Preparing for Change with Steve Johnson

In this episode, the guys are joined by Steve Johnson, founder of the Wellbeing Science Institute, for a fascinating conversation about elite sport, financial wellbeing and preparing for change.

Steve explains why supporting an athlete means looking beyond performance. From finances and relationships to identity, career and emotional wellbeing, a whole-person approach can help athletes perform at their best while also preparing for life beyond sport.

Welcomes & Introductions

Chris Budd – Founder of Ovation Finance and the financial wellbeing movement.

Tom Morris – Managing Director of Ovation Finance. Award winning, Bristol-based, chartered, B-Corp certified and employee-owned.

Fancy a chat with Tom Morris and the team at Ovation? Contact details here

What’s on Today’s Podcast?

A chat with Steve Johnson, founder of the Wellbeing Science Institute.

Steve began his career as a personal trainer and sports psychologist before moving through management, financial services and investment management. For the last 12 years, his work has returned to elite sport.

His wellbeing programmes take a holistic approach, helping athletes consider not just sporting performance, but their physical, psychological, emotional, relationship, community, career and financial wellbeing.

Tight Ass Tommo

Light-hearted money saving tips, guaranteed to make you smile and think twice about your spending habits.

This time, food is on the menu.

Chris suggests going vegetarian to cut one of the more expensive parts of the weekly food shop, while Tom makes the case for visiting your local butcher. Better quality, support for a local business and, depending on what you buy, it might not cost any more.

Interview with Steve Johnson

• Looking at the whole person, not just sporting performance
• Why financial wellbeing matters for elite athletes
• The pressures of earning significant sums at a young age
• Identity, status and the question of “Who am I?”
• Knowing who to trust when money and success arrive quickly
• Why most elite athletes struggle to make a living
• The financial challenges facing women in professional sport
• Staying at the elite level, not simply getting there
• Financial literacy and the influence of agents
• Why wellbeing can be a performance enabler
• Preparing for injury, changing contracts and the end of a sporting career
• Normalising change rather than treating transition as unexpected
• The importance of understanding who you are and what matters to you
• The losses athletes can experience when they stop competing
• What elite sport can teach us about retirement, selling a business and redundancy
• Why financial education needs to start earlier and feel relevant to young people

Conclusions from the Guys

Reflecting on the interview, David highlights Steve’s approach of starting with the person rather than focusing solely on results, contracts or performance.

Tom reflects on how easy it is in sport, and in life generally, to become focused on the outcome. Paying more attention to wellbeing and the process along the way can help people enjoy what they are doing, while potentially supporting better outcomes too.

Chris picks out two particularly important ideas from the conversation.

The first is normalising change. Whether it is an athlete facing injury, somebody retiring, a business owner selling their company or somebody being made redundant, change should not necessarily be treated as an unexpected event. Recognising that transitions are a normal part of life gives us an opportunity to prepare for them.

The second is not defining ourselves solely through our job, status, income or wealth.

Chris reflects on business owners who spend years preparing their company for sale, only to complete the transaction and suddenly ask themselves, “Who am I?”

Preparing financially for a transition matters. Preparing the person for what comes afterwards matters too.

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Steve Johnson is the founder of the Wellbeing Science Institute.

After beginning his working life as a personal trainer and sports psychologist, Steve went on to work in management, financial services and investment management before returning to elite sport.

He developed what he describes as the world’s first elite athlete wellbeing management programme, working with both athletes and the people who support them. His approach considers the whole person, helping athletes to perform while also building the skills and self-understanding that can support a fulfilling life beyond sport.

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Episode Transcript:

Welcome, everybody, to another one in our long-running series of financial well-being podcasts, 

where three of us get together virtually and talk around issues relating to money and well-being. 

Some two things which I think everyone will agree touch us all at some point. My name is David 

Lloyd. I am recently retired, but still dabbling actor, writer, 

broadcaster. And I’m the everyman, if you like, in this podcast. I ask the basic questions. 

about things that I perhaps sometimes understand but often don’t understand at all. And my two 

colleagues come up with brilliant, clever and well-informed answers. And I’d like either one of 

those two colleagues to quite often I kind of invite one of them to talk first and then the other 

one always gets a little bit fed up because they feel that they’re getting second billing. So I’m 

just going to see who is going to dive in first. So yeah, Tom Morris, Managing Director. and 

Charter Financial Planner at an independent-based firm in Bristol. And I say this every episode, 

we support the podcast and have done for over a decade now. I’m very proud to do so. 

