E107 – The Long Win (w Cath Bishop)

Hello, Mr. James, and this is Jane,

and here we are again with another episode of a world of work podcast. What are we speaking about

today? Jane, well, today we are talking to the lovely Cath Bishop, formerly of Olympic rowing fame, and also a British diplomat of a number of years who has been exploring the culture of winning and competition in the workplace, and she wrote a book called The long win, which started to unpick why we're all so so obsessed with being number one and winning. Interesting.

I think it's gonna be a great conversation. I think we're gonna explore that obsession, and we're gonna explore whether winning serves us well in the long term. So let's get into the conversation. Okay, so here we are in the main body of today's conversation, and today we're going to be having, hopefully, a really interesting conversation about the role of competition and winning and the cultures that it creates in the workplace. And we've got a great guest to have that conversation with today. We're speaking to Kath Fisher before we get into that conversation, though, Kath, would you be able to introduce yourself to the audience and say a bit more about yourself and your background? And your background and what you're working on at the minute.

Sure. Thanks for inviting me to join today, looking forward to our chat. So I have a background, both as an Olympic rower and as a British diplomat working for the Foreign Office for 12 years, and those two experiences gave me sort of insights into teamworking and leadership and in very high different but high pressure, high stakes environments, and that's what I draw now my in my work as a business coach, and I recently wrote the book The long win, which kind of examines our obsession with winning and draws on my experiences across all of those worlds, Looking at business, politics, sport and education, and how our attitude to winning sometimes doesn't always help us to get the best out of ourselves.

That's great. Thank you. That's a really interesting background and an interesting subject to be focusing on, if we start at the beginning, when you're talking about winning and competition, and I guess, what it creates in us, in individuals and in us, in our groups, what exactly are you speaking about? What do you mean by this sort of winning mentality about competitive culture?

So what I want to do in the book is actually examine that definition, if you like, what have we come to think of as winning? Because I think actually we need to go back to some earlier definitions. We need to broaden out what we mean by that, and what I often see in the workplace, also in sport, also in education, also in politics, is a very narrow definition and an increasingly narrow definition of what winning means. It's literally somebody coming first. It's crossing the line before somebody else. It's being ranked number one. It's a short, narrow metric that often is fairly short lived as well. It's hitting a target in business, it's your annual results. And what I think we need to do is to broaden out our view of success. So I'm examining the way that we've got narrower and narrower, and in how we define it, and also how we make assumptions about what competitive means a we see it as as a very positive thing, and we often put it above, you know, it's an excuse so we can behave in any different way, as long as it keeps us competitive. But we've also shifted our understanding of competitive to be much more focusing on working against people around us. We're in competition with them. We don't want them to do well. We want we want us to be out doing people around us. And actually, I'd prefer us to move back to much more of an original definition of competition, which is where we're actually striving together. So that's the original meaning of compete area, the Latin word that competition comes from. So I really want to challenge some of our narrow views of how we think winning and competition ought to look like, to broaden it out into something that's much more helpful and sets us up to be more successful within the cultures we're working or or training in, and

when you're thinking about competition and winning in that way, and sort of the definitions that you've described there and maybe a trend toward that more immediate and competitive and perhaps even dominant definition of competition and Winning. Do you see that playing out in multiple aspects of the world that we live in? Is it just related to work? Do you see in our personal lives? Do you see it at a social or geopolitical level, given your background, where's your view on the domain that that lives within? Yeah, so

