Expert Breaks Down The HIDDEN Weight of Being a Head Coach

The higher you rise in leadership, the heavier it feels.

Not because of expectations, but because of The Weight.

Cody Royle, author of The Tough Stuff and coach to elite head coaches around the world, calls it the invisible burden leaders carry when the lives and livelihoods of others rest on their shoulders. It’s not about game plans or strategy. It’s about the emotional toll, the sleepless nights, and the pressure to always be “on.”

In this episode, Cody breaks down why toughness isn’t grinding yourself into exhaustion. It’s protecting your three most important coaching skills: awareness, communication, and decision-making.

We covered:

• Why “toughness” is optimism
• What Dan Quinn taught Cody about The Weight of leadership
• How fatigue erodes the 3 core coaching skills
• Why leaders across sports, business, and even NASA face the same challenges
• Practical first steps to get unstuck when the burden feels too heavy

Connect with Cody:
🌐 Website: https://www.codyroyle.com/
✖️ X (Twitter): https://x.com/codyroyle
💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/codyroyle/
📚 Book: https://www.codyroyle.com/home#books

 Follow Paddy for more:
🌐 Website: https://www.toughness.com
📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/paddysgram/
💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paddysteinfort/
✖️ X (Twitter): https://x.com/Paddys_posts

TRANSCRIPTION:

[00:00:00]  Cody Royle: Toughness is really probably closely linked to optimism in my mind. If we can get more humanity back to our coaching, everyone is gonna benefit. Fans, owners, players, the whole industry benefits 'cause we're squeezing too tight at the moment and it's not human. The three things that probably most rapidly deplete when you are in a state of exhaustion, your awareness, your communication, and your decision-making.

[00:00:41] Paddy Steinfort: Welcome to the Toughness Podcast. My name is Paddy Steinford, your host, and joining me today is a friend and colleague, but one of the world's leading minds and practitioners, really, in terms of coaching head coaches in elite sport, and also leaders in other areas. Cody Royle is the author of firstly, where others won't, but specifically the one that relates mostly podcast is the book called The Tough Stuff dealing with everything that comes with being the person, the head of a program is a former head coach now, a coach of elite head coaches all around the world. Welcome to the show, Cody Royle.

[00:01:07] Cody Royle: Thanks, Paddy. I'm looking forward to the toughness and the tough stuff coming together. Perfect fit.

[00:01:12] Paddy Steinfort: This has been years in the making perhaps, but definitely months of talking about, well, your book has my word in the title.

My podcast has your book, like theme run through it. So we should probably get together. And finally, there's a gap in our ridiculous travel and coaching schedules, and here we are. So one of the things that I did say as we were getting ready for this show, which I'm very excited about, is that, I haven't told you this, Cody, but very few of my guests, even though they know the topic is toughness and that one of the most common questions asked here is, what's your definition?

Like, what does it mean to you? Very few have actually taken the time to scribble their own definition and take notes. In prep, there is an Olympian, there is a Navy Seal. There as a coach of Army slash baseball and mental skills coach. So we're gonna start off with that. Before we jump into all your background and the amazing winding journey that has led you to be where you're now, talk to us about with your experience as a coach of head coach, former head coach, yourself, former consultant in the corporate space, but specifically dealing with his head coach leadership.

What does that mean to you in terms of what you've experienced and what you see with your clients right now? 

[00:02:23] Cody Royle: Can I start with what it's not or what I don't believe it is. 

[00:02:28] Paddy Steinfort: It's a hundred percent. Hundred percent a great [00:02:30] place to start. 

[00:02:31] Cody Royle: I know this podcast has, you know, military roots and, and a big military audience.

And so I, I'll use a military example because it's actually written in the tough stuff, and it's from Lieutenant General David Baro, who's talking to the New York Times about the new manual. And how, you know the manual is introducing sleep and mindfulness and meditation. And he says the Army has always had an internal dynamic that real men don't need sleep and can just push on.

And that's incredibly stupid. And really what he is talking about there is this idea of toughness, right? That we kind of have as slogging through and hard work and kind of this really blind, just get through it and. I know 'cause I've listened to your podcast. That's a lot of people's responses, and I don't actually think toughness is that I would actually go a little bit the other way and say that toughness is really probably closely linked to optimism in my mind, and to pull in a Simon Sinek version of optimism.

Like,  I think it's this, you know, looking at a situation, realizing the situation for what it is. But then also thinking that the future is bright. That's my idea of toughness. And then I think what that leads to is let's look at some, rather than just having like one definition, I think we can also look at where it's spread out through different things.

