Michelle Ackerley

Ben Ryan  00:00
This is the Ben Ryan podcast, part of the sport Podcast Network. Welcome back to the podcast where this week I take a look back over Series 1 and the many and varied voices and perspectives that we brought you over the past 10 weeks.

Tony Minichiello  00:16
Coach the moment not coach the clipboard.

Sherylle Calder  00:20
It’s not about the many things you do correctly or better. It’s like one thing that actually makes a difference.

Erwin Valencia  00:25
Take the steps. Don’t skip it.

Nemani Nandolo  00:27
Mum sat me down and said ‘Son’ and it still sticks with me, she said ‘Son, I never want you to live with any regrets

Austin Swain  00:33
The Archbishop of Canterbury…he talks about the high performing teams disagree well,

Tom Fordyce  00:37
There’s a phrase that stuck in my mind and it’s compassionate ruthlessness.

Greg Barden  00:41
I can’t remember the words exactly but it was like, ‘Greg, this is my train set. Shut up.’

Margot Wells  00:47
You only train to make you better. And if you don’t get any better you are as well do nothing and at least you will be fresh.

Matt Little  00:54
How hard is it hard day? And how light is a light day?

Erwin Valencia  00:56
My mom is like ‘Is that a cult? Are you joining a cult?’ And I was like ‘No Mom, it’s gonna get me, make me train my brain so I can get better grades?’ ‘Ah, well, if it gets you better grades…’

Austin Swain  01:04
The illiterate of the 21st century won’t be those that can’t read and write. There will be those that can’t unlearn.

Tony Minichiello  01:09
It’s always learning, always reading, always understanding, always growing.

Sherylle Calder  01:14
I always say to the player ‘Have you equipped yourself to perform better and what have you done this season, to make yourself better than you were last season?’

Ben Ryan  01:24
It’s been a fantastic start to the podcast and to round things off, I’ve enlisted the help of my partner, and TV presenter, Michelle Ackerley, who also happens to be an avid listener. Over the course of this chat, we pick out some of our favourite moments, discuss what we’ve both learnt, as well as expanding the chat around topics such as working in the media, lessons for life in general and we also briefly look ahead to Series 2 in July, and tease who some of my next guests will be. So on with the show and for this special programme whilst it’s been great asking the questions, I resumed the role of guest.

Michelle Ackerley  02:04
So it’s the end of your first series, Ben? How does it feel?

Ben Ryan  02:09
It’s been fun, actually, I’ve enjoyed doing it and I’ve learned a lot whether it’s been some of the stuff that I’ve chatted to, to my guests, and also just the whole process of talking to somebody to get the right responses, you know, so I do that, obviously, as a coach, but I’m learning kind of different skills now to get people to say the things that, you know, I want them to say, I guess, that are interesting,

Michelle Ackerley  02:35
We’ll talk more on that because it kind of relates to my world in a way, you know, the world of kind of telly and presenting and as you say, getting the best out of people. But why did you want to create the podcast in the first place?

Ben Ryan  02:48
Hmm, good question. I think… I’d been on a lot of podcasts and I’d enjoyed them. I enjoy the process and I listen to them a lot, especially when we were… before lock down, like go to work and get on tubes and listen to them. So I thought it’d be a good idea and then Martin Cross, who’s… actually I met him through through coaching his son, Christian Lewis-Pratt, Martin Cross has his own media company and he’s been kind of, he was nagging me for a while to really get something going, so him and, and Russell, who’s the producer, got me to sit down and start to nut something out and that’s where, that’s how it all began, really.

Michelle Ackerley  03:29
And you’ve had some amazing guests on on your podcast, I’ve listened to every single one obviously. Is there anything that’s really stuck out to you, from chatting to so many different people, some of which you knew beforehand, some that you’ve been getting to know through doing the podcast? Just upon reflection now, is there any kind of key things that have really struck with you from doing this?

Ben Ryan  03:51
I think it’s a combination of things really, because a lot of it is reinforcement, but through different stories or different words, but the same kind of premise. So it reinforces the kind of good stuff that you think that you need to put together and wrap around culture and performance and it’s coming out of somebody else’s mouth that’s done high levels of performance in a different area and so I guess that’s comforting, and maybe there’s something that subconsciously I’ve magnetised towards the guests, because I’ve seen some shared values, or there’s something there that I want to learn from them about,

Michelle Ackerley  04:29
You know what I’ve learned from listening to it? You’ve got a really calming voice. I mean, I’ve learned many, many things, obviously, from listening to your podcast but I actually really like the sound of your voice!

Ben Ryan  04:39
Thanks. I think it’s…

Michelle Ackerley  04:40
I know I listen to it every day but sounds different, doesn’t it, like over a podcast?

Ben Ryan  04:45
I think. Yeah, I’ve heard I’ve got that a lot from a lot of people recently that I’ve come across as very calm and I think I am calm and pretty laid back but I think it’s it’s something that’s emerged probably from my time in Fiji if I’m honest with you, I think, I think people that knew me before that time, they would say I’m fairly laid back but I wouldn’t say I’m necessarily calm. So it’s something that’s kind of emerged as one of my traits since probably 2013.

