In this archive episode from 2021, Terry speaks with performance psychologist Simon Hartley about mindset, motivation, and what it really takes to perform at your best.

Drawing on decades of experience working with elite athletes, leaders, and organisations, Simon explores the characteristics that world-class performers share, including passion, curiosity, resilience, and a powerful sense of purpose.

The conversation dives into defining success on your own terms, avoiding the trap of chasing external validation, and simplifying what you do so you can focus on what really matters.

For driving instructors and business owners alike, this episode is packed with ideas around self-belief, resilience, and building a career that genuinely aligns with the life you want.

A thoughtful conversation that’s just as relevant today as when it was first recorded.

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The Instructor Podcast with Terry Cook talking with leaders, innovators, experts and game changers about what drives them.

Welcome to the Instructor Podcast.

This is show that helps you become an even more awesome driving instructor and run a better driving school.

As always, I am your splendid host, Terry Cook.

I'm delighted to be here, but I'm even more delighted that you have chosen to listen because this week's episode is a From the Vault episode, something I am planning to do a bit more of going forward.

Because over the years we've had some fantastic conversations on this podcast and occasionally it's worth going back and revisiting ones that are still really relevant today.

Now, Simon works with elite athletes, leaders and organizations around the world, helping them understand what it takes to really perform at the best.

And in this conversation we explore things like passion, purpose, resilience, and what separates people who perform at a high level from those who never quite reach their potential.

And the timing of this episode is actually quite nice because Simon is going to be speaking at the Intelligent Instructor and ADI NJC convention I'm attending next week.

So it felt like the perfect opportunity to bring this conversation back out of the Vault and into the public stratosphere.

Now, before we jump into the episode, I want to give a quick mention to the Instructor, Performance and Psychology Membership.

The IPP membership sits alongside this podcast and it's where we go much deeper into the topics that really matter for driving instructors.

Things like coaching, mindset, teaching techniques, business development, pricing, marketing, and building a career that's about far more than just getting learners through a driving test.

Now, inside ipp there are hundreds of hours of content, including expert sessions with leading voices from both inside and outside the driver trading industry, as well as coaching clinics, discussions and practical ideas you can take straight into your lessons and your business.

It's also a community of instructors who are genuinely interested in improving what they do, supporting each other, and pushing the profession forward.

If that sounds like something you'd like

to be a part of, you can find out more@patreon.com instructor or use a link in the show notes.

But for now, let's open the Vault.

So, welcome to the Instructor Podcast, where every week we speak to leaders, experts, innovators, and indeed game changers.

And today we are joined by someone who fills several of those categories, Simon Harley.

How are you doing, Simon?

Very well indeed.

Thank you very much.

Delighted to be here.

No, it's great to on board.

Have you on board you're someone that I've wanted on the show for a while and you're someone that's taken.

I don't know if you'll appreciate me saying this, but it's taking a little bit of courage to pluck up to actually ask.

So I really do appreciate you joining me.

I like to ask everyone to start off with, just to tell us a little bit about themselves and a little bit of little.

Can't say a little bit about what they're up to now.

Yeah.

Cool.

So my background is sports psychology, which I've been doing for 25ish years now.

That means kind of working with sports teams and athletes, helping them to get their mental gain right.

But honestly, over the past 15 or so years I've probably been doing the same stuff, but outside of sport more than I've been doing it within sport.

So helping people get their mental game right, not just athletes and helping teams to win in whatever field they're in.

Whether that's kind of business, education, charities, healthcare, military, you know, you name it, whatever.

My passion though, my real passion and interest has always been to study the very best in the world, to work with them, to study them, to uncover what it is they do differently, how they think differently, how they take on challenges differently, overcome setbacks, all of that sort of stuff, so that we can adopt those principles ourselves and become great at whatever we do.

And when you say the best in the world, is that a specific genre or is that sort of anything that.

Seeing how people compare in different categories?

Yeah, it's absolutely across the board.

When I wrote my second book, it's called how to Shine, I wanted to understand world class individual performers.

So I'd worked with loads of athletes and I'd seen them all at work and I'd seen some people who were literally in the top handful in the world in their, you know, in their sport.

I'd also seen people who probably had more talent but never made it to that level.

And I'd started to distill down that there were a couple of principles that seemed to be common, you know, common characteristics in these, these individual athletes.

But I wanted to know, would those be the same characteristics?

I see the same kinds of characteristics in any field of love.

So when I wrote how to Shine, I looked at a world barista champion, a Michelin star chef, a mountaineer, a polar explorer, head of a world leading science organization, science and medical research organization.

Because I wanted to know, are there common characteristics in all of them?

And if there are common things that you See, for all of those people in really diverse fields, the chances are they're going to be pretty generic and they'd apply to most of us, if not all of us.

Yeah, interesting.

That was the first question I was intending to ask you.

Whether there were those commonalities across every field and are there and sort of do those characteristics spread across and are you seeing the same characteristic repeated?

Yeah, absolutely.

And you know, I did the research well over 10 years ago, probably 15 years ago on that.

And if I look at world class performers, you know, the sort of, the people around me, the people I work with now, they are exactly the same characteristics.

They're pretty generic, they're pretty enduring.

Yeah.

What if you were to sort.

I'll just throw a couple of those characteristics out, what would you say they were a couple of the main ones.

So the one that's probably foundational, really fundamental is that these guys tend to be powered by passion.

You know, then they, they don't just enjoy being successful, they're not just there to be successful in their field.

They're there because they really genuinely are passionate about what they do.