So I've got a newborn, and so toughness is a mother of a newborn, right? Like, once you've seen what they go throug in the hospital, the first three months of a kid like that is toughness. You need some serious optimism there. You need to look at a situation. I've got a human being that's relying on me, and think that the future is bright and I'm gonna continue down this path.

I look at people that say no to things. I think that's tough. I look at people that are willing to challenge the status quo and go against the social narratives, and to challenge ideas. I look at people that challenge themselves and their own ideas, and so I don't think it's this traditional idea of like physical slog and put yourself into a state of emotional exhaustion at the expense of everything else.

I think it's actually the other way around, like saying no and being optimistic and yeah, I know that's a very, that's probably just my definition, and a lot of people would disagree with that, but yeah, I'm sticking to it. 

[00:05:06] Paddy Steinfort: I think it's, well, no for sure stick to it 'cause it actually, you speak. In context of what you do day to day, particularly having a newborn talked about, you know, the concept of having one human reliant on as coaches or leaders in other areas.

There are many humans relying on you. Your ability to say no to things, your ability to think outside the square, challenge yourself. Development like that really applies to a lot of people who would engage with you. Have all of those things present, and it's one of the things that. I think initially I was surprised, but now I'm almost expecting it half the time.

Is that usually when people start talking about trying to improve toughness in a team or in themselves or in someone else, generally, the conditions are already there. Like, these people are already tough. Most humans have toughness within them. It's about being able to identify and access it and apply it at the right times.

And so your definition fits that. But let's dig in a little deeper on that concept of the one human who's relying on you right now, you and your wife. How old is the newborn Ollie's? Seven weeks. Ollie, shout out to Ollie. We're gonna dedicate this show Ollie. And so obviously that informs a lot of your day-to-day, like even your sleep cycles and your ability to work with coaches, but probably some of the metaphors used in your work.

How similar is being a parent to being a coach? You've been a head coach before. Is it similar in ways? It's obviously gonna be different in a lot of ways, but what are the crossovers? 

[00:06:34] Cody Royle: I mean, there's so many crossovers that I joke that this is my greatest coaching appointment, right? And it's actually been a great thing for my coaching, and my thinking about coaching, and helping other coaches because one, now I've experienced what it's like to be a new parent and what they've been through.

But also, funnily enough, I'm now in the state of depletion that I talk about. I'm spending my time trying to dig. Coaches, head coaches out of a state of depletion, which doesn't allow them to coach to their fullest potential and to use their talents. And I'm now sitting in a scenario that I, I can't avoid and being in depletion, right?

I sleep on 90-minute cycles and I was up at 2:00 AM this morning, you know, feeding him, and so it's actually really interesting going through this when my work is also to help dig head coaches out of the state that I'm currently in. So, it's a bit of a bizarre dynamic, but again, the feeling of going through it only strengthens my work and emboldens me to fix the, you know, the state that we as head coaches have put ourselves in. 

[00:07:53] Paddy Steinfort: Yeah. Let's, we'll definitely put a pin in that and come back to it because that is a key element of, particularly for your target audience, if you will, the people you serve. But most of the people who tune in here, that state of depletion.

Kind of like you said, you have no choice as a parent, often as a head coach, particularly in certain scenarios when wins and losses are deciding job security, there is not a lot of choice going on. Likewise, for performers themselves and people in other disciplines that have a similar demand. So interested to hear how you talk people through handling that and how you're handling it yourself.

About how you got to be the coach whisperer, the guru of head coaches, if you will. As your listeners will be able to hear, there's two Australian accents on this show, I think for the first time ever, and it coming from Australia, ending up living now based in Toronto, Canada, and coaching coaches in a bunch of different sports throughout North America and in the UK and Australia as well.

Like how does that happen? How did you go from being to Cody Royal Coach Whisperer? 

[00:09:01] Cody Royle: Well, I won't bore people with the full journey, but. I came through the AFL talent pathway, played with your brother in the pathway, and we haven't mentioned we're from the same suburb in Melbourne, so it's not just two Aussie voices when we're literally neighbors.

And yeah, I actually fell out of love with the game when I didn't get drafted. My whole life was set up around playing AFL footy. That didn't happen. You know, I'd kind of, I've hit a lot of, I'd hit a lot of the metrics. I'd been in a lot of the, you know, the state teams and things like that, and didn't get there.

That rattled me between 18 and 23, and really felt like I was floating. I didn't wanna do anything at university. I wasn't interested in any of the courses, and I was actually coaching that helped me refind the passion for the game. And so I was a coach at 23. Back in that same talent pathway. And that then shot me into coaching in general and got me really interested in how to coach, how to teach the game, how to connect with people in the game, how to connect with players, how to put all the pieces together.

