‘We Really Need To Think of Ourselves as Performers’

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On the surface, Cody Royle was born to coach.

As a young boy growing up in Australia, he’d simulate rugby games in his family’s garden and force himself to make quick decisions on substitutions and in-game strategies.

But his path to the sidelines of Australian rules football years later proved to be far from linear. It entailed agony over not getting drafted, deep self-reflection, moving across the globe, and a critical shift in mentality.

“I learned a lot about failing and how you can overcome obstacles through mindset,” Royle said.

Royle eventually became an assistant coach with a high-level club in Melbourne at just 23 years old, then moved to Canada to become an AFL head coach two years later.

He’s since written three books and currently consults for more than a dozen coaches across a range of sports, including leaders from Arsenal, the University of Louisville and the Toronto Raptors.

The Daily Coach spoke to Royle about his four craft areas for leaders, the three primary skills of coaching, and why coaches should treat themselves as performers, too.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Cody, thank you for doing this. I know you grew up in Melbourne and Canberra. Tell us about your childhood and how it shaped you.

I was raised by a single mom. Both of her parents had passed away by the time she was 16, so she never finished high school, but went on to become a top salesperson at Kraft Foods while raising two kids on her own. I learned the value of hard work.

Our family holidays were often mom’s work trips in disguise. She was off in a motel or hotel somewhere and would leave us in the pool to go do sales calls. I also learned a lot about intuition. Mom’s first question for me was always, “What does your gut tell you to do?” It instilled a reflection and intuition. Watching your mother go through that and the lessons you take from it become embedded in who you are.

What led you to coaching?

I was a state-level football player at three age groups, but I didn’t get drafted. I learned a lot about failure and mindset through that process. I didn’t realize my dreams and capitulated after not getting drafted. I had a really hard time finding something else I was passionate about. It was coaching that reignited my passion.

As I was playing for my local team, I ran into a coach (I knew) and tapped him on the shoulder. That seems to be a lot of people’s stories. They didn’t think about it, know anything about it, but through conversations with a coach, they say, “You’d be good at this. Do you want to have a go?”

He took me under his wing and said, “Let’s get you into coaching.” I started at 23. You’re young and trying to figure out the world, let alone coaching. But as soon as I realized what coaching was, I was hooked.

You became an assistant coach at just 23, then a head coach at 25. What’d you learn in those experiences at a young age that you now apply to your work with other coaches and leaders?

The idea of competition is, “Here’s my best. Here are my assumptions about what’s going to win.” The opposition has its own set of assumptions, and the game decides.

If you’re arrogant or big-headed in a competitive landscape, that’s going to get beaten out of you pretty quickly by competition.

You think you know a lot and, then very quickly, you realize how little you know. That’s only gotten stronger the more I’ve coached.

You write a lot now about how coaches need to re-think some conventional practices around the job. What are some coaching norms you think we should reconsider?

The biggest thing is coaches are performers too. I hate the term “old-school,” but (a coach) was this servant leader who spent 22 hours a day at the office studying film and didn’t sleep. He was proud of it. He didn’t see his family, ate at the McDonald’s Drive Thru, woke up in the facility, watched more film, then went down into the gym and saw the players. We just know so much now that that’s not conducive to anything that helps coaching. It’s not conducive to empathy, to awareness, to communication, to decision-making.

As coaches, we really need to think of ourselves as performers. That means our sleep, nutrition, hydration and mental states, and making sure we have access to our best skills when we need them the most.

If you show up to a game with two hours of sleep, you can’t operate at your highest level, just like you wouldn’t expect a player to reach his top athletic peak. A lot of the rules we apply to our players we can apply to ourselves.

You consult for coaches and schools now. How do you step into situations and provide meaningful feedback when you may not be an expert in what it is they exactly do?

I work with other coaches in team invasion sports, so there’s an immediate similarity. Aussie rules and American football, lacrosse and soccer. Underneath the veneer of the rules and the shape of the ball is the same game.

But I think the real benefit is in the not-knowing. It allows you to question certain things as a coach. You ask questions that someone who does know perhaps wouldn’t or someone who has grown up in that sport might not. I think there’s actually an advantage to having someone as a coach who isn’t (familiar) with the status quo of how this sport was coached. They ask better questions.

Can you explain your four craft areas for head coaches?

I spend a lot of time in and around coach development and education, and it’s a massive area of failure. In the ultimate leadership position, prominent coaches are getting into the role and saying, “I haven’t done any of these things in my 20 years as an assistant. I’m learning a new job on the job.”

I think the modern head coach is required to master these:

1. Organizational craft: The administrative areas of running the team.
2. Personal craft: Figuring out who you are and what you stand for as a leader.
3. Locker room craft: Your culture and how you manage your team.
4. Game craft: How you conceptualize and teach the game.

Each of those four may take on a different precedence at different times of the year or different priority depending on the state of the team. But ultimately, none of these is ever dormant.

Why is awareness for coaches so important in your eyes?

I treat awareness, communication and decision-making as the three primary skills of coaching. Awareness is everything that’s going on around us and within us.

Within awareness, I spend most of my time working on attention. It’s a spotlight on something. Think about yourself in a noisy café with a barista making a coffee, 20 different conversations going, and I can still look at you and pay attention and only hear what you’re saying to me. But as coaches, I think we really undervalue and underestimate our own attention. The biggest ways to deplete your attention are stress, threats and poor mood. Attention declines throughout the day.

You start to put all of that together, and we create these states of frantic anxiety around our team. We might wake up at 6 a.m. and the game tonight is 7 p.m. (Thirteen hours) have gone by of your attention being depleted, then you go and coach. If you think you’re at your optimum in terms of your attention, I can tell you, you’re not. You’re big time in the hole.

How does a coach train the ability to pay attention?

The most effective way to do that is a mindfulness practice. It doesn’t need to be sitting idle on a pillow meditating.

For coaches looking to start paying attention to their awareness and attention, the two easiest ones are to nap and to quit alcohol. It just completely stunts your ability to be aware and pay attention to the things you need.

You shared an interesting thought on social media recently. “Leadership is a game of failure masquerading as success.” What does that mean?

The lived experience of the ultimate leader is you spend most of your day dealing with things not going right. But that’s not the outside perception most people have. They see the success as the outcome. But the lived experience of going through that is more so one of failure.

A player was injured, or the day’s training doesn’t go to plan, or the bus pulls up on the wrong side of the road, or it’s late. The lived experience is mostly getting things wrong.

I think a little of it, though, is like baseball where if you’re getting three out of 10 right, you’re in the Hall of Fame… It’s not all rosy and not just making perfect, successful decisions every day. It’s spending your time thinking, and worrying, and having conversations, and firefighting, and having deep human emotions.

Understanding and accepting that is a good place to start.

You point out some shortcomings with long-time coaching practices, but you also give a lot of credit to coaches for the day-to-day challenges they face. Why is it important for you to strike that balance?

It comes from having been in their shoes. What I understand about head coaching and leadership is it’s extraordinarily difficult. People think of it as it’s good or bad, or you should be doing this or shouldn’t be doing that. I approach it more non-judgmentally. I don’t think it’s about putting “good” or ”bad” labels on things, but really, is that what you were trying to do? It’s not writing off things as old school and saying they’re no longer relevant.

There are a lot of great things that have happened in coaching. Coaches don’t need more people criticizing them.

Hopefully, I can come from a place of, “I believe in you, and well done for being in the arena.”

Q&A Resources

Cody Royle  ― Website | X | LinkedIn | Coaching | Newsletter: Coach Craft | Books | Podcast: Where Others Won't

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