‘What is the optimal environment for you to thrive in?” is the first question Owen Eastwood asked the European Ryder Cup team 12 months ago. After their victory on the greens of the Marco Simone Club in Rome, the players told a different story than the ones traditionally heard from sporting winners, reflecting the impact the performance coach had.
Rory McIlroy described how “we sat around the firepit, we chatted and got to know each other really well and that was an amazing experience. I thought I knew them for a long time – but I got to know something different about them and I think that really galvanised us as a team … we feel like we can be ourselves.” Justin Rose expressed his motivation when “representing something bigger than yourself”. And Luke Donald, Europe’s quiet, humble captain, carefully positioned the team within the bigger history of the Ryder Cup.
On his YouTube tour of their meticulously designed team area, Donald showed the wall lined with the names of everyone who had ever played for Europe. In the inner sanctuary of their locker room, everyone had a seat with their name above it and “this is your time” written in their own language. Most powerful of all, there was a named space for the late Seve Ballesteros to sit among them.
Eastwood has long been in demand. He has transformed the culture, experience and performance of teams that include not just golf’s Ryder Cup team but Gareth Southgate’s England, the South Africa cricket team, Nato’s command group, a global law firm and the Royal Ballet School. He has also written a compelling book on his work, Belonging.
“I feel that a Rory McIlroy or a Harry Kane, they want to be connected to something bigger than themselves and to have a special bone-deep relationship with people around them. And I’m yet to find an example where that’s not true,” Eastwood says.
“If you want to get the best out of people in the Ryder Cup team or football team or Royal Ballet School or whatever, you have to connect them to something bigger than themselves and connect them to people around them.”
As an Olympian now engaged in cultural change in sport, and calling for the redefinition of success beyond medals and the greater prioritisation of athlete and coach wellbeing, I am keen to understand how we can share Eastwood’s approach that so seamlessly entwines performance and wellbeing.
Why has his work had such an impact in different fields? It’s so refreshing to hear the traditionally “soft” language that Eastwood uses – emotions, spirituality, connection, vulnerability, wellbeing – set convincingly in the arena of “hard” performance at the highest level under the greatest pressure.
Eastwood was born in New Zealand and later became a lawyer for the All Blacks. “I’m completely unqualified to do the work,” he says. “I was a lawyer for 15 years, that’s the only thing I’ve ever learned to do … when I had an accidental transition to become a performance coach, I had no one model in my head, I had no psychology research in my head. I needed to be very, very practical with people.
“I actually think there’s a hunger for simplicity, that’s the only thing I can put it down to.
“Because I’ve not got any baggage about how I was educated or prepared for it, I’ve just had completely fresh eyes, looking carefully at what shifts things and what doesn’t.”
That means no complex models, no fancy diagrams. Eastwood draws on our “evolutionary super strength” to connect and belong that seems so blindingly obvious, you wonder how it ever dropped out of sport. Working “in the shadows”, offering a sounding board to captains, coaches and chief executives, Eastwood urges them to embrace emotions.
“The problem you have in teams is when there’s not enough emotion, not when there’s too much.
“People are scared of having emotional conversations … some leaders will run a mile from that. But when there’s a lot of emotions, it’s great, we can learn to optimise that. Teams need emotional energy.”
Unafraid to speak of spirituality (“it might freak your readers out”), he describes creating a great team as a spiritual challenge. “If you look at the definition of spirituality that is it: it is individuals connected to a higher purpose than their own and emotional communion between people.”
By his own admission, it is not rocket science, but he is surprised time and time again to meet experienced international coaches who have never learned what makes us tick as humans and are unaware of “the insight that 70% of human behaviour is determined by your environment.” Eastwood is incredulous at how coaches can go through multiple coaching badges without understanding how to build trust, psychological safety and belonging.
Eastwood’s background – his father is half-English, half-Māori – makes him feel at home working in team environments: “I come from what you would call a collectivist culture. We are hardwired that the community comes before the individual every single time, there is no exception to that.”
His only adjustment when working in individualistic cultures such as in the UK and United States is to have two conversations early on rather than one: “Firstly, about what we want to achieve together as a team; secondly, why this is good for each individual … I strongly believe you focus on building a healthy environment, and then we fine-tune performance from there.
“What we don’t do is try and build some so-called performance environment and then clean it up afterwards.”