And sometimes there's, there's a sort of an enjoyment in the process.

Sometimes it might not be literally the process of doing it, but the challenge of doing it, the stimulation that it gives them or that they know why it's worthwhile, that's why they're passionate about it, they care about it, it matters to them, it's important to them.

I'll take, I'll give you an example.

There's a guy who I worked with for many, many years called Chrissy, who's a swimmer and he would talk about those endless hours of staring at a black line on the bottom of the swimming pool.

And that, you know, that in itself wasn't particularly fun, you know, trudging up and down a pool, especially when you're cold.

You know, it's cold outside, it's dark, it's wet in the morning.

You know, all of that and you might be sore and tired from yesterday's training session and you know, you've got two more training sessions today and you do this six days a week, you know, kind of endlessly, hour on hour on hour.

But there's almost like a curiosity and an intrigue that comes with it all when you're trying to just become really, really good, ever better, as I call it in this field.

And that's really engaging for people.

You know, how do I knock a tenth of a second or a hundredth of a second or Sometimes a thousandth of a second off of my time, you know, what would I have to do?

How could I possibly get better at this thing?

That's what really kind of grasps them.

And when I look at it, passion and curiosity go hand in hand.

I often describe curiosity as sort of passion passed through the lens of a great question, as it were.

It's that that usually really engages people and it becomes probably more powerful than the medal at the end of it.

Yes, of course they want the medal.

You know, all athletes that I've ever come across want the medal, but that's not the be all and end all reason for doing it.

There's something deeper at work and many of them genuinely want to achieve their potential.

They want to know that whenever they finish doing this thing.

Athletes retire at a fairly early age normally, but whenever they finish doing this thing, they can look back and say no regrets.

I think that's key.

I mean, I'm by no means an athlete, but I would imagine if you do the absolute best, you know you can do, that's, that's the best you can do when you've achieved your goal.

And I think you make some key points there.

I feel sat under pressure now to, to produce some good questions for you.

But, but I think the thing that you've just said there, you spoke about impassion and enjoyment and curiosity and as you were saying them straight away, coming back to my profession of, of the ADI driving instructors, the, the ones that seem to enjoy the job most and send you, the ones that seem to be the most successful at it and the ones that I see online and the various Facebook groups and social media and stuff and you know, it's just a job, we don't want to get big headed.

And they never seem to be happy, they never seem to enjoy it.

But the ones that are like, it's not just a job, we're effectively changing someone's life.

You know, we might be giving someone potential for a new career or in my case when I learned to drive or just being able to get to the cinema, but that made a big difference and I think it's an interesting parallel.

And, and just on that you mentioned about the swimmer there, I'm presuming with that you were referring to Chris Cook because in your book Two Lamps of the Pool, it was something that really, really ne resonated with me in that book.

And I think you spoke then about he was struggling and you kind of said some online stuff, you just need to swim two lengths of the pool.

And initially I'm taking a bit of offense at that.

So I want to touch back on that a second.

But that's something that helped me a lot with driving lessons because for me, I don't just provide driving lessons, I provide theory test training.

I've got Facebook groups, I've got podcasts out for.

So I've got all this other stuff.

And then I feel myself getting overwhelmed just because I've got to go and do a driving lesson from reading your books, like, you just need to go do a driving lesson.

And then when I break it down to that, all of a sudden it feels a hell of a lot easier.

So with people that have got that mentality, like you said, that almost Chris Cook, the mentality of it's not just two lengths and an instructor that might be, it's not just a lesson, how would you reframe that?

So there are sort of different levels of this.

The passion bit, the curiosity bit, that kind of motivational drive is all, all revolves around the why, why do you do it?

And I'm a huge fan of having a powerful why.

And one that's not just links to the outcome of, you know, if I do this thing, I get paid, or if I do this thing, I win a medal or whatever.

It's not just linked to the outcome, it's linked to the reason why you would do it.

And one of my acid tests for motivation often is what would happen if you won the lottery?

Would you get up in the morning and do it again tomorrow?

And there are a lot of people, even those who have their own businesses, have their own, you know, kind of self employed or whatever, who would say, if I won the lottery, there's absolutely no way I'd do this tomorrow.

And you kind of think, well, in that case, there's probably some missing elements to your motivation.

And the problem with motivation is if there are some things that we absolutely need to keep us motivated.

For example, if I'm doing this for money and I'm not earning as much, my motivation is going to rapidly evaporate.

So we need a really stable base for motivation and that's linked to our why.

I can remember just touching on this one for her 25th wedding.

Sorry.

For her 25th birthday, I bought my wife a little secondhand car.

She wasn't a driver at that point.

I think she failed her test four times by that point.

And I gave her this little secondhand car and she was going to go and get some lessons.

She says that the biggest thing I gave her for that birthday wasn't a car.

It was freedom and the ability to go where she wanted, when she wanted, you know, not to be reliant on me, not to be reliant on public transport, whatever it was.

That's the thing I actually gave her.

And when you talk about, you know, what, what driving instructors potentially do for people, the impact that they can have, they probably don't realize how important driving is to that person.

And if you wanted to find a purpose, you know, from just my personal experience, there's a much, much deeper purpose, you know, deeper reason to do what you guys do and do it well.

And so that's the why.

So a powerful why is at the heart of it.

It's not the same as a what.

And I'm also a believer in really simplifying what we do.

And this is where when I said to Chris, you know, your job is surely just to swim two lengths of the pool as fast as possible.

That's a really simple, clear job.

You know, it's.

It's a.

