Brent and Shari sit down with the renowned performance coach Dr. Fergus Connolly. Together, they explore what it really means to achieve and sustain greatness - not just in sports, but in business and everyday life.

Far from the typical “tips and tricks” podcast, this conversation goes deep into universal truths about success, human connection, and why copying superstar tactics isn’t the path to lasting results. Fergus draws on his unique experiences coaching elite athletes, special forces, and world-class executives, revealing how principles, not just processes or hustle, hold the keys to performance that doesn’t burn you out.

Expect stories about building teams that thrive beyond individual brilliance, the risks of “heroic compensation,” and the surprising power of stepping away from the grind to unlock creativity.

Whether you’re leading a sales team, managing a business, or just trying to show up better in your own life, you’ll walk away with inspiration - and maybe a laugh or two - about what really matters when it comes to peak performance and human connection.

👤 Connect with Fergus Connolly:

✅ “59 Lessons: Working with the World's Greatest Coaches, Athletes, & Special Forces” Book: https://geni.us/FergusConnolly

✅ Website: https://fergusconnolly.com

✅ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fergusconnolly/

👤 Connect with Selling Isn’t Everything:

✅ Official: https://SellingIsntEverything.com 

✅ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@SellingIsntEverything 

✅ LinkedIn (Shari): https://www.linkedin.com/in/sharilevitin

✅ LinkedIn (Brent): https://www.linkedin.com/in/brentadamson 

✅ Brent’s Latest Book, The Framemaking Sale: https://www.theframemakingsale.com/ 

Selling Isn’t Everything is produced by Chris Stone at Cast Ahead:  https://CastAhead.net 

About a year ago, I had this incredible opportunity and pleasure to speak with a global company and their first line sales managers. And at that meeting, I got to meet someone who's become a friend and someone who's incredibly impressive. Fergus Connelly. Dr. Fergus Connelly, in fact, who is a world class coach, not just to sales teams, but to athletic teams, professional football, basketball, rugby, you name it. And I wanted to give you all a chance to hear from Ferguson and his incredibly inspiring message about not just peak performance, which you know, but sustainable peak performance and the human side of driving for peak performance and how we can make that happen for ourselves and the people we work with every day. And if nothing else, I just want you to hear his accent because it's amazing. And I think that's pretty powerful.

Fergus, you good looking stud. How are you, man?

It's great to see you again. Good to see you again. How are you doing?

I just want. Good, I'm good. I just want to talk to you because I love your accent so much. I just wanted. It's like, it's the mellifluous tones of your beautiful Irish accent. It's going to wash over me.

He does fanboy. He totally fanboys you, Fergus. You got to know that we talked yesterday and he was like going on and on about Fergus the Great. I just got to tell you because he does not fanboy a lot of people.

Oh, man, I thought. I thought I was the one with Irish. I thought I was the one with Irish charm.

My mom keeps reminding me I am Irish. But just it's like a quarter, like by the time you get to my generation, it's not like full on. It's like I don't have the full Monty that like, you know. You do. Yeah.

Well, we're getting to hang out again in February as well. That's right.

A couple weeks.

Look forward to. Yeah, looking forward to that.

Yeah. So remind me, where are you? So are you in SoCal? Where are you?

Yes. Yeah. Orange County. Yeah. Yeah. So I've got the sun. Maybe not as much as you, though this morning.

He does look sunny. Ferguson, I for one, am very excited to get to know you. I've been stalking you a little bit. Your TED talks, your podcasts. And one of the thing that struck me, I mean, Obviously you've spent 20 years coaching some of the best of the best and some of my favorite teams, which we'll get into, and Special Forces. And I love your frameworks, your ideas. But what really struck me and where I want to go today is that so many of your principles and your frameworks and your outlook, these are universal truths. They do not just apply to athletes.

And, you know, Brent and I obviously are our audiences, a lot of CROs and sellers and others. But I really want to focus on how some of these methodologies and ideas are universal truths and can be applied to anyone, everywhere, even in our personal lives, because I find it fascinating. But before we get into that, I wanted to just start and say, you know, how does somebody with a PhD in computer organization, computer optimization, end up coaching elite athletes and soldiers? Like, what happened? How did that work?

I could give you a really long answer, but the simple truth is I'm just fascinated by what does it take to win? Like, what does it take to be successful and then to be truly great? And, you know, it's funny, you talk about methodologies and frameworks. When Brent and I first met in Houston, that's where the connection was. Because as he was explaining this to me, as we were sitting down and going through it, I recognized somebody who was looking at very, very complex ideas and creating a model and principles. And that's where the connection was. You know, the detail that comes later. It's like that saying that, you know, the techniques are many, but the principles are few. And so I thought that what, you know, what Brent and Carl were looking at were they were looking at it as a macro and then reducing it down into principles that people can apply. And the techniques may be different.