it's absolutely across society. That's why, I think, in a way, it's quite difficult to challenge. But actually that gives us a different lens on it, because we've all come across. In different parts of our of our lives, so we will have experienced it growing up. So actually, the the home environment can sometimes be competitive, where children are compared to each other, and you're competing with them in order to clean your plate first or win at Monopoly. The same in school, we're often set up to be very much assessed individually, not for our collaborative or creative talents, but in outdoing the person next to us. And then that carries on into the workplace, where we're perhaps competing with those around us to be promoted, to get some kind of reward or win some kind of incentive. And most obviously, the sports world is something we look to that gives us an example of that sense of who's the best, and we're all ranked against each other. So I see it playing out in multiple domains. I think perhaps the political world is one where it's most extreme, where politicians cannot be seen to like an idea from the opposition, where, you know, our very parliament is set up, pitting each side against the other that gets us into this binary thinking of win loss, that if you're not with me, you're against me, and actually, my success has got to be defined by you doing badly if you're on the other side, which draws us away from a collaborative approach towards most of the very complex issues we face, where there isn't one simple answer, And one side doesn't have all the answers, and we need to really see things in a much broader lens. Yeah, that's interesting. I think

there's some, some really interesting stuff in there I'd like to explore about things like, you know, winner takes all zero sum games and things like that. But I think we'll, we'll touch on that a little bit later, because I think that's a fascinating way to frame our gaming interaction with others, however we interpret that in our lives before we move on to what why is this topic so important to you? What is it that really draws you to this topic of competition and winning and the sort of undertones I understand from you of a desire to move towards a more collaborative approach to what we do? Why do you think it's so important? So

it's been a real theme of my life. It's been particularly the last 20 years, I think I've seen it just crop up everywhere I've looked, and I've seen it holding us back. So I've seen it driving dysfunctional behavior, both in the school world. I mean, I'm a parent, and I see the behavior that comes from the desperation for the schools to be top of the league tables, children getting ranked and on that basis, getting into schools or not getting into schools. So I see it in that personal world. I experienced it myself as an Olympic rower for 10 years, in that culture where it was all about being top, who's the first place, no room for those who come second. You know, do you want to be a winner or a loser? And particularly my early Olympic career, there was so much stock put by this very macho domination sense of what winning meant, and actually it really held me back. It stopped me exploring how to go faster, how to improve my performance, because I was just trying to be the toughest out there. I was just trying to beat the people around me, but it meant by the time I came to to race against the rest of the world. Actually, I hadn't improved. I hadn't explored ways of going faster. I hadn't taken time to make technical changes that might have slowed me down for a couple of days or a week or two in order to go significantly faster in three months time, because I because we had to all try and win every single day against each other. So I saw it really from that very personal lens, and I've seen it come up in in the organizations that I work with now, when we're developing teams, when we're looking at developing leadership, often an organization will perhaps bring me in to support creating a winning culture, and they think, Oh, she's got that Olympic background. You know, we want to be number one. We need some motivation. Come and come and help us. And what I actually do is to then explore a bit about, well, why do you want to be number one, and what's the meaning behind that? Because, you know, you're you usually, you know, a company will also say we need to motivate people, because our staff engagement scores are low on the surveys. And, you know, we can see that our teams aren't performing. And in actual fact, this this language of just being number one, it leaves people cold on a daily basis. It's very hard to connect your work to this goal of somehow being number one in the sector. So it's about creating a deeper meaning to the work. So it's not that they need me to give motivational workshops, although I give lovely motivational workshops, of course, it's actually about helping the leadership to create a much deeper sense of purpose, of meaning that people can connect their everyday work to. So I've seen it come up in so many different contexts, and just this opportunity to explore things at a deeper level is what's often missing when we think we should just be competing to be number

one? Yeah, and I think within that, there's this sort of definition of the games that we are playing. And I think sometimes we lose track of what the real game that we are playing is, and we focus on the finite games that drive some of that competition, which can be helpful, but we we can lose track of the more infinite games to, you know, to. Use a bit of loose quoting there around a broader definition to what success in life looks like and and we can frame our successes around our actions and our accomplishments, rather than our sense of being and who we are and our fulfillment in the moment and those things which, which is a really, really interesting split. And part of me wonders if there's a fair amount of cultural background in that as well. Um, do you, do you think that this sort of need, the sort of competitive streak that we have within humanity, and that desire to be first and to explore and to, you know, achieve our manifest destiny and all of that stuff? Do you think that that is inherent in us? And do you think there are positive sides to that drive, as well as maybe some negative sides around it?

