Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:06] Speaker B: Welcome to the Game Changer Unlocked. I'm your host, Brian Fetzer. On the show, we sit down with leaders and innovators who are helping people perform, lead and grow at a higher level in sport, in business and in life.
And today's guest is someone who has built his career around one of the most important and often overlooked the drivers of performance, leadership and communication.
Amen. Devlin brings a diverse background that spans business, leadership and high performance environments where clear communication isn't just helpful, it's essential. He's a fellow at Oxford University, adding academic depth to his real world experience and how teams operate, how leaders influence outcomes, and how communication shapes culture, trust and performance.
He's taken those insights and built 9minute, a platform based on helping leaders, teams and organizations simplify how they communicate to create clarity, alignment and better results.
What makes Amen's perspective so valuable is that it's not just built on theory alone, it's built in, grounded in real world experience where communication directly impacts performance.
Today we're going to break down what great communication actually looks like and how it applies across sports, business and in leadership.
Eamon, welcome to the Game Changer Unlocked. I'm so excited to have you.
[00:01:41] Speaker A: Hey, Brian. Yeah. Looking forward to this. Yeah, let's jump in.
[00:01:45] Speaker B: Take us back to, you know, your journey, you know what, what experience really shaped how you think about communication.
[00:01:54] Speaker A: I spent many a year as an attorney.
I was a lawyer for the financial services sector for just over 20 years. Then I realized I wasn't a very good lawyer. So I thought I'd switch out and do something different.
I guess the standard moment, Brian, was when my.
I got two daughters, Nancy and Zoe. So my elder daughter was playing football. This is 2020 for a local soccer team. We were living in Switzerland at the time.
The team wasn't doing very well. It was losing 6 nil, 10 nil, 12 nil. And the more the team lost, the more the coaches kept shouting at these young girls.
Until one day my daughter had a nine minute team talk. And after that team talk, she said, I'm done, I'm left, I'm leaving sports.
I can't face this anymore. So she left and she was crying. I think I was crying at the time as well.
And I remember thinking there must be a better way of communicating with people. This is a crazy outcome for the player, for the coach, for the sport.
And so that can set off a whole. Yeah. Series of curious inquiries of what makes a good team talk.
[00:03:10] Speaker B: I'm trying to envision talking to a team for Nine minutes.
And what you would even say for nine minutes, man, it just kind of blows my mind a little bit. I mean, given a lot of teen talks over the course of my career.
And nine minute just seems.
Seems crazy.
[00:03:30] Speaker A: Oh yeah, it's.
[00:03:32] Speaker B: It's just. I'm just, I'm just sitting kind of, kind of taken back by that.
[00:03:36] Speaker A: I think what happens is people lose, you know, the idea of time. If you're very anxious, nervous, you know, if you are.
Yeah, not necessarily very thoughtful sort of way of thinking, you know, the idea of how long you're taking, something can just be removed. So we often ask coaches, how long do you think you spoke for? And they generally sort of undercut about 50%.
[00:04:00] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:04:00] Speaker A: So, yeah, so there's. So one of the things we try to do with coaches is just getting videos and just like this is. Yeah, just. Let's just analyze what you currently do by video.
And coaches do two things. Normally they underestimate how long they spoke for.
They also grossly underestimate how many. How much. Like how many tactical messages they, that they said so comes out very unstructured often.
And then players either get. Switch off or they get annoyed or.
Yeah, normally not very ineffective outcomes.
[00:04:36] Speaker B: I mean, I've always found less is a lot more. And you know, just, just with communicating, especially to athletes and when you have, when you have a brief period of time, you're talking about halftime or during a competition, and even with regular communication with individuals that you're, you're leading from a business sector, how much of leadership, in your opinion, comes down to communication?
[00:05:03] Speaker A: I can't give an exact number people have attempted to do that. I think that's difficult to really put a, you know, empirical sort of my personal view.
It's important because, you know, you have all these great plans in your head, right. How to plan how the team, your business or sports team is going to operate. But people don't understand what you're trying to do. Then what you have then is people just interpreting their own plans.
You end up with chaos.
In the moments of that matter, people sort of start putting their own twist or their own interpretation. And the coach gets frustrated because, you know, Brian's not doing what he's supposed to do or Philip's not doing, he's supposed to do.
So being able to kind of have a plan which is clear, which is understood. And then the really good leaders we find really check understanding, like they deliver their message, but then they find a way of like getting the team to repeat back.
What are we Talking about.
So I think that's the.
I think without effective communication.
Yeah. You can be looking after a very chaotic group very quickly.