And I was very fortunate when I moved to Canada, you know, the initial idea was two years, do the working holiday thing that a lot of Aussies do, and get some international experience. I got over here and loved it and stayed and got involved in coaching here. And so that led to, you know, high performance program and the ability to really build one almost from scratch.

And so, you know, spend 10 years in that environment, and that brings access to all the other high-performance coaches in Canada. And yeah, that was kind of the, the, the coaching thing. And so I'm quite weird for a, an Aussie in that most of us compete until we're about my age. Whereas I, I essentially stopped competing and started coaching at 23.

And so here I'm at 30, that turned 38 with 16 years of coaching experience. And I started writing about it as a way to educate myself and to learn. And that's how the books came about. And yeah, the tough stuff kind of came out of necessity. It was the book that I, for myself, I needed some help. I got to a position where I ran into something that I couldn't deal with, and went looking for resources and that wasn't there. And so..

[00:11:30] Paddy Steinfort: Love that. One of the things that we like to ask as we get into definitions is how actually get to that definition, right? And for you, that is almost the story of it. As you went on this coaching journey, discovered that a lot of the stuff that's available. High-performance pathways and development programs is very X and O heavy and not very, you know, X and y chromosome heavy dealing with humans, and particularly your book, The Tough stuff, which I can highly recommend to anyone who is into being head coach, but secondly, even just leaders, and I'll talk about my personal experience with that a little later in the show, but as you described it, it's the only book that focuses entirely on the human experience of head coaching. 

So it's, it's about the emotional toll and the identity issues, the loneliness. It's not about tactics, it's not about wins and losses. It's not about. Whether we're good, it's about dealing with other people, which is clearly an issue that head coaches deal with more than others. And at the same time, for people who are the CEOs, for people who are parents, for people who are principals, who are managers, people who are leading in any capacity where other humans are reliant on all the strategy in the world doesn't help when there's a interpersonal issue or there's a philosophical issue that could scuttle everything.

So as you dug into it, tell us about probably the most surprising thing that you discovered as you got into away from the strategy of coaching and more into the human side of it. 

Cody Royle: Well, there's a couple of things. One, again, it came from a place of necessity, so I had a player take his own life, and so I was looking at the emotional side of coaching, and one surprising thing was that it's not just missing, it's non-existent, Paddy. Like you cannot find anything about the emotional side of coaching and leadership.  

[00:13:30] Paddy Steinfort: It's, and you're saying there, when you say that. You are saying the emotional toll, or coaching people's emotions. 

[00:13:37] Cody Royle: The, like the emotional toll, the stressors, the, you know, they're kind of hidden in autobiographies and at the end of the career, and you know, someone kind of maybe has a passage about it, but that they don't want to hear stories about that, right?

You want stories of drinking with Joe De Maggio and Frank Sinatra in the bar you don't want to hear about. So those things tend to get omitted. And what that does is I want both, I want the stories of drinking with Joe and the stories about what the hard work behind the scenes, but keep going. 

[00:14:06] Cody Royle: Yeah, me too. And I think what that has been driven by is this idea of toughness that we have, right? Like it's this, we pay you a lot to put up with a lot of bullshit. And so deal with it like this is part of the job, but that's now overindexed to the point where it's detrimental to leadership in general, and certainly coaching and certainly connection.

So the fact that it was missing so comprehensively was a big thing. And then, the other surprising thing that I found was actually on the flip side of releasing the book was just how many people messaged me, and I've been told I've, the book saved marriages. I've been told that the book saved lives. I've been told that the book saved careers, you know, coaching careers.. 

[00:14:57] Paddy Steinfort: Jobs for sure.

[00:15:00] Cody Royle: Uh, I've been told that, you know, a lot of men in particular were able to give the tough stuff to their wives and say, this is why I'm so obsessed. I haven't been able to put words to it. This is why I'm awake at 2:00 AM thinking about caring about these players or their circumstances, or whatever it may be.

And so the amount of people that have DMed me. It has been surprising, so many. The people that you see on television every single day pop into my dms and say like, thank you for writing this book, 'cause it has perfectly described my, my human experience of coaching. Yeah. That was surprising. I wasn't writing it to do that.

It was therapeutic for me. So to hear that. There's a community out there that are all kind of struggling together was surprising. 