So I absolutely wanted to explore that in the book, and I started off really not sure what the answer was, because so many people would say to me, Oh, we're wired to win. That's just how we are. You can't stop that. But actually, there's a whole body of interesting work in anthropology where they explore actually how we've evolved as humans, and actually what it is that makes us tick, what helps us to survive, and there's a huge emphasis there on our ability to cooperate in large numbers with sophisticated communication, and that's what's marked us out from our ancestors. So this sense that, you know, all you know, we're wired to win, that's, that's our fundamental way of operating, is a very narrow view. It's one way in which we can motivate ourselves, but it's a very limited and short term way of motivating ourselves. It's that almost like the the addiction part of our brain. That means, you know, we can do something for a hit, you know, just like we want to have a like on our on our tweet or on our Facebook post. You know that that makes us want to do the next one. And playing to that kind of short term motivation that you know, you get some extrinsic reward. You get a medal, well done. If you win this race, you get a reward, a bonus at work, if you do this, that actually plays to a very limited part of our brains that doesn't actually enable us to be resourceful and therefore to develop performance and at a higher level. Whereas, if we play to the part of our brains that responds to meaning, to purpose, then we tap into a much deeper source of energy, of creativity, of resilience, which is actually what we need to be more successful, to raise our performance, if you like. So if we play to this short term extrinsic reward system, we are limiting our potential, and that's what is really the thing I want to change. You know, our systems are often geared around these short term metrics, these short term rewards, because they're easy to measure and to give out these kind of external rewards, but they limit our performance. They limit what way they give, because they don't tap into this part of ourselves where something has a much deeper meaning, and we can then, you know, really recruit the creativity, the collaboration, the ideas that we have in order to develop things to a much higher standard. So this is really about seeing a reframing of winning in order to perform at a higher level, not about lowering standards, but changing the framework we put around winning that will enable us to explore our potential together much more.

That's a really interesting question I want to ask you a little bit as well. You mentioned that you're a business coach and that you work with lots of organizations, and I just I wondered, when you go into an organization and you see what you what looks like, a very strong win loss culture, particularly this singular winner idea, what does it look like? What do you see? What are the, what are the tells that you look at a business and you're like, Oh, hang on, I think there's something that we need to unpick here.

So typically, there'll be this sense of, I'll hear quite a macho language around, yeah, we're all about winning here, you know, we're all about high performance. So they talk the talk, if you like, that's that's actually not very human. It's quite about domination. It's about, you know, power. It's about ranking. And they'll also, at the same time, there'd be a sense of, but, you know, there's something not right here, because our indications are that, you know, perhaps it typically a staff engagement survey is showing us that engagement is low, and there's, you know, low trust in the leaders, and you know, perhaps the culture our questions are answered in quite a kind of negative way. And so those are the things that are, that are most obvious to me, the language and perhaps some of those indicators within a survey, which are flagging to the leader that, oh, you know, sometimes we haven't got something right, and often their instincts will be we need to do this more. So we need to be even more kind of winning. We need to up it even more, when actually, we need to come away from that narrow view of winning and add in the meaning, the purpose, the impact, the difference that we're going to make in our jobs.

And you mentioned in the book you talk as you and James are just talking about the sort of wider beyond business issues. So the cultural, the politics, the education, this, this idea that you talk about the oppositional world, is that just, I mean, is that something that is. Is inherently, do you think, quite dangerous in an organizational culture if you're always pitting your team or your organization against everyone else.