[00:06:12] Speaker B: It makes a lot of sense. And you kind of answered this question already. But I wanted. Because I think it's super important to kind of add to it. Where do you see that most leaders fall short when it comes to communication?
[00:06:29] Speaker A: Oh, how long have you got?
There's a very famous.
So we work in rugby union as one of the sports you work in rugby. We find often the leaders are very good communicators.
There's a very famous coach in that world called Sir Graham Henry who was the head coach of the All Blacks, the New Zealand rugby team which won the World cup when he was boss.
And he's got a line which is before you speak, you got to work out who is it for your big speech. Is it for you as a coach to show off how clever you are or is it for the help empower the players?
And I think that's a useful sort of question. Before coaches speak to their players, you know what you're about to say, who's it for? So I think really working out what the purpose of communication is because without knowing the purpose, it can just be very scattergun.
And then also I think the really good leaders of.
Are very self aware.
They're very self aware. They take time to really understand what they're doing. And the ones who are less effective, they're kind of blinded by ignorance. I think they think they're doing okay, but they haven't got the guts to really analyze their own performance.
And you get this sort of what I call the disconnect between the leader and the troops.
And the ones are really good.
The gap between the leaders and troops is very. Is very tight.
Whereas the leaders who are less reflective.
Yeah. Go up in long speeches which are. Which usually aren't well understood. And yeah, you can end up with a very chaotic place that makes.
[00:08:17] Speaker B: It makes complete sense. And I'm a huge fan of the All Blacks and read a bunch of books. Legacy. And I mean it kind of goes on. I've watched a lot of documentaries and had a chance to be down in New Zealand a couple different times.
And that thought process which you just said to me really shows why they were so successful. You know, from a standpoint, having a leader that thinks that way when it comes to communicating with. With their team, that's. It's impressive for sure. For sure.
Yeah.
[00:08:51] Speaker A: I mean, you look at you. I actually know.
I know James a little bit the author of Legacy, he actually lived in London, not far from where I live. And so that team, that generation of team, they're arguably one of the best in the world of making the players really important.
So at a very high level, which you know already, Brian, is that when it got, when it got to game day, when it got to the most important day of the week when you perform, you know, as sports people, they had the view that the players need to be in charge today.
So when you get to that, you know, when you get to the stadium, the players are, they know the plan, they've been involved in the kind of formation of the, of the game plan.
But most importantly, they're the ones in charge. And the coaches are there to support them, but they're not there to take the limelight or make grand speeches and make it all about themselves. Because I think, you know, our business thinks that the most important people on game day are the players. All the rest is noise.
So if you can build a system that empowers players, it might help.
[00:09:56] Speaker B: Well, and I think that what one of the biggest things it does is allow them to be athletes and be players as opposed to thinking of how, how are we going to do this or how are we going to do that? They can be very instinctive and just play which using their God given talent to get, get things done. As opposed to, you said, is it, is it about the coaches and about, you know, how they're showing how much they know?
It's not really about that. It's about how well they're going to perform.
[00:10:23] Speaker A: Yeah. And it's challenging.
You know, there are lots of sports where there's just an assumption that the coach needs to do a lot on, on match day. You know, in soccer, coaches say a lot before the game.
They give hundreds of messages during a, during a competitive game.
You know, and yet when you ask coaches, you know, what would Brian's ultimate state be to perform that they tell you to work two words, which is flow state.
[00:10:47] Speaker B: Right.
[00:10:47] Speaker A: And you know, I always say each time you make an intervention to a player, each time you make, you know, you give a, you give him or her a new tactical instruction or some quote, feedback.
I also, you're probably slowing that player down. You're giving that person more weight to carry. Now it might be helpful, but if you fill our pockets with loads of information and ultimately might need them to be confused, then, yeah, we can prove that has a sort of negative impact on performance.
[00:11:18] Speaker B: Absolutely.
We're going to take a quick commercial break. We'll come back and we're going to break down nine minute, you know, where the name came from, which we touched on a little bit and we'll do into more detail and, and how it's helping people and organizations communicate more effectively. We'll be back right after this. Commercial break on the Game Changer Unlock.
Episode 23, segment 2, take 1.
Welcome back to the Game Changer Unlocked. Make sure you download this episode. You can watch it on NowMedia TV. You can also get it on a podcast. So anywhere, just go to NowMedia TV. You can get all these episodes. I'm here with Eamon Devlin, founder of Minute Nine. And in the first segment we talked about his journey. Now we're going to break down what he's building and why it matters.
And Amen. I'm going to start with that first question and we'll keep it simple because I flipped it and now I want to say it correctly again. It's minute Nine, not nine minute. And I think it's important to kind of understand the context of why you came up with that name for the company.
