six children, but overall it seems a sunshiny sort of childhood: annual trips to Jan Juc beach on the Bass Strait coast; loud and boisterous family meals; a larrikin dad who ran a small cleaning company.
But one night in 1985, when Crowe was 16, everything changed. Woken by Marianne’s screams, Crowe ran into his parents’ room to find Daniel mid-heart attack. Crowe and brother Danny kept him alive for about 20 minutes, using the CPR they’d learnt as young lifesavers. Eldest brother Patrick, by then a doctor, soon arrived, but it was too late. At 57, Marianne, who had never worked outside the home, took over Daniel’s cleaning business. Not long after, Crowe remembers holding her in the Jan Juc car park for 10 minutes as she sobbed in his arms. “Oh my god, the pain and emotional release in that moment,” he says, eyes welling. “I cried in the back seat all the way home.”
“When you lose your dad, your greatest role model, so young, you think about what lessons you can learn.”
His father’s death, says Crowe, was “easily the heaviest crucible moment in my life”. He went “off the rails” in year 11, but it also sparked a philosophical curiosity in him about life’s purpose. “When you lose your dad, your greatest role model, so young, you think about what lessons you can learn. ‘How do I move on from this adversity, and how do others move on and find purpose in the face of adversity and tragedy? And where do you find the joy?’
Looking back, I definitely found love and compassion through my mum, my brothers and sisters, and the idea of treating Dad like an angel and dedicating a part of my life [the helping-people part] to my dad.”
Crowe studied philosophy, anthropology and literature as part of an arts degree at Monash University. In 1987, his first year at university, he met his future wife through university friends at a pub. Sally Grace, who grew up in nearby Mount Waverley and was studying occupational therapy, remembers Crowe’s attire: green denim boat shoes, pink paisley pants and a Garfield windcheater. “I remember thinking, ‘He looks a bit of all right, but oh my god, look what he’s wearing,’ ” she tells me.
They got together later that year, both 19, and married in 1994, aged 25. This was despite – again rather cheekily – Crowe featuring in Cleo’s 50 Most Eligible Bachelors list the same year (he had no public profile, but guesses he was picked because of an advertising relationship between his then employer Nike and Cleo). The article depicts him as a wholesomely good-looking 25-year-old whose interview answers are less cringeworthy than those of the other blokes. Describing his biggest turn-offs, he says: “Racism, sexism and getting your willy stuck in your fly after a cold surf.”
Finishing university in 1989, Crowe was weighing further study in journalism or teaching when, in 1990, he landed his first full-time job at the Australian Hockey Association, in promotions. In that job, he secured Nike sponsorship for the men’s hockey team and suggested publicity ideas to Nike for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. The following year Nike offered him a marketing position, based in Melbourne. “It was more by luck than design that I started in sport,” he says. “And I think Nike was less interested in my knowledge of sport than my interest in storytelling.” Either way, it was his dream job.
At Nike, which Crowe calls a “story-telling platform” rather than, say, a global sportswear manufacturer, his job was to enlist Australians as brand ambassadors. He signed the future Olympic gold medallist Cathy Freeman, long-distance runner Steve Moneghetti and AFL footballers Wayne Carey and Garry Lyon. He also signed, and became close to, the late Shane Warne. Crowe fondly recalls taking Grace to Shane and Simone Warne’s house for dinner. The planned bolognese sauce was a disaster, so the two couples ate pancakes, drank strawberry Quik and played PlayStation for three hours. “It was the most delightful evening,” Crowe laughs.
His rise at Nike was meteoric. On his first overseas trip, in 1994, Crowe found himself at dinner after the Miami Open with Nike co-founder Phil Knight, along with Andre Agassi, his then-wife Brooke Shields and Pete Sampras, among others: “I was pooting myself, you know?” Knight, who is worth about $US45 billion ($65 billion), offered Crowe a lift on his private jet to Nike’s headquarters in Oregon. The young Australian so charmed Knight on the plane that Knight ended up carrying one of Crowe’s bags into head office, much to the astonishment of the company’s long-termers. “Somehow I ended up having quite a close relationship with him,” says Crowe, who became Nike’s then youngest director in the Asia-Pacific, based in Hong Kong.