So yeah, if anyone is looking for some professional help with their financial planning, we have a 

wonderful team over here. You’d be delighted to talk. So yeah, there you go. 

There is the plug. And it’s only right that I do because the team put an awful lot of effort in. to 

producing this it is only right and it is also only right that as one of your clients i fully 

endorse that statement because i’ve been very happily with ovation for i don’t know how long chris 

20 years something like that and and the financial advice that they give me is just great i feel 

very well looked after enough of the blurbs let’s now speak to the man that originally set the 

company up in the very first place who are you chris bud founder bud here 

Do you know, just to top of his plug, one of the things I love about podcasts, there’s a lovely 

serendipity between the fact that adverts on podcasts last for 30 seconds and my iPhone has a jump 

forward 30 seconds button on it. 

Because long listeners of this podcast will know that I adore adverts and I will do anything to 

avoid an advert. And so it’s just wonderful. You can go click, that’s three minutes gone, and you 

come straight in when they’re coming back from the adverts. I love it. That’s exactly what people 

would do with this preamble. You know that. 

And I’m not actually… I haven’t historically been a big listener of podcasts, but I’ve started 

listening recently to The Rest is Politics with Alistair Campbell and Rory Stewart, which is very 

interesting. And they do these ads as well. And I find it really, really strange that these 

authoritative, very knowledgeable political commentators will suddenly go… 

Have you tried Colgate toothpaste? It’s guaranteed to bring your teeth out in a shining white gleam 

and then immediately switch seamlessly to debating the latest political news. Well, fortunately, 

we don’t have to do that. We are truly independent, funded by nobody other than Ovation Finance. 

I’m going to call you out on that. I’m going to call you out on that. I reckon you’re secretly 

sponsored by Colgate is the fact that you just mentioned them. 

That’s not true, but if they’d like to send me a brown envelope, I’m sure I could arrange it. Well, 

look, there is one company that should be listening to this and sending us a big check, and that is 

Ovation Guitars. Because you mentioned founding the company. When I started Ovation, 

I had to come up with a name. Oh, it’s a really hard thing naming a company. It’s like naming a 

band. All the good ones have gone. Everything’s really cheesy. Try to think of a good name. 

And so one day I was walking in Padstow on holiday with my wife and I just turned to Susan and I 

said, oh God, I don’t know what to call it. What about ovation after the guitar? And she looked at 

me and she said, that’s not the worst one you’ve said, actually. So shout out for two things here. 

Number one, ovation guitars. If they want to sponsor us and send me a free guitar, they’re very, 

very welcome to. And then secondly, Joan Armatrading, who is my guitar hero and who plays an 

ovation guitar. So really it’s due to Joan, the 70s and still current, 

a musical troubadour and songwriter. It’s because of her that ovation is named Ovation. There you 

1. Do you know what we still have? your acoustic ovation guitar in the meeting room.

I have no idea if it’s tuned because I certainly can play an instrument, but it sits there as a 

memory. Excuse me. I now have basically one job in ovation, and that is to make sure that that 

guitar is tuned. So I can guarantee you, if any client wants to come and have a quick strum, that 

guitar will be in tune. Is it like a shrine? Do people beat a path to the doors of the ovation 

offices in order to worship the guitar of its founder? They should. They really should. 

They should, but I can happily say they don’t, David. Well, 

I’m going to start that movement. But before we do that, I think we probably ought to get on with 

what we’re here to talk about, because I think the fast forward thing on people’s iPhones will be 

going mad at the moment as they cut through all this junta. So, Chris, what’s happening on today’s 

podcast, please? Today, David, I could just shorten things up. 

We’re going to hear from a guy called Steve Johnson. He’s the founder of the Wellbeing Science 

Institute. He was a sports psychologist and a really, really cool and interesting guy. 

I first came across him because somebody got in contact with me that had been on his program. which 

he runs internationally for support organizations. So like the Professional Cricketers Association 

or Professional Footballers Association, same sort of thing, support sporting organization. He 

trains the trainers, so to speak, to help support sports people, elite sports people. And when it 

got to the section on money, it turns out he’s using all of our stuff, all of my material and 

crediting it, which is absolutely fine. So I got in touch with him and then such a nice guy, was so 

enamored of what he had to say, thought we’ve got to get money. podcast so really interesting chat 

with steve johnson coming up right looking forward to that but before we do that we need to come to 

the main event of the podcast which is of course tied to ask tomo where tom morris comes up with a 

brilliant money-saving ruse that will save us all a lot of money so i haven’t got one this week 

before we move on to the main man himself but chris i believe you might have a contribution I do. 