[00:15:48] Paddy Steinfort: Yeah. And I, I think I'm gonna share two surprises for me that really aren't surprises, but they were, I talk about this in the context of surprise, as when I'm running a session with athletes, whether it be an individual or a group, or likewise with a venture capital firm that I work with, they deal with different pressures.

But you know, stories of million-dollar deals that they have to decide yes or no in two hours. Like it's a pretty high-pressure thing that they deal with, right? But the same responses happen is that when you say something that hits home, that's the truth with people, even if they're not a coach, CEO, whatever, I'm a director of performance in, you know, high performance organization and it still rang true with me this concept that if, I'm sorry I strayed a bit from the story there, but if I'm talking with a group and I say something, it's home.

Hmm moment. And you see a lot of people, they're like, they pause for a sec, they'll nod, and they'll just say, Hmm. No,w if it's a really profound thing, that's the whole room does it. And everyone almost laughs 'cause they're like, holy shit, Don. You feel that too? But I had that, and I assume many others have had it.

In your reference to the concept of the weight. Now, you talked about the emotional toll, which is a nice phrase, but when you put it as the W that hit home for me, not surprisingly, I'd felt it, I'd experienced it. I've dealt with other people who deal with it every day, but when you put it like that, it was really different, and it hit home, and it was so simple, right?

The fact that when you become the guy or the girl, woman, whatever phrase you want to use, you are the person at the head of the program. It's different. You can be assistant coach, offensive coordinator, assistant Matt, whatever you wanna be, even the VP. But when you're the president, the head coach, the he a, as they call him in baseball, the gaffer in soccer, whatever it is, when you are the person, that weight is different.

It hits different, and it doesn't go away because no matter what time you wake up, your phone is full of messages and emails. You can engage with them whenever you want. There's always someone waiting and wanting and needing shit sorted. So talk to us about how that concept coalesced in your mind and how, and maybe a couple of examples that might resonate with the audience, military or otherwise.

Just people who are leaders and maybe haven’t heard the concept of the weight, but it'll ring true for it. 

[00:18:18] Cody Royle: Yeah. So the way that I describe it is people have this concept of leadership and expectation. They talk about the weight of expectation, but in the elite world, I've never met anyone whose own expectations aren't far exceeding what outsiders think of them.

And so, I don't subscribe to that as like the core idea. The weight for me is, the emotional weight of caring about people and caring about your role in their development. And so it's really interesting because you are spot on there, Paddy. Like the story that sticks out to me is from Dan Quinn and Dan. 

[00:19:01] Paddy Steinfort: So Dan, for those, those that don’t know, former head coach at the Atlanta Falcons and the NFL. 

[00:19:04] Cody Royle: Yep. And hadn't been a head coach at any level. So, you know, he jokes, he'd never even called a timeout until the NFL. And you know, and he said to me when I asked him what the difference was, like when you were paying attention to how things changed when you're a head coach, what were some of the instances of that?

And he said there's a couple. One, your relationship with your staff changes because now their whole livelihoods are tied to your success. He's like, there is nothing like that. Defensive coordinator is a big job. It's a prestigious job. You're on television. All these kind of things. When everyone's kids are now in private school and they're tied to your success, that is a weight that manifests so many times over. 

And when you start to fail, when you lose a Super Bowl from 28 - 3 up, that's what comes up for you. It's this expect, it's not the expectation, it's the caring. And the other thing that he said to me is the thing that changes is immediately just be just by a job title. Now, everyone in the building treats you differently.

[00:20:13] Cody Royle: And so he said the biggest realization for him was that whoever walked through his office door, that 10 minutes that they spent together, that might be the most important 10 minutes in that person's day. And they might have actually had a sleepless night worrying about shit, I've gotta walk into DQ's office tomorrow and give him some bad news.

Right? And it might just feel like another 10 minutes. But to that person talking to the hefe, the gaffer, the coach like that is huge. And you don't have that in other situations. And so, yeah, I think it's a really important point. Frank Lampard talked about it. Steven Gerard talked about it. All of these players that are coming out think they know what coaching is, and then you dig around in their interviews, and they are all talking about it.

It is different, Brendan Rogers has talked about it. It is a different lens that you are viewed. Under and under. The reason the weight works is because you physically manifest a weight on your shoulders. That's that phrase, right? 

[00:21:23] Paddy Steinfort: So let's actually look, let's talk about that, because that was one of the things that I would say was a bit of a surprise for me.

The first time I experienced it when I went from being a coach within assistant. Being the head of, not even the head of the entire performance department, but the head of mental performance. So I had other coaches underneath me. I was responsible for 200-plus athletes, 60-odd staff. This is with the Toronto Blue Jays.