Michelle Ackerley  05:15
I think that’s interesting and actually, that is such a good trait, I think to have, being an interviewer, or presenter, you know, really I think of it from, from my point of view with broadcasting, because it does have an impact, I feel, on how the other person feels around you and what they feel comfortable talking about. Have you noticed that with the guests that you’ve been chatting to… that you’re able to put people at ease?

Ben Ryan  05:40
Yeah, I’m definitely conscious of wanting people to know a) that, that it’s, this is a safe space where, you know, I’m not trying to catch them out or anything, it’s just trying to get good conversation. And, you know, obviously, I rate what they’re currently doing and that’s why I wanted to get them on the pod but then also, you want to show that, you know, you’re competent as well. So yeah, I suppose that that all all helps. Trying to think of that question about that calmness. Occasionally, I’ve had it in earlier in my, my career… I think it’s weirdly, I think some of the calmness has come from the Olympic Gold medal because, you know, it kind of underlines perhaps, even subconsciously, that the way that you approach things has also got, you know, has got some success attached to it and I used to get these reoccurring dreams that I’d have, for years, really where it’d be going into a changing room, putting your stuff on, and you never put your kit on in the right order and then you have to put it all on again, it’s really frustrating. And then you go out to go on to the pitch, and you always go in the wrong door, and you end up outside the pitch, looking in and that’s constant, that was constant and it went away when I won a tournament as a coach with a World Series. And then, you know, if, if then there was a break between tournaments or we hadn’t won for a few months, then it would start to slowly creep back into my, into my dreams. And then since the Olympic Games, I haven’t had that reoccurring dream. So it’s one I had probably from the time I started with England Sevens in 2006 and I would have had it all the way through till 2013 and then sporadically with Fiji and then it disappeared and so it might be linked in… I think it’s, I’m not saying that just winning a gold medal suddenly puts a stamp on you that says, you know, he knows everything about what he’s doing. It definitely, from an outside point of view, gives you kind of quality assurance. I mean, there’s there’s tons of rugby coaches I know that work in international sevens that are world class practitioners, they haven’t got an Olympic gold medal, because there was only one available but they’re still amazing at what they do and that doesn’t, shouldn’t really come into it but I think all the work I do outside rugby, I guess helps having that tag, and the other successes we’ve had. And I think it’s more perhaps that I don’t necessarily do things in a traditional way. So I’m a bit more creative in the way that I think, I put culture kind of front of house a lot more and individual performance and getting, wrapping all of that round team performance. So because it’s not the traditional way of doing things, and because I haven’t come from a traditional background, you know, I wasn’t an international rugby player, I played professionally, but never made the top and there’s always a little bit more of a glass ceiling to, to get those top jobs or the top spots. And so when you then can get a world title or an Olympic gold medal underneath your CV, then that kind of breaks that glass ceiling. So so I think that’s probably why for me, it did add to my relaxed nature that I suppose I’ve had since Rio…

Michelle Ackerley  08:46
You say you didn’t have a kind of traditional route into what you do. For people that might not know, you just explain that a bit more? Yeah, I mean, I played rugby, from the age of sort of seven with… my mum took me down to Richmond Rugby Club, and Captain Mack who was the first guy that taught me rugby and it was tackling back then, you know, now there’s lots of non-contact and tag rugby up until that age group… back then at under seven, it was full on, you know, you could whack each other and I loved it. And it was great. And so you go through the system when you’re younger. I kind of had a two or three years at school at Wimbledon College where I didn’t really… I just was off the rails a little bit and so wasn’t focused on anything particularly and got lost a little bit and teachers tend tended to pick the big kids and I wasn’t one of them. And then kind of got through the university system with Loughborough and Cambridge and got back to playing professional rugby, but I never got beyond that so although I played in the top two divisions, I didn’t then go and play you know, high level international rugby and and I think at the emergence of the professional game it almost felt like you needed to have that behind you to get given those top jobs. So then you work your way through the system. So I went from a supply teacher in Southall coaching football actually, to then going to a private school in Oxford to then coaching at Oxford University U21s, coaching Oxfordshire County, coaching Newbury as the backs coach, then coaching Newbury as the main coach and then we took them into promotion and then every time it started getting into bigger organisations and then coached England counties, and that’s when I got on the radar with the RFU and then they got me involved in different age groups and then they asked me to take the England 7s job, and then it went from there, really. So I literally ticked every single box going up, I didn’t jump any and in those first few years, I just had hundreds of hours of on the pitch coaching, which also gave me the kind of experience around the culture, creating the right culture because I was doing so many different teams and I had come from lots of different backgrounds as far as the teams and people I was coaching… You mention creating the right culture quite a lot. You know, it’s clear that that’s something that’s so important to your style of working. Exactly what do you mean by that?