And one of the mistakes I made early in my career, when I would go and visit great coaches or teams, I would walk away with techniques, and I was missing the bigger picture. And that's the single biggest mistake that you see. Even in companies and organizations, they get so caught up in copy and a technique or a tactic, and they're missing the overall. The model. I call it the model that the principles fit into.

And I love that. And when you talk about principles and models, I look at them as universal truths. Do see those principles and models as not just applying to success in sports or in business, but in our personal lives as well? I mean, do you see them that broadly? And can you illuminate us a little bit on that?

Yeah, absolutely. And I think the starting point is, and Brent and I spoke about this as well, the starting point is what's your definition of success? You know, so you have to be very clear about that. What do you want to be successful at? And. And then you work backwards from that. Because it's funny, some organizations that I've been part of there's one very big government organization. I'm not going to name them, but I'd done some work for them. And at the end, there were 11 or 12 people in the room. And I asked each one of them, okay, what does this organization do now? Been very successful.

And every one of them had a different answer. One person said entertainment, another said education, another said research. And, you know, being very, very clear about what success is and working backwards from that, that has to be the starting point.

Brent, had you talked to Fergus about that particular piece before?

Yeah. You know, I think Fergus, the question I always ask is of myself and anyone else is like, what if you don't know what success is? Right. So Jim was like, so you have to start with, like, what's my definition of success? What if you don't know, is it too dark? I don't know. It's like, how does that work?

Let me give you a sporting example. If you've got a. If you own, let's say you bought a sports team in the morning, is your definition of success profit or titles?

Right.

Because they may not necessarily be the same, or there may not be a correlation between the two. In fact, if you look at, I think, the last. The top five most successful NFL teams, I don't think any of them have won a Super bowl in the last 10 years. So what is success? And being very, very clear about that and being very clear throughout the organization, because that's where conflict then starts to happen, or unconscious conflict between an organization as a whole.

And when you work with people and you go deeper on that, do you find that, you know, obviously, you know, a player might have a different term, you know, idea of success than the defensive coach, than the, you know, head coach, but do you find that even working with one individual, they've never articulated that or thought about that. And you help bring that out. And can you tell us about that process?

Yeah, so. So even. Even in the corporate environment, what you find quite often is that it changes, it flips. So somebody may have been working exceptionally hard, and their idea of success was perhaps recognition and ego and status in their profession. But then as they transitioned through it, then it becomes more about, how do I sustain a high level of success? And it's wider now because they've got people who are responsible to them, they've moved up, they've got families. So it's about, how do you sustain success at that level? Being successful is, I wouldn't say easy. It's straightforward. Push very hard and cranky, and you can run any organization really hard for three years, but it's not sustainable.

So how do you. And then the key thing above all is finding alignment with your people and then your overall. The organization's overall goals. That's the ultimate. Where they see a mutual success between what, what they're doing and their success in the organization that's sustainable.

You talk about something that I call heroic compensation. And the idea that performance dependent on a few individuals in the organization isn't really success. There's a few individuals mistaking brilliance for a strong system. And of course, we see that a lot in corporate America where you've got two or three top performers. They're like, oh my God, we're brilliant. And I could see how this would, you know, manifest on a top team. Oh my God, we got Michael Jordan. We're going to win every game.

We've got this person. We're going to win every game. Can you give us an example of how you've seen that playing out and how that affects what you're talking about, about sustained success? Because I see a correlation there. And Brent and I see this all the time in organizations where you've got five or seven top performers, maybe even one or two top performers, and the danger of that. But I'm curious how you see that in the sports world.

Regardless, sport and business, you see the same thing. And there's so many threats associated with that. One of the really common ones a lot of people don't speak about is that there's an attempt often to copy the. Those one or two high performers and to copy the habits and behaviors that they see. And that's not possible. And then people fail to do that in organizations, particularly whether they scale or whether they grow. Then what happens is you've not educated or distributed decision making or leadership. So as the organization scales, you're not scaling the skills that are necessary, particularly around decision making.

And this is where having a sustainable model becomes so, so critical. Not to mention, not to mention what happens if one of those elite or high performers leaves. What do you do then? You've lost domain knowledge. You've not lost brilliance, and you've also lost. Or you realize you've had an illusion of brilliance perhaps associated with one or two people. So there's so many risks and threats with that. I'm sure you guys have seen it so many places.

But Fergus, what's the best sort of connective tissue? Right across. Particularly to your point as you scale, you gotta keep everyone on the same page and sing from the same Song sheet, all those other wonderful metaphors we all use all the time. But is it. And we can say, well, it's a common vision, but it's a common purpose. All this stuff just seems so abstract. I could keep everyone. And I've been in companies where the way that we keep this thing all going in the same direction is just we define a very rigid process and make sure that everyone complies with the process, Right? And I've been in other companies where there's almost no process but the, the common interstitial tissue, the connective tissue, is this vision and a set of just core principles that we all believe in, but we kind of manifest in slightly different ways.

How do.