[00:12:49] Speaker A: Well, the initial reason was my. Yeah, it was because, because my daughter had that very bad team talk and she left sport because of it.
There was a secondary reason which came out sort of after the company was sort of was formed, which at halftime, Brian, we look at, we look at players, you haven't say basketball, where you've got 15 minute break at halftime.
You've got your players before the, before the, the umpire calls half time. You got your players on the court.
You know, the heart rates are pretty high. Right. They're sprinting up and down their courts every 7, 8 seconds.
So it takes time for those players to relax, to kind of come back to earth, to be present in the locker room.
And we're generally saying, depending on the group, the environment, the culture, we generally say it takes about sort of eight, nine minutes for the players to relax, to come back to earth.
That sort of process of bringing them from the high of playing competitive sport, bringing them back to the locker room where they're actually landed present really on the floor, you know, just be.
[00:13:54] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:13:54] Speaker A: So we look at how long does it take for a team to, to really, you know, because until the players are really, really in the locker room, there is no point really for the coach speaking to them.
So we look at very closely how long it takes the players and the coaches to come back to earth.
[00:14:11] Speaker B: That makes a lot of sense when you look at the problem you're trying to solve with Minute Nine. How would you define that?
[00:14:25] Speaker A: Make communication more effective in moments of pressure,
[00:14:31] Speaker B: which is always the key.
Why is communication still such a major gap within teams and organizations?
[00:14:45] Speaker A: Well, there are societal changes, Right. Which we'll all be aware of. You know what, you know, look at my two daughters. How they grew up is pretty different from how I grew up in Ireland many years ago.
The social media has changed things. Arguably, you know, concentration limits levels of focus.
I think also a lack of willingness for the heads of a group to be really, you know, to be reflective themselves.
How willing are they to reflect on their own performance, their own communication?
So without.
Yeah, without people really understanding what they're doing, first of all, we would argue making change is very difficult.
Just getting leaders just to stop, just to reflect, to watch back, to really accept how they currently communicate. And ideally, Brian, for them leaders themselves to see what they could improve.
So we always say to leaders, it could be a chairperson in a board meeting, it could be a head coach just to kind of video their own performance, leave it a day and then watch back the recording and just see what you notice.
Just do it on your own, actually. Ideally, if you've got children, give the recording to your kids to watch and see what they see. Certainly if they're anything at my kids, they give me pretty direct feedback on what's not working very well.
But, you know, it's from a place of love and hopefully it's from a place of love.
So, yeah, when we work at professional teams, we insist that coaches have looked, are able to watch back themselves, which is not easy. You know, people don't like the sound of their own voice for various historical reasons. Unless you're a psychopath, in which case you should be very worried. Genuinely, you should be very worried. Like sounding your own voice and then from there just kind of really accept where you currently are communicating and then seeing what can be done to make it better.
[00:16:53] Speaker B: Is that what makes your approach different from kind of traditional communication training?
[00:17:02] Speaker A: I think that's one focus. We also look at who's the most important person in the room. So most of our work is in professional sport. And one of our principles internally is, yeah, the athletes are the most important people on game day.
Everything else is subsidiary. The owner, the president, the media crew, the coaches, the head coach, the head coach's entourage.
That's all comes down. List number 2, 3, 4, 5.
Number 1 clearly are the athletes. So building a structure, a process that gives those players the best chance in the locker room to perform the best they can when, when the Whistle goes.
Whereas we see in reality a lot of communication are built around what the head coach thinks and how he or she wants to deliver things without rarely really inquiring how the players want to hear things.
What works best for that particular culture? What works best for that generation?
Yeah, so I think that's making it player centered and also getting, making sure the leaders are in a place where they can reflect themselves of how they're doing.
[00:18:10] Speaker B: When you're looking at the most common communication breakdowns, so you're saying that a coach probably is trying to provide too much information or on the same time, when I say coach, coach, business leader, somebody that is conducting a meeting might be presenting too much communication. Is that fair to say? Fair assessment?
[00:18:29] Speaker A: Well, if you look at professional soccer, which is most of our work in the sports world, actually, I'll ask you a question, Brian. So halftime in, you know, you got the World cup coming up in, in the US and beyond with two questions. How long do you reckon a coach speaks for at halftime in football, on average?
[00:18:50] Speaker B: Well, what I would hope it would only be, you know, four or five minutes because you're, you've got, you've got the commercial breaks, you've got, you got players getting treatment, you're getting kind of back. I mean, I could imagine, I'd hope it would be less than that.
[00:19:07] Speaker A: But yeah, the average is 6 minutes, 30 seconds.
[00:19:10] Speaker B: That's pretty close then.
