We caught up with leading personal motivation and corporate perfromance coach Pete Cohen. He spoke exclusively with NMP Live about how he's helped top sporting stars, what leadership means and the importance of making people feel valued and supported in a corporate world.
Watch the full interview or read the transcript below.
In conversation with Pete Cohen
How did you move in to a career in coaching and personal development?
I have always just been fascinated with helping people. So, my background, believe it or not, was in sport science. I was a personal trainer for many years. I used to wear Lycra and jump up and down and teach aerobics. It didn’t take me very long to realise that so many people were joining a gym and would not come.
So, then I got in to nutrition, and thought maybe that is the answer, because most people wanted to lose weight who were joining a gym, and I realised that no, there is more.
Then I studied psychology, specifically sports psychology, and then I started working with people with their mind. Because I believe that really that is the key to most things.
I have been extremely lucky to work with people from all different walks of life; highflying business executives to world and Olympic champions, just to everyday people just like you and me.
Have you always been a positive and energetic person?
Interesting for me, because I was very self conscious and I think one of the reasons why I like to entertain people is for years I wanted people to like me, because of my deep-seated insecurity of feeling I wasn’t good enough.
I will never forget I got coached myself for many years by someone who helped me so much and he once said to me “listen, human beings are just flawed, we are not perfect”. So, as much as I have a big nose, and big feet, and a bald head, and even ear hair, physically I’m not perfect and mentally I’m not perfect either.
It’s part of being a human being. And when I started to realise that I started to not take myself so seriously and probably become much more effective at what I’m doing.
I think that people tend to change, not when you tell them what to do, but when people have a different perspective of things, when they go “oh, I’ve never thought of it like that”. I believe that people need to take ownership of their process of change for people to become the best version of themselves that they can be.
Who are some of the well-known sports stars you’ve worked with?
Well, definitely the best, I laugh because every time I think about it makes me smile, I spent two years of my life working with Ronnie O’Sullivan. That was fascinating to me because it was an interesting story. Someone was looking after him, he was struggling, and they contacted talkSPORT and they said do you know someone who could help Ronnie? They contacted me because regularly I have been on talkSPORT as an expert in sports psychology.
I went to go and meet Ronnie, and we met at The Ritz and they wouldn’t let him in because he was wearing jeans. Then we went across the road and we sat and we just spoke. I just let him talk, I didn’t really say anything, he obviously felt comfortable and then he came to my house in West Sussex, in Washington, and he stayed for three days. He was only going to come for a couple of hours and he stayed for three days.
I really got to know him very well, but I remember one of the things we did was I made him watch a couple of hours, not a couple of hours, maybe five hours of Michael Jordan videos. Michael Jordan is kind of like my hero, even though I have never watched him play and I’m not really in to basketball, but I believe success always leaves clues and there is a lot of similarities between Ronnie and Michael Jordan. I mean, extremely talented, but talent is only going to get you so far.
So I spent two years working with him and immediately he won three tournaments back to back, which he had never done before, which was awesome. But then he lost in the first round of the World Championships, he lost to Marco Fu. He did make a 147, but then he disappeared, he disappeared for two or three months, doing what Ronnie used to do.
Then he came back, we started working together and he won the World Championships for the second time.
That was awesome, just being a part of someone’s journey. That was one of the best.
At what point does a sports person or team bring you on board?
When you work with a sports person it is always interesting because of all the years of working with people I think there has only been one or two people that have ever contacted me when things are going really well. I can think of one lady, Anna Hemmings, who was World Champion Marathon Canoeist. She phoned me up a couple of times and said “you know what Pete, things are going really well, can we explore about how we can make things better?”
So, in answer to your question, most people come to me because they have got a problem, and they want to get out of that problem. For example, there is a team of us who worked with Tim Henman in 1998, and he got to the semi final of Wimbledon for the first time, then we never saw him again after that.
For lots of people their driver is the fact that they’re uncomfortable. They’re in pain and they want to move away from it, but once they get comfortable again they get comfortable again until they get uncomfortable. So, I am always looking, with athletes, what is holding them back? What is their thinking? And often it is very simple, it’s how they’re talking to themselves.
My goal is to inspire people to be better than their best every single day and to help them remove the obstacles. One of the biggest obstacles that human beings have is the voice in their head. Some people call it a monkey; I call it a duck. I’m pretty well known for people giving me ducks or people telling me that I’ve helped them exterminate their duck.
