I had a wonderful 24 hours last week: a private dinner held at Evelyn Partners, followed by the Women in Football BeInspired conference. They involved a lot of conversations with people I don’t work with, a blend of friendly faces and new ones.

At some point, I caught myself talking about the people I work with.

And before my colleagues start panic-reading this, there wasn’t any moaning. I was talking about them with something that sounded like admiration. About the confidence the team has developed in themselves and one another over 2026. About the culture and the camaraderie that’s developed, about the trust, the respect, and the meaningful challenge between people who genuinely like each other.

I found myself saying some cliche line like, “there’s something special brewing”.

Then this week I’ve realised I’ve been sharing those views with relative strangers, yet I’m not sure I’ve said any of it to my colleagues recently.

Why that happens

It isn’t that I’m actively withholding it, but I think it’s that we’re always in the current thing, or already starting the next one. There’s always a search to be engrossed in, clients needing time, a deadline that moved up. So appreciation is the one item on the list with no due date, so it gets deferred and just quietly pushed into a week that never arrives, yet my wife and kids hear it all over dinner.

The daft part is that this should be the easy thing to do. The criticism you’ve never said out loud at least has a rational reason for staying unsaid… it can be awkward, it carries risk, you’re worried about getting it wrong. Admiration or praise has no real excuse, we just don’t prioritise it.

Question 003

What have you said about your team that you’ve never said to them?

It might be the frustration you’ll share at a conference after-party but never in your 1:1. Or it might be like mine, the good thing. The “honestly, they’re bloody brilliant!” that you’ve somehow forgotten to say recently.

So give it a go.

Try it on your own to start by working out what it was, and who should have heard it. Let them know but don’t focus on perfection, just make sure it’s said. A phone call on the way to training in the morning tomorrow, or share it in-person over coffee later today when you’re in the gym together.

Then for your team, my advice is don’t make it an in-person shared exercise. I would just send them this, tell them yours, and let them handle their own. Just nudge them to do it in the next 48 hours.

And if it’s more constructive feedback, it’s worth reminding that deserves more privacy, a bit more preparation and a probably door that closes.

I’ve made a start, but I can always do a better job of sharing my appreciation. So thank you to those that have subscribed to these ramblings and told me about how you’re implementing with your teams.

Let me know if this one helped, and see you next week.

Part of my job is walking into stadiums and facilities I don’t work in.

It means I get a period of clear sight and I try to use that freshness to notice everything. From who speaks first in meetings (or who never does), to which conversations happen outside rather than inside the meeting. Even things like the old broken bin that’s used every single day by players worth £100m, or the cheap disposable cutlery that screams British ‘caff’.

If I’m around long enough, that attention can get cloudy. The environments can start to absorb your freshness. It’s well evidenced why this happens and it’s not exactly a character flaw but attention is expensive, so the brain stops spending it on anything that hasn’t changed lately. A good example is I stop smelling the new reed diffuser in my own house after just minutes of walking into it. Or when I’m in the market for new running trainers and I notice them everywhere.

That’s what I find interesting about onboarding of new staff or athletes. We treat a new starter’s first week as a period where they know the least and so we load them with handbooks and meetings. When in reality, it’s the only week they’ll ever see the place clearer than ever before and there’s an opportunity to utilise that freshness that is so hard to recreate once they’re 6 months in.

Last week’s question was about the promises that quietly slip, so this one is about the things that never get noticed in the first place.

Question 002

What would a new person notice in their first week that the rest of us have stopped seeing?

Discuss it with your team over lunch, or your next commute instead of the usual playlist (in my case, Olivia Dean on repeat).

The thing could be small like the broken bin. The tired paint in the locker room, or lack of smiles in reception. Maybe the meeting that runs twenty minutes over every time because of sloppy structures, or the treadmill that’s not been fixed yet.

Or it could be bigger. Who gets listened to and who clearly doesn’t.

And the dream scenario is if you’ve got someone in their first few weeks with you right now or joining you shortly. Please ask them - it could shine a light on something you have never seen before. They might be polite about it so maybe show them this post so they know why and ask again.

See you next week.

It was my birthday last weekend, and I don’t like them that much.

I feel guilty writing that when there’s plenty to be grateful for, but I want to be honest. “Yeah, I’m alright” could be a lie around my birthdays, my kids’ birthdays and especially New Year. All of those moments create internal stocktakes, and I’ve rarely been able to take them lightly. I typically ask myself big questions about my own “performance in life”, and those questions rarely come with easy answers.

Now, that reflective state has always come naturally to me. I’d consider myself an introverted, deep thinker, who is in a permanent state of “how can I improve?”. It’s probably teetering on prohibitive, but secretly I’d rather have it than not.