Ben Ryan  11:12
I think a coach’s job is to provide the support and the tools for somebody to get better, to improve. That means that you need to personalise things in a way that also doesn’t stop everyone understanding what the team rules are, what the guardrails, the guidelines are for those teams. So getting that culture right, where people feel that they can, to use the work example, to skip into work. So really excited about going to work and also feel valued and also feel that their voice counts, and that I care about them as an individual. I’m a big believer that, you know, if they’re happy off the field, if they trust you, if you know a bit more about their background and what their drivers are, then you can get more out of them than if you just treat them as a collective. And so you know, whether that started with me in my journey as a kid, but certainly in my professional chapter as a supply teacher, first in a school behind, in Wembley, behind IKEA, to going all around inner London on supply to then getting a job at a comprehensive in Southall, where those kids still wanted to be valued and wanted to feel like they had purpose and belief even if that’s your, you know, your year eight tutor group, they still want to feel value and so those those things, I guess drove me and that, for me is what kind of the principles of culture are…

Michelle Ackerley  12:40
How important is listening and really paying attention within coaching and I ask this because I’ve been interested in you know, the crossover between broadcasting and the telly world, which is what I know versus the world of sport and coaching, which is, you know, very new territory for me, but one thing that I always think about in terms of broadcasters that really separates the good from the great is the art of being able to listen and really hear what someone’s saying, but also pay attention to that. So for example, you might be in a live TV scenario, and someone’s talking in your ear telling you how much time you’ve got, you know, you’ve got to link to an ad break or whatever. but you’re also engaged in a very in depth chat with someone and you want to make sure that they are really, you know, giving you the best answers possible. So you’ve got to be able to create this art of really listening and letting that person know that you’re really engaged in that chat. Does that kind of resonate with you and what you do and do you find within your world that there are the good and the great?

Ben Ryan  13:49
There’s definitely people around which you kind of feel like they’re really listening to you. So in the podcast, Dr. Austin Swain, for example, you know, I’ve kind of briefly touched upon my time at Loughborough in my first year where, you know, I never went to any lectures, really, but I did go to his, and maybe… one of the reasons was his content was really interesting and I was just genuinely interested in the psychology of stuff but also he was engaging and he made you feel valued. And, you know, 20 years on where, you know, I go and have a chat with him for the podcast, exactly the same thing happens, you’re engaged, you feel like he cares, he asks questions that makes you feel valued. And, and you know, he recognises your… all the things that he doesn’t even realise he’s doing that’s creating for me, a safety mentally around him. And that’s a real gift. I think I you know, I, I’ve known Austin for a long time and he’s always had that. So that’s probably a real, a real trait for him that he’s had from the very beginning. I think going into that communication, I think there’s different skills here for talking in a podcast to try to get that conversation right to make sure that you are allowing someone to kind of fully exhume so you get all those, you know, the bits of information that may be are waiting to come out, and you’ve got to allow them to. But as a coach, I think I’ve had up and down relationship with communication. So I think, where I say I’m always been very good at is picking up the nonverbal stuff. So people’s body language and general stuff around that. Where I’ve been up and down with his communication as far as listening effectively, properly, and not suddenly disappearing off into my own head with one thought, and then switching off for a while. I think in coaching terms, you kind of split it into the pace of listening sometimes and that includes the non verbal stuff, is decision making, and problem solving. So with decision making, it’s often very quick in sport, as a player, you know, if you see someone’s shoulder pointing in the wrong direction, you might be able to take take him on or little movement and depth and space, they’re quick decisions and obvious and normally there that’s just based on experience, that’s autonomous, you know, you don’t think about it. Whereas the problem solving, which is far more on kind of the coach, so if you imagine that’s your players on the field, doing 1000s of those decision making choices all the time, and you’re trying to pick up little cues from that, but then you’ve got the longer problem solving, which is you’re looking at the tactics, you know, do you need to shake things up a little bit. Do you need to have… what you’re going to say at halftime, they’re the problem solving, and I’ll be picking up those communication skills from their body language, the flow of what’s happening on the field, on what people are saying to me around and all of that stuff, then goes into kind of your filter, to then work out what you’re going to try to solve. So it’s constant and changing, I think communication can be in that vein and it can also be in the way you actively listen to someone to get that deeper listening, that Austin talked about in the pod.

Michelle Ackerley  17:03
And just how much preparation behind the scenes has to go into that problem solving then, because again, if I think about, you know, writing a script, or preparing for an interview, I’ll do a lot of research beforehand, and I’ll prepare and I’ll prepare and prepare and then actually when I get to that interview, I’ll almost let it all go. But knowing in the back of my mind that I’ve got what I need but then in that present moment, I’ll be very reactive and you know, in the now… how does that relate at all to what you do? How would you compare?

