No.

This is not going to be a post about everyone’s favourite Catalan Football Coach and all-round rollneck sweater wearer.

But it does start in Manchester, as so many good things do.

So, one of my oldest friends is reasonably high up in a reasonably big corporate concern.

He won’t mind me saying that as far as I can understand it, his job involves making sure that one person in his organisation talks to another person in his organisation and vice versa. This blows my mind. Despite having been in the working world since I was fourteen, I still think of jobs as being … well, the things they say they are on the tin: Doctor, Teacher, Plumber, Baker, Lollipop Man, Chef - four of which I’ve actually done for a living. His job doesn’t seem to be as much a job as the working description of a Marriage or Couples Counsellor, but I know it’s important - because if that person doesn’t talk to this person and this person doesn’t talk to that person, then this thing doesn’t get done, or that resource doesn’t reach the place it needs to in time, and all sorts of horrible things ensue.

I was raised to be capable and competent. That doesn’t sound particularly cool or sexy, until you realise that when you go into a cardiac event or start choking on a grape in the park it’s the capable and competent person who is going to save your life while the cool and sexy people stand around, filming it on their ‘phones for their streams. This means learning basic life skills from swimming to being able to change a nappy while dealing with two other children at the same time and generally making yourself pretty good at most of the things you try. I can’t attach a mesh to the worrying bulge in your descending aorta (although I’m aware of the principles involved, never having rowed on strokeside I’m not arrogant enough to give it a go on spec), but I can probably treat your sprained ankle / gashed knee / need for cake fairly comfortably while showing you how you can make electricity with lemons, copper and zinc.

But specialisation is, increasingly in the West at least, the way that people are making a living.

Which leads me back to my friend.

Highly special individual.

No.

He’s not imaginary.

Earlier this week, I got a message from him.

Work going. Off to see one of your lot about a gold medal.

And the accompanying picture was one of my lot.

A rower.

No names, no packdrill, but it’s one of our lot who recently won a Gold in Paris.

My friend’s company had organised a presentation with this rower.

You know the sort of thing.

Someone in HR or corporate …

(It’s always someone in HR or corporate … )

(Or someone in Corporate HR.)

(Always.)

(And that’s fine. A lot of those people earn way more than me - which in the modern world is always the last card that some will put down to trump you.)

I’m not against ‘motivational’ speakers - especially ones who are Olympians, especially ones who are rowers. They might be lottery-funded, but British Olympians earn less than you’d earn stacking shelves in Tesco, with less job security, and literally no Employment Rights, as Jess Varnish and others have found out. You get a career-ending injury, and even that is gone, while your team coach / physio / admin carries on with their salaried remuneration with pension and defined benefits. An athletic career is short, winning an Olympic gold medal is very difficult, and we are well past the point where an Olympic gold medal was said to be worth a million pounds. That was said back when we didn’t win that many of them, so they had a certain amount of rarity value, which they still do, but not as much as back in the days of Daley Thompson or Seb Coe. Then, you might be able to shimmy sideways afterwards or during your career into a coaching role, or an admin role, or a presenting role on the BBC alongside opening supermarkets, and attending village fetes. Speaking on the after-dinner circuit was a thing then too. It’s a gig where a company or organisation has a shindig and brings in a speaker as entertainment. Depending on context, this might be an ex-footballer or ex-rugby player - before the concussions and the CTE mean they can’t remember the punchlines to their anecdotes anymore - or a comedian off the radio or telly or … or … or …

The motivational thing became around about then - the idea that you could bring in a sportsperson, and they would give a talk about teamwork making the dream work and that their tales of about living a life full of fresh air and exercise would enthuse people to go the extra mile in their cubicles or go and sell more plastic pallet ties. You know. Glengarry Glen Ross but with medals and lycra. I’m not being snarky. These are all things and not only does someone have to do them but many make good livings out it. I know that Steve and Matt parlayed their Pairs and then Sydney Four success into a successful double act that’s still running today. But they’ve kind of cornered the market in the well-paid Saudi gig area - because they were among the first through the door and their narrative was both compelling and well-known, thanks to Gold Fever.

And because they’re Steve and Matt. Have you heard our conversation with (now) Sir Matthew Pinsent? He’s brilliant, erudite, engaged, and passionate well beyond the usual anodyne platitudes some athletes use as shorthand for dialogue.