This is about the time that you and I met. And so it was serendipitous that we crossed paths at that time because I was feeling the wake. It didn't really null it right. I know that my health was suffering. I know that my sleep was definitely suffering. But tell us about some other things that. It could be signs for people that they're actually experiencing the weight, but it's kind of hard to put in into words.

Like when someone says, how's your job going? And you're like, ah. Like everyone thinks it's awesome, but I don't even know where to start in terms of how overwhelming it was at that point. When you and I met, it was kind of hard to describe and still is in sometimes because it's hard to put into words the overwhelm, right?

Which is a, I guess a symptom of the weights. But what other things show up for people? It could be early indicators that maybe they're dealing with stuff that they didn't, they don't even know they're under that level of juris until sometimes it's too late. 

[00:22:42] Cody Royle: Yeah. I, I mean, you've kind of described probably the key one, this feeling of being stuck, like not knowing even where to start, which, you know, when you take a step back and you, you look at, just to use your example, because I know you.

You are a highly skilled, highly experienced practitioner who should know where to start, right? Like you've got all the tools to know where in the bathroom when you're doing the renovation, to go, and start chipping away at the tiles first. Right, but this weight kind of detracts from your ability to, you know, have access to that experience, to have access to that talent.

And it actually becomes a source of frustration because you don't know where to start and you don't know how to kind of push through some of the barriers that you're facing. That's a majority of my work right now. 

[00:23:39] Paddy Steinfort: And so that manifests in people who should be able to make decisions, can't. Or they make bad decisions? Yeah. Like what's the, how does it show up? 

[00:23:47] Cody Royle: Yeah, both. Um, so a feeling of that you don't know how to progress behavior change in that you are, you know, you start to become more flippant, more aggressive. You know, you start to deal with situations badly because you're in this state of depletion. And so the way I describe it in coaching is, right, like your primary coaching skills are, are awareness, communication, and decision making.

Any coach anywhere in the world, track and field, NFL, doesn't matter. Those are the three things now, awareness, communication, and decision making, right? You can deploy them in any situation. And, the three things probably most rapidly deplete when you are in a state of exhaustion. Your awareness, your communication, and your decision making, and so.

This is like getting into neuroscience territory, but I, I think there's enough evidence now to suggest that that is undoubtedly true. And so when you start to see signs around those things, you can't find words. You are making poor decisions that are digging yourself into a hole. You are actually paying attention to the wrong things or you, you lack focus.

That's a majority of my work now is finding ways to free up coaches so that they can get better access to those three primary skills. Uh, because the think you know this better than most. Paddy, think of the knock-on effect down to the players, right? Like, if you are lacking in your awareness, communication, and decision-making, how poorly are you coaching them? 

Like their development is severely hampered by the fact that you can't sleep. You feel like you have this ton of bricks on your shoulder, shoulders, and you can't cut through the political red tape of the organization, and you just feel stuck and blah. It's remarkable how consistent. That challenge is across the elite sporting landscape. 

[00:25:50] Paddy Steinfort: Yeah, and I was gonna say like, forget elite sporting landscape. Well, don't forget it. It's your bread and butter. Mine too, in some ways, but the more I've been drawn into other fields, like sitting in heart surgery department, sitting in NASA.

The International Space Station's missing mission control center, they talk about the same thing, right? Is their ability to maintain good situational awareness, to communicate effectively even in life and death situations, and their ability to make the right decisions, right? These are life and death scenarios that definitely exist in the military and exist in some of these other areas, and I was actually surprised and forever thankful to some people who drew me into that community.

I was like, oh, it's just sports, not life and death. But as you mentioned earlier to the leader, it is life and death in the sense of it either ends a career, changes someone's identity. Or it just, it's, they care so much about either their role in the community or the team they're leading, or the business they're running, or the chasing that to fail is a death of, but it has the same internal consequences on our, like you said, know the difference.

I'm curious about, you talk about your, your work day to day these days is digging people out of that spot, right? Where they're stuck. For those who aren't head coaches, who don't have the responsibility cache or potentially cash to engage with Cody Royle and have you helped dig them out? What are some of the first things for people who are in the tough stuff in a business, as a CEO or an entrepreneur running their own thing, as the head of a school, as the head of anything, what are some of the things for you that you know are pretty easy go-tos as a first step for those people who get stuck?

Momentarily, maybe not permanently, but they're stuck, overwhelmed. They don't have an answer. Normally, they're good, but they're kind of stuck. How do you get through that tough stuff? 