At Nike, Crowe started thinking about how to help athletes live better lives. “I’d seen so many athletes go off the rails with really bad advice and not getting perspective on what’s important in life,” he says. After the 1997 Asian financial crisis, Nike transferred its Asia-Pacific executives to American soil. But Grace was pregnant with their first child and Crowe didn’t want to take the family further from Australia. He reluctantly left Nike and spent two years as marketing manager of the Hong Kong Jockey Club, before the family returned home to Australia in 2001.
Crowe’s message is that we’ve lost the art of living. We’re too hard on ourselves. We’re too busy pursuing perfection, trying to meet other people’s expectations.
Back in Byron, Crowe is locking up the house and talking about the Bluesfest line-up. He mentions Missy Higgins and casually drops in that he might do a catch-up session with her while he’s here. I wonder to myself if there’s any high-achiever in Australia this guy isn’t mentoring.
I first met Crowe before Byron, on a morning in late March. Delivering a keynote speech to leaders of health insurer Bupa at the Novotel in Melbourne’s CBD, he’d arrived early and started chatting to some female Bupa employees. He was fully engaged: direct eye contact, listening intently, telling jokes. There’s nothing peacocky or stiff about Crowe; he’s at ease in his own body, with himself.
On stage, he captivates. No one fidgets. Crowe’s message, essentially, is that we’ve lost the art of living. We’re too hard on ourselves. We’re too busy pursuing perfection, trying to meet other people’s expectations, or chasing extrinsic goals such as money, status or celebrity. We keep a mask on, hide our emotions and fear vulnerability and shame, which disconnects us from the people around us. In trying to numb these bad feelings – through alcohol or Netflix or consumerism – we numb joy as well as pain. So – and here, he borrows heavily from Brené Brown – we’ve become “the most addicted, medicated, in-debt, obese adult cohort in the history of the world”.
Crowe’s solutions involve focusing on “the human being, less so on the human doing”. To concentrate on your “to-be list” rather than your “to-do list”. He reminds clients of the brain’s negativity bias: “it’s got Velcro for negative, Teflon for positive”. He encourages reframing thoughts with gratitude: instead of thinking: “I’ve got to pick up the kids from school”, say “I get to pick up the kids from school”. It’s your decisions, he says, “not the frickin’ conditions” that determine your mindset. Put another way: “You can’t control the waves but you can learn to surf.” (He’s a walking bumper sticker at times.)
He gets clients to answer basic questions like “Who am I?“, “What do I want?” and “What kind of human do I want to be?” A loving soulmate, grateful son or mischievous mate? He asks them to tap into their earliest happiest memory, to work out what lights them up, to identify the “not enoughness” stories and to turn them around to self-acceptance and unconditional self-love.
Part of this involves coming up with “courage mantras” that you say every day, or when you need to do something hard. (Cathy Freeman’s was “Do what I know”; before the Bupa event, Crowe’s is: “I’m imperfect but I’m worthy and I’ve got something to say.“) You need, he says, to take control of your own story, because otherwise “the three biggest storytellers on the planet” – the news media (“predicated on negativity”), the advertising industry (“predicated on shame”), and social media (“predicated on social comparison and perfectionism”) will do it for you.
He also talks about a “connection mindset”, that we’re neuro-biologically hard-wired to connect – with other humans, animals and the environment – and that’s why we’re here. He teaches clients to be interested, not interesting, to ditch “vertical relationships” where you put yourself above or below another person, and to find a sense of purpose, to dedicate your life to something or someone. “To make their day, to serve them, to love them,” he says, “unlocks this extraordinary sense of contribution and meaning and fulfilment.”
At the Novotel, Crowe asked the Bupa leaders to take their pens and paper and write down three words in big bold caps: “I AM ENOUGH”. Dutifully, rows of seated executives bent their lanyarded necks and wrote these words. As did I. It was uncomfortable. Afterwards, over coffee, Crowe looked exhausted. It’s been a big six months.
/continues:
