Dr. Harvey Anderson is a senior academic and practitioner whose career spans over three decades in sport coaching and performance. Based at Sheffield Hallam University, Harvey is currently the Collaborative Course Leader for the BSc in Sport Coaching where he integrate sport coaching, biomechanics, strength and conditioning and notably, existential psychology. An accomplished cricket coach at the elite level and a Chartered High-Performance Coach, Harvey has presented his work globally, and his critical rethinking of concepts like mental toughness continues to challenge and inspire the field. In our conversation, Harvey offers a compelling critique of modern sport psychology’s overreliance on technique, contrasting the “quick fix” mentality of sophistry with the deeper, often uncomfortable demands of a Socratic or existential approach. Drawing from thinkers like Viktor Frankl and Nietzsche, he discusses how concepts like identity, mortality, and personal responsibility are essential for supporting athletes beyond their performance years. Whether reflecting on his own experience of career-ending injury or critiquing the talent pathways that drop young athletes without psychological preparation, Harvey makes the case for a sport culture that nurtures the whole person, not just the competitor.
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Mathias Alberton (00:03)
Hello everyone, this is Mathias Alberton. I am the creator of Martial Attitude. This is Martial Attitude Voice. As you know, it's a podcast dedicated to sports psychology, to intercept discipline across different sports experiences, but also to see how different perspectives in psychology generally could approach the sport and the sports. And apart from this, know that I am very much working with visually impaired and blind people in central London. I'm creating this training program for blind people, enhancing their posture, overall psychological and physical well-being throughout the workout based on Kung Fu Wing Chun with the intention to create more comfort when they are in touch with other people, touching them and being touched by them in subtle ways in social settings. If you are interested, course, spread a bit the word. We are running the workshops every Sunday, starting from 12 noon to 5 p.m. There are three workshops, so you can attend whichever you want. Just drop an email. We will sort it out for you. Today we are speaking about psychology again, Dr. Harvey Anderson.
He is a senior academic and practitioner with a career spanning over three decades in sport coaching performance. He's based at Sheffield Hallam University since 2012, if I don't remember wrong. is currently the collaborative course leader for the BSc in sport coaching. And it is a very interesting thing for me today to talk to him again after actually having attended a seminar where he was presenting a couple of weeks back, the Psychological Insights Into Coaching Practice hosted by Newcastle University. It was very interesting online event because he is kind of integrating sport coaching, biomechanics, strengths and conditioning, and notably, which is the thing that he was actually presenting at the conference hosted by Newcastle University, Existential Psychology, which is an area he has explored quite deeply. He has written papers about it, specifically on the reframing of the concept of courage versus mental toughness, but maybe we can talk about this a bit later. And of course, this is a kind of opening new scenarios to have a conversation about spoke psychology and Heraclitus, I hope he will help me out to refresh my humanistic background. As an Italian, I studied philosophy for long years or so. I hope something will come back to mind. Harvey, thank you very much for joining the podcast. How do you do?
Dr Harvey Anderson (03:23)
No, thank you for having me. Really glad to be here.
Mathias Alberton (03:26)
Existential psychology, let's say, just to point it out to the audience, just to frame it a bit, as far as I can understand, it's that kind of branch of psychology focusing on the individual's experience of existence.
Maybe there are some aspects which are normally emphasized, such as freedom, responsibility, meaning, authenticity. There are, of course, a plethora of philosophers across the centuries who have explored this. I think about Kierkegaard, Nietzsche. But of course, here, when we first met, so to speak, it was pointed out the idea that all this started with the Socratic philosopher back in Greece 3,500 years ago, roughly. Now, I mentioned Heraclitus because I'm a big fan of the idea of panther a. Um, so everything goes, everything. can't dip yourself two times in the same water of the same river. Um, but he, I, I point out, uh, Heraclitus, a panther a, because I want the audience to just frame how, you know, you say something like that. Some gazillions of years ago.
And then, you know, someone else later will say, okay, if I can't do it twice, why doing it at all? Or why putting any significance to it at all? And therefore you end up in something like nihilism, which is another take on the thing. So actually some people, some philosophers are important people thinkers have thought and spread some ideas, but then ideas impact differently. So one thing is to become a Buddhist or to become a bit closer to nature and to understand that maybe there is a rhythm in things and you have to adapt to it. Like the river, for instance, or you say, okay, fine. So it doesn't matter. I can do pretty much whatever I want to, because nothing comes back. So better to do it now because I won't have the opportunity to do it later. Now, instead, when we're talking about your stance, your take on Socratic philosophy versus, for instance, something else, something that might be, let's say, sophism philosophy and sport, what's your take? How would you frame it?