[00:27:52] Cody Royle: Yeah, so I wrote about this concept in the book called High Performance Knowledge Work, and I think it holds the key to a lot of this discussion, and this is the foundation of what I.

[00:28:08] Cody Royle: It's pulled in from, you know, the management concept of knowledge work. So the, the Drucker, which is, you [00:28:15] know, when your knowledge becomes a resource for the organization and expands the amount of resources available to an organization. So it's not things, it's not physical things, it's the knowledge of the people and the knowledge of you are.

[00:28:28] Paddy Steinfort:  The other industries might refer to that as human capital. 

[00:28:31] Cody Royle: Human capital, and that, that's what he is describing there is, you know, the modern marketer, the modern accountant, the person that they're thinking is actually the tool for the organization. So when you pull that in, and then you pair it with high performance and the lessons from science, and what I've done is I've paired it with.

You know, Lisa Feldman, Barrett's concepts around, you know, the body budget, and how we spend resources against particular tasks. And then there's also some self-determination theory in there as well, in that autonomy, competence, and relatedness. And so when you bundle all those things together, you kind of get this idea of high-performance knowledge work.

So really, what it is, is working better, not more. And when you audit your behaviors and you audit your tasks, and literally, I have coaches write out every single task they'll do in a week, and we'll go through line by line and cross some of them off and be like, Gary is, you are just doing that because you'd landed on your plate one week and you just kept doing it.

You don't need to be doing that. You don't need to be doing that. You don't need to be doing that. And to go back to my opening gambit Paddy, is people that say no to things. Leaders that say no to things and really deploy their mental resources, their emotional resources, their knowledge, work against the right things.

That's where we need to be headed. And again, so you've gotta really protect your brain, protect your resources to deploy against the right things. And we're not doing that. We're deploying it against everything because you can, right? And there's this idea that, you know, I've gotta do the video analysis, I've gotta plan the training, I've gotta speak to all the guys.

I've gotta go down to medical, I've got the analytics guys wanna come in, and it's all over the place. And so it's really spreading yourself thin. And then that catapults you into this depletion that we see. Yeah, 

[00:30:34] Paddy Steinfort: And so, I was speaking with a colleague yesterday from my time at the Blue Jays who's gone on to work at the LA Dodgers, LA ffc.

She's possibly one of my favorites. Tanya BOV’s, Tanya B. It's a lot easier to say. And we were talking about this exact concept and specifically she was kind of coaching me through a current. Situation of not necessarily overwhelm, but definitely a, a very vague and undefined environment and huge scope of a current project within a high-performance org.

And I think she talked about the same thing. Tell me if this sounds like the way you would frame it. She said, you need to sit down and you need to go through three headings and put everything that you do under these three headaches. Eliminate, automate, and delegate. And that allows you to just be a little more focused in here's the things that you have to do your job well, and everything else can go kick rocks. Is that kind of what you're talking about?

[00:31:25] Cody Royle: Yeah, precisely. You can do that in a whole bunch of different ways. And I mean, you could pull in time management processes and things like that to really find whatever works for you, but ultimately we're talking about the same thing is working better, what whatcha actually going to do?

And I'll tell you the key to this right now Paddy, is actually explaining it to others. So I talk about explaining coaching to those being coached because what ends up happening is when you get this right, you have a shit load of time. And it makes you anxious because you think that you should be frantically busy.

You should have this frantic anxiety about yourself. And if you don't, you get anxious, and you have this impression that everyone else is saying, well, what are they actually doing? But that's actually what leadership is, having the time to think, having the time and, and the resources to, yeah, deploy your mental capacity against the right things.

That's leadership. But you, where we live in a world where there's this idea that unless you are running around with your hair on fire, you're not actually doing your job. And so, you know, again, I, I think it comes with, we have to also educate. This is why I'm doing this. This is why I want to be home at 5:00 PM to cook dinner for my wife, because this is an energy-giving activity for me that makes me a better leader, a better coach.

[00:32:59] Paddy Steinfort: So one of the other tough things that comes up with that, I think from experience and also from having witnessed people trying to change the norm from the seat. So it's one thing for you and I to be coaches of people or leaders of people and encourage them to do that. But when a head coach of an NBA team starts trying to change their practice, or the head coach of an international football team starts giving themselves space in between windows, there are reactions from people who are used to something different and arguably are pretty wedded to the idea that the higher up you go, the harder you should work.

That becomes tough things that you have to deal with as a leader is if you don't do things how people think they're supposed to be done. And until you produce results, that approach, you're gonna continually be questioned. How do you instruct your leaders, and how do you encourage leaders who are listeners to this podcast, whether it's coaches or otherwise, to handle that element of the tough situation they might find themselves in?

