 Hi everybody I'm just off an interview that a Bernard Brogan had with a guy called Rory Griffith who's from the IIVN board in New York and he shared a range of very interesting insights about how you transfer skills from sport to business so I thought I'd share them with you. The first one is the reality of being a team player he said it's really easy to talk about being that team player if you're somebody who's getting the playing you're getting the glory you're getting the goals and so on but he said it's a very different story when you're sitting on the bench when you're also not being able to play on certain match days because of injuries when you are the 31st player on the panel and so on then he says you really have to think then about selflessness about the team dynamic and so on and I think that there is a lot to be you know there's a lot to consider there when it comes to business particularly when it comes to hard times and what what being a team player was really out about the second is he said is everybody that has their metrics but a leader cultivates energy around a vision so he said in the company there are various people who have different KPIs he mentioned IT and sales and marketing and so on but he said a really good leader creates a vision and then shows everybody what their role is around making that vision happen. He particularly mentioned his previous manager Pat Gilroy was very very good at doing that where he said he always knew where he wanted to go but he was happy to bring in the ideas of the team and was open to their ideas and Bernard said he reflects that in his business today. What he does is that he talks to his staff all the time around different ideas and innovation and so on so that they can bring those ideas to the table. He also spoke about how different leaders bring different things to an organization over time whether that's a football team or whether that's a business so he spoke about when he got his debut from Pillar Caffery back in 2007 he said he was well ahead of his time the Dublin was the first county to have their own fitness and conditioning coach and also he was the first guy to bring mindfulness into play and he said he doesn't get the credit that he deserves from putting all of that in place because then future leaders could actually build on that. Now we contrasted that to Jim Gavin who was all about believing in the process. He truly believed that if you had the right person on the right day in the right frame of mind and gave them the jersey that the process would unfold and also Berner told us the story but he said like he was always getting being a forward he was always being in front of the goal or regular being in front of the goal and he said he'd be thinking okay don't hit the goalie don't hit the goalie where would it go? Straight into the goalie's chest. So he said Jim Gavin really taught him how to take time and to reflect and to be calm under pressure and while it sounds like you can't do that when you've got seconds he told us about a very small technique that he had called responding rather than reacting. Reacting is when you just react to a conversation everyone shouting and roaring and everything else but he said when you respond is when you stop you take a second you understand that you've time you place the ball low and fundamentally you do get the goals and it does make a big difference and he said how that worked for the last 10 goals that he had for Dublin which is a serious feat in its own way. He also spoke about Jim Gavin who espoused the idea of the performance trinity so he said like what are the three key things that really matter to you and in Berner's case he said playing for Dublin his family and his work as an entrepreneur. So Jim's whole point is that if you don't have balance between the three of them if any one of them is not getting the attention they deserve or if any one of them is getting too much attention it can affect the other two. So he spoke about that and how they were constantly encouraged to establish that balance among all of those. Now also in response to a question about you know working from home and the changes brought on in business through COVID and so on and he was asked then a question around like how do you overcome difficult times and particularly when you're when you might be the person going through them or if you're destroying them and other people. So he said one of the key things that he does is to show vulnerability to build trust as he said if you have to have that real hard authentic conversation or if you have to give the feedback that may not be easy to hear he said it's important to show vulnerability by pointing out first how you might have struggled at various stages along the way and how you overcame that problem and how you were in the position that ultimately the other person might find themselves in. The last point he mentioned is actually not something we always hear from sports people well I'm speaking personally anyway and that is that he said a lot of people analyze failure and the decomposer that did wrong and so on like that but he said there's a lot of value in analyzing success is that success can be a very good teacher if we take the time to understand what made us successful along the way and in particular he said there that you know a lot of people celebrate success and they enjoy it but then they move on and he said there's a real lost opportunity there so there was a lot a lot that he shared in those 40 minutes of a discussion and I hope this has been helpful for you and also if you want to find out more about Bernard his philosophy and his principles for success his new book The Hill is now out in all good bookshops and I'll put a link in this post as well where you can look at that. Thanks everyone bye.