So it is limiting. Ultimately, it's limiting what people are able to do, because a it's quite a threatening culture when you're like that. So there's a lot of fear around and that means people won't be free to explore, to experiment, to share ideas and to connect with others and to support others. So there's a sense I've got to protect myself. You know, it's me against the rest of the world that actually limits what's possible, because it means you're not challenging your thinking, you know, growing, taking on different ideas, looking at other perspectives. You're seeing all of that as a threat. You see feedback as a threat. You see all those ways of learning actually as a threat that maybe you know you're not good enough as an individual. So it limits, it hems us in, and it means that we're not exploring and growing as much as we need to and and that's particularly damaging in the current context, when we generally need people to be able to adapt, to be quite creative. I mean 2020, more than ever. But a lot of the complex issues we face, they just aren't issues that we can fix. No one person has the answer, whether it's looking at environmental issues different business sectors, looking at equality, you know, improving inclusion at work. You know, all of these issues are complex, and they require a combination of ideas and perspectives in order to create solutions that again, there's no one solution, you probably will try something, and then you need to iterate it, review, tweak, go, again, refine, review, adapt as the marketplace changes or as another factor changes externally, and it keeps us stuck. If we're in this sort of it's me against the rest of the world. We don't adapt quickly enough, because we're not open, we're very defensive. So it's limiting in lots of different ways, our mindsets, our behaviors and our ability to develop effective relationships with others.

Do you? Do you think it creates a challenge for managers and leaders to attract more diverse talent. So I just I wonder, if you create that kind of culture, and you're going through the recruitment process and people are exposed to that kind of culture, whether that very specific focus on winning means that you will always end up with the people most wanting to work from you, from quite a narrow pool of people who enjoy that very combative style, I guess. I

think for sure, you attract a narrow pool of people, and you also make them even more narrow once they come in, if you like. Again, the danger of competing is that you're competing around quite a narrow metric. So anyone who doesn't fit into that is is devalued, is disregarded, or even, you know, kind of, yeah, left by the wayside. So we so we get an ever narrower and that's the track that I see a lot of organizations on that's just not helpful, because at the same time, they'll be saying, oh, we need more innovation, we need more collaboration. And yet they're going in the opposite direction. I think one of the issues of ranking people, which happens from a very early age at school, continues through almost all of our educational lives, through university, and then can happen again in the workplace, means that we miss out on appreciating different perspectives, there can only be one number one, so that, in itself, means we're devaluing everybody else, rather than seeing there are different ways of doing things, and those, those alternative voices that don't fit into that neurometric are are, you know, undervalued when that's exactly what we need to challenge the thinking To get cognitive diversity, we need to appreciate a much broader set of skills, perspectives, input, and to be developing that which just requires a broader base of what good looks like again, to have a meeting where, you know, we're not trying to be the sort of top dog, but we're actually trying to get the best Of all the ideas that are in the meeting is a fundamentally different approach. So rather than competing for the best idea, now let's, let's get the combination. What can we take from all of the ideas in the room that will move us on and we It enables us to get from this place where we're we're all echoing one way of doing things, if you like, to moving forward and becoming collectively more intelligent. Yeah,

so interesting. And I think one of the things that always strikes me and frustrates me is that when you have an industry particularly that is obsessed with being number one, very specifically number one, what happens is when, when an industry does jump to number one, quite often, all the other sector, all the other organizations copy that organization, rather than looking at whether things work. So I'm thinking here about the Spotify experience. So Spotify jumped way ahead in terms of music streaming, and suddenly every other music organization wanted to redesign its teams and redesign its structure to be more like Spotify, rather. Than thinking about what would suit them. And I think that's a real like unintended consequence of being obsessed with being number one. If you're obsessed with number one, then you you you allocate more importance to that role of being number one in the sector, and therefore you assume they must be better than you in every way. And then you copy stuff. And I think you end up with a really, you end up with organizations, certainly in sport, I see it as well with copying each other all the time and copying their performance techniques, even if they're wholly not appropriate for their particular sport or their business or the size of organization they run.

Yeah, and it stops you then developing the things that play to your strengths and the things that the number one person Spotify may not yet have done. You stop yourself exploring that, or they haven't done it, and we've got to do what they do. So again, it holds you back rather than looking what's possible. How can we explore the potential, as yet untapped from all of the things that we have that are unique to us? Now we suddenly kind of tie it, tie ourselves down by not exploring those things, and try and do something somebody else does better than us as well as they do. And again, it's limiting. It's holding us back.

