Olympic Spirit

A trio of world-class motivational experts have come together to create a mini textbook – designed to fit in your pocket and help you achieve yours dreams, as Steven Mayatt learned at Artbuthnot Latham’s office in the city.

If you have followed international athletics’ over the past couple of decades, the names of Steve Backley and Roger Black will be well known to you. You might well also know their names – and their faces- from any number of television appearances.

Steve’s area of excellence was throwing the javelin, and his world-class career stretched from 1989 to 2004. He was ranked world number one when he was just twenty years old, and he went on to established three world records, win gold in seven major championships, take medals at three consecutive Olympic Games (the only British athlete to have ever done so), and become one of only a very small number of UK athletes to win the IAAF’s World Athlete of The Year award. In recent times Steve has become a BBC sports commentator and motivational speaker.

Roger’s career in athletics – apart from specialising in both the 400 meters and the 4 x 400 metre relay – isn’t too dissimilar from Steve’s. Roger represented his country for a decade and a half, and was Great Britain’s team captain. He has won fifteen major championship titles – including European, Commonwealth and World championship gold medals. He suffered setbacks such as debilitating injury during these years, but overcame the odds to win silver at the Olympics in 1996. The common denominator between Steve and Roger is their vocation for motivational speaking. They came together to found BackleyBlack three years ago to ‘inspire, motivate and entertain’ audiences, and translate their experiences into ‘real-life, day-to-day activities that can be acquired by anyone with the will to commit’.

Both Steve and Roger have made the very proud trip to Buckingham Palace for a British honour; Steve has received the OBE and Roger was awarded the MBE.

At this point in the story we need to introduce a third character; Humphrey Walters – who regular readers of Private Life might recall was profiled in the magazine a while ago. Humphrey enjoyed a successful business career before moving into a whole new direction as an expert team-builder. In 1996/7 he sailed around the world on the yacht Ocean Rover in the BT Global Challenge, having put together and managed the boat’s team; in 2003 he worked on the creation of the England rugby team which went on to win the World Cup; in 2005 Sir Anthony Bamford, head of JCB, called in Humphrey to create a team for their (hugely successful) assault on the diesel powered land speed record the following year.

It’s best to let Humphrey take up the story at this point, perhaps: “What happened was that I had written the Little Book of Winning some time ago. It was all about performance, and it was aimed at people who, like me, have the attention span of a gnat. I wanted to put the ideas in a concise format, and I wanted it to be something that readers could dip in and out of; a book you could stick in your pocket and read on a train, on a plane, standing up on the Tube – wherever.”

Many people had come up to Roger and Steve after a presentation, asking for a summary of their thinking. They thought that it would be a good idea to have something to back up those talks, and they were introduced to Humphrey. As he says, “It was obvious that you could combine anecdotes and thinking from business and sport in a really compelling way. The Olympics are coming to London in 2012, and while that’s about sport, getting it organised, getting the venues built, arranging the huge logistical challenge, is primarily a business challenge.

We decided to put together a book similar to The Little Book of Winning. Steve and Roger sent me all the snippets they could think of by way of examples. I told them not to even think about the structure; that would be my job. I got a mass of material from them and I pasted it all over the wall of my office.

“There had to be a logic to it all, so I decided to take the five Olympic rings by way of a format, and create five sections within the book. These fell into a natural chronological order, and I started with the initial impetus – having a dream; having an ambition. Secondly, how do you convert aspiration into action? How do you actually get under way with your dream?

“The next logical step is how to up your performance; raising your game to a competitive level. Fourthly there’s coping with setbacks; there are always going to be problems – there are always going to be other people who are negative about your ambitions. You have to be prepared for major hiccups along the way, and be able to overcome them.

“Finally, fifthly, there’s the big question of ‘winning after winning’. It’s one thing to succeed just once. The real heroes are the men and women who go on winning. So I created a format based on business thinking, into which I put Steve and Roger’s thoughts – to illustrate the points that we wanted to make in each of those five sections.”

Humphrey says that in his experience many people in business have no clear direction, and haven’t identified what it is that they really want to achieve. He goes on to quote a statistic that throughout business only around quarter of men and women are really doing what they enjoy, and a similar proportion of the total actively loathe what they do for a living. It’s statistics like that, he says, that make people want to start their own business – not necessarily to become hugely wealthy or to conquer the world, but because they are looking for a greater sense of fulfilment in their professional lives. This is just one of the groups of people at whom The Little Book of Inspiration is aimed.