[00:19:12] Speaker A: Pretty close. But I mean, but if you add up those words, right, people speak at 140 words a minute, depending if you're, if you're very nervous, usually speak a bit quicker.
Yeah. So you can get to, you know, 1500 words very easily.
And then if you ask the coach to recall what he said at the break, they themselves struggle to remember.
So what chance does the player have to.
[00:19:42] Speaker B: How are your players going to remember that? And there's probably also other coaches or other individuals that are speaking as well. So it's not just one voice, it's probably multiple voices. Correct?
[00:19:53] Speaker A: Yeah. On our research, we'd be very clear on that, Brian, is that if the players trust the head coach, they want to hear from the head coach.
That's it.
Now, it's more difficult in certain sports like NFL and but as a basic principle, they want to hear from the person in charge. Now, by the way, that may not be the head coach, funny enough, although depends on who the actual leader of the group is, which isn't always the person the biggest title.
[00:20:17] Speaker B: True.
[00:20:18] Speaker A: But in summary, yeah, they want to hear from the, from the, from The. From the. From the head person.
[00:20:22] Speaker B: Well, it's kind of that top down kind of approach. You want to hear the person that's calling the shots per se as opposed to just hearing noise.
Really?
[00:20:33] Speaker A: Yeah, they want to see the person take responsibility.
These are precious moments, big moments. These are moments can be won or lost. So they expect the person who's responsible for the entire group to step up and forgot that person to perform and not just to get up. I'll let somebody else do it today.
I don't feel like it.
But as an interesting sort of aside, if I may, you mentioned this episode 23 and it is relevant to communication.
Obviously. There's a very famous player who wore 23 Ryan, you'll know.
Well, do you know why he wore 23 Jordan?
[00:21:11] Speaker B: I do not know.
[00:21:14] Speaker A: His brother played basketball, but not to very well. Not the same level as MJ, but his original squad number was 20. His brother's squadron was 23. So he wore 23 in honor of his brother.
[00:21:28] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:21:30] Speaker A: The reason for mentioning that is we try to use storytelling all the time with our coaches. I try to give a little way of people remembering something which hopefully sticks in somebody's brain as opposed to just doing the X's and O's in a very analytical, what I call the spreadsheet type way which people find often difficult to recall. Whereas a little short story can just help lodge that in the brain for longer.
[00:22:00] Speaker B: With that, how about giving us an example of where working with the team the communication changed the outcome.
[00:22:13] Speaker A: Seen a few.
I've seen a few that said we've seen more that damage things than the we. We would say a significant portion of team talks in professional sport that we've seen do more harm than good.
And we knew this from like with our professional teams, we analyze the first 10 minutes of the second half.
So if it's in basketball, NFL, soccer, because you could argue that whatever happens at halftime is directly linked to the first 10 minutes of the second half. I mean you can't. I never say, you can never claim a speech will win you a game because there's so many factors. The opposition, temperature of the air, the match officials, the color of people's jerseys as a whole. You know, there's a thousand factors.
One example would be where we were. It was a team that was losing. I'm going to pick a soccer one. It was in Holland. Team was losing three nil at half time against a team that should have been beaten like it was. This team was favorites for the match, but they were Getting, you know, the terrible first half man sent off as they're losing three nil.
So the odds of you turning around that much, probably close to 2%. But you could play that game 100 times and you're going to lose that game. 98.
And the coach walked in, actually a Dutch.
Yeah, a native coach, and said, you know, some of you think this game is over.
And he said, I'll tell you as the head coach of this group, you're right.
It's finished, the game's gone. You've left too much to climb.
These guys are playing well today. We're not. We haven't showed up.
But that's okay.
You all have other games to play.
It's only one game.
But now what's at stake is more than the result of this game. What's at stake is your character because you're not about to see what sort of person you are.
Are you a 4 nil type of guy, 5 nil.
Or are you sort of person who tries to climb back up the mountain Knowing your odds of success are really low and knowing your character, I can assure you gentlemen, is way more important than this match.
I can't tell you how to decide that, but I look forward to seeing what your decision is and I'll see you back in this locker room at the end of the game.
Remember, the game's gone. It's fine, we've lost the game, but you're about to see what sort of person you are.
End of talk.
[00:24:53] Speaker B: Did they win or did they drew?
[00:24:57] Speaker A: They drew three each.
[00:24:59] Speaker B: Wow, that's impressive. I mean that's an impressive.
It's an impressive mindset shift for a coach to kind of get this team to kind of think a little bit different differently as opposed to the feel sorry for myself and shoot, it could have been easy. Five, six, n Without. Without question. That's.
I like that.
