Why Rugby Players Turn to Aristotle

For the past two years, I’ve been running a philosophy group at Saracens rugby club, the current champions of the rugby Premiership. Once a month, I go to Saracens’ training ground in St Albans and give a brief talk about an idea from ancient philosophy that can be applied to our lives today. Then the group – usually around 10 players and staff – use that as a starting point to discuss how to live well.

We’ve covered everything from “accepting adversity” to “what makes a good friend”, and have explored ideas from many wisdom traditions – Epicurus, the Stoics, Taoism, Buddhism – as well as looking at how these have been revived in modern psychotherapy.

It all came from a project I’m working on at Queen Mary, University of London, to see if philosophy can be useful beyond academia. I have run philosophy clubs in a mental health charity and a Glasgow prison, as well as the current one at Saracens.

I went in to the rugby club with zero expectations, and still find it strange to sit in a circle with Jim Hamilton, Owen Farrell and others, discussing Aristotle’s idea of the Golden Mean. But it’s been good fun for all of us. It was “the most popular thing we did last season,” says defence coach Paul Gustard, who is now defence coach for England.

Why do rugby players need to sit around talking about wisdom when they could be doing star jumps? Aren’t they living the dream already? Yes and no. A career in professional sport comes with some incredible highs. “Winning a big game is an ecstatic experience,” one player said in the philosophy club this week. “I don’t think people outside sport ever feel like that.” But there are some real lows too.

We might think of athletes as supermen, but it turns out that a lot of their lives are beyond their control. Are they fit? Does the coach pick them? How do the media treat them? How does the rest of the team play? When those external factors are in their favour, they’re gods. When fortune shifts, suddenly they’re a nobody. The transition to life after sport is particularly hard. How will you get that high again?

What has surprised me, talking to various coaches over the past year, is how little attention most clubs pay to the mental and emotional well-being of players. Considering how big a factor the mind is in sport, you’d expect top teams to invest as much in mental wellbeing as they do in physical fitness. In fact, it’s more or less ignored.

This reflects the attitudes of wider society. If you get cancer, you can expect all the care and sympathy in the world. If you get mental illness, no one wants to talk about it. That’s particularly true of male culture. Men are not good at taking care of themselves or each other, and numb their pain with booze. As a result, suicide is the biggest killer of men under 50.

The values of professional sports teams can also be quite toxic. “It’s a fear-driven industry, focused on short-term success,” says Neil Burns, a mentor who’s worked with top cricketers. “Athletes often get used up and tossed aside. Values and wellbeing don’t usually get a look in.”

Saracens are trying to do things differently. When new management arrived, in 2009, they insisted that the character, values and wellbeing of the players were the top priority, and results would follow from that. They launched something called the Personal Development Programme, to support all the players in their lives and their careers after sport. They duly invited various people in to talk to the players, including mindfulness experts, a yoga teacher, even a philosopher (me).

image: www.saracens.com

The “Saracens revolution” has created a unique culture. Alex Goode, the 26-year-old Saracens and England fullback, says: “The old Saracens was not a particularly friendly place. There’d be quite brutal banter. Now, there’s much more of a feeling of togetherness.”

The esprit de corps has made the team stronger and better. Saracens won the Premiership in 2011, and broke the record in the 2014 season for most tries scored and most league points won, reaching the European cup final and Premiership play-off final, both of which they sadly lost. Last season, they had their most successful season ever, winning the Premiership and the AV Cup. They’re currently top of the league, and many of their young players are playing for England in the Six Nations.

Other teams are following their lead. The head of the Personal Development Programme, David Priestley, moved to Arsenal last season to develop a programme there, and I’ve done a couple of philosophy sessions with the players. In cricket, after some high-profile burnouts, the ECB is beginning to recognise that “inner fitness is the foundation for long-term success”, as former England coach Andy Flower puts it. In the United States, the enlightened coach Phil “Zen Master” Jackson is putting values and wisdom at the centre of his basketball team culture. In American football, the New England Patriots, winners of the 2014 Superbowl, have also been incorporating ancient Stoic philosophy into their team ethic, via a book by Ryan Holiday called The Obstacle Is the Way.

It’s interesting to consider whether this focus on wellbeing could be transferred to other industries. Poor mental health costs the UK economy roughly £23 billion a year through absenteeism and low morale, according to the Centre for Mental Health. Yet, according to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), only a third of British companies offer any stress management or resilience training, which usually means one half-day session a year.

That’s not enough. What impresses me at Saracens is that it’s not a once-a-year workshop. It’s a values-driven culture, sustained every day in every interaction (or not). Just as importantly, it’s a pluralist approach, exploring various ways to live well rather than forcing employees down one path. There is space for players to discuss ideas and share their own experience. This helps create a culture of peer support, which is more powerful than a one-off workshop.