Humphrey’s message to them is formulate the sort of simple, basic strategy, which the book describes, and to overcome the negativity of other people – be they colleagues, teachers, or relatives. “It’s surprising how many successful entrepreneurs left school, having been told that they would never come to much in any field, but who in fact hadn’t yet found their calling – their particular niche,” he adds. “The whole point of the book is that what we are talking about is real. It’s not mere theory, it’s not pie in the sky – it’s real. All theory is based on practice, and often challenges are nothing like as hard as people fear – but they do have to work for their dreams.”

Humphrey tells his audiences that no one is going to give them a brilliant opportunity for nothing, but the opportunities do exist and are just waiting to be revealed. He makes the point that what is often needed, in many cases, is a catalyst, and it’s the fervent hope of all three authors that the little book might just be that catalyst.

The message, he says, is very similar for the youngsters he often addresses in schools: “The exam system – A levels in particular – are often a huge Rubicon for teenagers, and it’s all too common for them to not be prepared for the challenge and to loose faith in themselves. What is most needed at that stage in their lives is someone who will assure them that their dreams can have a reality, and that just about anything is possible. My message to them is exactly what I would tell someone two or three times older.

“It’s all about winning by inches. If you work on your personal performance you’ll achieve your aims. That’s how athletes work. As the little things are improved upon, so the incremental improvements add up.”

For most people, Humphrey argues, the factor limiting their ambition isn’t their background, their parents’ position in society, their race or any other external factors; it’s believing what other people say about them, especially if those comments are negative. “Other people are often envious of your ideas and your ambition, sand their certainty that ‘you’ll never make it’ can be a very corrosive factor in anyone’s self-confidence.”

And despite what everyone thinks and says about it, Humphrey insists that Britain is a great place to achieve one’s ambitions. What is well worth doing, he says, is to undertake another exercise in positivity and identify just what we, as a nation, are good at. He cites the arts and entertainment – particularly television, which he insists is the best in the world by far – our national ingenuity, and – very specifically our banking system: “There’s been a lot of criticism of the banks in recent years, understandably so in many cases, but at the core we do have terrific institutions and a huge number of very talented people.

“People make comparisons between the UK and the USA; I’m a great admirer of how things are done in America, and certainly they still have that Wild West, can-do-spirit – they have that freedom of the Great Plains in bucket-loads. But look at everything they’ve got going for them that we don’t have. Britain really does punch above its weight internationally and that’s down to the very high calibre of our best people, and the solidarity of our institutions. But similarly, look at the drive for education in India, and how hard many of the people who have come here from Eastern Europe have been prepared to work. The key is to find out where best stuff is being done, wherever that may be, and do it better.”

Going back to talking about banking, Humphrey, Steve and Roger are banking with Arbuthnot Latham for this publishing enterprise. Humphrey and I chatted ahead of an early evening presentation that Humphrey made to a room – a very full room – of clients and other business contacts from across the city. “I really admirer the way Arbuthnot think with events like this,” he said; “It’s lateral thinking. It’s not just getting like-minded people together, giving them a drink and a few canapés, but exciting their interest – and, of course, giving them a chance to converse, whether it’s high-level networking or chat about the weather.

“I always get the strong impression here that Arbuthnot Latham is saying: ‘We’re really interested in you, and we just want to do a bit of something for you’. It engenders goodwill all around.

“This really is such a personable bunch of people – and in that, they are quite unlike any other bank I’ve ever known. As a client I ring people here, and they know who I am. There’s no formality; if I want something doing, I give them a call and they say ‘Right, we’ll fix it’. That’s what people like me want. It’s the antithesis of being told that everything has to be referred to head office. I don’t care about bank’s protocols and internal processes; I just want someone who gets things done. I regard so many of the Arbuthnot Latham staff as friends, and I wouldn’t think that of a High Street bank in a thousand years.”

The trio have self-published the book, and as well as selling it directly to their audiences, several companies have ordered copies in bulk and re-branded it with their own logos and CEO’s message on page 3. These companies provide it as part of their social contract with their staff and clients, and while they want their staff to read it, of course, they also want it to be passed on to family members.

Who knows, you may find that a supplier of yours sends you a copy by way of a Christmas present! And just in case you don’t, its not available through Amazon or any other retailers; you simply email Humphrey@humphreywalters.com.

Taken from Arbuthnot Latham / Private Life / November 2011