Dr Harvey Anderson (06:29)
Okay, thank you for that. There's so many possible questions thrown in there. But yeah, so for me, the original thoughts of Socrates and going back even to the Stoics and so on, they all censor around this idea of knowing yourself. And that falls at a complete opposite almost to the sophists who believed about techniques and so on.
Uh, now that was a center of a paper by John call it back in 1996, which was around about the time I had started to kind of play around with these, um, kind of ideas. Cause I I'd been quite unsatisfied with a lot of the sports psychology because it was purely mental skills training. And that's fine and has its place, but it was just literally learn these techniques, go away, use them. Everything's fine and dandy. Um, from a, from somebody who was struggling at the time with myself, with my sports.
It was lovely and they worked really well when everything was going well, but it's something really bad happened. If it was some extreme events, it was really tough all of a sudden. And, you know, Harvey, person wasn't kind of up for it. Then all those techniques went out the window. So I'd already kind of got this kind of feeling that there's something not quite there. they say then John Collett's paper kind of came out around about the time, the late nineties, with his idea of saying, right, yet it's great that sports psychology has all these techniques and you can use them.
But if you don't actually address who you are as a person, they don't have that sticking value. They're not really, really useful at all because you will always getting the way of any kind of techniques that you use. And those kinds of thoughts then have been echoed over time. So if you look at Schopenhauer and then later Nietzsche and so on, Schopenhauer was heavily influenced by the Greeks and particularly Stoics and so on in terms of how to use life. You then get into the existentialists. So you've got Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. And there's a bit of a departure in terms of those two with Kierkegaard being all about God. But then the relationship that you have with God and taking responsibility for that versus Nietzsche who declared God is dead and we've killed him sort of thing, which was about, you can't use God as an excuse.
We've got to take responsibility for our life, it's up to us and we build the meaning and so on. So we are always held accountable irrespective of what you do. You have the freedom, but then you have the responsibility. Which then goes kind of as time progresses and we go then move from this idea of will to power to getting into Victor Frankl's work in terms of this idea of will to meaning. Frankl pointed out that we always have choice in life and whatever the most meaningful things are that are the things that are the most powerful. So Frankl was a cyclonist who was kept in several prison of war camps, including Auschwitz, quickly discovered that those who had a meaning or those who had a purpose in life were the ones who survived. And those who lost that purpose were the ones that died and died quite quickly and really struggled. So it's this idea of, right, you are you, you need to know who you are. You need to know what you think is important. Then you need to live your life that way. And then that kind of goes full cycle a little bit later on in terms of my own life and my experiences in around having both my mom and my grandfather was very close to both dying of cancer and got quite heavily into the literature around cancer. there's a lot, there's a lot of cancer sufferers who suggest that actually cancer is a really, really positive and powerful thing in that it gives you a clear vision of, you know, you only have one life and you need to live it and you need to do what's important. And a lot of stuff isn't actually important. What we think is when we get to the real nitty gritty of what's kind of really powerful meaning in life, they're the things that we should go after and we should, we should focus upon. you know, so there's that whole, what's the meme that's going around at the minute is when you realize that you have the second life and the second life is telling you that you only have one life. It's about like, you've got one life, it's limited. the existentialists often get accused of being quite a doer and negative and fatalist with this idea of momentum or knowing you're gonna die. But...
Mathias Alberton (10:57)
The idea, I think, in the meme that you were referring to is that you only have two lives the second one starts when you realize you only have one
Dr Harvey Anderson (11:04)
Yeah, exactly. So and it's an idea, meant to more, you're going to die, basically know that you're going to die, and then make your choices accordingly. What's actually important, we've got a limited amount of time, limited amount of resources, you are who you are, you have what you have. What you know, what's the big one thing that you need to work and you kind of go with it rather than doing lots of other things for other people, because that's when you start getting dissatisfied and your mental health problems start and everything else where you just start being overwhelmed by the underworld almost.