But the above is something worth considering. Because even in the world of continual content, there are not a lot of paid presenting jobs going on the BBC, or elsewhere. If it’s the Olympics and its rowing, a member of the Sydney Four is going to have the gig. Steve Cram is going to have the athletics. We have more commentators and analysts than ever before, driven by the idiotic need for evermore clickbait hot takes, feedback, reaction moments and so on, but the gigs you might have expected to get back in the day off the back of winning at something that isn’t football are mostly taken - and they aren’t paying a million pounds, a million pounds by the way that is worth a lot less now than it was then because of hyperinflation in the UK. Then, if you were a millionaire, you were what was called in the North-east at the time, minted. You were rare air. You were rich. There weren’t many of you about. Now, a million pounds is basically what I used to think of as a normal family house in the North-east in the UK, a car, and living overheads. Not that I earn it, but that’s what things cost now. Still, we’re so much better off out of Europe as a playground for Disaster Capitalists.

Because of the above, and because I have an inkling of just how brutal, hard and unforgiving elite sport is, I think that after hugging their family and friends everyone who did well at Paris should have got on the ‘phone, hired an agent and asked them to get them as much work as possible as a motivational / after-dinner / local authority come into schools and show off your medal speaker and made as much hay as possible while the sun shone on them - because memories are short, attention spans now shorter, and the cycle will quickly move on to the next new story.

And also because I’ve been fortunate enough to talk to Olympic Champions because of Broken Oars Podcast, I’ve been lucky enough to find out that they are genuinely good company. The ones I’ve met haven’t talked in platitudes. Platitudes are given to the media because they are, like a well-conceived coaching call, a condensation of an ethos, an approach, a practice. They are the tip of the sword. But when all you have is the platitude, thrown about on social media and memeified, those other, far more important things are forgotten. Given the opportunity to stretch out beyond a few gasped moments at the end of an incredibly gruelling race at the end of an incredibly gruelling four-year cycle when a microphone is shoved in their face, each guest we’ve talked to has been brilliant, insightful beyond their sport, and profoundly relatable on a human level. A massive penny drop moment for me came while talking to Andy Hodge. A brilliant rower, three-time Olympic Champion and now passionate advocate for getting young people into sport, it was while chatting to him about his experiences that I realised that sportsmen and sportswomen are not the divinely created beings the media and press might sometimes suggest, preordained to come down, walk among us, and win. Actually, they’re normal, ordinary people who through a combination of genetics, opportunity, support, luck and hard work get to achieve extraordinary things.

If that’s the message my friend sat through, then that’s a positive message to receive at any point.

It helped to shift the perspective on a lot of things I’ve done in my life. For reasons we won’t get into, although a lot of these would be classed as significant achievements by most, they weren’t necessarily seen as that by me, as they had been driven by the wrong motivations: external validation rather than internal fulfilment, for example. Or as part of an externally-projected self-image rather than coming from an internally-motivated drive for fulfilment. To put it another way, I was doing those things for other people - not for myself.

Conversations with people who have quite literally waited for the rest of the world to catch up with them helped shift my perspective on things I’ve accomplished. Rather than see my rowing career, for example, as a failure because I failed to win a red box at Henley, I saw the wealth of positive memories, relationships with others, experiences, skills, abilities and accomplishments that it had actually given me - all of which I still possess. I also realised that I resented my academic success and intellectual development because it had been driven not by a love of learning per se but because of being an undiagnosed dyslexic at school and labelled ‘thick’ by teachers and classmates. The drive to prove people wrong can be a powerful one, but if it leads to excelling in something that you aren’t really that interested in anyway, then it’s a very hollow victory. When Broken Oars talked to Eric Murray, one of the greatest to ever do it, he made the point that it takes ten years to win an Olympic Gold medal, and if you don’t enjoy those ten years, the one second it takes to hang the medal around your neck will not make up for it - something that many Olympians have found to their cost. Regardless of how I came by them, however, I know see that those experiences gave me tools and skills and knowledge and a hinterland that I will always have in my toolbox if I need them - which is good.

