How vulnerability became sport's winning weaponKonrad Marshall
The Age
18 May 2018It is a Thursday morning during the Victorian school holidays, and the semi-rural grounds of Geelong Grammar School are deserted but for the luxe new theatrette of the prestigious boarding school, which is overflowing. Inside, more than 600 educators and facilitators sit quietly, filling even the aisles between rows, craning their necks at a handsome young man in a blue polo shirt as he strides to the lectern. A barrel chest on panther legs, the 28-year-old keynote speaker seems affable and relaxed, radiating muscular confidence.
But, he explains to the audience at the educational conference, he does not always feel this way. After all, he says, the life of a professional AFL footballer is filled with myriad challenges to happiness. He recites a list of obstacles. First, you live inside "an industry of winning", and yet perversely losing has become the dominant aspect of the sport. "That's what you're judged on: the losses and poor performances." He holds up his hands. "That's a really difficult thing to adjust to."
A career in footy, he adds, is challenging immediately; you're plucked from a junior talent pathway and thrust into a ruthless scrum of competitive beasts. "You're no longer the oldest or the best. In fact, you are literally the worst player in the side." Anxiety takes hold, he says, and it eats away at your self-assurance. Ephemeral worries contract negotiations, injury, fluctuating form conspire against you. "You're fearful of getting the ball in your hands. The joy you once got out of footy has
changed."
Of course, he doesn't feel that way right now. He hasn't in some time. Because he is Patrick Dangerfield, a shining star not only for his team, the Geelong Cats, but a poster boy for the entire AFL one of the top footballers in Australia and a charming, ubiquitous media entity. Yet Dangerfield has been through his own slumps of continuity and confidence, and what he learnt within those troughs, he says, is that peak performance emerges not when the chin is held up but when the guard is let down. We do our best, he says, when we are allowed to feel insecure, and to express that insecurity
"Because," he pauses, "everyone has a story."
Way up above, in darkness at the very back of the room, a tall man with a thick, brown bushranger beard sits taking notes on a laptop, nodding. His name is Shane McCurry, and he has worked for several years in athletic culture and leadership roles, most recently at the
Richmond Tigers in the AFL but also with National Rugby League club Wests Tigers, with the NRL itself, and with several private sector companies. The openness that "consultant, coach and facilitator" McCurry just saw in Dangerfield, he says later on the campus lawn, would have been unheard of in elite sport a decade ago. Yet such sensitivity, once a liability in an alpha male domain, is now an asset.
All over the world from America's National Football League (NFL) to the National Basketball Association (NBA), from our own AFL to NRL athletes and coaches are cultivating club cultures in which tales of personal hardship and woe are welcome, even desirable. All are clamouring to embrace the biggest buzzword in professional sport: vulnerability.
The most publicised incarnation of this shift was the "Triple H" sessions used at AFL winners
Richmond last year, where once a fortnight a player stood and shared three highly personal stories about a hero, hardship and highlight from their life from jarring migration narratives to caring for a disabled loved one. Running defender
Brandon Ellis wept as he told his teammates how he felt ashamed "like scum" growing up in a housing commission flat and stealing clothes from the mall. Veteran defender Bachar Houli spoke tenderly about the birth of his daughter, and how he now makes a point of kissing both his father and his mother every time he sees them.
These closed confessional sessions in front of 50 musclebound blokes often ended in a heady mixture of tears and applause and group hugging, and ultimately acted as an emulsion, uniting a group en route to a famous premiership. Ellis was one of many Tigers who said the sessions had built not a team but a "brotherhood".
Something similar happened last year for the Buffalo Bills in the brutal realm of America's NFL. Detailed in a Sports Illustrated piece titled
"The Crying Hour", the Bills invested in a program whereby each weekly team meeting would end with a linebacker or tight end telling a candid and often blubbering story about their upbringing. This cluster of gargantuan, weaponised athletes said they, too, now felt like brothers. This was to be a tradition their new coach, Sean McDermott, had said he wanted when he took over: "We're going to build this thing on love."
In rugby union in 2014, when NSW coach Michael Cheika was credited with taking the Waratahs from ninth place to a Super Rugby championship in a single year, he was assisted by a program he called "the couch of truth", in which two players would sit in front of their teammates while Cheika peppered them with questions, nudging them to share honest, authentic moments from their past. Back rower Wycliff Palu said the sessions left a mark: "That's where it all started."
Even New Zealand's fearsome squad of All Blacks has taken the idea to heart. Their mental skills coach, Gilbert Enoka, recently confirmed how a new culture was built there. Disclosures drove acceptance, he said, which created closeness. "People tend to think vulnerability and high-performance culture don't mix," Enoka said. "And that's false."