Mathias Alberton (11:32)
Also, there is this interesting thing you touched upon, which is the memento mori. Now, allegedly, we might be roughly the same age, I'm assuming here. But let's say when you're in the late 40s or the beginning of the 50s, ⁓ then it is something that, let's say, organically comes about. It is maybe because your children start to grow up to an age which started reminding you of yourself when you were younger, before, or let's say after you started to have a sense and consciousness of yourself into the world, or because your beloved one's parents or close family started dropping dead like flies for whatever reason. So you start to put, you're compelled to put into prospective things.
It is interesting though that you mentioned of course the paper, the Collette paper before, and the idea of a Socratic approach looking for a bit more meaning in what one does versus the Sophistic approach which in a kernel is to make a Rocco Barocco thing or whatever happens to you so that it looks nice and efficient to others and everyone goes wow, but is a bit of a trickery and it doesn't have or it could even if it might have but is not required to have a deeper meaning. The meaning is just to win the argument per se. Now I am also thinking that 3,500 years ago when these guys were around, know, average life was 35 years old, roughly. Maybe even less, maybe 28. So, and until the mid 1800s, for instance, the Wild West, it was about 32, 35 years old. So, when we're talking about the young and beautiful and the heroes and the gods, and the beautiful ladies of Dante and Petrarca and all these guys, they are always extremely young. And not because they have a thing for very young people, but just because that was the age to be young. And when you were having something like 40 years old or 50 years old, you were old and wise and you seen them all and you were actually waiting for crossing the river with a couple of coins to carry on to take you on the other side. So now, paradoxically, all this technology, technology, the science applied to all domains of life, for instance, medicine, you know, made us live better with all the teeth, with repaired bones and normal gait or close to normal gait, regardless of the accidents we did have driving a motorbike for fun in previous years. So let's say that the meaning of life, whatever that might be, it is also framed into a vast, larger, bigger, longer future, which is a very disconcerting and discombobulating concept because we started to understand ourselves to have a fairly long existence across a multitude of events. Not just a close scenario like, okay, I live 13, I might have as many left and that's it. What do you make about this?
Dr Harvey Anderson (15:42)
Yeah, to add to that as well, the change there is your identity. So I'm still playing a reasonable level sport, I cricket. As well as playing cricket in a reasonable league standard, I'm also playing over 50s cricket as well. So, which is an interesting one, kind of getting my head around that, how am I actually 50? In my head, I'm still 25. I keep trying to tell myself, I look 25, I clearly don't, know, wishful thinking and all that.
But you see, the extension of life starts to give multiple different concepts of what's actually old. And their change as time goes on, I speak to my students, they think anybody over 35, 40 is really old.
I'm not even middle aged. you have that. And then on top of that, more recently, certainly from a kind of societal perspective, we've gone from being where you had one job, you go on, you do your apprenticeship, you have a career and you do that for life until you retire. And then, you know, might have a couple of years and then you die. now we are with life expectancy is we're getting up to the 70s and 80s. We're going to work through. We'll probably have, you know, multiple careers and multiple different jobs that we work in. So we start to have multiple identities.
Also, if you're now living to your 60s, 70s, 80s, there's going be grandchildren that you can potentially spend a period of time with, maybe great grandchildren and great great grandchildren. So again, that's all very, very different. It's all very, very new relatively, you know, for human existence because as you're saying, a couple of hundred years ago, that didn't happen. So we don't know how to do it. There's no template there. Now we can't learn, you know, how did I relate to my great great great granddad? Never existed, you know, that was years before me. So, you know, it's it's just tricky.
Mathias Alberton (17:28)
And all this boiling down to the athletes or to sports psychology. You know, because when we think about sports, generally speaking, but not so far from reality, if we open television and we watch some competition, chances are these guys are 12, 16, 23, 27, done, retired. So, sport, in a very broad term, is a young enterprise. And it has to be lived and pursued for performance at higher level in those years.
So let's say that the perspective here is kind of closed. The horizon is kind of closed. It's very much maybe close enough to what it was 3,000 years ago. So my life, meaning the sport life, is going to end soon. So I have to make the most out of it now. So I'm interested not in fantasies.
I'm interested in results. Can you help me with the results? And this is where we intercept this idea of psychological techniques which might help the athletes and recognizing that maybe the athletes need much more than techniques. What do you think about this?
