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Authentic gay conversations on personal development, life coaching, and mental health. Join Keegan Hirst, founder of Gay Man's Coaching and former professional rugby player, for weekly real talk about gay lifestyle, coming out, relationships, business, and authentic living. Deep, honest conversations that help gay men build confidence, find community, and create vibrant, unapologetic lives.
Hello and welcome to the Gay Man's Coaching Podcast, the podcast for gay men who wanna perform better across their body, their career, their mindset, their relationships, and their life. Hosted by me, Keegan Hurst. As always, I am really, really excited to talk to you today about this episode. I it's a bit of a personal one for me. I went to the funeral of a coach who I was very close to, on Friday before we went down and did our amazing event that we did on Saturday.
Speaker 1:It was his funeral on Friday. And so I want to I want to talk about some of the lessons that he imparted on me, and want to share those with you. That is how I feel like I can honor his legacy. So I want to do that in this episode. Just a couple of announcements before that.
Speaker 1:We are rapidly approaching the end of June, the end of the first half of the year. That is where we are gonna have numbers locked in for Montreal. So if you are wanting to come to our Montreal event, is in September, it's September 28. It runs for four days, three nights. All the information is in the hub.
Speaker 1:Or if you are not part of GMC and you are interested and you would like to attend, then you can, reach out and email me. But spots need to be locked in by the end of June. We also have two spots left for our retreat in Cornwall in August. So if you are wanting to spend some time connecting with the guys, private chef, disconnecting from work, breath work, yoga, training, spending time in nature, spending time away from social media and the big buzz of life, get yourself to the retreat. It's going to be amazing.
Speaker 1:But I wanted to getting into this episode, I wanted to share I wanted to share the lessons that John instilled in me. As I said, it was his funeral, last week, and he was one of the people who genuinely made me who I am. And I'm I'm not talking about this for sympathy. I'm here because John dedicated his life to coaching. He was a rugby league coach, you know, as soon as he retired from playing, he became a coach.
Speaker 1:And he spent his whole life putting things into people, whether it was beliefs, ethos, philosophies, And I feel like the only way that that work survives him is if it keeps getting passed on. So I wanted to share three things that he gave me. Lesson number one was believe it before it's real. I remember multiple occasions where John believed in me, before I believed myself. When I first signed for Batley, I'd had my coach at Jewsbury had just kinda worn me worn me into the ground and just kept telling me that I was crap basically.
Speaker 1:And John signed me and he said, you know, I think you have potential to play Super League. I think you're a great player. And I just didn't believe him. And I played a couple of crap games for him, and I kept apologizing. And he kept saying, I know that he's in there.
Speaker 1:I know that he's in And he kept putting me in. And I think a lot of coaches would have probably dropped a player at that point, but he and and I'm sure at some point, he he would have had to, but it started to turn the tide. And I remember a couple of years after that, he made me captain. I couldn't believe it. I didn't feel that I deserved it.
Speaker 1:And and he saw in me, you know, leadership that I didn't see in myself, not at that time anyway. And this was before I came out and I was, you know, comfortable in my own skin and things, he obviously saw that in me. And the year that we it was actually the season that I came out. He, we we we we didn't have a lot of money at batting as a team. And we always, like, performed a little bit better than what we should do.
Speaker 1:You know, we'd finish kinda mid table. Nobody expected us to do anything. And this particular year, if you finished in the top four, you got into like a special playoff thing and there's a chance that you could get into super league, which was the the top league. Now nobody expected a batlet to get into super league. Spoiler, we didn't get into super league.
Speaker 1:But he that's what he set the goal as. He set the goal for us to to to finish in the top four and to aim for for the top spot. Now there was a team in there called Lee who had spent loads of money. They had all these superstars. They said they were gonna go the season unbeaten.
Speaker 1:And he he basically bold us up so much. We played Lee on the first game of the season, and we beat them. They would go on and and and be unbeaten the rest of the season. They got automatically promoted into Super League. But he he believed in us so much that we were gonna beat them, and then we went out and bet them.
Speaker 1:And then we went on to have an amazing season. We finished that season the highest that Batley has ever finished. And he just he believed it so much that it became contagious, and we started believing it. And then other people started believing it and buying into it. And you have to be a little bit delusional before the evidence shows up.
Speaker 1:The belief comes first, the proof comes later. And that comes with if you're maybe you're looking to build a physique that you've never built, have a relationship that you've never had, go for a job that you've never had. Certainly something that I have had to experience building GMC and growing GMC. You know, when we did the events, when we started doing the events, I was like, nobody will come. Nobody will come.