Just a quickie. It’s kind of funny, but also when you think about it, actually really, really good. 

I saw somebody comment this online. Go vegetarian. The most expensive thing in your shopping 

basket. Okay, stop drinking alcohol. It should probably be in there as well. But one of the most 

expensive parts of your food shop. 

Let’s not be silly. One of the most expensive parts in your food shop is going to be meat. 

Actually, go vegetarian. It’s very, very healthy, and you’ll save yourself lots of money. How are 

you finding it? Where are you getting your protein from, Chris? Technical. I don’t understand the 

question. 

It’s mainly because I’m teeing up my life choice now. So I’d noticed actually supermarkets, 

this isn’t across the board, but I was finding the quality of our meat wasn’t fantastic. The price 

per kilogram I started to notice because nobody understands really comparable. what they’re 

actually paying for their meat. So I decided we got very good local butchers around the corner from 

1. And I said to my wife, Lindsay, I said, do you know what? Stop getting the meat from the food

shop. We’ll stop doing that. And I’m going to go to the butchers and we’ll be doing it for a few 

weeks now. And the quality of the meat is massively improved. The actual price of it for some types 

of meat is cheaper, for some about the same, but ultimately you’re getting… 

far more for your money so this isn’t actually my tight ass tip perhaps it should have been but go 

and it’s supporting a local business so for me it’s been a massive positive and it’s just making uh 

that protein part of our diet spread further in what is a growing in terms of eight you know my 

children are growing up so you need more and more food to put on their plate so they use the local 

butchers do you know what that is my tight ass tomo tip go and use the local butchers Good quality 

meat. And I can guarantee it ain’t going to cost you much more. And you might even find you’re 

saving yourself some money. Well, spot on. And in fact, Chris will know we have a local independent 

butcher as well, rather confusingly called Baker’s. Baker’s the butcher over in Nailsey. And again, 

you can go in there. And if you say, where does your beef come from? He’ll virtually point over the 

road and go second field along. And so you know the provenance of the food that you’re eating. And 

I think that really, when you look at some of the stuff that’s on sale in supermarkets, and 

certainly if it’s been imported from other countries, you just don’t really know what’s been done 

to it. Our budgets, I find it can be around about the same. Certain cuts can be more expensive. 

Certainly beef and lamb has gone through the roof these days. We’re buying a lot of chicken and 

pork. Can I just reply on the protein point? Legumes, pulses. 

etc beans yeah i have i have but i mean i totally agree with you with your purchase point but i 

because of this long list has made well listen a blue blue zone podcast episode we did about 25 

episodes ago with blue zones around the world and i bought the cookbook and um people who live to 

100 or more around the world their diets tend to be quite similar and there’s a lot of pulses and 

beans in them so i bought that cookbook as soon as i was away for a week i made myself a load of 

meals from this cookbook based around beans and pulses it had an expected outcome which i don’t 

think i need to say i think it’s a very expected outcome actually oh gosh but what what i’m 

concerned about chris is when you’ve been doing your financial plans and your forecasting which we 

talk about a lot on this podcast have you increased your when you expected to die because if you’re 

going on this health kick all of a sudden out of nowhere You might have to add a couple more years 

onto your life if all of a sudden you could be in a blue zone liver because you don’t know Chris 

too well. I’ve not known him as a blue zone kind of, you know, I hope you don’t mind me saying, 

Chris, you know, you like a glass of wine and, you know, you enjoy life. But, yeah, there you go. 

Watch out for that. You’re going to have to increase your age expectancy now. Breakfast is the most 

important glass of wine of the day. 

That’s a joke. That’s just a joke. Okay, we can discuss Chris’s alcoholism in a future podcast and 

indeed mine as well. So let’s move on then to the second most main event of today, 

which is your interview. Set it up for us again, please, Chris. Yeah, so Steve Johnson, founder of 

the Wellbeing Science Institute and a really nice Australian. And let’s leave it at that. 

Let’s listen to have a chat with Steve Johnson. Hello, Steve. Welcome to the podcast. How are you? 

I’m well, Chris. How are you? Yeah, very good. Is it okay if I mention that you’re currently in 

France? I think giving you just let the cat out of the bag, yes. Lovely. 

What’s it like then? It likes the sunny outside. It is nice and sunny, and I’m comparing it to the 

UK weather at the moment, and I’m pretty happy being in France. Yeah, fair enough. Steve, 

before we get into some of our conversation about elite athletes, can you just give us our 

listeners a kind of one minute? Catch up on your background. Yes, well, I started my working career 

as a personal trainer in my university days and then worked as a sports psychologist both at 

university and in private practice. And then through a series of accidents, 

ended up working in management and then financial services and then investment management. 

