During his tenure as the RFU’s former Performance Director, Chris Spice saw rugby become of one of the global leaders in how it addressed the mental aspect of the game. Gazing began working with Chris to devise a mental skills development approach in 2003. Chris quickly recognised his department would not only need to strengthen its departmental infrastructure but would also need to adopt “a common language and a common framework that everyone could understand and build around”. Chris chose Gazing because of our balance between the practical and the theoretical, and our understanding that the team would need to be self-sufficient and equipped to deliver the programme themselves.

What we did

Thanks to our highly pragmatic approach, Gazing developed a programme that allowed Chris’s coaches to quickly deliver our Red2Blue methodology to the team, building awareness and mental toughness. Our one-page maps helped them to ‘navigate’ their way around a problem to its successful resolution in such a way that they remained focused on the task in hand, ignoring potential ‘diversions’.

Results

According to Chris, Gazing’s approach positively impacted his ability to manage his fifty-strong department by helping them to become even more focused on their principal departmental aims. He said it had helped to create a far more robust approach to problem solving and decision making. Each of the five departmental sections produced a specific action plan or ‘pathway’ that together created a common departmental ‘framework’.

Chris emphasized the value of Gazing’s programmes: “We are a highly motivated departmental team and we intend to become world leaders in what we do. Our use of Gazing’s methodologies helps us to stay focused on the task in hand; to avoid distractions and to prioritise what’s important, and what’s not. It gives us a common language that minimises the risk of miscommunication and misunderstanding.”