Ben Ryan  17:39
I think for people that work, have worked for a long time in a very small area. So let’s take Rugby Sevens coaching or rugby, rugby in general for me. I think you’ve banked so much experience that problem solving or that decision making can come pretty quickly for you in your own strand of sport. So I remember being, I think I was in Los Angeles, just doing some commentary, guest commentary for the World Series and one of the Fijian boys that I’d coached for a few years got the ball 80 metres from the opposition line but I could, you know, I immediately said on TV, this is, this is a try. And he was nowhere near the try line but there were so many little things that I would have picked up subconsciously around the shape of where he was, what he was doing, what the defenders were doing, the pace, the tempo, everything that would have given me that information. And I’ve seen that with other experts, you know, sitting down watching a football match and someone going, you know, left back has got himself out of shape here, there’s going to be an opportunity and then 10 seconds later, and he hasn’t even you know, it’s been a very lazy glance, and he’s already got all that information. So I haven’t got that in other sports, I’m at the point where I’m still trying to gather information to be more strategic and solve problems. I’ll be trying to fix the problems that take longer and require the information that I’ve gained across a whole breadth of different areas, rather than just that niche that in rugby, you can see immediately in nanoseconds but in other areas I’m doing now, it just takes that gathering of information from all the multi disciplines so that you can help someone solve a problem.

Michelle Ackerley  19:21
So I guess it’s long, longer term as well as that that short term instant fix.

Ben Ryan  19:25
That’s it

Michelle Ackerley  19:27
What I’m really interested in as well and you talked about it in your pod with Greg Barden actually, is those difficult conversations that you’ll have to have and I thought that was a really interesting episode because the two of you really faced a moment within your careers where you fell out and obviously if you haven’t listened to it, you know, this was the first time that you’d spoken for a very long time and you address the point in your career where you said openly that you didn’t feel that you’re at your best And when I was listening to that I actually thought, you know, as a listener that takes a lot of confidence in a strange way for someone to openly admit that there was a point in their career where they didn’t get it quite right and it made me think more about the, the sporting world, and egos involved, and the pressure attached to performance. Is it normal for people to actually hold their hands up and be like, you know what, I didn’t get that quite right and, you know, how do you build from that? Because to me, as a listener, I think that is that’s the sign of someone that’s actually got it right, when they can address their flaws.

Ben Ryan  20:37
Yeah. I think for coaches, you can look back at things differently, and reflect and if you’re not in the moment, and the egos kind of been parked, then you can talk perhaps more openly about some of the mistakes you’ve made but when you’re actually in the humdrum of it and you’re working day to day, I think it’s a lot harder for coaches to accept that they’ve made mistakes unless they’re really open. And so for me, like, I don’t know how many players I have coached but 1000s and 1000s of players, Greg was one of the ones that stuck out of having… just not got that right and having unfinished business around that. There’s, I probably can think of one other player that I’ve coached where they would not speak well of me. But in that, in that example, I don’t think they’ve looked in the mirror and seen what they didn’t do. And, you know, I don’t feel there’s any, you know, there is anything for me to do with in that respect, I felt, you know, that was, something I dealt with and sometimes players don’t always feel that they’ve been given the rub of the green when actually perhaps, if they look at themselves, that’s there’s something that started with them. But with Greg that was different and I’ve had other players… I remember Chris Cracknell, who ended up being assistant coach for me with Fiji. I picked him up when he left Harlequins to play for Newbury and then I got rid of him, and he moved on to another club, and we had a mini fall out but it didn’t last long because I had the tools then to sort that out and then I ended up bringing him back to play for England. And then, you know, we’ve had a very close relationship since then. So there’s been occasions where you have healed those and, and done them very quickly, but in Greg’s one, it was a very cathartic experience, because it’s been eight years, you know, I had no contact whatsoever, I knew that, you know, we had unfinished stuff to say, I knew that I had got things badly wrong with him and then Greg had the, you know, humility, really, and, and you know, confidence in his own ability to entertain that conversation to chat about it so openly. So…

Michelle Ackerley  22:41
What was going through your mind when you’re on your way to that?

Ben Ryan  22:44
I was actually, you know, I remember that it’s a nice drive down to Bath to the headquarters of Pixie and had given myself plenty of time and had a couple of stops for my normal  espressos

Michelle Ackerley  22:56
Did you have your cinnamon bun Ben?

Ben Ryan  22:57
No cinnamon, cinnamon bun. I do occasionally stop for a cinnamon bun at a well known, well known coffee shop, of which their coffee is absolutely horrendous and don’t touch it. But they’ve got good cinnamon buns. But the cinnamon bun actually that is below Greg’s HQ at Pixie at the coffee shop there is, I think looks significantly better but I didn’t have it and I was a bit nervous talking to him and so you do that whole small conversation at the start, you know, chatting about coffee and what you like and this and that, yeah, all that stuff, how was your journey until you start to just warm up a little bit and get into stuff and, and I had kind of said mentioned at the start, I’d like to talk about it and so Greg wanted to talk about it as well. So very nervous about it, I think those conversations… people call them courageous conversations or difficult, or whatever you want to call them, they come at different degrees so that was quite an extreme one, that we’d had eight years not talking but then there’s the one where you know, you’ve just spoken to someone and not particularly had a positive conversation, then you can see that there’s a phone call coming in from them, and you don’t deal with it. Or you see it and what do you do? Do you answer the phone and have that difficult conversation? Or do you park it, and it’s easy to park it but my advice would be to… is to you know, to immediately engage and, and do that and that’s a difficult skill to have that consistency and so it comes on every level from from those small things to the larger ones.