It's simple.

And actually when we kind of strip away the, the extraneous stuff, it becomes a lot easier to do.

But the reason why he swims is critical.

He wants to achieve his potential.

He wants to lay down his very, very best.

He wants to finish his career saying no regrets.

That's why.

So they're not the same thing.

And sometimes people kind of confuse them and intermingle.

I think that's.

I think that's fascinating because it's something that I've been reflecting on a lot this year and I realized that my goal for as a driving instructor is I want to get to a point where I can do 10 hours a week.

And I don't want to stop, like you mentioned about win the lottery.

I wouldn't stop teaching.

I will just do less hours because at the minute I need to do the hours I do for financial reasons, so.

Which takes away some of that enjoyment.

I had a brilliant.

A driving instructor named Sarah Baldock.

She did a brilliant guest blog on my website for me and she spoke about how she almost felt belittled.

Almost.

That might be the wrong word, but by over instructors that she wasn't doing all this amazing stuff, she was just teaching people to drive.

But the blog is brilliant because she come to the end conclusion that that's what I want to do.

I enjoy teaching people to drive.

I get this satisfaction.

And, and you could see like you were talking about the why that her why?

Well, she just loves working with these, these people.

She Loves that part of the job.

And it's like, that's all you need to be if you, if you can.

Success is individual, I believe anyway, you know, success for Premier League football is going to be success for a Sunday League footballer in summit situations, which will be different.

Success for you and me, would that be something you agree with?

Success is individual?

Yeah, completely, yeah.

One of the issues that I think we have in society now is that we almost like rely on society to tell us what success means.

And you know, if you think about all of those messages that we probably had since we were, you know, tiny kids, society will tell us success equals.

To be successful, you need to be rich, famous, you know, kind of good looking, whatever it is, you know, you need to be all of that.

How do you measure it?

Well, bank account, size of your car, size of your house, you know, number of followers on social media, whatever it is.

And that's what society, I think would love everybody to kind of buy into.

Because if you think about it, if we all believe that success equals more money, bigger house, bigger car, that's great for the commercial economy, isn't it?

I mean, retailers will do really well, manufacturers, and that'll kind of help feel the economy.

But, but for a lot of people, that becomes like a hamster wheel that they just keep running on.

And I'm a huge advocate of just stepping out of that and asking ourselves, what do we actually believe success looks like to us?

Do we have to buy into all of that?

Because if you think about it, even if you weren't kind of sucked into the money, wealth kind of spiral, women have been getting, you know, bombarded for years by, you have to be this size, you have to fit into that dress, you have to be, step out, decide for yourself, choose.

Is that the definition, definition of success that you want to subscribe to or do you want something else?

How would you, what advice would you have for anyone that was struggling to decide what they would either class for success or what they want to achieve within their, their business?

Because that's something I struggle with.

And I think it's taken me a long time to get a rough idea of where I want to be.

I mean, I've worked with lots of business leaders and entrepreneurs over the years and some of them have just sort of slipped into that default mode of growing a bigger business.

And some of them, when they get a couple of years down the line, turn around and say, what have I built?

Why did I build it?

I've just built this kind of monster.

And it's now a hungry monster that I keep needing to feed.

Actually, what I've done is I've created a life for myself that I don't particularly want.

I've created a business that I don't particularly want.

And honestly, if you gave them the opportunity, they'd probably rewind time, go back again and ask themselves the question, what kind of business do I actually want here?

What kind of business do I want?

What kind of life do I want?

Let's deliberately create that rather than building something that I don't want.

And so that's kind of one element of it.

And it's really easy, particularly if you subscribe to lots of the self improvement, personal development messages out there.

If you subscribe to all of those, you would end up saying bigger has to be better, more has to be better.

There's a Danish philosophy that I really appreciate and embrace.

It's called lagom.

And it means enough.

It means you are enough.

You don't have to have more.

More isn't necessarily better.

You don't become better just because you have more.

And it just gets you to kind of question these things so that you can decide for yourself.

Many people, I think, have actually started doing this more during lockdown because we had a bit of a sort of a break.

Things were thrown up in the air and lots of people just had an opportunity to start thinking about these things.

I don't think there is a predefined answer, but I do think self reflection is valuable pondering.

I'm a huge fan of actually taking this stuff out when we go for a walk or whatever it is and just starting to ask the questions of ourselves.

My personal view on success, and this is one that I probably started to draw maybe 10 years ago.

I became aware that my parents probably looked at my success.

Their view of my success was related to what I'd achieved.

So at school, what grades did I get, how good were my first couple of jobs and what was my salary like and you know, how high profile were they and all that sort of stuff.

And then I write books and things like that.

So, you know, that's a good sign of success.

And I thought, you know, that's not how I view my success.

I don't work it on that basis.

To me, I describe success as being proud of who I am.

And that's very different to what I've done or what I've achieved or what I've accumulated, you know, through the course of my life.

And again, you know, it was life experience that Made me question this.

I can remember one of my very first jobs in professional sport.

I was working for a Premiership rugby team and there was a guy there who was in the same sort of field, you know, I was in sports science.

He was more sort of strength and conditioning and fitness.

And he said to me, the better you are in this business, the more you earn.

And I earn loads of.

And I was a very kind of impressionable 20 something year old at the time.

And I sort of took that on board because, you know, this guy had worked for the British Lions and you know, had a stellar career.

So I thought, well, you know, he maybe knows what he's talking about.

And it was a few years later.

I'd worked in Premiership football, I'd worked in Premiership rugby.