There is not one philosophical or scientific answer to the question of how to live well. But some philosophies have survived for two millennia because there is wisdom in them. The challenge for organisations is to offer useful ideas and techniques, while enabling employees to find what works for them. And if that sounds soft and fluffy to you, go and watch Saracens this season.

This post is by our collaborator Jules Evans, a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow and Policy Director at the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary University of London.

Success and Mental Health: Too much pressure?

This interesting article in the New York Times attempts to put the suicide of Chef Benoit Violier into context by highlighting that this is not an isolated episode: many highly successful chefs have recently ended their lives. Violier was most certainly a high achiever: his restaurant, Restaurant de l’Hôtel de Ville, had been awarded three Michelin stars and in December was judged the No. 1 in La Liste, France’s ranking of 1,000 restaurants in 48 countries.

“It can’t keep happening; it just can’t,” the food writer Kat Kinsman said on Monday. In January she started Chefs With Issues, a project aimed at illuminating the job-related stresses and mental illnesses afflicting many people in the food industry. Depression, anxiety, addiction and eating disorders are common.

Is this a pattern in the world of high cuisine only or is it a widespread phenomenon among high achievers in different fields? It is surely something that needs to be explored as part of the "dark side of success".

Meeting Curious - thinking about failure and vulnerability in the light of success

Last week, at Wellcome Collection, I met with Helen Paris,who together with Leslie Hill form Curious. Curious have already created two artworks with the support of Wellcome Trust. One about ‘gut-feelings’ (The Moment I Saw You I Knew I Could Love You) was a collaboration with gastroenterologists at Barts, London. The other, about smell and memory (On The Scent), involved collaboration with a biologist at the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bangalore, India.

Helen and I had a wide ranging conversation, but one element stuck in my mind – the possibility of failure and the opportunity to fail. Helen teaches performance at Stanford, USA. In one class she asks students to experience failure by creating ‘bad’ artworks. In order to succeed in the class they have to fail in their art, which Helen says the students find very confusing. What is the role of failure in success?

For artists, learning to take risks is necessary for success. Yet taking risks results in the possibility of failure. Drawing on Nietzsche', the early contemporary choreographer Doris Humphrey described how the modern dancers should always inhabit the ‘arc between two deaths’ - the moment of falling, between standing still and lying down. For Humphrey, lack of risk was the death of the artwork. If you were safely standing, or safely lying down, nothing interesting was happening. To dance, to create 'good' art, you must take the risk - and accept the possibility of failure.

But in healthcare, risk is unacceptable.

In a Lottery-funded project about interpersonal perspectives of suicidality, I was interested to hear service-user and family members discuss how while risk, and risk-assessment was very much part of many suicidal people’s lives, care and humanity was less evident. It seemed to many of our participants, that our risk-averse healthcare culture had reduced care to box-ticking, and that the humanity had all but disappeared. I am reminded of being told about an experience of being an inpatient (partly described in an article by Amy Woods & Neil Springham), when the service-user reported that hearing kind words from the ward cleaner was a standout moment of her mental health inpatient stay.

What is the relationship between risk and care? Trust seems important here, and was lacking for those participants who had been suicidal. I’m very interested in how trust manifests between people, rather than inhabiting any one person. It is neither a cognition, a behaviour nor a feeling, but perhaps a mixture of all these, happening across persons, not inside them - in a distributed way.

Helen Paris told me she thinks of trust in terms of an invitation – the invitation is given to the audience and she awaits the response. For example, in their recent piece Out of Water, Helen holds out her hand to an audience member, who is then led down to the edge of the sea. In making the invitation there is risk and vulnerability. How will the audience member respond? Helen says creating an atmosphere of trust and safety in the artwork is important.

There is risk and vulnerability in mental health care too. For service-users, who have perhaps been let down or hurt many times before, there is huge risk in approaching services for help, and allowing themselves to become vulnerable in the moment of trust. But for the staff too there is risk and vulnerability. (And I am thinking of my own experience here, as a trainee psychotherapist). If we make ourselves vulnerable by showing care for a service-user/client, what will happen? There is risk in creating attachments with the people we ‘care’ for (and this also goes for informal carers and wider friends and family of those with mental health problems). There is risk in acknowledging that as healthcare providers we often do not have adequate methods to ease suffering, and that we, sadly, sometimes fail to keep people safe or help them become well.

In thinking about success, failure, vulnerability and risk are all implicated. This seems to be the case in both artist endeavours and in healthcare.