What I’ve worked out is that unpointed reflection is my problem. The right question can either release the shackles, or makes the big question look like a stupid one to have been carrying around.

I remember in my early 20s at Catapult, I was given the opportunity to work with an executive coach, Gwen Byrom. Gwen would ask me questions that would both knock me for six and then permit me to sprint again, rather than drunkenly tip-toe around mines that I’d dropped in front of myself. She still does! Gwen made me realise the art of coaching, and appreciate how vulnerability can exist in business and sport.

Then a few years ago, through the joys of parenthood, I got lucky again and met a fellow Dad up here in our small Yorkshire village — Chance Marshall. He happens to be a creative psychotherapist who asked me questions I’d never been asked before over a flat white in our local coffee shop. The type of questions that make me feel 6-years-old again, or make tears roll down my face before I can get a single word out.

What’s all this got to do with sport? I am hopeful a lot.

Through all the reflection, I’ve been sharpening what I care about and what I want to commit my next decade to. It’s not perfect, but it’s a version of this…

I want to help sports organisations become places where talented people can actually be good at their jobs. To make culture, leadership and alignment matter as much in sport as how recent the last win was, or the strength of the next starting line-up.

Because the pattern never changes. Enormous rigour applied to what’s easy to measure: xG, training loads, recruitment models, MRIs. Almost none applied to what decides whether any of it lands, or how well people make decisions together.

We are quick to audit the things we can measure easily, while we hope about the human.

That gap is the work I’m excited about and enjoying. It’s what I do at Bloom Sports, helping sports organisations hire the right people and advising on where to focus their efforts. It’s what Sportsmith is for, helping performance experts navigate the chaos of elite sport.

So I’m giving it a name, and commitment.

Sport is Human. One question a week, aimed at inspiring more conversation and connection in elite sport and beyond. The types of questions Gwen and Chance would ask me, but built for the sporting setting. Questions you can sit with on a drive home, or drop into a staff meeting when you’re brave enough to hear the answer.

Question 1

What did we promise to do differently this season that’s already slipping?

Not just the ones you’d put in a board update but the small and niggly ones. The thing agreed in pre-season or your post-season review. Something that’s quietly gone back to how it always was.

On your own: answer it before you talk yourself out of the first thing that came to mind.

With your team: everyone writes it down before anyone speaks. Then read them out.

See you tomorrow.

Candidates can talk into their phone for five minutes and have a structured deck before their morning brew is made. Polish is free now... well, £18 a month if you upgrade your Claude.

We regularly ask candidates to produce a piece of work during search processes. It helps reveal how someone thinks, where they go for information, what they leave out and how they narrate a decision. Even their reaction to the ask is telling.

That’s all getting harder with the adoption of AI tools. Structuring information, designing slides, copywriting, selecting headlines, turning a load of information into something that looks like an insight. It’s increasingly automated and I’m seeing examples every week of presentations looking more and more similar. Actually, similarly sterile.

But after reflecting on my recent vendetta against ChatGPT slides, I think presentation tasks quietly rewarded the wrong thing at times anyway. Fifteen years of judgement and poor deck-building skills could get marked down, while confident delivery over fairly thin thinking got marked up. Take production quality out and what’s left is what we always claimed to be measuring. So I think the weight now moves to the defence of it.

It’s similar to why Bezos got rid of PowerPoint presentations at Amazon and replaced them with written memos. We adopted 2 and 6-page memos at Catapult to structure debate and decision-making. I hated writing them at first because they’re SO HARD to write. You can’t hide behind a nice graphic or skip over the difficult bit. You have to make the argument, defend it and actually try to influence a decision. After a year of constantly writing them, and maybe a few tears (no, genuinely!), they taught me that slides can sell dreams with very little substance.

And that’s probably the bit I’m coming back to with AI and it’s impact on exec search. You can generate a deck in five minutes. You can’t generate the judgement, experiences and stories that should sit behind it.

So, a message for candidates: If you’re going to use AI for decks, please bring your own content and critical thought. Know why something is on page four. Know what you left out. Know which assumption you’re least confident in. And have some actual stories from your career that explain why you think what you think. Also, at least tell Claude which typefaces, colours and style you want so yours doesn’t look exactly like everybody else’s.

And for those hiring: Create a few decks using AI yourself and you’ll very quickly start spotting the fingerprints. Then look past the polish. Don’t assume the insights are the candidate’s, don’t even assume the words are theirs. Ask harder questions. Get them away from the deck and into the stories behind it.

P.S. Even if the defence is now more important, I still think most AI-generated decks (and LinkedIn posts!) are largely terrible and you can spot them from a mile away. Those who can use the tools without losing their creativity, and more importantly fill the output with their own experiences, opinions and stories, will be the ones who stand out.