I reached a pretty high salary level as I went through and I still, you know, I wasn't 30 years old.

Yeah, I don't own the big flashy cars and all that sort of stuff.

And a few years after that I was driving around in a bit of a tatty little car.

I was probably earning a third as much as I was when I was working in Premier League football.

And I thought to myself, am I as third, a third as good?

No, I'm better, I'm a better practitioner.

I know more, I have more impact with my clients.

You know, I'm actually far better at what I do now, but I earn a third as much.

So it doesn't work, does it?

And I can remember driving this little car around a ring road and I said to myself, I'm not the money in my wallet, I'm not the size of my bank account, I'm not the size of my car or whatever.

That isn't me.

That's not my success either.

It doesn't, it doesn't actually reflect how good I am as a professional, never mind as a person.

So being proud of who I am is the way that I now view my success.

Can I look myself in the mirror and say, I genuinely like you as a human being and you know, that's my kind of view of success.

And it's not, it's not all or nothing either.

It's not, you're either wonderful or terrible.

Sometimes I look at myself and say, yeah, yeah, I like you, but you could be a bit more generous sometimes.

And so there's no perfection involved here.

And I'm really conscious now that I also want my daughters to understand I don't measure their success by their grades at school.

I won't measure it by how successful they are in their careers either.

I'm looking at how good a human being are you, are you kind, are you honest, are you generous?

You know, those are the sorts of qualities that I would start to look at.

There's a lot I want to touch back on there.

You've said some big stuff.

I just want to touch on that final point.

I'm interested to ask you about that because from a personal point of view, I think that's a mindset shift I've had this year as well, looking at the person rather than an accomplishment.

And you said about your daughters and about being proud of who they are.

How have you, how did you make that mindset shift to looking at the person rather than the accomplishment?

Because I still struggle.

So for example, my steps on.

I'm not going to run through his report, but he come brought his report on the other day and my initial gut reaction was to be initially thinking, oh, he could be doing better there, could be doing better there.

And it kind of have to take that step back and be like, but he's trying and he's doing his best and he's not going to be good in all these subjects.

This one is wearing really, really well and because he enjoys and actually do you know, what is it that that 15 year old teenager stage where he's just starting to come out of it and starting to be a bit more of a, you know, talkative, pleasant human being again.

But my initial thought was that negative.

So how do you shift that mindset?

Yeah, I think that there are all sorts of things that play into this for a lot of people.

They kind of need the external validation stuff because they haven't quite nailed the internal validation.

And so on a very kind of individual, personal basis, there are people who, in sporting terms, athletes need the medal to tell them whether they're any good or not.

And I don't know whether you've ever watched that.

There's a film called Cool Cool Runnings.

Have you watched it?

Back in Jamaican Bob Sway Team.

Yeah, yeah, there was a, there's a little phrase or a piece in there and John Kennedy plays the coach, Irv, and he says to one of the athletes, if you're not good enough without the medal, you'll never be good enough with it.

And it's a kind of, I think it's a brilliant reflection on life in general because if you need the money, the car, the success, the award, the recognition from others, the validation, whatever it is, it probably means that we're not giving that to ourselves.

We're not providing that to ourselves.

There's another phrase that I've kind of tended to, which I've kind of created and adopted, which is that our ego tries to fill the hole where self worth should be.

Our ego is the bit that needs the validation.

It wants other people to think well of us.

If we already think that we're happy with ourselves, we don't need other people to be happy.

So whether it's what we get dressed up in, in the morning or what we present ourselves like on social media or whatever it is, it's our ego that's trying to kind of get that validation in some way.

Or look at me, aren't I great?

I got an award or, you know, look, I've got the money, whatever it is that, that sort of, that version of the medal that, that we're looking for.

People also try and sometimes do this through others.

So, you know, sometimes parents look for that through their kids.

You know, if you're successful, that shows that I'm a good parent and, and I see stupid.

You know, I don't know whether you've ever stood on the, on the side of a field and watched kids playing football, you know, kind of 8 year olds or whatever, and there sometimes is a coach on the sidelines, bouncing up and down, shouting, swearing, screaming, you know, tearing strips off the kids and tearing the referee up and all that sort of stuff.

You think, what on earth is going on?

And if you kind of dig under the surface, the coach cares about the result.

Why?

Because he's worried about how.

Or she's worried about how it will reflect on them.

And so they're desperate to win, to know that they're a good coach.

So you think, well, that's the form of validation that they're looking for here.

What if they didn't need it?

What if they already had that sense of self worth and they didn't need to win or lose today in order to feel good about themselves?

So we're just taking a quick break from this episode because I want to quickly tell you about the instructor performance and Psychology Membership, or ipp.

If you enjoy conversations like this one.

IPP is where we go much deeper.

It's a professional development membership specifically for driving instructors who want to improve not just what they do in the car, but how they think about their coaching, learning and running their business.

Inside IPP you'll find hundreds of hours of content, including expert sessions with specialists from both inside and outside the driver training world, coaching clinics, discussions around mindset teaching techniques and practical Ideas you can take straight into your lessons.

A social community of instructors who want to keep developing, supporting each other and pushing the profession forward.

If you'd like to check it out for yourself, you can sign up of a monthly membership or you can get a 16% discount on an annual option.

Or if you want to test it first, there's even a free trial for a full week.

Just head over to patreon.com instructor or use the link in the show notes.

But for now, let's get stuck back into the episode.

What I love about talking to people like yourself, who are clearly outside of my industry is how reflective it is in our industry, what you're talking about.