And then the last 12 years have been back in elite sport. So that’s a quick snapshot. 

Yeah, great. Thank you. We came across each other because you run training programs. Tell us a 

little bit about those training programs. They’re really interesting. Yeah, so we developed the 

world’s first elite athlete well-being management program. So that’s for people who work with 

elite athletes or for elite athletes themselves. You probably had about 30% to 40% of the people 

who do our course are actually elite athletes. And their role is in the increasingly challenging 

world of elite sport. sport athletes so that one, they can perform at their best, 

but two, so they can actually live a life which is fulfilling and flourishing. So we developed this 

program and one of the features of it, it’s holistic. So we look at the whole person, not just 

performance, and we actually think about their life once they leave the training park or the match 

arena. And included in that whole person view is financial wellbeing. 

So we’re looking at physical, psychological, emotional relationships, community, spirituality, 

careers, and finances. So take a really holistic view on. That’s amazing. Are you unusual, 

Steve? Because as an avid sports watcher, one doesn’t get the feeling always that the sports people 

I’m enjoying the skills of are necessarily looking for a fulfilling life. Well, 

it’s probably fair to say we pioneered that very holistic approach. Other people did what is 

loosely called dual career approaches, where they tried to help athletes think more about what do 

you do when you finish competing. But we were probably the ones that focus a lot on that really 

holistic perspective. The challenge, of course, it’s one thing to get to the athletes because they 

intrinsically understand how important it is to think about their whole life, including finances, 

because they’ll be at the peak of their, for most athletes, they’ll be at the peak of their earning 

potential, most elite athletes, or they can be at that time. 

So they understand the need because the income can drop off a cliff pretty quickly. 

The tricky thing is to persuade other people in the elite sport ecosystem that the whole person 

matters. And that means, you know, the CEOs or the high-performance people or the head coach or 

the manager. Or the agents. Getting them on board, agents. Well, agents are kind of invested 

because they know the better prepared the athlete is, the longer career they have, 

more commission. So the agents are kind of loosely on board. Yeah, yeah. Can you just give us a 

little insight into some of the main, general issue, not just financial. We’ll come into financial. 

We’ll drill that into financial in a second. But what are the sort of issues you cover with elite 

sports people? Look, we cover everything from people make their pathways into elite sport 

because… there are dedicated pathways, people making their way into elite sport. 

The challenge of the transition into elite sport can be particularly difficult. A lot of people try 

to make it, but very few do make it at the elite level. And so helping people once they’re there, 

not just getting there as a life dream, but staying there is the difficult part. So supporting 

athletes psychologically, emotionally. physically and in terms of the other aspects of the life 

that really matter to them are really key. But one of the challenges is if working with groups of 

athletes or teams of athletes is no one athlete is the same. And the best programs, 

the best approaches are able to have generic principles but customised particularly to the 

individual. And even within teams, you can have people on. crazy salaries and then people just on 

quite modest salaries within the same team so you know you’ve got to be able to balance all that 

out but the reality for most elite athletes most is that they struggle to make a living yeah so i 

want to ask you about that but before we do let’s just carry on with the glamorous side um because 

there are some i guess i’m particularly with me thinking of footballers um who get you know you get 

a 19 year old getting getting crazy amounts of money very very quickly um what issues does that 

create and how do you help them well that creates a raft of issues in terms of their self-concept 

so you know who am i as a person and often people who are being paid lots of money, 

start to falsely believe that this brings them some other attributes that other people don’t have 

as people, they can lose touch with reality and sometimes that happens. 

It also creates a lot of pressure on them to live a certain lifestyle. It creates a lot of pressure 

on them to be responsible with that money so they can hang on to the money. It also means that 

there’s lots of people in the ecosystem trying to get access to that person and the money. 

So it’s very challenging to identify who are people I can trust. Who your friends are. 

Let alone people. Who are people I can trust with my money or financial decisions? 

So all sorts of things there. And then there’s the underlying anxiety of when will all this end? 

It’s going well now, but I’m only as good as my last performance or my last contract and what 

happens after the existing situation and where do I go to next? Or potentially what league will I 

play in or what team will I play in or as an individual athlete? What’s the next competition where 

I could potentially earn money? Yeah. But there’s a big difference between the Olympic sports. 