Michelle Ackerley  24:25
And another podcast moment, I’d probably say, that stuck out for me was your chat with Margot. I mean, she’s incredible, really and again, I can imagine she’s the type of person that’s probably had a few difficult conversations within her career but the confidence that she exudes is just second to none, isn’t it?

Ben Ryan  24:48
Yep, Margot Wells… I have come across not many practitioners where there so sure, I think Sherylle Calder is similar as far as she’s 100% certain on what she delivers works. And so that’s, you know, I’ve had physios that have been like that in the past and I think Austin wouldn’t admit it, but he knows that he probably has that that in his locker as well. But with Margo, with Sherylle, but then with Margo, she’s 100% certain that what she does works but then to kind of expand that… what she does is not normal. So she is not, she’s not come through, you know, a Sport Science degree, a Biomechanics, Masters, all these various other things, to put things underneath what she does, she knows from her experience, having coached her husband at a very young age to an Olympic gold medal in the 1980 Moscow games at 100 metres, to what she’s had over the last three, three decades plus, she’s built up this bank of just confidence that she knows what she does works and so she’s filtered all of the stuff that perhaps she’s used and doesn’t work. So she’s super confident about it but she’s going to have sceptics, because she’s not coming again, from the traditional backgrounds, she’s a female in a male dominated sport and that means the backroom staff are generally all male, still, she’s doing things in a slightly different way, she’s not afraid to have conversations, that’s going to suddenly throw people’s egos into the room at the same time. And that’s all because she’s 100% certain about her ability and she feels, I think, quite rightly that what she does, other people can’t do and just let her get on with it. And so I kind of… I came across her a small bit when I was England coach, because some of the boys were using her and our physio also had a really good relationship with her so I never had any problems that she wasn’t doing anything other than adding value and I’d always make sure that I speak to those players about the workload and what they’ve done with Margo and what we need to do to make sure so that neither of us were working them too hard, so that they were going to break down. So we had a good relationship with that and then, you know, I didn’t speak to her for ages until I had that conversation at Guildford at the Spectrum at the athletics track in the in the stands with the rain coming down and could have spoken to her for hours, you know, and she’s one of those people that when she finished the pod, you think I’d like to have her as someone that you kind of have a sounding board for some of the other things that you do in sport just to get her independent view on stuff.

Michelle Ackerley  27:27
Yeah, a completely different perspective. Do you think then it’s about coaches, professionals finding their niche, because one thing that seems, you know, a trait with all of the people that you’ve interviewed is that they are 100% certain that what they do achieves things, you know, that, that it creates success, and even listening to Sherylle, that was, that was a completely different one. I hadn’t actually heard of someone that, you know, does what, what she does, and as you said before, it’s that kind of unwavering confidence in your own ability and actually finding, as I said, like a niche a different way of, of doing things.

Ben Ryan  28:09
Yeah, I mean, I think it’s in most sectors, but sport, in particular, and especially leisure industry, there are so many charlatans around now that have neither got the expertise, the experience, or the research, or, in most cases, actually any sort of qualifications, to be telling you how to lose weight, how to get faster, how to put on muscle, and then taking that a step further coaches that have got to where they’ve got to, not based particularly on ability, but might have had a head, a step up for whatever reason, their playing career or whatever it is. And we’re also going through kind of a change really, in the generation of players that we’re coaching, and athletes that require a different way to be, to be talked to, to be dealt with and there is a, you know, a slowly removed group as well of coaches that don’t know how to handle that. And so I think they’re still filtering all of that stuff out and I guess I’m saying all of that, because niches are emerging, where people have decided, you know, over decades that what they’re doing works, and it might not be across a huge remit, but it’s small things and actually, you know, with Sherylle it’s not a small thing to get your vision better. You know, I’ll be watching football all the time and it’ll be you know, somebody has not spotted someone on the far post for a cross or there’s a pass or whatever and actually, she would argue that all of those things can be taught and can be learnt through the different exercises that she would do and the tools she’ll give those players… going back to as a coach, giving them the support and the tools to make them better.

VO  29:53
You’re listening to the Ben Ryan podcast, available on all major platforms, including Apple Podcast, Google, Spotify, TuneIn, Stitcher and Amazon Music.

Michelle Ackerley  30:08
I just want to hear some highlights from your career because obviously people would think winning Olympic gold that is the standout moment for you, would that be true? Or what are the, what are the kind of more nuanced moments, moments that people won’t really know about that have really stuck with you, and have meant something?