How do you think about. Is it. It's all of the above? It's none of the above. Is this. Is it a set of metrics? It's like sometimes just a dashboard, right? So we're going to. We're going to manage to these numbers and like, you know, come hell or high water, we're going to get to those numbers and everybody kind of just figured out. But we're going to celebrate when we come and when we collectively as a team, cross the finish line and hit that, you know, that particular bar. But it's this weird sort of voodoo is somewhere in between all those things.

Maybe it's none of those things, maybe it's all of them. Maybe it's one in particular that you'd point to. But how do you, particularly to your point, as you scale, how do you. Is there. What's the secret sauce of keeping everyone together?

I think one of the traps sometimes we fall into is we assume that humans are like machines. Humans are complex adaptive organisms. They're incredibly complex. They're an organism. So they've got feelings. And this is the art of science or the art of coaching. The other point is nobody wakes up in the morning to come to work for company X or company Y. They're working for themselves, for their family, to support them.

And that has to be recognized. And then, like I've said before, I think you were there, There's a quantitative and a qualitative assessment of. So while you are driving towards metrics, and of course it's a business, there's a metrics, there's a qualitative aspect to that. Did you just reach target? Barely. Did you burn a whole load of bridges to do that? And so this is where just measuring purely on the quantitative can be very, very misleading. So to say that it's just a purely objective approach that's not going to be sustainable if you don't have the subjective assessment to allow you determine whether or not this success is sustainable. That's the same with people, the same with the business.

So you're talking about that. It's. And you mentioned that before, that it's one thing to achieve success, you're at the penultimate of your career, it's another thing to sustain it. And I've always wondered, what's the role? David Brooks, in his book on character, I don't know if you've read it, he has an incredible metaphor and he talks about this idea of resume virtues versus eulogy virtues, right? Resume virtues being the skills you're able to make this many free throws, you're this strong, you know, the skills of the game, whatever the game is, as compared to eulogy virtues, which some people might think of as emotional intelligence. But it's deeper than that, right? It's character. It's, you know, what happens when you don't win? What? How much discipline do you have? How much self awareness do you have? I'm curious, in your view, what's the role and the ratio of resume virtues versus these eulogy virtues?

Well, I think they're connected because even when you're profiling athletes, you're profiling executives, you have an objective metric which is the what. And then the next two questions are how and why? So how did they achieve the number? And that starts to inform whether or not it's sustainable. And then the other one, then deeper, is that motivation, why are they doing it? And if you can understand those two things now you start to understand again, is it sustainable? What drives them, how you can support them? Are there other skills perhaps, or other ways that they can continue to keep this metric high? Are there other skills that you can help them develop so they can exceed it? And so there's the what. But the question then always asks is, well, how did they achieve that? And really another deeper question is why? What's driving them?

Can you give us a story or an example about a player? Everybody likes to hear about famous players anyway, but I'm sure you've got a ton of stories and examples about somebody who maybe didn't understand their own why or it wasn't aligned. I think it would shed some light on it for our listeners.

Yeah, I think in sport, I think it's very common. There are lots of players who, and I see a lot of commonalities across domains, but somebody comes into their career early on and you measure their bench press or their speed or whatever, and they score off the charts and they're hired straight away. So this is what they can do. But very often they're compensating, perhaps for poor tactical awareness. I use the very same language with executives. They've got X number of calls or X number of hours and they crush it. But they're compensating perhaps for tactical knowledge of the area of the industry. This is the classic salesman who can perhaps outwork somebody else, but that's not sustainable over a period of time.

So how can you improve their tactical knowledge, their experience, and educate them, provided they're willing and then understanding the why that's driving them, that becomes important. Because now you're talking to them about a long career. No, that's the process. So I've seen it tons of time. People who. With athletes, guys who can bench press the building if you let them. And what's really interesting, I had this conversation last week. If you give a person a few hours off to work on one thing, just give them a few hours off, they're going to invariably be drawn to work on the one thing they're good at.

Could be communication, could be cold calling, whatever, they'll work on that. Very few people work on the area I called a limiting factor, not a weakness, but that limiting factor that could allow them to have to compensate less. Tom Brady is a great example. Physically, perhaps not the most dominant athlete, but he never lets his limiting factor fall below a functional minimum where it became a weakness, a true weakness or disadvantage. So that's what you're looking to develop in your high performers.

Okay, I gotta know because isn't Tom Brady perfect? Like, what is Tom Brady's limiting factor?

Some of his physical qualities might not have been the best, might have been the best runner, the fastest runner, the strongest. But he was always able to compensate for those with amazing tactical ability, tactical acumen, positioning. But even though perhaps physically he wasn't the fastest, he never let that become a weakness. So this idea that you can make somebody's weakness as a strength, as a myth, but you don't want them to fall below a particular point, and that's the key.

I'd agree with that. That's the sole, sort of. Because there's a very, very long list, Fergus, of things I'm bad at. In fact, it's probably everything, actually, now that I think about it. But there's. But there's really interesting question of, like, how much time and effort do I spend in getting really good at it versus just like getting by that and then leaning into the things I spike on. Right. So there's a.