Yeah. That’s changing now. But, you know, if you go NFL, NBA, 

major league baseball, hockey, and obviously football, being professional football in the elite 

leagues, you know, people can make exorbitant amounts of money. And the real challenge is not just 

making the money, but how to hang on to it. Yeah. Just something you said at the beginning there, I 

can just ask a bit more about that. I think you said something about who you are is not necessarily 

how other people see you. So you’ve become very wealthy, very successful, very quickly. 

What do you mean by who you perceive yourself to be distort, I guess, compared to how other people 

see you? What do you mean by that? Yeah, but our sense of self happens in domains, and I might have 

this…-concept of being, I’m a great athlete, but that doesn’t necessarily transfer into other 

aspects of life. Am I happy being the person I am? Am I a good son, 

daughter, husband, wife, boyfriend, girlfriend? Am I doing that to my potential? Am I making a 

difference to my community? Am I being true to my values? So it raises all and puts all these 

pressures in a very concentrated period of time. A 19-year-old, 

20-year-old, these are not things that most 19, 20-year-olds need to think about, are they? No, 

that’s right. And when you think about this, you know, a lot of our elite athletes are under 25 

years of age. But we know from a brain development perspective, it’s only around 25 years of age 

where our brain starts to work efficiently as an integrated whole. So we’ve given people all this 

responsibility, all this accountability, actually, and rewarded them for it. 

But their brains are still a work in progress. So they’re working out who they are, 

their place in the world. They’re working out what really matters to them. And none of that is 

concrete yet. It’s all fluid. So again, this is just another pressure. They’re not only meant to 

work out how to be an elite athlete within an environment which may not be that explicit, 

but they’re also trying to work out who am I. world. And they’re also trying to work out, okay, 

what do I do with my money in that context? And they’ve also grown up with images of wealth and 

success in every walk of life in our Western society as being financial. And so if I’m being paid 

lots of money, that means I must be a certain type of person, which can be disturbing. Exactly. 

So just explain the difference, if you would, in this context between accountability and 

responsibility. Well, accountability means that You’re accountable for your performance. 

Responsible means you care about performance. So in a team sport, you’re accountable for 

performance. You’re responsible for contributing to the team. But the buck stops with you for your 

performance. Which is accountability. One person. Which is accountability. But you’re also 

responsible for contributing to the team’s success. Along with other people. 

And if you don’t perform. individually, you won’t get selected. Yeah. 

Yeah. I could talk about that particular topic for hours, actually, because accountability response 

is such an interesting thing. But let’s just move to the kind of the less glamorous sports, 

perhaps Olympics, or it could be sports that just aren’t particularly well paid. There you’ve got 

incredibly successful people who don’t have the financial returns necessarily. What are the issues 

that you see in that kind of context? We could probably start the conversation, Chris, by talking 

about women’s sport, because if you look at the pay gap between men’s and women’s sport, 

it’s still significant, like hugely significant. So straight away, 

for most sports, women are struggling to get paid and struggling to make ends meet. 

And as a consequence, what they have to do is constantly juggle the athletic demands with the 

demands of other employment. And also, as you would well know, that women do the majority of caring 

in relationships as well. So there’s the additional burden of doing that emotional caring work. 

So women’s sport is a huge issue in terms of elite sport, particularly. 

And then when we talk about throw in Olympic sports where people don’t make much money anyway, 

the situation’s even worse. And that’s true right around the world. Yeah. Yeah, 

I remember working when I was a temp in my early 20s in an office. And one of the other people in 

the team was an England hockey player. And it was all amateur, but it was elite. 

And the company gave her all the time off she wanted. So a very enlightened employer in those days. 

I guess that’s what you need. You need a hustle, don’t you? You need help from all places. 

You do. And part of it, if you think about it, making it to the elite level is it. in a tournament 

you know say you’re in a tournament to make it but you know you’re going to be one of tens of 

thousands who actually get there and that just means you got there for one now the job is can you 

stay there yeah and again that’s where that’s a whole different ball game because getting there is 

often talent and ambition but to stay there is really about mindset and learning is there a Does 

the financial rewards or lack of them get in the way of performance or can it? 

I don’t think it does. Look, I don’t think it does because I think when people are on the journey, 

there’s something more than money driving them. Now, what you’ll notice around the leagues around 

the world is a lot of that money. has come into sport from corporations or high net worth 

individuals or leagues themselves serving a particular niche, 

like the Indian Premier League in cricket, for example, serves a particular niche around gaming. So 

that’s the reason why you can make extraordinary amounts of money in a very short period of time. 

But I think what we’re noticing is the internationalisation of sport globally. 