[00:25:20] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And we would argue on that we, you know, other tools like that. But what you're trying to do as you spot it, you're trying to the players to latch on to something, you know, they're trying to latch on to or a feeling that I maybe take, take the pressure away. It's like look at, you know, we're all worrying about the result here. Let's just forget about the result.
But there is something arguably more and more important, you know, at play here.
[00:25:51] Speaker B: I love it. Eamon. This has been great. When we come back, we'll shift into the world of sports and coaching and how communication is shaping performance at really at Every level.
Next up on the Game Changer Unlocked.
[00:26:04] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:26:18] Speaker B: Welcome back to the Game Changer Unlocked. Loving what you're watching? Don't miss a moment of the Game Changer Unlocked and or any of your other favorite NOW Media TV shows. Live or on demand, anytime, anywhere. You can download the free Now Media TV app on Roku or iOS and enjoy instant access to our full lineup of bilingual programming in both English and in Spanish. If you prefer to listen on the go, you can catch the podcast version of the show right on Now Media TV's website, www.nowmedia.tv on Apple, Spotify or any other of your favorite podcast channels. From business and breaking news to lifestyle and culture and everything in between, now Media TV is streaming 247 and ready whenever you are.
We're back with the Game Changer Unlocked and I'm here with Eamon Devlin. And now we're turning to the world of sports and coaching where communication can make or break performance without question. We, we were talking a little bit during the break about the differences of coaches and the different cues and so forth, and you mentioned one thing that just kind of like it just kind of struck me as I started thinking about it is the body language of coaches and how they communicate.
If you could kind of touch base on that a little bit, that was kind of fascinating, to be honest.
[00:27:48] Speaker A: We, we've run tests, Brian, how much players can remember from team talks like before, before a game.
We've run tests and which players can hear depending on the sport from the coach during a, during a competitive match, obviously at half time. We've run experiments of what first thing people often say players is, is they reflect on the body language of the coach.
Like, you know, what was he stood over, was he shoulders back, you know, did he, did he or she look confident?
Linked to that is what the coach wears.
So there is very clear research on what you wear will have an impact on how the players see you. So for example, if you're, it's mainly soccer research, but if you look at the coaches often wear like a smart casual like, like what? Like you're wearing right now. Like if you look very smart and professional.
The alternative of that is more tracksuit or the club colors.
The research would suggest if you wear tracksuit, people see as more tactically aware and efficient. But you wear something like Europe, you're wearing the seat more powerful and more strategically based.
Now if you're out of shape and wearing a tracksuit, that's probably not a good look for a coach.
[00:29:06] Speaker B: Interesting.
That's Fascinating that there's so many of the different, you know, just the body language and how you communicate. One of my favorite coaches, Jurgen Klopp showed a ton of emotion when he was on the sidelines. He's pumping his fists and you could always see him, I mean he's always grabbing a players giving him a big hug, they come off the pitch.
Does that play into it as well?
[00:29:34] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean can you mention soccer? We looked at, we did a lot of work trying to understand what it's like to be professional. Football. I never played football myself, but some of my team has and we've also interviewed a bunch of players from, from big teams like, like Liverpool and Real Madrid's and try to understand what it's like. And sadly there's two things came out from our, from our analysis. One is players are often very lonely and secondly, often very anxious, particularly on, on, on game day.
So I think what, I don't know Klopp, but I think what Klopp is trying to do is trying to make them, you know, show warmth and protection and I'm here to look after you. So yeah, the more tactile communication, hugging, fist pumping you can get in probably doesn't make sense. And again there's research which suggests that teams have got higher fist pumping. High fiving from basketball is will, you know that you can correlate that to winning.
So if you look at the other extreme teams which are very disparate and no real eye connection. Eye contact, yeah. They're literally less connected as a group, which is a problem for an invasion sport. These are complicated games to play and so if you're not connected it's difficult to win.
[00:30:50] Speaker B: You mentioned athletes feeling pressure and loneliness. Do you think social media has really played more of an impact on that for an individual? Maybe not just even sports, just across the spectrum, but the loneliness and the kind of pressure side,
[00:31:11] Speaker A: I think that's clear. Yeah, I mean they're much more of a. The feedback is more, is more immediate. The feedback is more brutal if you're.
When I was a kid, right. Feedback if you're a player was in the press the next day but it went through an editor and you know, there's only certain things you could say and you know, it got through the editors so whereas now it's. People can say what they're like online without any real sort of pushback. I think also we've as a basic sort of line of thought, the bigger the player, the, the more lonely the player is because we realize that the Friendship group. Like, if you play for Real Madrid, your friendship group broadly is incredibly small because if you're Jude Bellingham or Ky Mbappe, you're no longer really Ky Mbappe or G. Bellingham, you're Judy Bellingham. And killing Mbappe, you're. You're, you're these rock, you know, superstars.