It feels like it would be really hard to step away from, I guess, our cultural backgrounds and our upbringings in which we do spend so much emotional energy focused on the competitive nature of our lives and trying to win. And it feels like we might need to be in a fairly strong personal, emotional or psychological position to really face into that and accept that and to try and do things in a new way. When you work with senior leaders who are exploring this, what kind of things do you think they need to have in place already, or what kind of conversations do you have with them to help them think in a new way and to explore embracing these newer definitions of of success and winning.

So the common starting point is often just to think about, you know, different levels of what does success look like. And often they'll jump to a kind of medium term or even short term metric, and then we just build out from there. Why is that important? What happens? You know, what impact will that have, and what will it enable thereafter? And also, what will you gain if you don't hit that metric, if you don't get that outcome? But what else are you learning and gaining at the same time? So you're broadening out that sense of momentum, having learning as a real target in itself. How is your team exploring innovating on the way to achieving that outcome? Because that will determine whether you can achieve the outcome after that, or whether you're able to adapt. How are you exploring and measuring things like adaptability, like psychological flexibility, the psychological safety that's required for a team to thrive? So we focus again on how we can understand the approach, the how that we do things, as well as, you know, jumping to these short term outcomes, we then kind of will explore, what's the meaning for that. What Why are we here? You know, why does this team exist? And what are the things that we're trying to change? What difference do we want to make beyond ourselves, beyond that six month point, annual point, again, just to develop out if a much broader sense of success. So we have broader success criteria. And that's really the starting point that unlocks and creates a great momentum. It creates some different conversations, and it unlocks that motivation. It's not about then kind of you know, for forcing people to do things different, it's actually what's the environment you can set as a leader that will enable people to do to do things in a different way, to explore their their ideas more proactively. So rather than fixing individuals, we're focusing on the environment we're creating within which those individuals can thrive. And that's quite subtle but really important shift.

And do you think that's a new role for leaders? Do you think a lot of leaders managers see that as a role already, or do you, when you're speaking to them, find that a bit of a change in approach for leaders? So

I think there's a lot more appreciation that culture affects the bottom line, but I think there's often a sense it's hard to measure, and therefore we sort of stick away from it. And what I do is to encourage leaders to go there. You know, if something's difficult to measure, but it's important, well, let's we can't ignore it. We need to find a way to explore how we're going to get some feedback about what's happening at that lived experience level of the culture, not just what we intend or what we've articulated in the in the mission statement, what's really happening and and so we look at how we can, you know, really set up some different conversations, some different spaces. We move away from the metrics, and we look at what isn't being measured in the metrics that still matters. Okay, how are we going to develop that? And it's not for me to create a formula. It's actually for them to co create that with their teams. And again, that then creates a very different, collaborative, exploratory conversation that's ongoing. So we move away again from this sort of sense of we're fixing things, to thinking, well, how we develop. Developing culture each day together, and how we're exploring that and shaping that, and thinking about where we want to go next with that. So it is a mindset shift away from fixing things to creating things together. It is about asking some different questions, and it is about challenging, you know, some of the less easily measurable stuff. You know, this metrics issue is a big blocker on developing effective cultures. And, you know, again, what I do is help people to challenge them. You know, yes, the metrics are useful up to a point, and systems need them, but we've got, we somehow enabled them to become everything. And there's always a lot of important stuff that isn't measured that are the things that trip you up, that lead to reputational issues, that lead to something going wrong, that creates a, you know, really serious challenge, or that leads to people leaving and talent not staying. And all of those are issues that that leaders are very aware of. The need to attract talent. They need to retain good talent, and there is often much more of a focus and discernment about which companies are really living their purpose. Are really, you know, going beyond the rhetoric in terms of their environmental impact, their social value that they're adding from the next generation coming into the workplace, as well as all of us in 2020 reevaluating what really matters and seeing our organizations in a different light. Yeah,

and you talk very a little bit about purpose. I just wanted to explore that a little bit more. Again, when you're speaking to people, do you think that they have a clear sense of what their purpose is and an ability to connect with it? And how do they help their teams get closer to this sense of purpose and that real underlying drive in their organizations?

