Headlines regularly report the latest outburst on court, a striker’s unexplained goal drought or a coach’s touchline rant. We search to understand how the best teams make game-winning decisions, communicate almost telepathically, recover from failure and deliver breathtaking performances when it matters most. It’s a confusing world of belief systems and mindsets that can be hard to navigate and dominated by urban myths.
To help answer these questions more systematically, Kate Hays, one of Britain’s most progressive sports psychologists, shares her insights and approach honed across Olympic sport, rugby and football in her new book How to Win. Hays, head of women’s performance psychology at the Football Association, takes us behind the scenes of some epic sporting achievements, from Tom Daley’s diving career to the Harlequins championship-winning team and Sarina Wiegman’s Euros-winning Lionesses.
A promising 800m runner growing up, Hays had twin fascinations with the worlds of sport and crime. She recalls loving the TV drama series Cracker, based on Robbie Coltrane’s colourful criminal psychologist, and was gripped by Paul Britton’s book The Jigsaw Man. Britton, a forensic psychologist, looks for the “mind trace” left by criminals rather than fingerprints or bloodstains, and asks himself four questions when faced with a crime scene: “What happened, who was the victim, how was it done and why?”
Hays likewise uses four questions to create the building blocks to sustainable performance: who are we? Why are we here? How do we play? And how do we win? These simple but not easy questions develop the deep roots needed to underpin long-term performance in the constantly volatile, unpredictable world of high-performance sport.
A turning point came when Hays led sports psychology for Team GB. After the 2016 Rio Olympic Games, Hays and her colleagues were troubled by the athletes’ adverse stories, despite the impressive medal tally. They believed the human costs were unnecessarily high and detrimental to future performance.
Project Thrive emerged, based on a double ambition of performance and thriving for every Team GB athlete. This thinking continues to underpin Hays’ approach. “I just do not buy into this idea that performance needs to be separate from an environment in which people can flourish and thrive,” she told me. “I think the mistake is when you look at those as two separate things.” Although acknowledging “people can be successful when they’re not in the greatest place”, Hays is convinced that success garnered in that way “can’t be sustained”.
While discussions about the future of sport focus on fast-evolving technology, virtual reality headsets and AI, Hays emphasised to me: “At the heart of those things is still a human being that needs to execute those skills under the highest pressure (constantly increasing from social media). To do that, they have to be able to emotionally regulate and maintain focus on the right thing at the right time.” Emotional regulation is a theme throughout the book.
Daley explains in the afterword how Hays helped him manage “main character syndrome” where a person believes, wrongly, that all eyes are on them. By creating a purpose beyond diving, Daley unlocked the freedom necessary to excel across five Olympics: “The truth is that we’re all supporting characters, and if we can learn to live like no one’s watching, it’s possible to free ourselves from embarrassment and fear. This attitude allows me to do whatever I think is best for success.”
I first met Hays 10 years ago when I was supporting the coaches of the Cambridge University crew preparing for the first women’s Boat Race to be held on the London Tideway Championship course. We were on a steep learning curve facing fast-rising standards and a global audience.
That first year would bring unprecedented levels of media and public interest plus an Oxford crew with Olympic and international experience far beyond any of the Cambridge student rowers. Our chances of winning were nonexistent, yet we needed the 2015 race to be a success for the students, the club and the wider sporting world. Knowing of Hays’ reputation and versatility across sports, we invited her to help us.
Hays helped reimagine and redesign what success looked like: firstly, a challenging but achievable performance ambition for the Cambridge women’s crew to give their best performance and go as fast as they were capable of on race day with measures around that; secondly, the goal to be brilliant ambassadors for this pioneering moment in women’s sport; thirdly, taking a strong first step towards creating a sustainable high performance system to develop the rowing talent at Cambridge over the long-term.
Hays worked collaboratively with the coaching team – a constant feature of her work and integral to her deep impact wherever she goes. Although the Cambridge women lost that year, they walked away knowing they had given their best performance in a race that attracted huge positive coverage. As a team, we took a giant step towards building a culture and performance system that would lead to a stunning course record in 2017 and an unbeaten streak since.
Fast forward to her current work with the Lionesses. Hays talks of the “meeting of minds” in her first conversation with Wiegman whom she describes as “so psychologically well-informed.” Asked about the challenges of the upcoming Euros where the Lionesses will defend their title, Hays sets this calmly within the wider context and infinite game of sport: “There is always change. So you’re constantly readjusting, reflecting, re-evaluating … whether you haven’t won yet, whether you’ve won multiple times, it almost doesn’t matter because that change happens anyway.”
Like Hays, her book is grounded in the practical application of psychological principles, leading us firmly away from popular myths, cliches and superstitions. There are no silver bullets for mastering our minds but Hays’ four fundamental questions provide a map for anyone inside or outside sport to set themselves up for sustainable success.
How To Win: Lessons in Success From the Front Line of Performance Psychology by Kate Hays is published on Thursday by HarperCollins