So, yeah, trust levels are a play then. Who, who can they really speak to?
So often they just rely on their families as people they can trust, and often their families are managing their careers, so you're managing business, and so they end up isolating an awful lot.
Professional sports people are alone an awful lot because obviously they travel an awful lot. So, yeah, so if you accept that that could be relevant to some of your players, then you probably need to look at ways to try to minimize or lower those issues. I don't think you could ever eliminate them. I think it's the stardom and the social media. Those two things together have made players very exposed.
[00:32:49] Speaker B: It's fascinating. And I want to go back now, go back from a standpoint of age, and we've talked about the professional side of things, but youth sports has become, at least in the United States, has become a massive industry, massive business.
And there's so many coaches that are involved that aren't necessarily coaches. They're, you know, moms and dads that kind of trying to help, you know, help out a club or so forth.
When, when youth coaches right now, in your opinion and what research you guys have seen, you know, are youth coaches getting it right and where are they kind of missing?
[00:33:30] Speaker A: It's back to self reflection. Good evening.
If you're coaching your under 8 team in, you know, Ohio, I don't see why you shouldn't video your own performance the same way you did for, you know, for Barcelona.
It's ultimately, you're the coach, you're trying to influence behaviors.
But in order to look, you know, to get. To get better yourself, I say you need to understand what you actually do yourself and for you to be comfortable what you do yourself. Because you might decide after the review, yeah, I'm great. I'm the best of a coach. I've got this lockdown.
I don't need any help. If you conclude that, that's up to you, but at least go through that process of being aware of what you do and then you can decide, no, I need to, ooh, maybe I'm saying too much, or maybe I'm just speaking to, like, these three kids and never, you know, one tip, we all say to Coaches at your non elite level is after training, write down all the names of the players that you could remember who were training and the ones that you missed off are the ones you should speak to next training.
You probably didn't speak to them at all during that training session.
[00:34:36] Speaker B: Interesting.
That's a great way to look at it. I mean, do you think, or I should say how important is communication and building an athlete's confidence with that, what you just said kind of in mind?
[00:34:54] Speaker A: Yeah, it's a kind of philosophical question. It's what I'm really working on. What is your purpose as a coach? Why are you there?
What are you trying to do?
Like is it, is it developing, trying to develop, you know, young people to be better people and better athletes. Are you there to win all the time?
I think it's worth deciding which it is, you know, and some people will say I'm here to make sure everyone gets a good chance and wins and. But then you look at the behaviors of the coach and they just pick the top, you know, the first 11 players all the time and you know, the players who are less, you know, on the face of it, less able don't get, don't get a look in. So the coach is kind of confused himself. I'd argue, you know, you're saying one thing, doing something else.
There is, but these are complicated environments. You've got parents as well, right? Parents are kind of hoping that, you know, they're their son or daughter can be the next big thing in sports. So they're getting involved.
I've learned myself as a parent after, you know, a competitive match in the car is just not to bring up the game on the way home.
I've not found the formal words that doesn't can just, you know, can often just be inflamed things just by how did it go. So I just like let, let, let, let my kids bring it up.
[00:36:14] Speaker B: That makes a lot of sense and it's actually incredible advice.
Now for other people, they're going to want some credible advice from you. How can they get in touch with you and how can they find out more about Minute nine and how it might be able to help their organization and their team?
[00:36:30] Speaker A: The best way is our website, minute9io it's not.com because we said we couldn't afford the dot com. So it's Minute 9io also on LinkedIn. So if you just Google yeah, Eamon Devlin halftime, you'll get lots of propaganda.
[00:36:47] Speaker B: Well, when we come back, I want to dive a little bit more into the halftime piece of it because you've done so much research on halftime. So we'll be back and we'll bring this full circle. We'll talk about how communication really applies not just in sports, but really in business, leadership and everyday life. And we're going to touch base a little bit more on our halftime talk. We'll be right back right after this commercial break on the Game Changer Unlocked.
The Game changer unlocked episode 23.
Eamon Devlin, founder of Minute Nine. This is segment four, take one.
I'm here with Eamon Devlin, founder of minute nine. And we've talked about communication and leadership in sports, and we're going to expand that to how it really applies across business and everyday life in this segment. But I want to start off first aiming with talking about halftime, kind of the break in action. And it, I guess, really could apply to a lot of different business meetings. You could apply to really anything. But speaking specifically with sport, though, you know, you've done a lot of research on halftime and what you found out about that kind of break in the action.
What is the most profound kind of research piece you found, you know, when you studied halftime or the middle of a competition?