Dr Harvey Anderson (19:18)
Yeah, very much so. So it goes down to the whole identity piece and it's something where if we don't focus on the individual, if we don't help them find out who they are, if we don't help them recognise that there are human beings outside of that sport, that they're not just that sport. So I'll give you a few examples. One, there's the ticket in the UK, the young footballers that come through. Manchester City have an elite under-5 football academy.
I won't get my soapbox and rant about that, but that blows my mind. But there's really young children who get identified as being kind of talented. They go into these pathway systems, they get up to 16 or so, then boom, they dropped. They're out of the academy system. And that's like a death to them. They've gone from this identity of being a talented footballer to suddenly bang, you're not. And if they've got nothing else at that period of time, if they've developed nothing else in those teen years, which are really difficult years, and then to go, and by the way, that whole identity you've been carrying for the majority of life, well, that's dead, that's gone, game over. And hence why we have issues in and around. It's not just football across all sports. Athletes get kicked out of the Olympic cycles and so on. Basically, this deselection process.
Bang, that's the end of that identity. Game over. You know, all people. I had similar, I got to 19 years of age and all I'd ever wanted to do or was expecting to do was play cricket professionally. Got to 19, diagnosed my third stress fracture in my spine, it's all bump. I said, game over. You're not gonna bowl again. And I was in, also I can't, happened to coincide with some other things like my mum dying, but I went through a really horrible period of time with that of getting low, this identity of, know, half of the fast bowl is no, is no more. How do I deal with that? And now that will happen that high performance sports at any level now be it early, they get thrown out midway through, they have a bad injury or just age, you know, performance decreases we see at the minute again, in English cricket, Jimmy Anderson is now moved back to playing T20 cricket and is, is doing exceptional at least 41 whether he actually gets picked or not, he's going to be interesting to see because his performance is so good enough to play for England. They probably won't pick him because he's 41, but he's going to have to deal with at some point, accepting I'm no longer Jimmy Anderson, the superstar cricket player. And now Jimmy Anderson, retired former superstar cricket player. And that's a massive kind of chunk there for the identity, which goes back to this whole idea or issues that we're talking about in terms of sophistry.
They're great giving people techniques and so that they can use them in their performance, but we're giving people absolutely nothing to deal with their identity and that identity change. We've done nothing to help them understand who they are. We've done nothing to help them see actually outside of being a superstar football, a cricket player, tennis player, gymnast, whatever, I'm a human being and I've got these strengths and these weaknesses and I have these desires in life and that I can do everything else. So yes, we've got some real issues in and around identity selections, deselections, how that's then done. And now, yeah, high performance is kind of cut off points for most people, late 20s, early 30s. We're now getting masters level kind of programmes and stuff where people 35 plus are now taking part and that's going up. I'm playing in supposedly county standard cricket over 50s and there's an over 60s. There's England versus Australia over 60s, the grey ashes, which is again picking up more and more recognition, we're noticing now that actually you can still be a high performance athlete, but obviously the age is a barrier and it's knowing who you are within that period of time.
Mathias Alberton (23:14)
The question here is how do we put in place these bits of informational support for the athletes? Meaning, there are different ways of answering, I imagine. So if you're working within a team, if the sports psychologist had some knowledge about the philosophical stance versus another one, could be open to listen to these kind of perspectives and to feed them or propose them or facilitate them to the athletes if necessary, where necessary. That's one option. The other option is, well, you know, I work as a sports psychologist.
We have a couple of teams, 20 individuals, but overall there are 40 people. We're talking about gazillions of people here which are not professional athletes or which might be professional athletes, but they don't use a sports psychologist. And by the way, I am now that sports psychology. So how can we reach those? So maybe is a problem of general education, meaning that
I mentioned that I have done classical studies, it doesn't mean that everyone that is about 50 and from Italy has done them, absolutely not. However, let's say that there is a tendency in certain parts of Middle Europe or Southern Europe to insert some part of philosophy into the school system, the curricula let's say, a that is completely absent to my knowledge nowadays across. But nevertheless, he exposed some principles, some ideas, let the children explore different things. What do you think? How would you boil it down? mean, how would you do it?