Which is a much smaller list.

And so.

But it's easier to focus on. And one is that. So, you know, I could kind of go both ways. Like, well, Brett, you're falling into your comfort zone. You're not growing, you're not expanding, you're not getting better, or you're not, you know, or it's like, no, actually, you're doing. Particularly at your age, you know exactly what you need to be doing, which is focusing on the things you're great at, because that's where you actually can have the greatest impact and surround yourself with others who are great at those other things. And I don't know about you, but this has been a tension in my entire professional career trying to figure out which of those two directions. Where do you fall on that continuum?

Your strengths are your strengths. If you're working with someone, those are their strengths, and that's what got you to the table, or that's what got you to the feet. So you have to maintain those and continue to improve them. But if there are those limiting factors, something that's holding you back, you want to improve it a little bit at least, so it doesn't become a weakness. That's the key. So you could be the world's best quarterback, the world's best point guard, but perhaps if you're not a good teammate or you're not contributing and that then starts to affect your performance, okay, now that's something that we need to work on. That's something that now has become a limiting factor and has fallen below a certain point. And it's the same with everybody.

It's helping people understand what those are and just doing a little bit of work to keep them above that functional minimum.

Is that counterintuitive to most people? And I know I grew up with a Gallup philosophy. I started with Marriott, and we all did Gallup, and this whole Marcus Buckingham idea of go with your strengths, manage your weaknesses, which of course, I love, because then I decided, oh, I'll just hire assistants to do other stuff I don't want to do. But that's limiting, right? Because, you know, if you're going to be a star athlete or, you know, certainly run a company, you've got to have a little bit of knowledge about everything. And like you said, those limiting beliefs can. Can really hold you back. I guess my question is, how do you assess which of those limiting beliefs you need to know a little bit about and which ones? Oh, my God, don't bother. It's not important.

Or even surrounding yourself, like Brent touched on earlier, surrounding yourself with people who are, that is their area of strength. And so that they, as a group or as a couple or as a team, you compensate. And that's why the best backroom teams or the best groups of people I've been around have brilliant arguments. But they know that it's all for that one mission back to what is successful and that in that closed circle of trust, they all think differently, they all have different strengths and they're willing to trash it out and compensate for different perspectives that people have because of their strengths. And so building that high performance team around you or having those people around you, that's where it becomes so, so important. And you see, back to what you just said is when you have an awareness for some of the things that you're perhaps weak at, well, you can make sure that you have people surrounding you so that the team as a whole are successful. And that's really important. But it comes with conflict.

And I know the term psychological safety is used an awful lot. I prefer the term performance safety. There's times when you need good arguments, like really strong arguments where people stand up for what they believe, but they all know once they walk out that door. That argument was purely in service of this overall mission that we've all committed to.

When I think about who you work with, you know, again and who you've worked with, including my alma mater, the University of Michigan. Go blue, right? The. These are literally world class athletes, special forces. These are people who are at the very peak and you're trying to get them even beyond that. But I think like for an everyday schlub like me, right, who's just trying to get out of bed and survive the day, right, and is exhausted, it's a little overwhelmed. There's like this, like, how do you find this balance? Or is there a balance between push for excellence. At some point it becomes hustle porn. Do you know what I mean? Versus how do I distinguish between I need to push myself to be better, always.

Versus I'm exhausted, I need to rest. Versus I'm just doing this in a performative way to just be better for the sake of, you know, in athlete. Because for athletes there's. There's a game, there's a score, there's a team. And I suppose in business there's a scorecard and all that kind of stuff too. But. But at the end day, we're all just freaking human beings just trying to get through another day, do you know what I mean? And for someone like you, who's trying to do your best to squeeze the absolute pinnacle, best performance out of everyone, do you find yourself kind of thinking through that tension of like, dude, I just want to, I just want to just make it through the day versus I want to be the world's best. I, I, I don't even know what my question is, but I did.

I find myself struggling with that tension all the time. And I just, how does that incorporate? How do you think through that? I don't know. Where am I going with this, Fergus? Save me for myself. Say something smart.

There's a few massive misconceptions that Brent, you made. First of all, having had the benefit of working behind the curtain, these are all just humans. They all have bad days and some of them good habits, terrible habits. I've had world famous athletes break down and cry over things that they've been struggling with. And it's not always, you're right. Like, I mean, this idea of hustle porn where it's about working harder and that that's never going to lead you to a sustainable success and it's being able to manage and understand what is going to lead to sustainable success. So if you wake up in the morning and you're tired and you need sleep, you need sleep. There's no, I think it's Chinese saying, when hungry dries from thirsty, drink water.

Wise men. Know what I mean? You know, you have to be aware of the situation that you're in. And in many cases, in many cases, my role has been to help players and help people take time out and recognize the different types of recovery they need not to do more. And in fact, with the people that you work with as well, they've got to where they've got to, no offense, they've got there without you. Same with me, right? Oliver Maven, who is the old coach at the Chicago Bulls, said the only person who ever made an athlete were their parents. So as a coach, don't get carried away with your input. So your job is to help them sustain success. And sometimes it's really about being more effective and efficient.