You know, I think that, and I'm sure most industries are like this, but the driving instructor industry is very insulated.

A lot of us, or a lot of it is, oh, it's different for us.

It's different for us.

But you were talking there about sort of the external internal validation and it's just clicked for me, that's.

That's the learners, that's the students.

You know, they are relying on the instructor and part of what we're doing so much is to make them not need us, you know, even when they do something right and they look at us for reassurance.

You know, my question is, oh, it was going to be reassuring you after your driving test.

You've got to be able to do that.

And just what you were saying then about the awards as a big.

I'm going to use the word debate.

There's a big debate in our industry at the minute about driving rewards, because there's a few that go on at the end of the year, as of any industry, and I think they're a brilliant thing, I really do.

If only because it shares some positivity, but there's also that negativity around them.

I think it goes one of two ways, and that negative side is we shouldn't need awards, we're just driving instructors.

I get my reward from the student passing that side of it.

How important.

So those.

I'm just going to reframe that slightly.

My opinion on awards.

It's like I said, they're not necessary, but they're still nice, they're still beneficial, they still generate interest, they still make people feel good.

That's my take on it.

I'm not concerned if I don't get one.

I'm going to be pleased if I do.

What.

What would your take on those external validations, are you wards like that be?

Yeah, I think it all hinges around the meaning that we attach to them.

And you're right.

If you, if you can turn around and say, yeah, I get one, great, lovely.

It's the same in, in my business there are lots of professional speaker awards.

Yeah, if I get one, that's wonderful, that's lovely.

Do I need it?

No.

Does it, does it prompt judgment or jealousy or whatever?

Hopefully not, no.

Because if it did, that would not be a positive side of it.

So with any of these things, it's the same with hitting goals, hitting targets and all that sort of stuff.

It's the meaning that we invest into that that becomes critical, not the thing itself.

So yeah, if we, if we can detach our emotions from it, our self worth, our identity from, from those external things we're using in a far stronger place.

The vulnerability comes when we attach all of those things to something external.

Whether that's feedback from somebody, whether that's an award, whether it's hitting a target, whatever it is an outcome of some kind.

When we attach our emotions, our self worth or identity to those sorts of things, we usually create trouble for ourselves.

Yeah, I think that comes back to what you were saying before about being proud of who you are.

If you're proud of who you are, then those awards or any form of, you know, recognition, whether it's a review or whatever is, is just a bonus.

And I think that.

But it's becoming proud of who you are.

It's been a long few years.

I started writing a book.

I've since stopped and I've completely reframed and gone back to writing it a different way.

But I wasn't proud of who I was as a person.

You know, when you spoke about being proud of who you are before, I wasn't, I didn't.

I attached my value and my self worth to what I was doing.

And it was, well, I'm just a driving instructor and I'm not even a well known driving instructor.

Clearly I'm not.

It was, it was that kind of mentality and really weirdly, it switched one day because I came home and as always, when I come in the door, my dog came bounding over to see me and it just immediately clicked.

It's like my dog thinks I'm awesome.

Every day, no matter what I've done, she thinks I'm awesome.

And that kind of spurned this idea for a book which was dogs.

An issue was dogs don't think are mediocre.

And then I like my dogs, think you're awesome.

Let's go with that one.

And that's.

It just clicked for me.

And then from then it was just starting to look at myself differently.

And.

But if someone is struggling to find that self worth, to find the things they can be proud of in themselves, what suggestions would you give them to start looking for that one thing or that spark?

Well, I mean, you've kind of alluded to it in the words looking for confidence in whatever form it is.

Same with self belief.

And self worth comes from evidence.

And the problem with most people, it's not the lack of evidence.

The evidence is there, but they're not looking for it and they're not recognizing it and appreciating it.

So, you know, going back to your example, it wasn't just that day that the dog banged it up to you.

She probably been doing it for years.

The evidence was always there.

But until you actually recognize it and appreciate it and embrace it, it doesn't have an impact.

When you do, then actually you see the good that you're having in the world.

You see the fact that actually what you're doing has a positive effect on those around you.

And in lots of cases, we can see all of this through our relationships.

I mean, you've, you've just highlighted one relationship that wasn't with another human, it was with an animal.

But it's still being highlighted through that relationship.

Somebody essentially says, I love you, I really appreciate you.

And what most people don't do is they don't go a stage beyond that, Say, well, there must be a reason for that then, because you don't have to.

Nobody's got a gun to your head telling you that you have to bang up and give me a cuddle.

And when we start tapping into that and ask ourselves, why are our friends, our friends, they don't have to be.

Why do they invest into that relationship?

What are they getting out of it?

They must be getting something or else they just leave.

Why are the people around you that are really close and genuinely give you their love, why do they do that?

There must be a reason.

And when we start to understand what that reason is, we can see that actually the world's probably a better place for having us in it.

Yeah, definitely.

And I think as instructors, we can, you know, tie that to our students as well.

And as much as we've spoke about not needing external validation, you know, those students, they keep coming back for lessons.

They're not all ditching me.

They're not all ditching us, they're coming back and you know, they leave us nice reviews and they recommend us so to look at that and just think, well, we must be doing something right because you know, if they recommend us to our friends, they're not going to do that.

If they don't, they might not.

They might not leave us, but they're not going to recommend us if they don't like us.

Yeah, absolutely.

And it's one of those businesses actually your business where you don't tend to get much repeat business.

I mean, I don't need to take another driving test hopefully until they're, you know, or until they're 80 or whatever it is that you.