Dr Harvey Anderson (25:34)
Well, there's potentially two parts to my answer there. Obviously, firstly, there's key principles of existentialism that think will be useful to answer your question. The problem that we've got is something that Eric Fromm discussed, and it's ideas of the difference between to have and to be. And we are very, very much in a society that's focused on to have.
So it's to have qualifications, it's to have an education, it's to have these talents, it's to have this house, this car, this clothes, this whatever, and this consumer nature. And we start to view the value of people based on what they have. So if you've got a big house, a Ferrari, nice clothes, and lots of money in the bank, you are seen as a better person. And that's moving away from the classics of when it was about who you were as a person, the to be.
So that person is an honest person, that person is a courageous person, that person is creative person. They're powerful, really important virtues to have, but it depends how our society operates and what they dictate as being important. So we've got that battle anyway. We are stuck in this consumerism kind of world where it's more important to have than is to be. how we answer that, I don't know.
That's a real issue in the first place. And then secondly, to get onto your point of kind of how we get around some of this stuff, for me, it's about the whole system actually accepting some of the key principles of existentialism. So one of the key things being this battle between freedom and responsibility. I'm noticing more and more and more, sadly our politicians don't necessarily set out the right kind of examples about taking responsibility.
We seem to again sit in quite a blame society. It wasn't me, I can't do this because of this and that because of that. Very rarely do we take full responsibility. Going back to Frankl who said, we have ultimate freedom. Even though we might be constrained by a whole host of things, so he was constrained in prison, had nothing, literally nothing, everything taken from him, his manuscript, his clothes, his freedom, his liberties and everything else. Even in those extremes, you still have a choice. You can still choose how you die.
You can still choose how you live. You can still choose your attitude towards... So for example, he apparently actually counseled the prison guards in Auschwitz. So he had meaning by the people holding him there, the people conducting all these atrocities, he was still working with them to try and help them. Because that gave him meaning. So said, we always have freedom to choose but we have to then take responsibility for that. So for me, it's about drilling down to those kinds of things within life. Make your life your own life. Be authentic, be you. So you have to know who you are to be you. Understand that you've got freedom, but with that freedom, you've always got responsibility. So if anything, whatever happens to you, you still are responsible.
Even if only you're responsible to how you respond to what has happened to you. So if you walk down the street, somebody randomly punches you in the face for no clear reason, you are still responsible for that. If only, how do I even respond to that? Because I could choose to run after them, hit them back. I can choose to sit there and be a victim. I could maybe go and ignore it. I could use it to drive me to suddenly take up martial arts. There are a whole series of things I can do that, but I have to take responsibility for what has happened there because it's me, it's my life, it's nobody else's.
Mathias Alberton (29:10)
I understand this is your approach. This is the way you approach your practice, let's say. So if it comes in handy, this is your philosophy, your backbone philosophy. Is that right? I understood correctly. And because there are, you know, if we open the book of psychology for sports psychology,
Dr Harvey Anderson (29:29)
Yeah, yeah.
Mathias Alberton (29:39)
Let's say 70, 80 % of the problem there are, of course, I'm overgeneralizing and simplifying, but let's say 70, 80 % of the job is performance anxiety, kind of. And some tricks, some techniques, some skills, breathing, meditation, all this is well and fine and it might help you to pass the moment. But then what else? How do you use this skill? I I believe you said, well, look, a bit of breathing, a bit of meditation, you know, we create a step-by-step guide to approach the day of the competition so that we chill out throughout. It might be helpful. Let's do it together.
And this is, I guess it is fair to say that is not a problem at all. Given this example, which is a made up example, how do you also combine this Socratic process, if you wish?
Dr Harvey Anderson (30:53)
The existentialist in particular views anxiety as being important, which is a vast departure from lot of the kind of more mainstream psychological approaches that we have where it's kind of pushed away or kind of medicised away. You know, it's a really bad thing and you can't have anxiety, there's that little passive mental health problems and so on and so forth. Whereas the existentialists say, actually, anxiety is a really important message coming from the subconscious.
It's a signal that we need to be doing something about whatever it is that this anxiety is about. Therefore, we have to understand it. We have to dig into it and find out what's going on. Why is it actually affecting us? What is the meaning that we're giving that's creating the anxiety? So rather than kind of almost as I medicating it away, we take it on and we challenge it, which is difficult, which is really difficult, not easy at all.