So it varies, of course, what I always do is just try and deepen it and also connect it to the everyday. So sometimes there's a sense that purpose is something we discuss on a strategy away day, and then it sort of is turned into a nice statement, and it might be put on the wall. But what's really useful is when that relates to, you know, what happens every day? So, you know, sometimes we do experiments where we'll say, okay, every meeting, every conversation, needs to be started off with how it links to the purpose. So we bring it into the everyday. How can we make it part of what we do? How do we connect every interaction to that bigger picture, and how do we then understand it at a deeper level? So it's an ongoing piece. Again, we're shifting from that sense of, oh, we know what our purpose is, and now we move to what we're doing. No, we bring it with us. We adapt it. We understand it in a different way. We perhaps define it in a different way, as we understand it as we work, and realize how our impact might shift. You know, what we can achieve looks slightly different. So, so we need to refine it, review it, and when new people come into the team, then we need to go through that process, you know, once again, to check and think about why we here. Can we still achieve what we wanted to achieve at the beginning of the year? You know? Again, those are the sorts of questions that a lot of companies are having at the end of 2020 you know, how do we still achieve that impact that we want to have? It might look quite different now and then going forward in 2021 so it's making purpose, a part of what we live, a part of how we, you know, interact, how we also organize our time. So, you know, any number of There are any number of ways we can be busy. We can fill our diaries. And most people have that challenge. How do they prioritize if we don't have that sense of connection to what really matters, what's going to have the biggest impact on that wider purpose, then we can make some bad choices, or we can simply do what's in front of us and what's just popped into the inbox, so the more we can connect and understand what really matters, what's going to make the biggest difference, the better decisions we can make on a daily basis. That's really

helpful. Thank you. I've got one more question, and I'm going to hand over to hand over to Jane, and my question is really about the title of your book. We've spoken about a lot of different things here, and obviously in your book, you speak about the long win. Can you tell me a little bit about what led you to the decision to choose the title the long win, and what that means to you?

So I thought for a long while about how we're going to redefine success, and how can I encapsulate that concept. And I thought about whether do I actually want to use the word win or not, you know, because I don't want to trap us into sort of another game, if you like. But our original definition of winning was around the concepts of effort and joy, and those are the things that I think should still be part of how we define success. So actually decided to keep the term winning. But you know, the long win is about playing the longer game. Going back to that concept you mentioned, of the infinite game, if you like, because our lives go on beyond each annual set of results, beyond each short term outcome beyond any race that we might or might not win a medal in. And so it is that sense of what's what's the bigger picture, what's the long game, what's the what's the long win that enables us to make good choices in how we spend our time and not find out that? Well, I might have done one in the short term, but I'm completely off track from what really matters. To me in the long term,

that's really interesting. I also I just wanted to ask you a little bit about an overlap I sometimes see with sport and business around the idea of beating yourself and personal best versus beating other people, and whether that's a concept that you relate to or you think is useful or not, because certainly, the work that I've been involved in previously with young people and things like that, it is, to some extent, personal best, and being your best self and finding ways to improve your performance such that you deliver at your best possible limits is has been a helpful way of reframing something that's within their control and also distracting them from what's going on elsewhere. And I just wondered if you thought that related to business at all