It’s the quacking, it’s the mental interference, it’s the stories you’re telling yourself of “I can’t do this” or “I’ve played this person before, it’s not going to work, I’m not good enough”.
Even Usain Bolt, in the documentary that has just come out, he says that every year he would still say to himself ‘I wonder if I have still got it. I wonder if I can still run fast’, and you think hang on a second, the fastest man in the world is still asking himself that sort of question.
So everyone thinks negatively, it’s what you do with that negativity. You can either let it inspire you or you can let it make you a victim and never really go anywhere in life.
How does your work with athletes differ from working within business?
Well I suppose it’s always the same; there is a problem, let's find a solution. That’s what I’m known for. People would come to me with pretty much any problem and let’s find a solution.
With corporates, again, really fortunate that often the work you do with a company you often get a chance to see what is going on and what some of the issues and challenges that people have around engagement, around focus, around people going the extra mile in what they do. I’ve been really lucky to work with corporates where you get to see where their issues are and then look to try and find a solution.
Working with corporates is always challenging because sometimes they are more interested in the bottom line than actually interested in people. That’s what I’m interested in; people, the emotional intelligence of people, making people feel valued and supported. Because, when you do that people tend to go the extra mile and use the potential that every human being has.
What are your main speech topics?
I’m fascinated by leadership. That’s something I have been working on a lot recently. I remember reading in a book by Napoleon Hill that was written in 1937 where he interviewed 500 of the most successful people of the early part of the last century. There was a thing that really struck out at me, which was the era of the go-getter has gone, it is the era of the go-giver. And he wrote that in 1937!
It might have taken years, and years, and years for people to catch on to that subject that we have got to inspire leaders to inspire people. So anything to do with inspiration, motivation, confidence, wellness, is something I’m fascinated with.
People say are you a motivational speaker? Okay, what does that mean? Even when I hear that now I think I’m an American, I gotta come on and say ‘let’s go! Gimme five! Whoa, yeah!’ And that can work but motivation doesn’t work.
I like to call myself an inspirational speaker because my background is in psychology, so when you understand what motivation really is you understand that motivation doesn’t really work because people are only motivated to do things they enjoy doing because the brain is always trying to protect you.
Organisations still don’t get this, but they need to get it! If you ask anyone to change in a business, people say ‘it’s the fact we have had so much change, but nothing ever really changes.’ That is a factor, but it’s more the fact that you are asking people to do something that maybe they’re not comfortable doing, so immediately their defences will come up.
So, motivation doesn’t really work, we have to go around motivation and we have to light the fire inside someone, which makes them realise that if I do this it is going to make a difference. It’s the WIIFM, ‘What’s In It For Me’?
What does success mean to you?
The word success, to me, means enjoying what you do. I was actually reading a thing about leadership recently, actually listening to it this morning. And when you look at John Maxwell’s work, who has written the book The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, and he talks about the greatest success in life, of a leader or anyone, is loving what you do.
If you don’t love what you do then you are never going to put your heart and soul in to it. So teaching people how to love what they do is a real key.
What are the key take-away messages from your talks?
Well, definitely one of the key messages is always about the duck in your head. I mean I’ve talked all over the world where companies have actually bought ducks for everyone. It might seem a bit kind of childish, if you like, but the duck is a symbol of what you are saying to yourself.
What is the biggest obstacle? Well, it is you. It’s what you are saying to yourself. And what we have often done is that people have given their duck an actual name, and they have put them on their desk, because that voice is in your head.
You know, when you wake up in the morning and your alarm goes off, what actually got you out of bed? It was probably pain actually, you probably had to press the snooze button three or four times, because the voice in your head, the duck, was going stay in bed. But, eventually your bladder started to hurt you because you needed the toilet, and it was often pain that got you out of your bed.
It’s often that duck that tells you not to make that extra phone call, the duck that said to cut corners. Once you can start to see what it is that you’re saying to yourself the power comes back to you. That duck in your head, in many cases, it’s actually trying to help you, it doesn’t want you to fail, it doesn’t want you to often stand out, but it just does what it thinks is best.
That is often one of the biggest take-aways, but I suppose the other big take-away is you have what it takes! Every human being has what it takes to make more of a difference but it is just a question of getting comfortable being uncomfortable. That really is the key.
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