And nobody says it is going to be easy, but it's about then what, and particularly Rollo Mayer's got a great book, 1953 on the meaning of anxiety. And it's about turning, know, working out what it is and finding out what underpins it specifically. So give it an object, then it becomes fear. And then when it's a fear, we just take it on with courage and courage is choice. And that could be a tiny, tiny little thing that we choose to do take a couple of deep breaths and still go, know, jump in that whole feeling when you first jump in at the deep end of the pool. Well, right, we have to go. Somebody's going to push me now, whatever. It's about finding those little things and getting those little wins and making courage the habit.
As opposed to kind of medicating it went, Oh, I'm excited. All right. I need to do my breathing. I'm an X, Y, and Z movements and what have you. It's okay. Well, this clearly means something to me. What's going on here and kind of know who I am. Okay. Yeah, I'm scared. You know, I might get injured. might get hurt. know. Again, personal experiences, Thai boxing, going into fights and stuff. You've got to face it. You can do all the exercises you like, but if the back of your mind is going that block over there is going to beat the hell out of me.
The only way to really take that on is courage and go, okay, yeah, it's coming my way. What can I do? I'll take responsibility. I'll do what I have to do. So I guess it's good to have those techniques. They're nice. But if we keep ignoring it, that leads to repression and a whole host of mental illnesses. We don't want that. We want to take it and work out what it is, find out what the meaning of it, and then deal with it accordingly.
Mathias Alberton (33:25)
It is interesting because time ago I have done research upon emotions in professional boxing, specifically on the difference perceived by the professional boxers between anxiety and fear. It's not tight boxing, it's not a combat sport, but because you just touch upon the argument, given your experience, how do you understand the difference between anxiety and fear?
Dr Harvey Anderson (33:54)
From the literature it would argue that fear has an object. Anxiety doesn't. So we know what we're scared of, there's a specific element to it. Whereas anxiety is a little bit more unknown, we're not sure what exactly is causing where it comes from. It's that inner kind of feeling. Whereas fear has a clear object. I'm scared of spiders, I'm scared of getting hurt, I'm scared of hearts. So there's a definitive object to it.
Mathias Alberton (34:25)
And you have just mentioned the idea of courage. You need courage. You need to, let's say, tame fear by using courage.
And you have also written a paper about this. The idea of courage versus the idea of mental toughness. And again, for the audience listening, mental toughness is something that was very big in sports psychology about 10 years ago and still is a big thing, but it was really a buzzword everywhere.
Those were actually the years where you wrote the paper, so something was going on there. So can you tell us a bit more about the courage versus toughness, mental toughness?
Dr Harvey Anderson (35:27)
Okay, so, well without going on a rant, there's a presentation floating around on YouTube about an hour long, all on that. To me, there's some real issues with mental toughness as a concept, the way it was created and so on, I don't really want to get to the technical side of things. But it's kind of viewed as something that you sort of have or you don't have, this trait. And that I found a real issue because if I've decided I don't have it, it's a problem. Also the kind of the poster boy in Fernveen's cricket was a guy called Alistair Cook and everybody kept going about how he was clearly had mental toughness and then he did several interviews with it. I don't have mental toughness. And if you look at a lot of the definitions, it's about basically being successful and winning. If you win, then you're mental tough and if you don't win, then you're not. Which again, I had real problems with, you know, so for example, if I go in and I go and fight Mike Tyson, his prime, who needs the most mental toughness? Me or Mike Tyson? Pretty clear it's going to be me. And who's likely to win? Well, Mike Tyson. So by definition of the definitions that were out there for mental toughness, Mike Tyson has more mental toughness. Sorry, I completely disagree. There's far more physical attributes, far more ability and a bit younger than me and the rest. So, you know, Mike Tyson wins hands down.
It's got nothing to do with anything going on in terms of kind of the mentality to it. So that's where I had real kind of problems with it. it, strikes me almost like a bit of a made up concept as well. So if you look at the researches, they're not sure if it's a state or a trait and how it actually works. for me, it doesn't really help. Knowing whether or not, or what score you get on a mental toughness scale doesn't really help you. It doesn't give you a practical outlet. Whereas courage, it's really simple. Courage is a choice.