I’m reminded of inadequate responses to numerous cultural reviews over recent years across Olympic and Paralympic sports that uncovered “cultures of fear” and made a list of recommendations. “Cleaning up” but not really changing the fundamentals, whether it was tracking medals above all else or addressing festering issues of sporting integrity.
Eastwood tells me a story from a visit to an Olympic sport to review its culture. He was given a grand tour which ended with a stunning presentation showing increasing medal success and a developing pipeline that promised even more medals. When it came to questions, Eastwood, “a believer in gut instinct”, felt something was off.
He checked if he could ask a personal question of the presenter. She agreed and he asked if she had children. After nodding, he then asked if she would be happy for them to be part of the programme.
She paused for a long time and then, he recounts: “She said: ‘No. Because I don’t think this is a healthy place for young people … Because their lives are dictated by a coach, family, their diet, their holidays, all of that has to be passed through a coach. They don’t develop a voice here because they are always told what to do, they are never asked for their opinion … I think it’s a very impressive programme what we’re achieving, but it’s not a place I’d like my child to be.’”
For Eastwood, that crosses a red line. “I’d hope that people would see Gareth Southgate and Luke Donald and people like that and go: ‘I’d like myself or someone I care about to be in that environment. I think it would be a healthy place for them.”’
Throughout his Ryder Cup captaincy, Donald repeated: “My main job is to create the environment for these guys to thrive in.”
It is a phrase I remember Southgate using during his first World Cup campaign as England manager in 2018, confusing journalists who had asked him what success looked like, expecting him to respond with a World Cup finishing position. Eastwood reframes what ambition and success in sport should be.
Eastwood is unequivocal that his work is not warm and fuzzy, but goes to the heart of performing in high pressure, highly scrutinised situations: “Belonging has a profound effect on behaviour … We have this need to belong. If the need is fulfilled, it becomes quite profound in terms of managing your own stress. We have a capacity to communicate at a much higher level. Our communication skills, particularly for males, are much better when you feel you belong.
“Our cognitive decision-making, problem-solving in real time is much better when our stress is under control because our anxiety is reduced. And most of all, when we feel we belong and our anxiety is reduced, if we don’t understand something, then we will put our hand up and are much more likely to say: ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t quite understand what you’re asking me to do’. You can’t call it a high-performance environment if you can’t put your hand up and say if you’re not clear on the gameplan.’
Eastwood identifies a new breed of leaders emerging, far from the old model of heroic, all-knowing, dictatorial leaders. He references Southgate, Donald and Pete Carroll of the NFL team Seattle Seahawks as leading the way. He sees less willingness to accept sporting trophies that come at a high human cost.
“We can’t call ourselves successful because we’re ranked No 1 or get a lot of medals when that [long-term mental health issues] is the cost.” He explains the need for leaders in sport to “broaden their definition of success”, connecting with my own work and book that redefines The Long Win.
Eastwood believes responsibility for culture must sit at the top of sporting organisations. He argues that boards should be setting the “cultural blueprint” for their sporting environments, not leaving it up to the whims of the latest head coach.
He cites the work of Dan Ashworth (now at Newcastle) in this area at the Football Association where the football body set out to create a core culture and values across all their teams, from U19s to senior teams, men and women. On a visit to another Olympic sport, Eastwood recalls how he saw two very different coaching styles within one space – one that was more respectful, a dialogue and the athlete’s reflections constantly sought; the other that was aggressive and directive, with language such as “that’s not good enough” – a phrase I heard so regularly during 10 years of Olympic training that it sends shivers down my spine.
When asked to describe the culture he had observed, he said “there is no coherent culture … the coach is king or queen. If my child was to come here, I would have no clue what their experience would be, it would completely depend on who they end up with as a coach”. Eastwood is clear that this is a failure of leadership at the top, “deferring and subcontracting culture to coaches”.
At a time when it is easy to feel disheartened by sport’s crises of corruption, abuse and burnout, Eastwood offers a compelling vision of what sport can be. Another favourite Eastwood question to ask is “What gets in the way of you being the best version of yourself?” Blasting taboos, Eastwood shows us a clear path to help sport be “the best version” possible for everyone involved and for society more broadly.
Belonging: The Ancient Code of Togetherness by Owen Eastwood is published by Quercus. Cath Bishop is an Olympian, leadership and culture coach and author of The Long Win