[00:38:29] Speaker A: So when you ask coaches what's the most important thing at half time, they always say their speech. Halftime talk.
If you ask players what's the most important thing at half time, of course the coach's words are important, but it's not in the top three of importance.
[00:38:48] Speaker B: What are the other two?
[00:38:52] Speaker A: You're familiar with Maslow's hierarchy of needs. You need certain needs in order in place to kind of perform at a very elite level.
One is, you know, food and water to feel safe, to get and to feel rested.
Those sort of, you know, philological physical needs should need to be met first of all before you can sort of launch into. Into lots of tactics.
So having, yeah, having the right fluids, having the right solids, foods kind of recover that what you've spent in the first. In the first half.
And then lastly is getting so the body gets very cold very quickly.
So your body temperature will drop.
Anything could be, yeah, muscle temperature, but 0.5%, which has a really big impact on performance, on your performance and power.
So getting the body re warmed up again at the end of halftime is really important. And then we get to the coach's words.
[00:39:59] Speaker B: And you know what, now that I think about that, that's typically the opposite of what happens. You come into halftime and you see the coach immediately goes into talking and then get your fluids, get Your other things afterwards, just when you just from a perspective of watching halftime displays and so forth, that makes a lot of sense to kind of flip things.
[00:40:23] Speaker A: Yeah, the analogy is you've got your.
If it's, let's say soccer, you've got 11 airplanes flying on the pitch. Whistle goes a halftime during the men's World cup, you've got to find a way of getting those players heart rates ending up to 90% sort of maximum rate. They're tired, they're anxious, they've just played a very intensive game of football. 45 minutes longer actually because of those water breaks coming in in the World Cup.
[00:40:49] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:40:49] Speaker A: And yeah, getting those planes to land in your locker room just takes time.
And until they are really lined up on the Runway, engines off where they can refuel, they can take stock of where they are and then the coach will come in and address the, the line of airplanes lined up on, you know, jfk.
[00:41:11] Speaker B: So, so the bigger point here is if someone wants to become a better communicator, where should they start
[00:41:20] Speaker A: making sure the people you're about to speak to are they, are they actually in front of you?
Like, are they really in front of you?
Your body can be there, right. But your mind can be, as you will know, your mind can be somewhere else.
And so taking time to really check, are they in the room with you?
Because if they're not, then it's, it's wasted words, wasted opportunity.
[00:41:45] Speaker B: Is there a difference between communication between sports and business?
[00:41:53] Speaker A: There is for sure. I mean, I always think the biggest difference between sport and business is in sport you all get the same outcome.
Like if you win the super bowl, you all get a title. Every, everybody. If you work at Apple, they're all different outcomes, different amount of shares, different amount of pay, different amount of knowledge, different information. It's, you know, in sport you have this unitary sort of, you know, we either win or winner lose together. In sport, the reality is everyone wins and loses in different ways every day. And there's no real end of year, but there are certain principles which do apply, which are people still need food and water, rest, people need to recover, people need to be in the room, be effective.
And the really good coaches, Brian, know they know what tool to use in the moment. So they don't really pre plan much stuff.
They know when they walk in the room, they assess the boardroom.
What's the best thing I can do to my team today to make them feel like, to get them to the next level?
Maybe today it's not the PowerPoint maybe I did start today and the Excel, maybe they both go.
Maybe there's just no belief in the room today. We just had two quarters in a row which are disastrous. They don't need another spreadsheet with fake news in it. Right. We all make numbers to look a certain way for predictions, so maybe there's a belief.
Yeah. So I always say, like, before you start giving people X's and O's, does your team have any belief they can get, you know, they can get to the next day? Because if they don't, you have a motivate, you've a. You have a belief issue to try to address before you get to the nitty gritty of your game plan.
[00:43:35] Speaker B: Right.
Well, how can, how can a leader communicate in a way that kind of builds the trust, accountability of all the things you were just, just speaking about?
[00:43:45] Speaker A: Really easy way. Well, I say easy is to be vulnerable and say, you know, I always say to a coach, have a good story about your own background like that. People can, you know, I always say, I always often use my coaches. I grew up in a very unsafe house. I grew up very scared. I've got very bad teeth. My teeth.
I grind my teeth. I have done all my Life.
I've had 95 operations of my teeth. Basically grind my teeth the way all my life. And that's fear.
Never feeling safe, never feeling, you know, really sort of, that's. That was, that was my livelihood growing up.
And so, yeah, be able to share something which, you know, reveals something of you, might help bring you and your, know, your, your group together a. A small bit.
But if you go into the, you're going to do this, you're going to do that.