Ben Ryan  30:29
There is no doubt about it that the Olympic gold medal is the number one because it was not that one moment, it was a, it was a combination of three years of hard work that had put a plan together. So and it was then showing, it was the reassurance that that what you did to prepare those teams over those three years, you know, worked and without wanting to get into the actual, the Olympic Games, but it was one way traffic really for us. So we really were a level above everybody else, and we’d got everything, right, and the players were just, they were running themselves by the by the end of it. And nusnced thingd for me, are when you want to, when you decide on a plan of action for something that might be slightly different, or you’re looking at it from different ways, it might be how you prepare a team going into a long haul flight, with a short turnaround before a tournament, and you nail everything so that you made sure that by the start of that tournament, they are feeling really happy, healthy, fit, jet lags gone, they’re ready to go or, and they’re aligned, that’s a massive win and you feel a real sense of pride, that you’ve got your multi-disciplinary… to everyone’s together and they’ve done that now that, you know, no one knows about that because on telly, then you run out into the field in the first game but actually those those wins, I find are vitally important and then so are there moments where as a coach that you get a lot of two things really; I used to love watching just players, you know, you spent a lot of time helping them get better, and then suddenly seeing them blossom, you know, so whether that meant they’ve left your programme because they’ve gone somewhere better and it’s changed…. you know, in Fiji, we probably had 20 odd players that went on from the programme, at least, to very high profile clubs, where they were being paid large sums of money, that totally changed their life. So it’s a cool thing, always a cool thing to tell someone that you’ve, you’ve selected them to play for their country but it’s also cool thing for them to leave that shirt and go somewhere that you know will change their lives and their family’s lives forever. So that’s, those are the things that you know, again, there’s no results, no one’s won or lost but it’s part of a combined effort towards helping someone getting better, and then their journey takes them somewhere else away from whatever programme you were doing. So they’re the kind of nuanced things, I think, as coaches that we also love, as well as those in the moment, things around, going into a game, you know, five minutes, ten minutes before a match, where you just feel that everything’s absolutely ready to go, you know, and you’re very excited about it. And then you’re, you know that there’s gonna be a good performance coming and on top of that, you get all the adrenaline rushing through because it might be in a stadium of 60,000 people and the floodlights on and everyone cheering and those moments are why I guess one of the other reasons why you enjoy coaching so much because you do get that immediate feedback on whether what you’ve put into place and what your colleagues have put into place is working because someone’s scored a try or someone’s won a game.

Michelle Ackerley  33:37
How does the mindset of of a coach impact your day to day life? Or does it? Does it make you think differently about just normal actions? You know, because if I’m walking around, sometimes if I start speaking to someone in a shop or whatever, I might end up in like interview mode, and you know, start asking them so many different questions. I think, Michelle, what you’re doing? Is they’re kind of a similar thing that you would do because of you know, it’s, it’s within you?

Ben Ryan  34:04
Couple of things… in day to day, like I don’t enjoy watching rugby anymore, because I don’t look at it as a normal punter. I look at it… I’m looking at the technical, the small bits, I’m looking at all the other things around that and so I don’t enjoy it. I can’t get, I can’t take myself away from that at the moment just to purely enjoy it as a spectacle. So I’ve watched very little rugby at the moment which is a shame because it’s a sport that you know, I grew up and I loved and I adore but…

Michelle Ackerley  34:31
You watch a lot of football though Benny!

Ben Ryan  34:32
I watch a ton of football. Yeah. And I think that’s maybe because I can just enjoy it because I didn’t play football at a decent level and I enjoy the drama of it. I really enjoy the movement and I pick up so that going back to that point about coach, I then look at body language of somebody, I look at their warm ups. I look at you know what they could do that they could input from other sports and so all of that is really, of real interest and outside of that the general coaching… you and me will walk into Marble Hill Park and we’ll watch Sunday league football and you know, you see the coaches like,

Michelle Ackerley  35:08
You get so engrossed in that!

Ben Ryan  35:09
Yeah, I can sit and watch that for ages. I love watching people just getting into, into all sorts of loops around what they.. engrossed in what they’re doing, but getting carried away and doing some fundamentals really wrong. But they don’t understand it because they haven’t got the tools. And yeah, there’s times that I would carry on walking and talk to one of those coaches, but I could see they don’t want to engage. They’re too busy at ffing and blinding to somebody or shouting at the referee and it’s the same when I’m walking past, you know, as we go into the park, on the right hand side, there’s normally some, some younger kids getting some football coaching. And you can see sometimes, there’s one coach in particular, when I see him, he’s always engaging, always smiling, always asking kind of questions or being positive. I think that’s great. and you want to go and see him and say, mate top job much better than that bloke over there with the Sunday league team. And then you know, you go a bit further across, and there’s a cricket match going on, or there might be a school… Orleans might have got their kids playing rugby on one of the other pitches and so I’ll definitely have a kind of a tint of my eye around coaching and then it’s the same in other stuff that you see around COVID. You know, I get, I get infuriated sometimes that they’ve just got their guardrails or their guidelines. Now we’ve got Richmond Bridge, that’s supposed to have a one way system here. And it’s got some signs, it’s got some signs on the floor, big arrows showing which way to go and big signs on the end of the bridges, but no one… because they’re so used to walking across that bridge of without any of those signs. It doesn’t get… no one cares, there’s no guardrails there and so a number of emails, this sound so Alan Partridge, a number of emails, I’ve sent to the council to say, you’ve got to change what you’re doing here because it’s, there’s no, there’s no change in behaviour, they completely ignore me because they’re like while we’re putting up a couple of signs, it makes doesn’t make a slightest bit of difference, they needed to have various people there… It is quite amazing working with you over that bridge, because 100% of the time we’ve walked over, you will make a comment. It’s one of those things that does not sit with you and then sometimes we’ll walk over, you know, maybe today we’ll just let’s just look at, shall we just look at the views, just look at the river and you will, on every occasion, reference it you know because it’s obviously so, it’s a part of you isn’t it? Like there’s some guidelines there and no one’s no one’s following them. How can we how can we make this better? Yeah, I used to get… I did the same. I mean, like, if I saw someone walking and they dropped some litter, I can’t stop and not say something even if that that’s a group of young lads that are probably you know, could put myself in danger, I still could not… something inside me that would physically be unable to let go of that and it goes back a bit to what I talked about with Fiji… the standard you walk past is a standard that you become. That for whatever reason that’s been implanted at me from year dot and you know what, for the good or the bad…that’s how I’ll behave around things. Yeah, and it’s kind of,  if you feel that there’s something that’s really gone against your value system. Maybe not, you know, a little nudge but a big enough nudge…you’ll see me walking over the bridge and I’ll pretend that I’ve I’m not bothered but I’m really bothered when someone walks the wrong way past an arrow, but then I’m not… it’s not their fault, necessarily, although I kind of have partial blame to them, because I’m thinking they should be looking at the signs more but it’s just human behaviour.