This movement started less than a decade ago with an American professor named Brenι Brown. It can be lazy to quote TED Talk numbers as a measure of reach, but her 2010 talk,
The Power of Vulnerability, is an exception. It is one of the top five of all time, with an astonishing 34 million views. In it Brown explains that, during hundreds of research interviews, she began to notice a trend in the way humans connect.
When she asked people about love, they told her about heartbreak. When she asked them about belonging, they shared horrifying stories of exclusion. People's most meaningful moments, she said, kept circling back to shame. Having to ask their husband for help. Initiating sex with their wife. Waiting for bad news from the doctor. Being laid off. Laying people off. What Brown saw was power in the willingness to share pain and discomfort. "And what underscored it all was this excruciating vulnerability," she said. "It's this idea that in order for connection to happen, we have to allow ourselves to be seen. Really seen."
Paul Groves has seen this in action perhaps more intensely than anyone. Groves is the senior coach of the Western Bulldogs in the AFL Women's competition. His team won the premiership in March, but they finished sixth of eight only a year ago. In that previous preseason, he says, the team endured a vicious physical boot camp that left them athletically primed, but they played poorly thereafter. The experience led to an entirely new approach this year: a two-day event held at a city hotel. Theirs was a preseason "camp" without a single sprint or kick, handball or push up.
Day one they just talked about what is important to them in life, what demons they wrestle, and why they love football. The players were not the only ones to grace the stage, either. Coaches, trainers, doctors, statisticians and support staff all had to speak, and the tenor of their speeches swiftly grew painful.
"Pretty much everyone cried," Groves says, matter-of-factly. "It was a really emotional day. We were mentally exhausted afterwards, because there was a lot of rawness." They heard several stories about sexuality and the trauma of coming out as gay. There were countless biographies blighted by depression. Tales of illness and death, fear and self-loathing, anxiety and grief. They slept on it all, and brought the material back together on day two.
"It became a catalyst for new behaviours all season long," says Groves. "What do we want to stand for? How do we want to help each other? There was more smiling. Fewer critical voices. You felt like you knew how to tailor your conversations. But you also felt trust, because we all gave and received information that was personal and confronting, and knew it was not going to be used flippantly."
Samantha Graham has experienced similar epiphanies in a different setting. Graham is an expert in educational design and human ecology, and runs a mental skills training business called State of Mind, offering a suite of workshops and programs. A few years ago, however, she was half of a duo that worked with the likes of the BBC, Nestlι, the Reserve Bank of Australia and the South Sydney Rabbitohs NRL team, the latter in 2014, the season they broke a 43-year premiership drought.
There's a lot of jargon to weed through in what she does; in what all practitioners of such work do. Theirs is a lexicon peppered with references to self-actualisation and synergies terminology that would appeal to the LinkedIn crowd but essentially Graham specialises in group dynamics, power and trust.
Some clients, she acknowledges, are not willing to take part in the process. Not everyone drinks the mind-training Kool-Aid. For every fawning article about unlocking mental power, there are as many alternate headlines asking "Corporate saviour or crock?" Graham says lawyers and financial traders, for instance, are often attached to their modus operandi wrapped up in an identity that is always on, always stressed, always churning. "With those guys there was a lot of armour and not much openness to letting new information in," she says. "Their cups were full."
But the hulking rugby league players she encountered at the Rabbitohs were not so resistant. It was early 2014 when she arrived at the team's base in inner-Sydney Redfern. She was there at the invitation of then-coach Michael Maguire, essentially tasked with improving an already physically robust team that had inexplicably choked in the semifinals of the previous two seasons. "I like to say they could have run up Mount Kilimanjaro in flip-flops," Graham says. "They knew what was missing was all between the ears."
She remembers a critical moment near the end of that season, as the grand final approached a session in the weights room, addressing pressure and the "external noise" they all sensed swirling around them.
Senior players Lote Tuqiri and Sam Burgess led the way, sharing a glimpse of their own mounting angst, even the need to throw up before a game. "It was gold," she says. "Right there something shifts, and all these other young men are given permission to feel what they're feeling, to know it's a stage that will pass that others have been through it all before them."
Graham believes admissions of that level are all that's required in this kind of work that there's no need to "fabricate" vulnerability by tapping into some regressive childhood shame. All you need to do, she says, is create conditions for a meaningful conversation about what you're feeling in high-pressure situations. "That's plenty of vulnerability right there for most groups of men, in my experience."
She was often more shocked by the topics that hadn't been discussed. Investigating those moments on the field when your thoughts turn negative "identifying the chaos" is as deeply as she likes to probe. "Take them out of their comfort zone, because that's where learning happens," she says. "But you don't want to take them into their terror zone, because it's not productive or ethical."