When I started writing this, I thought that my point was going to be that motivational speaking is bollocks: that it has to come from within; that we are self-driven or not at all. But as I’ve teased out my thoughts on the subjects of motivational speakers in sketching this out, I’ve realised how dependent on others I was. I learned to be a good teacher by having better teachers than the ones who labelled me ‘thick’, for example. I had teachers and mentors and coaches who passed on their skill and expertise to me, often without sighing at my inability to get it on the first bounce. Because of them, I was able to become a teacher and mentor to others. I am self-starting, but a lot of that came from the fact I was doing things I wanted to do. And if I had a bad day, or a day where I couldn’t be bothered, or days when I’d just woken up on the wrong side of the bed, I had a Lewin, a Pete, a Denis, a Ben to pick me up.

There was some back-and-forth snark with my friend about what he might expect to hear from his Olympian. I might have suggested that these are just corporate jollies, a break from the daily routine. I might have pointed out that Olympic athletes are generally doing something they want to do (even if like me at that age they might be doing it for the wrong reasons) and want to be there while most working people work to pay the bills and are there because they have to be. And to an extent, that’s true. But a rowing friend once observed that while it would be nice to be able to row as well technically and physically as an Olympian, there must be days when it also feels like just a job to them too: another 21k can be seen in the same context as another strategy meeting about the third quarter. We often don’t know how lucky we are to be doing something until we don’t or can’t do it anymore. And I might have quipped something about expecting to have a full bingo card on his return: we followed the process … we trusted the process … losing in the world’s was tough, but it was an essential part of the process … winning was great, we followed the process … debriefing, we re-evaulated our objectives and recalibrated our process … our focus was on the process …

And that actually is a fair point.

Most of life is simple and can be broken down to the following: life is hard. There are no shortcuts or quick fixes. Do your best.

Buzzwords like process are thrown around like so much coaching / media mood music as if it explains everything when it actually explains nothing. Like some idiot calling for quick catches without actually defining what quick catches means from a technical and physical standpoint, the person who talks endlessly about process and following the process without breaking down what that process is actually made up of might as well just stand there and say we had a badger … we followed the badger … the badger wasn’t working … we punched our badger … the badger didn’t like it … we got sued, we’re now not allowed within one hundred yards of the badger. Like the word ‘press’ replacing the words ‘closing down’ in football, it’s an example of someone reinventing the wheel, trying to separate themselves from others, and trying to make money in doing so by retooling an old concept. Process is the current buzzword among coaches wanting to show they’re up-to-date. Its current usage is meant to signify that everyone is part of something organic within which negatives can be recontextualised as positive learning experiences (as they always have been, if your coach, teacher or mentor is any good), that we’re on that latest thing, the journey; that it’s never-ending; that there’s always something we can take forward …

But it means much the same as plan.

And actually you can follow the plan or process as much as you like but at some point you make the shot or you don’t; you get the win or you don’t; you learn the lesson or you don’t. That’s a result, and it’s black-or-white. Lessons might be learned going forward, but it’s not part of a process. That’s okay. Because life is made up of as many wins as losses and some of the losses come to be wins and some of the wins end up being losses because of the above.

And that’s all fine.

The snark might have gone back-and-forth because we’ve known each other a long time and therefore talk in that sort of shorthand.

But ultimately hearing someone else’s story can help us make sense of our own. It can show us tools we already have, and how to develop ones we want. It can clarify where we are, where we want to be, and maybe how to go about getting there. And in sharing and connecting lived human experiences it can show that we’re not alone.

And for all of those reasons, and all of the above, that’s why talking, at any time, is a good thing.

©℗ A. I. Jackson

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Origin(al) Stories was first launched to show some of the thoughts, decisions and processes that went into the writing, recording and release of the Northumbria album.

Following the launch of The Landing Stage, which brings together some of the things I do, I’ve continued adding to Origin(al) Stories.

Origin(al) Stories has none of the features beloved of self-help and influencers: how-to guides, lists, essential hacks.

Drawn from my personal diaries and journals, the posts might often seem unconnected, elliptical and fragmentary. Showing, as they do, my explorations of ideas and approaches and processes as I do things, they are best viewed as glimpses of my workings.

They show my mistakes, the false trails I’ve followed, and the blind alleys I’ve gone down - all of which are intrinsic parts of finding a path through to doing something.

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Thanks for reading. Have a great day. Tell the people you love that you love them. Be a positive force. .