[00:34:05] Cody Royle: The great thing is in high performance is you can use high performance and you can use humanity. And so what I often have my coaches do is explain it to their players in particular, in their own terms, right? And so you talk to them in athletic terms, what would happen if you worked 20 hours a day? What would happen if you trained 20 hours a day?

How would you feel? Kind of step them through the process, and you're trying to take them to the place where you are at. Right? You would be in complete exhaustion. Would you be able to perform? No, I wouldn't be able to perform. What, what would be missing? Would you be able to communicate? Would you be able to make good decisions?

Would you and performers, as you know, are hyper self-aware and, and they'll kind of sit there and like you described in the boardroom, kind of sit and go of. This is why I think I need to make this change. And the knock on effect, and this is the absolute greatest thing about it, is the knock on effect is you're a better coach to them, right?

And so your ability to impact them is huge that then personalizes that message for the athlete or the player and kind of takes it out of this. This is just some theory that, you know, was in a paper, and I'm playing around with, and I'm doing less. No, no, no. Humanize it. I can be a much stronger, better coach, a more personal coach, a more human coach to you if I'm allowed to see my daughter before.

[00:35:40] Paddy Steinfort: So I love it before she goes  to bed. Love in theory. I probably love it in practice as well, and maybe hypothetically talking from personal experience, but potentially, fathers, Dan Quinn as an example. When you're at the top of a unit of at least 50 staff and then 90 players and then other front office people, like this is a scale question, right?

One-on-one conversation. If I'm a CEO. Small business, small. I'm an owner of a small business maybe, and I've got 10 employees. I can have all those conversations if I have 200 people to have those conversations with becomes a little problematic. Yeah. Or no? How does that work for you, for people who have scale when you give them that message?

[00:36:26] Cody Royle: I mean, it's the same thing, right? So it's not just gonna be the head coach that's a coaching philosophy that ends up trickling down. And so it's gonna be the same conversation for your defensive coordinators, for your, all the people that are down, having the one-on-one conversations.

I would hope that the head coach, who is the one that is setting the tone, is setting the tone for the rest of the that staff. And so it starts to become, again, it's a personal thing. It's not just I'm doing this, all our staff are gonna be doing this, and the knock on effect is to you, because we're doing that currently, right?

We're driving a culture of fatigue because the head coach won't go home. I won't go to bed, and so all the staff are impacted in the same way that the head coach is. Because if I'm an intern, I'm not going home before the head coach. Right. I'm hoping for that 1230 in the morning chance meeting in the video room where they give me a project and it allows me to progress my career.

Now smart from the intern, not particularly smart from the head coach because that's just driving that. Fatigue culture further and further down the line. And again, the knock-on effect of the players is, is quite drastic. 

[00:37:39] Paddy Steinfort: Yeah. So you're talking about cascading, as in the head coach would have that conversation with his leaders defensive coordinator, a special teams coach performance, whatever, it's, and then they would have it with their staff? Is that what you're suggesting? 

[00:37:52] Cody Royle: Yeah. Where you've got scale issues like a 200 people. It's an organizational thing. I deal with the head coach because they're the ultimate decision maker and they're the one that needs to lead it and display to the rest of the staff what it needs to look like.

Ultimately, it should be an organizational ethos around if we say we're a learning organization, a teaching organization, if we say we're about knowledge and we're about finding nuances and we're, we're about noticing the right things on what the opposition are trying to do to us, that needs to be an organizational thing. That's not one person in a group. 

[00:38:28] Paddy Steinfort: One other tough ripple effect, I guess, or impediment to that philosophy rolling out is let's say your owner. Hypothetically speaking, not talking from experience, but the owner of the organization that this coach works for, either speaks a good game but doesn't live it, or just totally just says, no, that's bullshit.

I'm a billionaire because I worked my ass off. And you'll too. How do you deal with people who, because everyone has a boss, even the boss has a boss. We all think the coaches, the boss coaches isn't the boss. Coach reports to someone else. Whether it's a board in a non-American situation or an owner in an American situation, how do you help them deal with bosses who are not receptive to this sort of an approach? 

[00:39:09] Cody Royle: Yeah. That's the battle we're fighting. So, we're fighting a societal battle on one side in that there's this understanding of toughness that we talked about, right? Mm-hmm. Put yourself into a state of physical depletion, and then ultimately there's a.

Most owners in a professional sport are first generation, and so they made their money from Yeah, a particular way of working that came off the back of World War II, and so yeah, that's the biggest challenge. I still think it's a, it's that. Personal human touch. And so, I would then flip that into business speak, and it's the same thing.