Now you can do little things that are courageous, which might be massive to you, or you can do massive things, which actually might only feel like little thing. So the people who chuck themselves out of a plane for skydive that they call fun, I think are absolutely bonkers and I couldn't think of anything more terrifying to do in my life. For them, they'd probably get a little bit of excitement, but they wouldn't say it was terrifying. And I would go, well, that's insane, jumped in into a ring and fought a reasonable level at tire boxing. Other people think, why are you doing that? I've played cricket and faced people bowling 90 miles an hour with a cricket ball that could kill you. Again, people are like, why would you do that? That's bonkers. No, it's sport and it's fun. I enjoy it it's a challenge and the rest. So yeah, for me, courage is obviously based on the individual, but it's something that we can all do when it's a choice. Mental toughness, hmm, what can you do with it?
Mathias Alberton (38:10)
There are two questions that I really need to make. And they are not exactly related to courage, although it came across in the conversation, but they are, again, based on the difference between having a Socratic approach to sport, to life, generally speaking, or any other approach. One thing is, we touched upon this slightly. So, you know... The idea is, know, we can approach athletes with this or that philosophy. Fine. But do you believe that athletes are receptive to a deeper self-examination and philosophical, philosophical inquiry, or do performance precious limit their willingness to go beyond any surface level intervention?
Dr Harvey Anderson (39:13)
Yeah, it's going to be different for different athletes, certainly. We sit supposedly in this world where all coaches and psychologists work on holistic development, which I can categorically say is utter rubbish. There are very few coaches out there that really genuinely work holistically.
They only tend to work on this on the sport. might go, how's life going on? How's your job? But don't really get into kind of the deep and nitty gritty of it. I think there's an awful lot of surface level of that anyway. So athletes will be potentially quite resistant to it because it's just unusual. And yeah, athletes will focus on performance. There was kind of the research, but it was the one about the drug taken and if you were given this mystical drug that could guarantee you a gold medal but you'd be dead within 10 years, how many would take it? And 70 % of young Olympic athletes said they would. They'd happily end their life in 10 years time to win Olympic gold, which is quite frankly terrifying. But that's the nature of the industry, they call it, that they're kind of sat in. So whether or not an athlete is receptive to it, and there's got to be some work done there to actually get the athlete to realize and to buy in that the better they know themselves, the better that they will perform. It's not a one or the other, which quite often it gets kind of sold as of, we'll go down and do self development and that's about yourself or go do these techniques because they'll help you win a medal. know, one and one of the other don't go together. So we get a lot into this kind of what makes the boat go faster. And we talk about, you know, more, be more streamlined bigger engines and bigger sails and so on. If there's a big leak in that boat, you need to deal with that big leak. And if you don't recognize that there's a leak in your boat, your boat's going to sink. And that's exactly the same with our athletes and their wives. They need to be aware of their boat and look after their boat, i.e. them. And if there is a big hole that could let in water, they need to do something about that and recognize that, not just ignore it or do a quick patch up just to get through to the competition. They've got to be right. There's an issue there that we need to deal with.
Yeah. So I don't think it's a case of one or the other. For me personally, I believe that personal development is central to the high performance. And if you don't have that, your high performance is only going to be of limited time because there are too many other things that are going on. So yeah, for me, I'm not against having techniques and sophisticated approach to stuff and technology and the rest. They're brilliant, but they're add-ons. It's like supplements versus a good diet. They're add-ons. They're not your food.
Mathias Alberton (41:57)
And the other question is kind of impossible one to answer quickly, but it would be maybe for another conversation. I need to ask it because, well, simply put, the question is, what do you believe is the purpose of life? But hold on a second, all the horses for a second. I come to this question to you for a reason.
When we're talking about Socratic approach, we're talking about Socrates, of course, Socrates, as was mentioned, lived many years ago in another country with a different civilization going on at the time. And another lifespan, we touched upon this aspect, which is an extremely important aspect. But the thing is that he was pointing out, translated in English, that the point is, you know, the meaning is to be happy. And very recently, more recent times, I have personally seen, not participated, let's say being part of wide conversation among younger people talking about, well, what do you think the meaning of life is? And without going on Monty Python. But, you know, someone, I remember a debate and someone came up with the idea that, you know, to be happy, but the idea of happy that there was expressed there in that conversation, and I don't want even to insist that this conversation is the conversation that everyone is having. But the concept of happy is a very audio-monic one, which means translated, which is, know, pleasant, pleasurable, enjoyable, fun, entertaining, all these sort of things which might relate very much to what you were referring to as to have versus to be. So it's also true that from my I have said it, but we also live in a society where to have is fairly easy versus to be has always been fairly complicated. Or if it's not complicated to be something else, which is nearly impossible, is already complicated enough to know who you are, where you are. So the question what do you believe is the purpose of life comes because Socrates was saying that it was happiness even if intended maybe differently then than now. What's your take on this?