It's not about doing more. I used to use this phrase all the, you know, an awful lot more is of more, better is better. So are you making things better and not just doing more for the sake of it? Because that becomes a trap that only leads to burnout. It doesn't lead to very critical, critical, it doesn't lead to any critical thinking. It certainly doesn't lead to creativity and what. It ends up leading to our, to just systems and processes where people are being forced to follow rules.

God, this is so reminiscent of corporate America, right? You're going to say, I mean, you know, make more calls, do my. It's like I call it pressing the more button, you know, and the panic.

More is more. More is more.

Never.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, Sorry, but I mean.

But, but, but no, not at all. You don't need to be sorry because I just, I think it's like it speaks to everyone who's probably listening, which is there's this constant pressure to do that, to do more. And Fergus, we see it at the CEO level as much as we see it at the individual contributor level or at the frontline level, wherever. It's like there's this sort of expectation that I think what you're really preaching is a difference in kind versus a difference in degree. And I think most of us will gravitate towards a difference in degree, which is simply to say, if this much is good, this much is better, and this much is better. So I put in another hour, put another hour and it's like. And your point is like, actually if we stop and think about like, what's a different in kind behavior? Like actually, why don't we stop doing more of that and think differently about what we're doing altogether is probably the shortest path to what you've really hit hard here today, which is this idea of sustainable performance. Right, which is, you know, I wasn't necessarily coming into this conversation expecting to talk about that, but I think that's actually where you've really taken it in a really powerful way, which is what we're really trying to do, ideally in our lives and in our professions and in our leadership roles, is not to hit, achieve peak performance, but to identify a level of high performance that is sustainable.

Maybe that's, Is that, is that a fair articulation, sort of how you think about it?

Yes, it was actually. It was with the CEO last week and he wrote it down. He was asking, I said, your, your work is not to work. And he wrote it down his phone. But it was like his job is actually not to do more work. He has to work at doing less in his instance, for a number of reasons. But that's probably one of the most common challenges for a lot of leaders. First of all, to be able to create the perspective, to see what's going on accurately and more importantly for being able to deal with the people around so that it filters down I don't use the term trickle down, but to filter down.

And also I think the two greatest challenges and people who overwork struggle with this is their problem solving is not true problem solving. They fail at identifying what the true problem is. So they're just producing a solution for something that's already there. And the second one is creativity, innovation. Anybody who watches sports, if you watch teams who brilliant defenses, finding creative offenses is really, really difficult because again, in sport, often the culture is to simply do more, do more, and that's easy. So sustaining success is the goal because that allows you to continue. I remember working with a group of legendary rugby players a long time ago and I used to joke them, I can make you fitter, faster, stronger, I can improve your personality, but the one thing I can't give you is I can't give you experience. Now anybody who's running a team that's got very, very experienced people there, they have an inherent knowledge that they've gained that you don't want to lose because that's invaluable.

So you want them to sustain success, you don't want them to plateau and you certainly don't want to burn them out. So what's your approach to that? How are you going to do that? Certainly not by just doing more. Sherry, as you said, pressing the more buttons.

Yeah. You said something about creativity. And I see this, I struggle with this in my own life because there is a tendency to say, okay, I'm going to work harder at this one thing that I've been doing all along. And I am just now at my age starting to say, wait a minute, let's take some time off, let's go on a hike today and let's look at the entire problem differently. Let's get a new way of approaching it. There could be a creative way to do less, better. And what is that? And I do think that it takes stepping back and I think there's probably some brain science behind this. I don't know what it is, but I guess it's that there's a different part of the brain that when we're relaxed and when we're unplugged, that's when we get the insights.

So I guess this is very, very critical with a high performing athlete or a high performing CEO to just take the time to get other, other thoughts. How do you articulate that idea to people?

I tell them to let their brains surf. So it might be like you said, going for a hike or going for coffee. The only rule is always bring a Notebook. Always bring a little notebook in a pen. And I have, I gave Dean Cortis a million dollar pen. Did he tell you this, Brent? Through a million dollar penny? No, NASA when they were sending astronauts to the moon, I should have it here to show you as a prop. But they designed a pen that could write upside down, write in space, whatever, and allegedly cost a million dollars to make. Now you can buy it for 50 bucks now.

But it's a million dollar pen. There's a really small. And I always carry one with me in a notebook because when those ideas come, you might be having coffee, you might be having a random conversation with someone and they remind you of something, think of something and you've just been allow your brain to surf, to cruise through all of those things and those problems. And maybe it's something that the janitor said during the week that gives you an idea of how to reorganize or restructure something. And so being aware of those and then letting your brain surf through them. But you have to create time for that to happen.

That's exactly right. I have. Totally change of topic. But it really. I was on my run, not with my million dollar pen this morning prepping for this conversation and he said something that really struck me. You talked about data versus information and I love this. You said there's data that's useful, useless and interesting. That really struck a chord with me.