So, so yeah, there's got.

There will be other ways that you have to detect it.

Not just because they come back for more.

And actually in my business, often the very fact that they don't need to come back is brilliant if we've done the job and they are now independent because I'm a huge fan of making myself redundant from the process.

And so that in itself represents a real success.

Just touching back on the dog for a second.

One thing I did neglect mention is that she'll come and give me the cuddle, but she'll lead me for a smell of bacon straight away.

So, you know, I tend to ignore that bit.

I will easily.

She'll dismiss me.

I do want to touch back on one other thing you mentioned earlier, which was the idea of growing your business and you spoke about business owners you would work with who just followed that, well, traveling path of growing their business and then almost potentially regretted doing it.

I think that's really relevant and prominent in our industry as well.

A trap I almost fell into.

And I will just caveat this for anyone listening that there is nothing wrong with growing your business.

You know, as a, as a driving instructor, if you want to become a driving franchise and take on some franchisees and nothing wrong with that at all, but I think it's the well trodden path and I think people feel they have to go down this certain road within our industry and I very, very nearly did.

And I still not quite sure what made me change my mind.

If in fact I do know what made me change your mind.

It was something you're familiar with, which is Success Unlocked and the accelerators.

And it was, it was.

I can't remember the video, but it was a video you and Dino had done in one of the guides.

For anyone listening, Dino Tartaglia was on season one of the show and you'd spoke about the growth and how it doesn't always go the way you intended to.

That triggered me.

And it's like, I don't really want to do this.

I want to try this other thing.

And that's where this podcast came from.

It's where my favorite podcast I do, which is now leading me down all these other avenues as well.

So would you almost have a message for anyone that was scared to come off of that, well, trodden path?

Because it is the safe avenue, if you like?

Yeah, absolutely.

And for a lot of people, it does look like an enormous leap of faith, stepping off that common path, but it might not be our path.

And that's probably the sort of the honest reflection moment that we need.

There are all sorts of ways, as I'm sure you'll have picked up from.

From that video in.

In the Success Unlocked group, there are all sorts of ways to build a business.

And some of them, you know, have a.

You know, there are lots of people who've been down that path, and we can kind of see that it's a tried and tested route, et cetera.

And so there's.

There's a certain degree of confidence that people have that if you want to grow a business, you go and do it this way.

Yeah.

I was in a. I have been in a very, very similar position where lots of people in my industry create a brand and they get the employee people to go out and deliver their method.

And years and years and years ago, I had a conversation with Caroline, who's both my wife and, you know, sort of other half of the business, and we were looking at the vision that we wanted.

And the vision said very clearly, there will only be two people working in this business.

We will only have two employees.

Why?

We don't want to manage employees.

That's not what we might want to do.

I had an experience many, many years ago where I did grow a business in the kind of conventional sense.

We had lots of other practitioners out there, and I ended up being a manager and thinking, that's not what I want to do.

It's not my skill set.

I want to be a practitioner.

I've actually stopped doing the thing that I love and I'm good at and started doing something else.

And actually, have I grown the kind of business that I want?

It's not moving in that direction.

So I think for a lot of people, it does require a bit of a leap of faith.

But part of the challenge, I think, comes when we say we're divorcing one idea, but we haven't got anything clear to move towards.

So that puts us in a bit of a no man's land.

It's called the unknown.

And people are very uncomfortable often with the unknown.

That's where the fear factor comes from.

And I don't think often we have to leap from one to the other.

Whenever we move into our discomfort zone, we've got the opportunity of what I call taking baby steps first, followed by some steps, followed by some strides, and then eventually leaps.

And as we build our confidence, we start to extend our stride length so we're more confident moving into this new territory.

So one of my questions would probably be what would start to give you the confidence that you could divorce one idea and start to move towards another, or at least question one idea and start to think about another?

How do you kind of build that foundation of confidence?

Confidence comes from evidence.

What would you need to build in order to feel more confident that you can change direction on this?

I think that's a great question.

And looking back, that's probably the thing I did almost unintentionally.

The first thing I did away from driving lessons was the podcast called the Five Minute Theory.

I wanted to do this one for instructors, but I didn't feel safe doing this.

Who am I to do this podcast?

It was that kind of attitude, but I generally know more than learner drivers, so I feel that I could talk to them.

And it was a five minute podcast.

That's like the smallest thing I could do.

And then going out and doing that, that helped build up my confidence.

And then I'll do in that regularly.

And then came onto the instructor and then now I've been asked to speak at places and write for magazines and all this kind of stuff.

And it's.

It all started from that one five minute episode.

And I think that's probably a really good example of what you were saying.

The other.

The other thing that you do with this is when you start taking those steps and you realize that actually it's giving value to you and value to others, it starts to build your passion.

You know, one of those episodes you might have found that I think is in the Accelerator group of success engineers is on what I call pump methodology.

Purpose, meaning and passion.

And how do you grow purpose, meaning and passion not find it, you know, one of the big myths, and when I first talked to Dino Tartaglia about it, one of those things that, you know, was a sort of, I think, a light bulb moment for him.

You don't find your passion you grow it.

I describe it as kind of a spark to a flame.

That initial idea that I might want to do X instead of doing Y, that might be my passion for you.

It might be podcasting.

I don't know yet.

I've never tried it.

That's just a spark.

If you wanted to turn a spark into a flame or a raging inferno, you'd have to feed the spark.

You'd have to give it fuel.

Fuel and oxygen.

That's what's going to grow it.