I do, and I completely agree. And you know, a big part of the book and my challenging, my thinking, was seeing so many people in sport actually win and yet feel really empty, depressed, even, you know, to have have a crisis afterwards, because it's actually lost any deeper meaning, and they can feel quite isolated, because actually, it's a battle against people around them. So I think, you know, one of the big shifts in sports psychology has been to separate out these concepts of your performance and the results that you get, you can't control the results. They will depend on all sorts of external factors, not least your competitors, but also often on luck, on referees, on umpires, on all sorts of things. But what you can control is your best performance and making sure that again, as you're exploring that to its utmost potential, not defined by somebody else, because, again, there's a danger you limit yourself to just doing what they're doing, but exploring what's possible for you, which will give you the best chance of optimizing those results. I think the other thing that comes from that mindset is that you are tapping into much more of a positive motivation, whereas when you're competing against others, you're in much more of a threat situation. You see people around you see your competitors as rivals, and if you're then in in the threat mindset, you're much more tense. That's going to affect your performance. You're much less creative. You're in much more of a defensive place. So that's just not a good place to be in in terms of trying to achieve your best performance. And I, you know, remember a lot of the the early kind of language when I was sort of first in in the British team was around, you know, hating arrivals, not respecting them, and, you know, fearing them, if you like, or making try and make them fear you. And none of that was very helpful to what a peak performance requires is relaxation, absorption in the moment, being in the zone very present, and actually respecting your rivals, you know, even loving your rivals, because they are going to help you. You're actually collaborating together to create, you know, a new level of performance. And I think you know, some of the best examples have been those Federer Nadal five setters, where it goes beyond that sense of who's the best. They are both sublime, and they are using each other to reach a new level in tennis. And I think if you look at the longevity of Roger Federer's career, he's not concerned about just a ranking or who he's beating. He's concerned about the quality of the tennis, that pursuit of excellence, and he needs everyone around him in order to achieve that. And several times people interviewers have said to him, Oh, you're just You must be so frustrated. You've got all these other people, and you'd have won all of these other titles if they hadn't been here. And he always sort of looks with incredulity, even though he's such a gentleman, he doesn't sort of say anything too rude, but he's so clear in his response is always that I wouldn't be the tennis player that I am or the man that I am, if I hadn't had such good quality tennis players around me to play with. And so it is seeing others as a means of supporting and challenging, but ultimately striving together to reach new levels that puts us into a real world of high performance.

That is, without doubt, my favorite example I've heard of explaining, I think, for those people who enjoy tennis to understand that, and I would say this exactly the same with golf and things like Ryder Cup, where you get two great teams or two great individuals, that idea that together, you create the I guess, in in historical terms like that, glad to take glady take gladiatorial battle, that is a true experience for people watching and engaged in, is a really, a really lovely way of explaining how if you work on yourself and they work on themselves, you can engage and still create something really special. I love that. I guess one last question for me, you obviously have experienced a variety of cultures, working, workplaces and ways of working, through your diplomatic career and through your. Sport, and I just wonder, as someone who's probably had to deal with quite a lot of difficult winning culture, win loss cultures, whilst not necessarily feeling they're truly serving you, whether you have any practical advice for some of our listeners who might be in those cultures, but may want to start to gently initiate a change from either the bottom up, or from a sort of middle management position, what they can do to start influencing their senior managers around stuff like this, or what they can do to learn to cope and thrive despite the culture?

Yeah, absolutely. And that's really the situation I was in, I think, in my third Olympiad, that third Olympics, where I realized that the sort of old macho narrative wasn't serving me well, and there was new thinking around psychology and around creating cultures. So there were some shifts. But you know that that old way of thinking was was still present. And there's a psychologist in particular who helped me really to create success on my own terms, to come back and go for a third Olympics after two that had, you know, I hadn't performed to my potential, to reframe what success meant for me and to you know, therefore, be thinking about, what else am I gaining each day that I'm going to take beyond whatever result I get? You know, not to sort of feel that that the metrics are controlling what I do so, you know, define success on your own terms, and help those around you to do that. And that means, you know, we pull out the things that we're gaining that aren't simple metrics. So we're pulling out examples of the way the team is working together. We're stretching each other and get that real learning mindset in. So the mastery approach whereby, you know, every day we learn something new, we test ourselves, we challenge ourselves, we take on board a new idea, we keep thinking and we challenge those around us to do that gives a huge momentum and huge resilience to the way we work. So focusing on for yourself, what are you learning that you know maybe you don't get the metric that others appreciate, or maybe that's the only way they're going to measure you, but you know you need to develop beyond that in order to thrive and in order to be able to progress in your career, or perhaps go on to a different career or different organizations. So take control of that learning opportunity to challenge yourself. There's such a wealth of information and content and webinars and opportunities to learn you know that we've never had available to us before. So take control of your learning and explore that and find like mindeds at work. Who will you know, perhaps join you in that, who you know and something you both want to collaborate over, try and take on a new experimental project, keep that innovation piece alive. When you're in meetings you know be always asking, Okay, how else might we do this? What alternatives are there? What other ideas be somebody who amplifies ideas and meetings and make sure they get heard? You know, afterwards go back and sort of ask. That was a really interesting concept in that meeting. I'd like to hear more about it. So I think learning for yourself, but also where possible with others, is the key to giving yourself that momentum. If you feel that you're in one of these cultures where you often feel a little bit stuck within it, because it's limiting, what you can do learning is your way out of it. That's