Can you elaborate on that concept a little bit? Because I think it's very, very useful for all the senior leaders that run that report. Run this report, run that report. So if you could elaborate on that.

I described running a business, driving on a two lane freeway. There's really, really useful information that you need right now to keep moving at a pace. And then there are things that are interesting that you might move into this slowly and you don't forget about them, but they're there. And when time comes in, you can dip in, you have a little bit of time, you can study and use that. And then of course you have information that's useless. And the quicker that you can identify those things the better. Because what a lot of people do is they look at something and it's not relevant now and they forget about it. I call that moving it into the slow lane.

We will come back to it and we're not going to forget about it. And sometimes, sometimes you let a competitor explore that and run off with it or whatever and see how they evolve and then you take the lessons from them or you let something percolate. You See this with AI, for example, right now, so many people jumping into or pulling it into the fast lane and going with it. There are some ideas that need to be just parked, percolated in that slow lane and you can come back to it and see how they're relevant. Because you don't want to be a magpie. For those of you who aren't nature experts, magpies get attracted to silver, shiny things when they're making their. If you ever see a magpie's nest, it's got lots of glitter and lots of shiny things that it's been attracted to and picked up. So say to people, don't be a magpie.

Don't just get attracted to something because it's shiny and glitters and be very, very careful about what you're drawn to. But you might want to park that in the slowly and it's ticking over and then you can come back to it in time. But that's the idea of. Yeah, useful, useless and interesting information or data.

I'm feeling so much like a magpie right now.

I was gonna say I suddenly feel embarrassed about my gold.

I know.

One thing about data and I spent from my PhD then to working in sport, you've got all these numbers. One of the most important things is having that a qualitative metric alongside a quantitative number. It becomes, it's critical because otherwise you're just looking at objective data without context or without an associated value. And particularly, you know, in sales or in business where you're dealing with humans, you cannot run just purely off objective, quantifiable metrics or data alone.

Tell me more. Give me an example of what that might look like.

I think, Brent, you were there for the 100 meter sprinter, might set a new world record, but when you, you know, when you look at their sprint, their actual run or their risk, they. Yes, they set a new world record, but their stride was all over the place. They were running poorly, they're at the point of injury, so they go the next time they get injured. So it's. Yes, the number is, is very important, but it's how they got there. So that's the result, but that's the performance is what matters. Salesperson. Yeah, they hit target or they blew it out of the water this year.

But if you go back and you look at the calls, you look at how they got there. Running on fumes, it's not sustainable the next year because of all the pressure. They break down, they're gone. Or they're not a good team player. They're not a good member or as a manager or as a leader, team outperformed everybody else. But so the objective, yes, was achieved and objectively wonderful performance. But you go talk to the people. The subjective, informative.

A team's, you know, gone, burned out. You won't see them again. So it's. The metric is important, but the context, the quantitative must be. Must also have a qualitative metric alongside it when we're dealing with humans who are your most important asset.

I hadn't anticipated coming to this conversation just how much you were going to land on this of sustainability. And I appreciate it deeply. But. But let me just, for the sake of just argument, take the. The counter argument, because I'd like to hear you just really articulate it, which is, you know, look, if I can win this season and then you. So then I burn everybody out, then I'll just bring in new people. And, you know, I mean, I. So.

So maybe my performance is a little bit more erratic. Why is sustainability so important to you? Why? Clearly, your work, your thinking, your. Your efforts, your engagements are focused on that idea of sustainability. Make the case for sustainability. Why does it matter so much to you?

The really simple answer to that is because when I started working with elite performers, you came across people who had great performances. But then I started to ask the question, what is greatness? And every single. My definition is someone who's been able to repeat it and sustain it. So when I ask you for the names of great athletes, you say Michael Jordan, Tom Brady, Bill Belichick, in terms of coaches, then do it once they did it repeatedly, and that's greatness. And that then the All Blacks are great teams. That becomes the standard. So how do you sustain a high performance, elite performance? And there are many factors, but you're right. Yes.

In some organizations, if you wanted to, you could take any company, any one of you, and run it really hard for three years and then just replace everybody and try and go again. But you're losing domain knowledge and you're not actually solving anything. You're just repeating the same routine. So that's why sustained success has to be the goal for any CEO, for any company.

You had a beautiful TED Talk. And for those that are listening and watching, started out a little slow. And I was completely transfixed with your humility, your conclusion. And it was this idea. Well, there were so many ideas in it. But the one I want to focus on is this idea of being a sheepdog and being a number two. And you have spent your career really being the Coach behind greatness and being the number two behind people that are some of the greatest in the world. And it made me think of the film 20ft from stardom, where you have all these backup singers that are backups to Mick Jagger and Jim Morrison and all the greats and ICU as this person that gave, gave the recognition and was the engine behind the talent of a lot of these great high performing athletes.