People are afraid, right? They're afraid. They need a way of like bringing you together, not like putting out the armory. And this is my PowerPoint. You're going to fully listen to this.
Okay,
[00:44:56] Speaker B: well, it, it's really, it's making more about them than about you.
Which kind of leads me into the next question I had in mind was how does listening play into effective leadership and communication?
[00:45:12] Speaker A: There's a very famous sovereign wealth fund called the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund, the biggest sovereign wealth fund in the world. They found a load of oil 30 years ago and they basically saved the money that they got from this oil, which is very topical, I guess, in today's world.
The head of that, I can't think of his name, but the boss of that organization, he. I'm going to credit to him. This is his line. He spends some time with his team every week. And the only question he asks his team is what's in your mind?
Goes around the entire organization. Hey, what's in your mind today?
And from that just builds a picture of like, what the hell is going on in this organization.
[00:45:56] Speaker B: That makes a lot of perspective.
[00:46:00] Speaker A: Yeah, he's not trying to force an agenda. I mean, he will do at some stage because he's a boss. Right. He has to kind of ultimately have a strategy. And we're all going to do this, but before you do that, maybe just try to see what height exactly is this airplane. Like, what direction are we actually flying in?
And the truth is we've got 10,000 of these things flying. Right.
Not everyone's flying along the road. So just trying to assess which direction of what the direction of travel is. Because until you do that, then I always say very difficult to set plans, game plan or business plan.
[00:46:34] Speaker B: True.
You mentioned a little bit earlier about pressure and the pressure that athletes feel.
Business leaders obviously feel the same thing.
How can you communicate when. When that's clearly. You're clearly under pressure to perform?
[00:46:55] Speaker A: First of all, it's very difficult, I'd say. Right? It's difficult. It's not easy.
It's not easy. It's not easy to be clear. It's not easy to kind of be. To have clarity because you've got a whole lot of physiological things going on in your own body. Right. Which you have to kind of fight.
But there are various little tools we would say to kind of, you know, that. That idea when you walk into the room like we did. We work with some of the cancer surgeons here in the uk Anything, how they kind of.
What they do before they make a decision in an operation.
They just. You normally take five seconds before they make a decision.
Just whatever they're doing. It's like, okay, I'm about to say X before I do, I'm going to stop for five seconds.
One, two, three.
And then they make the decision. And they make it, you know, and they say aloud, they verbalize what they're about to do, which also means that somebody else can go. Actually not sure you want to do that today.
Yeah. Going back to that rest and water. Make sure the body is, you know, the body is tired or, you know, make sure those are. Those prior primary needs are met.
Self care.
I've got a. One of my. One of our soccer coaches. I haven't got my phone with me, but he. He would often open up his. His iPhone. Other. Other iPhone. Other phones are available, of course, and he opens his phone and there's a picture of his family. It's not a very good demonstration having a phone, but. And there's a picture of his family. And he spends 10 seconds just really looking at that picture, analyzing. That's Nancy, she's 11, Zoe 6. My wife Emily, like, really knowing and go, that's really important in my life. Puts his phone away and then he goes and addresses his team.
That's his way of finding a way of getting perspective.
[00:48:56] Speaker B: That's a great way to kind of reset or refocus what your thought process is.
I appreciate you coming on the show. It's been very insightful and I think a lot of people, if they listen, they're going to pull a lot of it out.
One last time. Where can somebody connect with you or find a little bit more information about Minute Nine if they wanted to get their organization involved?
[00:49:22] Speaker A: Yeah, there is. I'm on LinkedIn for my sins. Eamon Devlin on LinkedIn, our website. We've got a connection sort of piece there as well. Sort of, yeah. Minute Nine, IO and yeah, those are the two main ways.
[00:49:37] Speaker B: Eamon, this has been an incredible, valuable conversation. I appreciate you joining us.
[00:49:43] Speaker A: Thanks. Opportunity. Yeah. Good luck, everybody, with your communication skills.
[00:49:46] Speaker B: Absolutely. Hey, I'm going to take some of those tips. I'm going to work on it myself.
[00:49:52] Speaker A: All good? All good.
[00:49:53] Speaker B: What you've shown us today is that communication isn't just a skill. It's the foundation of leadership, performance and connection. And whether you're, you're coaching a team, whether you're leading a business or building relationships, how you communicate shapes your outcomes.
And, you know, that's all for today's episode of the Game Changer Unlocked. I'm Brian Fetzer.
Eamon Devlin for joining us. Thank you. Hey, and thank you for reminding us that your growth starts with awareness, intention, courage to improve, how we lead, how we connect. So until next time, stay sharp, stay intentional, and keep changing the game.