So people from around the world in their chosen sport can move around the world to various 

competitions and get paid extremely well. I think I’ve always been curious about is, going back to 

the highly paid level, that somebody will switch, renegotiate a contract for double the amount of 

money or switch clubs. And they’re already earning £50,000 a week or whatever the numbers are. 

I’m a bit out of touch. That might be a bit low for some of the top players. Are they actually 

motivated by that money? I think there’s a… a multitude of influences on athletes my own 

experience seeing it with athletes is a lot of those negotiations get left to the agent yeah and if 

the agent suggests that it’s a good thing usually they’ll suggest what’s a good thing which is in 

their best interest the agents that is then the athlete will probably go along with it but 

increasingly with the you know the players associations they’re starting to increase the financial 

literacy of the player, players and athletes, trying to get them to at least understand the 

sensible questions to ask. So that’s slightly changing, but agents are still very influential, 

particularly on what I would call the circuit sports, where you can go and play in different 

countries throughout a year or a season. Yeah. I was thinking in particular, I guess, 

of when the LIV League in golf was set up and there was one American golfer who is already worth, 

you know, three, 400 million, and he was paid 100 million to move to LIV and said, look, I’m just 

trying to look after my family. How much do you need to look after your family? Yeah. 

Again, I think this is where some real financial literacy education would be helpful, 

and this is the reason why we actually use your material, 

Chris, because we see the… world of finance, very similar to the world of life and careers, 

where you don’t start with the job, you start with the person. And I think if people, 

even these high net worth individuals, they start with themselves as a person and weren’t ranking 

themselves by the amount of money they had. then I think, one, life would be more satisfying, 

and two, they’d probably make better quality of life decisions. Yeah, and maybe that would actually 

improve their performance. I think I’ve mentioned to you before that we had an interview, one of my 

favourites that we did with Leon Taylor, the Olympic diver, and that was all about this thing, that 

when he went back to realising the enjoyment of the sport for him, his performance improved. 

Yeah, and again… I think not only does your sport improve, 

but your life improves. Yeah, of course. And that’s the thing we try to say to people, 

look, by focusing on your holistic wellbeing, it doesn’t guarantee performance, 

but we do believe it’s a performance enabler. It’ll get you to the door of performance in the best 

possible shape so you can focus on the things that matter. But we’re also not neglecting the other 

part of your life that really matters, which is all the rest of it. Yeah, that’s a nice way of 

putting it. The elite sport has something that other careers don’t really have. It has a lot of 

potential transition moments with injury or a very early end because not many sports people go 

beyond early 30s. What sort of issues or challenges do you see elite athletes facing there? 

One of the things we try to educate athletes on is we try to help them understand that The best 

approach to transition is normalization because transitions happen all the time. 

As a young person, you played for your local team. And then if you’re probably good enough, 

you might have gone to local representative team. And then if you’re good enough, you might have 

gone to either a state team or to a national team. 

And then all of a sudden, you might have been now in your late teens and you’ve got this contract 

sitting in front of you. Well, that’s all normal. But if you’re an elite athlete, so too is getting 

injured, so too is contract negotiations, so too is positional changes, so too is falling out with 

your coach and your teammates. They’re all normal things. So if you can go, that’s what’s going to 

happen, well, I can prepare for that. And that’s why, again, one of the most important things to 

help people on that journey is to understand who am I as a person, what really matters to me, 

and how can I live that? regardless of the many transitions I’m about to make. Because the other 

great thing about being informed in that way, it stays with you. So you can take that as you go 

into the next phase of your life, where that’s, you know, moving out of competing, maybe it’s going 

into coaching, or maybe it’s never seeing that bloody sport again. But at least, 

you know, with some self-insight, you have the starting point for other insight. 

And then that’s one of the greatest tools that you can have. And the way the world of work is 

changing at the moment with AI and technology and automation, they’re the skills that are going to 

be valued in the future. So that’s why we try to get athletes to, one, normalise, and that really 

reduces the risk when the unexpected happen, when things happen unexpectedly to the athletes that 

aren’t optimal. But it’s always the case of moving in, moving through. 

and moving out and if we help athletes understand you’re constantly going through that process then 

they can develop this sense of okay what are my strategies and they keep going back to those those 

strategies that would normalize one of the most important ones is that who am i yeah yeah and you 

mentioned values earlier on as well in that i’m having clarity of your values normalization is 

there a danger If you normalize some of these things, if you can reduce expectations, 

could this affect ambition? I don’t think so. Like, for example, normalizing, 

if you’re a rugby player, you want to normalize the fact that you’re going to get injured because 

that’s going to happen to you if you’re playing a collision sport. And then the question is, all 

right, well, if we accept that and we accept we’ve got good medical care and the medical side is 

going to be covered well, well, what else can we do? Well, we can also make sure that the emotions 

fit the facts. So we use these profiling tools which line up the progress on the physical side with 

what’s happening on the emotional side or the psychological side. Well, that’s another thing we can 

1. We can also say, well, what supports good recovery? So having clear goals,

being able to relax, meditation. 