Speaker 1:We can't do an event in Chicago. We can't do an event in London. Nobody will come. But you build it and they come. You believe in it and you talk about it and you make it a thing.
Speaker 1:Lesson number two was there's always another game. He he John was never scared of making mistakes because you always get another go. Like I said, you know, when I, when he when I went there early in the in the season sorry, early in my career, he, he gave me a few goes as always in another game. And he would always obviously, he would be upset when we lost and, you know, we dissect it and we would aim to learn from it. But a loss was never a verdict on him as a coach, us as a team, us as a player.
Speaker 1:It was one game, and life is the same. And John always talked about he said the fear of getting it wrong, it only has teeth if you think that you're only gonna get one shot, and you're not gonna get one shot. And even as John was famous for, he orchestrated one of the biggest cup upsets in, I think, sporting history, to be honest. Like, he he coached Sheffield to be Wiggan warriors back in the day, which was it was an unheard of. It's never been replicated.
Speaker 1:And so he he was synonymous with cup rugby, which is like knockout stuff. But even then he said, we get to play in the cup again next year. Don't don't don't because if you if you if you show up with fear, it it seeps into what you do and and you end up making mistakes, you end up not enjoying the process. And if you don't enjoy it, you you you can't, you you can't be yourself and you can't do it to your best ability. So it was always about, you know, get rid of the fear.
Speaker 1:It's okay. You get another go. And life is the same. Even if you go for a job opportunity, a relationship, a friendship, you know, you you make an error in your gym session. Whatever it is, you always get another shot.
Speaker 1:You will always get another shot. And that I think is one of the big reasons that I don't fear failure. And why I try to tell you guys to not fear failure because you will get another go. And lesson number three, John John could be a little bit boring when it came to how he likes us to play rugby. And he would always use a phrase that I've I've always I've used a lot since, especially when I've been playing games on sport like PlayStation games and things is to play the percentages.
Speaker 1:It would it would couldn't stress enough the importance of the boring high probability moves. They would always be the sexy high risk one one in a 100 plays. And John said something that I've I've said to you guys many, many times is that champion teams or champion champion people are built from doing the extraordinarily sorry. Are built from doing the ordinary things extraordinarily well, not the extraordinary things ordinarily well. That is something that has always stuck with me.
Speaker 1:It's about the basics, the the sexy stuff that gets that gets overlooked, that doesn't make the highlight real. But more often than not, those are the things that actually work. So he would say be delusional about the destination, but be disciplined about the route. Do the do the the the basic things over and over and over again so that they get so boring that you can't that that they become automatic and then keep doing them. Because it's a it's a game of probability, and like I said, you never get one shot.
Speaker 1:So you can play the probability. So to tie those all together, be have almost delusional belief about where you're going. And you get there by playing the percentages, by doing the basics. And you can swing, but you can still give it another, a shot and go for the big play if you need to because there is always another game. There is always another chance.
Speaker 1:Have a big vision. Have a boring method. Don't fear the miss. And just to finish this up, I just wanna tell you a great story about John. We were once playing in a cup game, and he was telling us about when another team that had coached to a to a a cup championship.
Speaker 1:One of the players had told a story about when you're in these high pressure environments, you need to have your head in in the fridge and your your heart in the oven. So you play with passion, play with vim, play with vigor, but you need to be switched on. You need to be, you know, a cerebral assassin and be cool and make the right decisions. And he told us that and he kind of walked out of room and we all, like, looked around and smirked and we were like, oh, yeah. Alright, John.
Speaker 1:Alright. And one of the lads was chatting to him outside and he and he said, John, how how are you feeling about this? It was like a quarter final or something. He said, how are you feeling there? And he said the lad was called Ash.
Speaker 1:And he said, oh, Ash, I'm so excited. I love this. I can't get enough of it. I bloody love Rugby League. And Ash said, you wanna go put your head in the fridge then, don't you?
Speaker 1:And it just shut him up and it was just so funny. At the time, there was some I've got some great stories about John, but it was really nice to see the guys again, but I just wanted to pay a little bit of homage to him and those lessons have changed my life. John changed my life and I've no doubt that they can change yours as well. So if you've enjoyed this podcast, share it, you know, whether that's on socials, whether that's in the feed. Let me know that you've enjoyed it.
Speaker 1:I I I hope that you've taken some value on it. Yeah, those things can change your life. So until next week, look after yourself, stay safe, and don't eat and drink and behave at the expense of how you wanna look and feel.