a great message. I mean, learning is such a powerful thing, and I think that's a great place to start to wrap this up. Unfortunately, we are running out of time, so just before we go, I wanted to ask, is there anything that people can do to learn more about you and the work that you're doing, or even engage and get in touch, if possible.

Sure, I'd love to hear from anyone who's interested in the long wind and beyond. So I have a website, cathbishop.com I'm on Twitter, on at the Cath Bishop. I'm on LinkedIn, Instagram, Cath underline Bishop, so please get in touch. And if you've read the book or interested in the book, then I'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback and become part of the mission to create more long wind cultures. That's

fantastic. Well, it's been an absolute pleasure. I've learned a lot along the way, and hopefully that keeps up that learning culture. That's good. So thank you very much for me, and thank you for me. Great to be here. Thank you.

Okay, so you are back in the conversation with Jane and myself. Jane, how did you find out? Did you have any specific takeaways you want to reflect

on? I found it really interesting. I think there's quite a lot in there, and it provoked quite a lot of thoughts that we didn't have time to explore, as well around working cultures more internationally and also around the idea of collaborating. But who do you collaborate with? Do you collaborate with your business competitors, or do you collaborate with the organization? Lots of things like that. But I guess the thing that stuck out mostly is something that is quite close to both yours and my heart, which is that the thing that she recommends at the end around dealing with cultures that are like that when they don't serve you as an individual, and that idea of continuing to develop and invest in your learning, I think that's really important, because I think it allows you to feel like you are growing as an individual, even if the culture and your performance against the metrics. Are in place within an organization, isn't something that is bringing you any satisfaction. You know, she mentioned about, you know, winning and still not feeling like necessarily, every athlete feels fulfilled. And I think that can happen in organizations at an individualistic level. You can sit there and go, Well, yeah, we're doing great, and we're number one, but we're not making great products or services. And so if you invest in your learning, then at least you're investing in your potential to be able to do that in the future, which is ultimately a relatively hopeful approach. I think, yeah,

that's that is, I think, helpful, and it's an interesting point, and it feeds into what I was going to come in with, which is, there's something for me about exploring which games we're actually playing. And so I think there you were kind of describing two games. One's that immediate winning in the moment, and the other is winning in a larger game of learning and development and having a fulfilling, enriching experience for yourself over a longer time. And I think we all are involved in so many different games, if you'll define them as that, in our lives, that it's just important to remember which games are most important to us, because we can get sucked into other people's rules. We can get sucked into other people's expectations of what success looks like, but that might not serve us in the larger games that we are playing with our lives. So I think there's something really important in there about our our perspective and about our self awareness and our reflection, and to some extent, some of the purpose points that Kath spoke about as well. Okay, well, I think we should wrap up there. So I think it's just time to say goodbye from me, and it's goodbye from me. Hi

everyone. This is James. Thank you very much for listening to that podcast, and please do share it and review it if you enjoyed it. And don't forget you can learn more about our coaching, workshops, courses and development programs on our website that's www, dot World of work.io, again, www, dot World of work.io, you.