Michelle Ackerley  38:40
That is fascinating. Just that area around value and how important it is for everybody. You know, it could just be that they were having a bad day… as simple as that?

Ben Ryan  38:51
You don’t know. I mean, this is probably for another time and you probably don’t want to talk too too much about this but in your industry. I mean, the lack of guardrails, the lack of wanting to engage in difficult conversations is mind blowing. Really,

Michelle Ackerley  39:05
We’ve talked about this a lot. Like I’ll come home and be like, ‘Oh, my God, I just had this conversation with the commissioner’ and it’s yeah, it’s kind of at odds with everything that you, you value and hold dear and,

Ben Ryan  39:17
And no one gets picked up for it.

Michelle Ackerley  39:18
Yeah, that’s why I think it could be interesting for someone from your perspective going into a different world, you know, and could probably actually give a lot of insight…

Ben Ryan  39:27
Yeah, I mean, I go into, some of the corporate stuff I do they bring you in because they want, they want to see change and so it’s an easier environment to come into because they’re willing to change… going into something like that, I mean, they need lots of people to go in there and they need a massive cleanout across the whole industry in my opinion, but if they’re not willing, or they don’t see it, and they’ve got these blind spots, you know, we could talk about blind spots and sub subconscious bias and all these various things, then they’re never gonna, they’re never gonna let and plus there’s no guardrails as far as them being brought to account by treating people badly. So, yeah, that’s another fascinating sector really that that can…

Michelle Ackerley  39:30
But it just shows the kind of work you do… it crosses boundaries, doesn’t it because, you know, various industries, organisations, companies, if they had a certain structure, you talk about guardrails and values and mission statements that actually work, things could really change? It’s just finally, what’s the future for you? What would you really like to be doing next? What are you working on next

Ben Ryan  40:31
Definitely I mean, just as a sidebar thing, I do miss, I do miss the tournamens at sevens because it’s… they’re such fun, because it’s two days of six games generally and you go on this rollercoaster as a coach winning, losing learning, planning replanning, dealing with people that are going through various emotions, opposition referee, everything…it’s brilliant, massive learning curve for coaches and  why I think… there’s some amazing sevens coaches that would do brilliantly in fifteens given the chance, but that world has kind of left me behind now really, you know, and we’re here and settled in London. And I think although there’s obviously lots of nuances in sport, I think what I find fascinating is that it doesn’t matter where you work, or what you do, I’ve not come across anybody yet that is working in a culture where they don’t feel valued, or they don’t feel happy that going into work that they really enjoy, they’re really successful at. So that commonality going into another sport, in a performance role, to help them get their culture, right, help them, maybe pick up on areas where I’ve got good insight into and that breadth across, I find really exciting. So going back to coaching, adding value to people through support, and resource and experience is where I’m going to end up next, and probably not in rugby. So yeah, you know that’s kind of my next stop Michelle!

Michelle Ackerley  42:00
Exciting times Mr. Benjamin Ryan!

Ben Ryan  42:03
Well thanks for asking me these questions. We talked about different things really, you’ve hardly mentioned Fiji, which is normally you know, those stories are the stuff that people want to hear but there’s stuff behind that and I guess that’s why I got all these guests for this first series, they’re not always the household names that people initially maybe want to get attracted to listen to a podcast, but they’ve got such insight and such interesting stories and they’re the people that I want to you know, to find for Series 2 and we have started to pick up a really nice list of names, of people that are going to come onboard for the next series that’s going to give us more of the same really.

Michelle Ackerley  42:38
So is this when the music would come in and “This is the Ben Ryan podcast.”