Did you ever want to be a number one? And how do you sustain your, what is your sustainability plan to keep going as you're building up the career of these great elite athletes and performers?

Oh, great question. I think Brent touched on it earlier, this idea of you get up and you hustle. And early on I thought because you read an ESPN article or whatever, you see an interview and the idea you walk away from is just work hard work, do more, but you learn early on. No, that is not the secret. But sometimes you yourself, when you're helping others, you can fall into that trap. And so for me, I have to be very, very disciplined about how I take time off and invest time in recharging my batteries, particularly because you don't often get a lot of calls with good news. Somebody's got a challenge, somebody's got a problem, and you're supporting them. So I have to be careful as well about taking time so that I can manage my time so that I'm able to address those problems.

And yes, from time to time, be a sheepdog. But everybody who's a sheepdog needs a sheepdog as well, needs somebody that they can call on, somebody that they, you know, that will answer the phone at 2:30 in the morning or when you're, you're struggling or that. And that becomes really, you know, it becomes really, really critical. And a lot of leaders don't have that, you know, a lot of leaders don't have that network of people that they can rely on.

The thing that really that we're exploring on this podcast I think is something that's been implicit this whole conversation, Fergus. But we can make it explicit, which is, at the end of the day, you've said it already, which is these aren't machines or human beings that you're working with, right? And when you, when you seek to get performance, particularly sustainable performance from a human being, it's different than the way you do it from a machine, right? So you have to, there's, there's, frankly, it's a lot more complicated, obviously, but there's, but there's, I, I think the. Tell me again what's your Ph.D. in is.

It's, it's because computer based computer. I was just thinking about it actually as you were writing computer based optimization in manufacturing. And I was just thinking back to, you know, we would measure the number of revolutions that a rivet or unit go through because we could predict when it's going to fail. You can't do that with a human.

So relate your PhD to your current work. Now first of all, granted, so I have a PhD in German and linguistics, so we know that we live in worlds where your PhDs don't have anything to do with what you do for a living. But I would imagine it comes back in all sorts of different ways in terms of either things like as an anti hero or perhaps actually the focus of what you're doing. But so much of what you're doing right now is about human connection. And You've got a PhD in optimization of processes, right?

Well, my, my, my original degree was in woodwork and construction studies teaching. So love that teaching and teaching kids, right? And so then, yeah, so I leave that and then go into programming and into data and analytics. So I shift from working with humans to working almost exclusively with machines. And then you start working with elite athletes and you realize, hang on, my, my teaching skills, pedagogy and connection and speaking becomes really, really critical initially. But then with the, you know, the availability of data in sport, now I've got to use both. But this is where it starts to again not break down, but the gaps become apparent. And I see this so much in business today. You know, like Sport 10, 15 years ago, we got this influx of data measuring human performance or measuring people.

Same thing's happening on the corporate world. There's so much information, but there's a gap because you can't measure humans the same way as you measured machines. It's a very same thing I faced in sport. So it's knowing what it solves, it's knowing what it doesn't solve. I used to say that, you know, sports science doesn't answer questions, it allows you ask better questions. And with data and in corporate, that's really what it's doing. It's allowing you ask smarter questions about why you got this result. That's where the advantage is to be had.

And so what are the kind of sum it up, what are the questions that if I'm a CEO ahead of any function really, and what are the questions I'm likely asking myself that would lead me to call Fergus and say, I need this guy to come in and help me figure this out.

I think, you know, the one that scares me is when everything's going wild.

Yeah.

Everything's going well. Have you asked why and how are you achieving that? Because sometimes you can, you know, everything can look good again, back to data and back to metrics, but you don't know why you got that result or.

You have a suspicion that something's not right. Right. Or perhaps like you've been instinctively. It's like, yeah, we got there, but it didn't feel like we got there the right way. Maybe. I don't know. Is that fair?

Yeah. Yeah. You spoke earlier about high performers. One of the real things about high performers is they don't see any difference between winning and losing. They interrogate the processes and the results with the exact same sheridan at the beginning as ruthlessness. Yes. It's important to celebrate and it's important to be able to sell, to sell this to the people. Because sometimes, listen, you can have a bad year, but you did everything well.

You have to be able to interpret that now equally, you can have a really good year, but have done a lot of things wrong. So you need to remove the emotion from it, interrogate the processes and the results, and the best leaders do that. And then they determine how they're going to present that back to the. Back to the team. Because again, some people could have struggled, but again, it comes back to confidence. No, no, no. You did things well. Some things outside of our control didn't work.

But we're going to stick at this because we know that it works.

Right about now, I wish I was a professional athlete and I could work with Fergus because maybe I need to join the special forces, I don't know. But, Fergus, I could go on for another hour with you. I am so inspired by everything you said. How do people find you? I'm sure a lot of leaders in every aspect of life would love to get a little bit more Fergus. So how do we find you? How do people contact you?

LinkedIn or FergusCondy.com. i like that. A little bit of Fergus sherry. I might use that as a sales title salesman.