Dr Harvey Anderson (44:55)
The thing that springs to mind is actually from Friedrich Nietzsche and it is his idea that this eternal reliving, so basically if you have to relive your life again and again for eternity on the loop, are you going to be happy with that? So everything that's happened in your life from day one to day whatever the end is, you are going to repeat.
Well, that starts to then challenge, well, what am I doing now? Am I happy to keep going through this constant nonsense? You so you're having a silly argument with your neighbor or whatever. Do you really want to be like for eternity going through that same ridiculous argument? And when you start to view things through that lens, you go.
That's actually not very important, is it? And it goes back to this idea, well, what's actually important? What do you want your life to stand for? If I have to keep doing this bloody thing over and over and over and over again, am I doing the stuff that I would want to do over and over again? Am I having the types of relationships with people that want to do it? Am I seeing the other side of things? Am I going, making the most of, if I go somewhere beautiful, see some incredible countryside or nature, am I actually involved in that and really getting the best out of that? Or am I sat on my phone?
And scrolling through endless nonsense. it's about this idea. So for me, the answer to your question is, is Nietzsche's what is the, you know, the meaning of life. It's what it's the meaning that you give it. What are you going to be happy with? What are you going to be satisfied with? What's going to be, if you're going have to live this thing over and over again, how do you want it to play out? And that, yeah, that's kind of in a short version, probably where I'd go to answer that.
Mathias Alberton (46:33)
And this is how Socrates' approach to spoke psychology can actually guide you through, because you go to answer these kind of questions, or at least to take a moment to think, these kind of questions are kind of relevant. Isn't that pretty much it?
Dr Harvey Anderson (46:53)
Yeah, so for me, you work with athletes, it's kind of all, what do you want your athletic career to look like? What do want it to have meant? What is important? Who do you want to be? again, there's a lot of chatting around being and who are you being? So are you being the type of athlete that you want to be?
And so, and again, looking onto the existentialist, there's an awful lot of discussion in and around kind of morals and ethics and those kinds of choices and about authenticity and being you. And for me, I think that's a really important thing for, there's been so many stories of kind of cheating and drug taking and the rest. And I think that's because there's been this focus on winning.
And that being the most important thing, rather, you know, this having, having won the gold medal and having this amount of money and having these prizes rather than being. Who do I want to be remembered as? Who do I want people to know me for? And if people talk to me or say, that courageous athlete, so all this, that and the other, am I that person that springs to mind or do they think, or do anything it takes to win? You know, so maybe ethically, morally a little bit lacking, et cetera.
Yeah. So for me, that's the way where I certainly look to work with athletes is well, who are you? Who do you want to be remembered as? What's this career about? Why is it meaningful? Why is it powerful? know, lot of athletes want to give something back to their sport or be remembered for whatever reason. So what is it that you want to be remembered for? What are the key characteristics of injury? How are you taking this injury on?
How are you going to deal with it? You know, you're out for six months. How are you going to be? How are you going to tackle that? What is you as a person, what's your stamp on this injury going to be about? Is it an opportunity to get better or is it just always me, you know, I've got this terrible injury and I can't deal with it.
Mathias Alberton (48:51)
Harvey, I'm aware of time. I'm really happy that we did have this conversation. It was great fun for me, but it was extremely insightful. So thank you very much for participating.
Dr Harvey Anderson (49:04)
No problem at all, thank you for the invite.
Mathias Alberton (49:07)
Absolutely, we do it again if you wish another time. Thank you everyone who has been listening to this episode. If you do have some questions for Harvey, please let me know. I will be super happy to forward them to him. And as I said before, if you are blind or visually impaired, you know someone who is, you might like to take part in some training.
Dr Harvey Anderson (49:11)
Definitely.
Mathias Alberton (49:35)
for you to become a bit more confident when you navigate ⁓ social context, public spaces. You know the drill. You keep in touch.