Ben Ryan  42:44
I have to do an outro now but maybe yeah, Russell the producer will still say ‘now you’ve got to go to an outro and name all the guests and then tell people to like and rate the podcast’

Michelle Ackerley  42:55
You say ‘click and subscribe and please leave a review’ Hold on…they really can, they really do make a difference…

Ben Ryan  43:03
Yeah, they do because like you know,

Michelle Ackerley  43:05
You’ve got some great reviews

Ben Ryan  43:07
We’ve had some great views and it’s not about moving up the charts or anything like that because it’s the quality of the people that are listening I love, I get so much feedback from people that are actually doing day to day performance jobs. So yeah, you know Russell say maybe I can cover it in this you know that go to TuneIn, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google or maybe

Michelle Ackerley  43:27
Wherever you get your podcasts from

Ben Ryan  43:29
Wherever you get podcasts from… subscribe and share and rate…

Michelle Ackerley  43:34
Rate and review

Ben Ryan  43:36
And I can probably name all the ones…started with with Tom Fordyce just as a bit of a startup, bit like I’m finishing with you… Am I dessert? No it’s breakfast time so you’d be a Pain Au Chocolat… but the wrong way around.

Michelle Ackerley  43:51
Yes it’s the wrong way around. I guess you’d have a Pain Au Chocolat at the end.

Ben Ryan  43:54
But then we’ve got.. so Margot Wells and then Nemani Nandolo and Austin Swain that we did two with and then Matt little who was, who was brilliant and we haven’t talked about but he’s he’s fantastic and we’ve kept in touch since, he’s got a new book that’s coming out soon that will be there’ll be ace and Sherylle Calder and Toni Minichiello  that I went up to see in Sheffield, that’s really enigmatic coach, someone that you know, that I’d love to have been coached by as a as a kid, which I guess is always a good.

Michelle Ackerley  44:27
Yeah that’s a great indicator, isn’t it?

Ben Ryan  44:29
Yeah and then Erwin, so E, from New York Knicks, Erwin Valencia, who’s just got ridiculous amount of knowledge and happiness around everything he does. And then Greg Barden and have I forgotten somebody? I probably have…

Michelle Ackerley  44:45
You’ve had a really, really strong mix of guests. You could have a great dinner party, you know, when things are normal and we’re not in COVID times anymore. All those people around a table would be ace wouldn’t it?

Ben Ryan  44:56
Well I thought whether it would be good actually to have kind of like a mini kind of summit where I get all of these people. and we can, we can just we can talk about it all, that would be, that’d be pretty good and so I think I covered, I covered off everybody in those in those ones. I don’t think I missed anyone.

Michelle Ackerley  45:04
And like you said, the next series, you’ve got some more great guests to come.

Ben Ryan  45:24
Yeah, we’ve got some we got some great ones. So I’m looking forward to that, we’re recording from this week onwards till June to, to get that right blend again, you know, because performance and culture, like we’ve talked about isn’t just in one specific area. You know, it might be people in the military, or the police force, or government or corporations or all sorts of things as well as obviously, the normal diet of sport, and I’d always like to have a guest from the Pacific as well at least. So I’ve got a very special one that I’m hoping to line up for next series that will be a lot of fun. And we’ve also got, you know, I’ve already lined up some that, I think, you know, are household names, but also ones that no one’s ever heard of, but they’ll be a bit like the Margot’s and, and Greg’s and and Austin’s and podcasts where they’ll they’ll get the most value from so thanks for this Michelle. It’s been good. I going to have another coffee now can I?

Michelle Ackerley  46:20
I’m gonna get another tea. Well, you can make me one if you like?

Ben Ryan  46:23
Yeah. Okay. I’ll do you an Earl Grey. Well, do you want to say this has been the…

Michelle Ackerley  46:28
Oh, yeah. can I say it? Hold on. What do I say?

Ben Ryan  46:30
Well just say this has been the Ben Ryan podcast. Thanks for listening.

Michelle Ackerley  46:33
Okay. Yeah. And what else?

Ben Ryan  46:35
See you in July.

Michelle Ackerley  46:36
Okay. 321. This has been the Ben Ryan podcast. Thanks for listening. See you in July. Hear You in July.

Ben Ryan  46:47
Same thing really. They won’t physically see me will they unless they’re actually one of the guests.

Michelle Ackerley  46:51
Why do people say see when you don’t see? Hear? No hear you in July doesn’t make sense…this has been the Ben Ryan podcast.

Ben Ryan  46:59
This is your main day job, isn’t it?

Michelle Ackerley  47:01
But I’m not Ben Ryan.

Ben Ryan  47:02
I know. But you know, you have to play different characters, sometimes, different personas.

Michelle Ackerley  47:07
Okay, one more time. All right. This has been the Ben Ryan podcast. Thanks for listening.

Ben Ryan  47:15
Not hear you…

Michelle Ackerley  47:16
I’m just… I’m not saying that…

Ben Ryan  47:17
Let’s just not even use any of this last bit…

Michelle Ackerley  47:19
I know. This has been the Ben Ryan podcast. Thanks for listening. I’ll be back in July. Nailed it.

Ben Ryan  47:25
That was good.