I need me some Fergus. A little bit.

Little Fergus seasoning. That's right.

I need Fergus.

Yeah. Awesome Fergus. Thank you so much for sharing your guys. Thank you so much.

Thank you for having me.

Thank you.

Cheers.

What I loved about Fergus, there's so many things but his calm. And I could feel how his calm is a real strength for him. And he's the quintessential coach. His answers were short Enough, but you got everything you needed in that. And that he really gave an opportunity for there to be a dialogue. And I think it's very often people that are in that type of a position or who have that type of authority, they overspeak that. But he was very judicious with his words, and they were powerful.

It seems that you say that because I've watched him work with sales leadership teams, and this is how I got to know him, because we were, you know, I was called in to work, you know, do a sales kickoff where he was also there working with the team and, and the first line sales managers that he was working with loved him. And still, they love him. He's still working with them. And, and they, they all get it. Like, he walks in the door and it's like Norm from Cheers, like Fergus, you know, partly it's the accent. It's just charming as hell. Right, but the. But the.

But it's exactly what you just said. He's got this sort of humble gravitas that I think is really. It almost. He almost forces you to lean in a little bit, doesn't he? And to kind of think about sort of how you want to. What you want to take from what he's saying. It's like, it's almost like you have no choice but to engage because it's like, it's a little bit, you know, you had Yoda over his shoulder or baby Yoda, I guess, technically. But it's like he's like, you have to kind of lean in. It's like almost like a Delphi oracle.

It's like, I think I understand that, but let me kind of think through this. And then you realize, oh, there's a bigger narrative that he's building around, particularly around this idea of sustainable excellence. And that. That, to me is one of the reasons why I wanted to have you get a chance to meet him. And the first talk about him, talk with him is this. You know, we're all pushing for excellence, or at least I don't know if we all are, but we're trying and we talk about it. But this. How many of us talk about sustainability the way that Fergus does with that much focus and that much care? And I think that's.

That, to me, becomes something that's critically important for all of us right now.

It really is. And there's so much talk about burnout and mental health issues. And you see it more and more, particularly with Gen Z and millennials and these cultures that, you know, where they're just Looking at the wrong metrics, they're looking at activities. And you made a comment that I thought was interesting. This may have been when we had stopped, but about a leader that, you know, and that this leader drives so hard. And that's great, except that is this leader setting the stage for everybody else in the company to burn out? Because it may be sustainable for him, but it's not sustainable for most. And this whole idea about taking time to reflect and you know it is. I mean, when you're working out, you don't just do 86 reps.

You wait a minute and then you do some more reps. Because the body and the mind needs to go into a state of surfing. I think he called it, or wandering. I'm sure my brother would have a neuroscientific term for it, but it's this idea of recovery. And I don't know about you, but I find I personally get my best ideas when I walk away from my computer and I think things through at a different level. The other thing I wanted to mention that he said that I thought was really interesting. And he said it at the end. Well, at the beginning he said, I don't get called when things are going well.

I get called when something goes wrong. And he said, we need to start asking better questions. And that is, why are things going right? And I think that was really hit me between the eyes. And I think it's so important for teams, especially when they're killing it, especially when they've got 20, 30% growth rate, to say, why is this working? What are we doing right? Because otherwise we're just unconsciously competent. And that's one of the things that we always do as a company. We always say, let's make the rest as good as the best. So we study the top performers and we say, why are they doing it right? Let's look at some patterns. Let's get some pattern recognition so that now we can look how we can help the rest be as good as the best.

And I do think there's a tendency for all of us, when we're doing well, not to stop and reflect. What are the three, Five. Three to five things we're doing that made us hit that quota or do well or nail that, you know, interviewer or whatever the case may be.

Yeah, no, I think that's right. It's a great point. The. Because, you know, it's like just kind of feels good. It's like finally something's going right. It's kind of on a coast in some ways. It's almost like, even more exhausting, though, Sherry. It's like.

I just seem to be particularly negative today. It's like, man, it's like, not going well. I got to reflect and root cause and dig down. It's like. And if it's going well, I can't even rest. Then I gotta. Actually, now I gotta do the same thing. But there's.

But I. I think that's the. It's. It's the curiosity. The word curiosity didn't come up in the conversation per se, but it was kind of there the whole time, wasn't it? Which is. You talk about creativity, he talked about asking better, different kinds of questions. And I. I think it.

It is. It's kind of your point, too, which is, it is this natural inclination asking, why are things going the way they are? Whether it's really good, really bad, or somewhere in between. And that. That. That sort of open mindset of always looking for a better understanding of why things work the way that they do, such that you can do more of the good stuff and less of the bad stuff. And.

But.

But again, this. This idea of, like. And so we could just do it a little bit longer. This idea of sustainability that he just really, really landed hard on, which in. In a good way.

No, I. I loved it.

Thank.

Thank you for bringing a new person in my life, friend.

Absolutely. I love that. All right, well, for everybody. Cheers. Everybody.