And by stepping out and trying it and doing it and finding out that people gain value from it and that you quite enjoy it, that starts to feed the spark to become a flame.

And when we do that, more and more and more, we build it into becoming a fire.

But it's only a spark to begin with until we do something else.

Considering doing a highlights package for this season of the podcast and, you know, taking bits from every episode is like a final episode.

I'm going to struggle breaking bits off of this because there's quality all over.

That's.

That's brilliant.

But I am.

I want to switch this around a little bit.

I want to come back to you

a little bit more.

You've dropped a whole lot of wisdom there.

But I want to speak specifically about two things.

Firstly, B World Class.

Now, I'll be honest, this isn't something that I'm overly familiar with.

I've dabbled in B World Class.

I've taken a think two of the online courses that were on there.

But tell us a little bit about that, what the idea is behind it, where it's going, who's it for, who's applicable to all of those questions.

Okay, cool.

Well, Be World Class is.

It's both the name of our business, Be World Class Limited, but it's also right at the top of the show, I was sort of talking about uncovering insights from world class environments, whether it's individuals, teams, leaders, or organizations, you know, figuring out what makes them great and then helping other people to adopt those principles.

That's what beworld Class is all about.

It's helping people develop the principles.

And it tends to work on sort of three levels.

Mindset, leadership, and teamwork.

So one of those kind of lenses that we look through is you and your mindset.

How can we help you adopt the kind of mindset that would enable you to become the sort of person that you want to be, achieve the sorts of things that you want to achieve?

Because in order to get different results, we need to do things differently.

But to do things differently, we need to normally become somebody different.

Just reading books and learning more stuff doesn't always translate into doing things differently or achieving the success that we want.

Loads of people sort of approach self development by saying, I'm going to go read some books, listen to some podcasts, watch some TED talks, whatever, great, but what did you do differently?

They also know that in order to achieve what they really want to, they probably need to change themselves.

They need to become slightly different as a person.

Not often transform themselves, but just develop some characteristics, you know, grow some characteristics within themselves.

It might be become more resilient or become more patient or become more consistent.

Whatever it is, they know that that's actually what's required to help them achieve what they want to.

So mindset is one of the lenses that we look through.

Leadership's another, teamwork's another.

And it's all about helping people become different in those areas, not just feel better.

Which again, is something that most of the personal development self improvement industry kind of gears itself towards, because feeling better isn't being better.

And sometimes being better is hard work.

So Ashley doesn't feel particularly good in the moment.

It's like having a really tough workout.

It's great for you, but in the moment it doesn't often, you know, feel cozy and pleasant.

So it's, it's helping people, giving them the support and the structures and the mechanisms and the methods to be able to do that.

I like that.

I think you've, you've kind of talked to a point where I'm at now.

And I'm sure a lot of people in business are at this point where you, you put the work in.

You're at that point where you put in all that work in.

And, but it's still hard work and you're not quite where you want to be.

You're not at the point where you could just ease off yet.

And it's so easy to give up at that point.

It's like, I joke all the time that I stopped doing this podcast.

Seven days a week, every day, I give up this podcast and then, you know, 10 minutes, I'm back on it.

How?

I mean, I'm sure there's stuff in B world class about this.

You spoke about this almost a step by step process.

But how do you keep going?

Because it's something you've done throughout your life.

You've kept going, you've dealt with adversity.

How do you keep going?

Going when it's hard.

Yeah.

And, and this is where two Characteristics really come into their own tenacity, which is the ability to just keep going and not quit and resilience, which is the ability to bounce back and bounce back stronger.

And I, I think in combination they're really, really powerful.

I mean if, if we've, if we've just got the sort of head down charge mentality, one of the dangers is we might not actually learn anything along the way because we're just like try to bulldoze our way through.

The ability to bounce back, learn and come back stronger.

In combination with that is a really powerful force.

And we've got a couple of programs.

One of them is World Class Espresso.

We call it World Class Mindset Espresso program which, which helps to start to understand how you build consistent focus, confidence, motivation, step into your discomfort zones, perform pressure, et cetera.

And a lot of that is the foundation to being able to develop these characteristics.

There's another session that you might have discovered and we call it our Episode zero in Be World Class tv.

It's open as a free preview actually.

That is a 20 minute kind of insight into mental toughness.

Tenacity, resilience and composure are the three critical characteristics to mental toughness.

It was actually taken from an interview that Dino Tartaglia and I did in Rome for one of our success engineers events.

We sort of tagged in the book launch for my eighth book, Master Mental Toughness and we were talking about how you develop these characteristics.

So there's a, there's a, an episode of sort of a free to access episode on Mastering Mental Toughness which talks through the process.

It's a five stage process that people can go through to really develop these characteristics.

Would you suggest maybe that's a good starting point for anyone looking at coming to be world class?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

And it's there deliberately as a sort of a free to access resource that people can go into.

And I'm a real fan of, you know, see whether it's valuable for you, see whether this stuff works for you.

See this if, whether this is what you need, if it is, there's, there's far more that you can access.

But you know, to get some value from this first.

If this is all you ever do, if you only access the free stuff and it gives you value and you don't go any further, that's fine, you know, as long as you gain value from it and really start to use it.

But if you, if you start to think, actually this is the kind of stuff I need and I need some more of it, there's more behind it.

So there will be links for this in the show notes.

So make sure you go and click on those and you get access to that straight away.

But the one thing, one more thing I want to touch on before I'll let you go.

Your books.

So you've got a collection of books that you've written across the years.

Admittedly, I haven't read them all.

The.