That’ll help your physical recovery. We can also say, well, now you’re not playing and training as 

much. There’s some other things you could do. Would you like to get involved in the community or 

would you like to focus on your wellbeing or would you like to think about dipping your toe in some 

things you’ve been interested in but just didn’t have the time for? Or we could even think about 

talking about what’s next when you finish competing and playing. So I think normalising actually 

helps get people ready because One of the things I’ve learned is this idea of if you help people 

develop a sense of coherence, that means they understand the situation they’re in and that they 

have the skills to navigate that situation and those skills are the ones that matter to them, 

then you’re much more likely to see intentional action. So rather than thinking about something, 

they’ll actually do things. Now, there’s a… A medical sociologist in the 70s, 

his name was Aaron Antonovsky. And his initial research was looking at people who’d survived 

concentration camps. He said, what was the difference between those people who survived 

concentration camps? and those who did. And Antonovsky put it down to a sense of coherence. So then 

he went and tested that idea in other fields. So I think one of the best things we can do to help 

people prepare for life after sport is to help build a sense of coherence. 

Do you understand what that is going to be like? Because we know that athletes, elite athletes 

particularly, have a great sense of loss when they leave the sports. They lose the sense of who am 

I? They lose a sense of social status. They often lose their income. They lose their friends. 

They lose their support network. They lose their medical support. So there’s all these losses. 

And then they often move locations because they’re no longer living in that town or that city or 

that place. So helping them understand that, look, if you make too many moves all at once, 

that’s going to be negative for you. And two, we can help you navigate those things by providing 

with real skills and knowledge. in the areas that matter to you, not to me, then they’re much 

better off. If anybody listened to this, if you forgive me for being a little clumsy maybe, I’m 

tempted to suggest that they rewind five minutes and replace the question that I asked you with, 

what will happen when I retire? Or what will happen when I sell my business? Or what happens if I 

get made redundant? Yeah. Because everything that you’ve said is about life transitions. 

It just happens to be you specialize in it for athletes. But that was marvelous. 

Just to bring this towards a close, let’s just have a particular think about your profession and 

that transition support that people get given. There tends to be a tendency, I think, well, 

you’ve told me in the past that people need to think it stops when you have gone past that moment, 

that the support ends when the transition is finished. I don’t think you agree with that, 

do you? 

Well, I think we can do better. And look, my observation, Chris, would be we’ve improved out of 

sight. across a whole range of areas. From physical wellbeing, 

most elite athletes now have some sort of medical care post-competition. Most elite athletes also 

have psychological support as well. I think the environment around… Speaking about mental health 

is dramatically changing in a positive way. I still think we’ve got the balance wrong where we 

spend too much talking about time talking about what’s going wrong. What we should be doing instead 

is promoting what we can do to make it go right in the first place. I think it’s probably about 85 

% of all the research, all the efforts, all the money goes into what do we do when things go wrong. 

We should flip that. 

Having said that, we’re making good progress. I think the career advice and support for elite 

athletes has been fantastic and that’s really growing in the right way. But instead of focusing on 

the job, we need to focus, start with the person. And then we need to also then think about what 

industries are growing and dying. And then we can start to think, all right, well, if I know that 

about me and I know that about these industries, what’s a logical path that I could track toward 

that? And that’s what I think there’s been some great work done by Stanford, 

by Burnett and Evans in their life design model. And they say, think about your whole life, 

not just your working life. So look, I think definitely on the right track, things are improving 

dramatically. I think the environment is improving dramatically. Yeah, let’s hope it continues. 

Yeah. Well, you’re a big part of that happening. Let me ask you this last final question then, 

Steve. If there’s one thing that you could change about how elite sport in the UK approaches 

financial well-being for athletes, what would it be and why? I would say start earlier, 

but make the way in which we teach financial literacy relevant to young people’s worlds. 

So, for example, you know, what does it mean to… a mobile phone plan. 

What does it mean to think about buying a car? What are the different ways? How can you save money? 

How do you not spend all your money on Uber Eats? Make it relevant to what teenagers do. 