That's, again, high-performance knowledge work comes from a management theory, and so I would flip it around and kind of have them educate and present around. It's the same things. It's like communication, decision-making, and awareness. They're still just as relevant to the founder of an organization.

And if you can be aware of the right things, if you can communicate properly and make good decisions in the boardroom, it has the same knock-on effect to your business. And so I, again, I don't think it's too dissimilar to the way you would describe it to others. Now, whether they go for it or not is another thing.

But I'm telling you, someone is going to get a competitive advantage doing this. Probably the coaches I'm working with. Yeah. And when we win, it'll be the new thing. It'll be the new thing, the new thing. 

[00:40:41] Paddy Steinfort: The copycat industry. I think like, I wanna, I wanna finish up on that because I think that's a really cool way to tie a bow on it, particularly because.

I, there isn't a huge amount of evidence where you can point to a Bill Belichick-led dynasty, where you're like, oh, this is why they were good. Right. And so I get, one of the questions I often will tie up with is, what's a hope? We've talked about some of the hardships you went through that led to, to what you uncovered and pivoted to.

You've talked about some of the heroes that you've learned from and applied in your own, in your own practice. But now we talk about hope. Why do you write your books? Why, what are you hoping to achieve working with these coaches and what do you see as the future in this element of improving leadership?

Forget just coaches. I wanna try and give this to the rest of the audience here to help people be better leaders on the pressure in high-pressure environments, in high-stakes environments. What is it that you hope your work is gonna help add to that, that movement? 

[00:41:40] Cody Royle: Yeah. I'm very clear on this, so. I'm here to add more color and more humanity and more, let's call it audacity, back into coaching.

And I think that's the way forward. Like, I think what we are looking for isn't more best practice and structure, and all of those things. I think we've got that. I think we're pretty clear on what those are, where. Leaders and coaches are gonna stand out is in their, is in them like the power is in them, and like their vision, and their who they are at their call.

And we are yet to see that, right? It's, we have literally. Them into a pulp to the point where when you see them on television, they don't look like they're having fun. They don't look human. They gray really fast. Their shoulders are slouched over, and it doesn't appear very human at all. I, I wanna change that dynamic.

I want to see rather than Sean McVay talking about burnout, you know he is younger than me and you, right? And in his fifth year or whatever and before the, before his second Super Bowl, he is talking about burnout. I want you to see Sean McVay with like all his brightness and color and humanity and just, I want that to be like spilling out through the television.

And I think we're a ways away from that, but I feel like that's my role here. I'm not religious, but I feel like there's a bit of a divine thing that if we can get more humanity back into to our coaching, everyone is gonna benefit fans, owners, players, like the whole industry benefits, 'cause we're, we're squeezing too tight at the moment and it's not human.

[00:43:33] Paddy Steinfort: Love it. I love that. The great Martin Seligman. To learn from it at UPenn has a metaphor he uses for his approach to introducing positive psychology to the world, but it applies just as equally to this changing the conversation around being the weight of leaders and how we deal with that tough stuff.

As he talks about a watering hole effect, you could go out and deliver one-on-one coaching to individual people, and eventually it takes off inside the population. And I think it comes from maybe even the theory of farming, where you can give individual pills to every cow on the paddock. Or you can just go sprinkle that stuff in the watering hole, and they all drink from it.

And sport is one of the great watering holes within our community, as well as the arts and entertainment. There are a few others where a lot of people go anyway. But if we're, if there's a lot of people watching sports High profile, we take a lot of examples in society about how these people act. This could be one of the great revolutions.

Thank you for your work in the background that a lot of people dunno about. Fantastic stuff. I, again, highly recommend Cody's book, The Tough Stuff, and if anyone wants to track you down, mate, where do they find you? 

[00:44:39] Cody Royle: Very active on Twitter and then everything is centralized just at codyroyle.com. All my books and podcasts and everything.

And with a name like Cody Royle, I'm very easy to find.

[00:44:51] Paddy Steinfort: Very easy to spell. C-O-D-Y-R-O-Y-L-E.com and likewise on Twitter. So give him a follow. And absolutely, I recommend for the last time on the show, read that book, Cody. Great to catch up, mate. We'll talk again soon, no doubt in one of our problem-solving phone calls. That happens every now and then. And meanwhile, mate, thanks again for your work. 

[00:45:10] Cody Royle: Thanks, Paddy. Thanks for having me on. And, thank you for your work as well. It's much needed and, uh, yeah, looking forward to catching up next time.