The one that's most prominent to me is the two lengths of the pool.

I spoke about that before.

I think that for me, I'm one of those people that's guilty of, you know, just looking at everything and clustering everything up and then everything really complicated.

Whereas right now what I'm doing is I'm talking to you for an hour and that's it.

I don't have to worry about anything else right now.

Question after question, then we're good.

But I mean, there's more to the book than that, obviously.

But I'm just interested to find out what made you start writing these books.

Was it almost a therapeutic process for yourself or could you see there was a need for it?

And if you could just give a little summary around 2 of the pool, that would be awesome.

Just a couple of lines.

Because I think.

And I will put a direct link for that book in the show notes if I can, because I think that book is absolutely perfect for driving instructors.

We are massively guilty of weighing stuff down.

So, yeah, I think I've asked you two questions there, so I'll let you take what you want from those.

Yeah, no worries.

So the reason to write the books is always the same.

It's because there's some insight, some understanding that I've uncovered, which I know is valuable to me.

I know it's valuable to the people that I've worked with directly, and therefore it's probably going to be valuable for more people.

And I just want to share that so that they can gain benefit from it.

And I've always kind of worked on the basis that.

I mean, writing books can make you some money.

Yeah, but it doesn't often, you know, if you think about the number of hours you put into it, it's not.

You don't do it to earn money, you know, that's.

It's not the reason to write a book.

You'd be better off doing something else if you just wanted to.

So it's really to start sharing these ideas and create something that somebody can gain benefit from.

They could pass it on to somebody else.

You just kind of multiply increase the magnitude of the benefit that you can create by writing a book.

Creating digital programs is exactly the same.

It's just a digital form of trying to do the same thing.

And my philosophy has always been, if it helps one person, it was worth doing.

If it helps two, it was twice as worthwhile.

If it helps three, it's even more worthwhile.

So that's the why behind writing the books to length of the pool is a really, really, really simple idea.

You know, it's all about simplifying, clarifying, stripping back, taking out of the complexity that most people build in.

It's not inherently there within what you do.

Most people overcomplicate what they do.

Our human brain is far better at overcomplicating than it is at simplifying.

So normally we need a little bit of a helping hand to simplify things.

Simplification's not easy.

It's more difficult, which is why we tend to overcomplicate things.

But the value when we do simplify and clarify is enormous.

It helps us perform better.

It clears our headspace.

It helps us become more focused.

Because we're more focused, we're more effective, sometimes infinitely more effective.

We get far more out of the time that we have.

And so if we can start to simplify and clarify, the chances are that we gain all sorts of benefit, performance, kind of mental health, get time back, you know, we're more relaxed, that most people, in truth, are spinning their wheels.

They're doing far more than they need to to get the results that they're getting.

And.

And this is about trying to help them to get more out of their time and energy and become, you know, far more productive and effective with the time and energy that they have.

Awesome.

All right, well, we really appreciate you joining us today.

I'm just going to give you an opportunity to tell people where they can find you anything else you want to promote.

And again, I will put all this stuff in the show notes.

Sure.

Well, the best place to start probably is just hit the homepage of our website, which is b world class.com that's sort of B for Bravo, E for echo world class.com and then I often say to people, just follow your curiosity from there.

You know, if you want to learn more about mindset, hit the mindset button.

If you want to learn more about teamwork, leadership, hit those buttons.

If you want to just sort of see whether this stuff resonates, there's.

There's even a box down there to sign up for the insight, which is Our little sort of four times a week.

Normally it's not an E newsletter.

You know, we send out videos and, you know, little links and memes and all sorts of things through there and insights from me.

And if you just wanted to sort of test the water and find out whether this stuff resonates, you know, have a couple of weeks worth of that and, and see whether this stuff does make sense to you.

Cool.

Well, really appreciate you joining us.

Oh, one last thing.

Could you leave us with a book recommendation to go away?

So it's going to be a very good year.

So leave us a book recommendation.

Yeah, there's.

There's one book that I would say it's probably the only book that I would say I would recommend to every single person on the planet.

The and it's called Man's Search for Meaning.

It's by Viktor Frankl and it's, it's not a particularly long read, but I would challenge anybody to say it doesn't really properly change their life.

I mean, most people that I know that have read it have said that had a really profound impact on me.

I must admit.

When you said that one book that everyone the Planet, which you read, I thought it was going to say to Lance of the Bull.

I thought that was going to be that one.

I thought I was.

I didn't think I'm recommending my own books.

No.

But I really appreciate coming on.

I am just going to mention, just for you, I let you disappear, that you're very much an inspiration from afar.

One of the things that I've learned over the past year, partly from you and partly from two lens of the pool, is that you can't do everything at once.

So I've taken a massive step back in some areas this year and focused on the things that I need to focus on.

Focus on my.

The parts of my business, focus on looking after my wife, focus on looking after me.

You know, focus on the key areas that's helped me massively get through a lockdown.

That's part of the reason why.

So we're in a familiar group, Success unlocked and accelerators as part of the reason why I'm not as active in there at the minute because that's not necessary.

What's necessary is I do this, but it's, it's there when I need it and going forward I will be using it more going forward.

I will be probably more interactive with yourself online going forward because you are that.

I've got a few of them.

I want inspirations from afar.

So yeah, I just felt it was appropriate just to mention that.

And I really appreciate you joining us and giving us some of your time today.

It's been awesome.

You're very welcome.

It's been a pleasure.

Thank you.

The instructor podcast with Terry Cook, talking with leaders, innovators, experts and game changers about what drives them.