And the earlier you start, the better off people are going to be. Fantastic. And so what that means 

is we need to get to the pathways. Yeah. Yeah. Well, look, Steve, absolutely fascinating. 

And I love your work. And I’m so glad that we’ve been put in contact with each other and more power 

to you. Thank you very much for your time with us today. Thanks for having me, Chris. Really nice 

to talk to you. Well, Chris, absolutely right. What a nice guy. What an interesting guy as well. 

Really, really thoughtful. There’s a lot to unpick there. I mean, I’m like you and indeed, Tom, you 

know, we’re all big sports fans. So I think to hear somebody who works in that field, working 

with… athletes like him uh it’s it’s really good to get that and i i did for a while worked for 

our local football club the only one in bristol city football club and uh and so i i had some 

dealings with professional footballers and and the level at which they you know took their their 

lives seriously and how how hard they trained and But the one thing that they all had in common, 

I think, was there was, to varying degrees, a bit of uncertainty about their life and the pressures 

and the stresses that were put on them as professional footballers. And I think Steve’s approach, 

which is to say, let’s not worry too much about the outcomes. Let’s not worry too much about the 

contracts and all of that stuff. Let’s look at the person. Let’s start looking at the person first. 

And I found that really, really refreshing. It reminded me… of my favorite podcast that we’ve 

done which was episode 99 with leon smith and it’s that reminder it’s leon taylor leon taylor sorry 

yeah leon taylor and it was so i find sport could be so focused on the outcome it’s always a 

results driven business that i do think that takes such a focus away from all of the other things 

that he talked about that can actually along the way that can help improve the outcome it’s that 

process and heck people should be enjoying the process and not be so yeah so help up on that well 

what was the end end result because ultimately what the end result is in in life in general is a 

lot of it’s so out of our control so we can forget everything else but i just spoke to everything 

we talked about here over the last decade and i was just so heartened to hear that as being used 

with with young A lot of young professional sports people, but heck, I think it’s really standing 

in good stead. It’s great to hear. There’s a couple of takeaways I would just like to draw out if I 

could. One was the thing about normalising change, which I think is a really powerful sentence. 

I’m doing lots of reading at the moment around transition, period of transition. It could be 

retirement. It could be selling a business. It could be an elite athlete having an injury and 

suddenly change their career. And one of the things that I loved about what he said was that don’t 

treat this as an unexpected thing. Normalize it. Prepare for it. Because the one thing, 

you know, hundreds of business owners in particular that I’ve worked with over the years in 

coaching and advising on succession planning, et cetera, is none of them prepare for the real thing 

they need to prepare for. They prepare their business, but then they sell the business and they sit 

down maybe with some money and then they go, who am I? And they’ve done no preparing for that. 

So don’t treat these things as unexpected and scary. Treat them as normal. Normalize change because 

then you prepare. loved that and the other one which is um on the same theme was about don’t define 

yourself solely through your job or your status or even your income or your wealth don’t because 

that can change um i’ve talked to the podcast before about my father and how uh when he went 

bankrupt he completely changed who he was and he was bereft because he had no idea of who he was so 

don’t define and Obviously, an elite sports person. I remember seeing Les Ferdinand, 

an England footballer for many, many years ago, who was training to be a chef. I love that. Find 

different things. Don’t define yourself by the one thing. I’d really like that. Yeah, and of 

course, as an elite athlete, it’s a short career as well. And understandably, you’re going to focus 

all your resources and your concentration on living in the now, getting as fit as you can, being as 

good as you can at the game. And it’s very easy for those things to fall by the wayside. So I think 

for Steve to have that. overview and say no okay yeah do your training yeah do all your preparation 

but let’s also look at what you’re going to be doing in the meantime to make sure that you are well 

and as tom said i think it does really chime very well with all the well-being issues we’ve been 

talking about now chris i’d just like to ask you Chicken and the Egg. So Steve actually was aware 

of your book, was he? He’d read the book or he’d listened to the podcast. And did he then start 

introducing those aspects into his work or was it the other way around? I believe so, yeah. I 

believe that he, the former, I believe that he, I don’t know whether he listened to podcasts or 

read the books, but yes, he’s then applied it, I believe, is the way around. Great. Well, there you 

1. So the word is spreading around the world, even as far as Australia. So well done us.

Yeah, well, do you know what? I know we can mock it in true British fashion. We could go with self 

-deprecating. But this sort of thing does make it worthwhile because that one person we’ve reached 

is now reaching many more people and creating a better society. 

The people they interact with, the more you can spread this around, it’s like ripples in a pond, 

isn’t it? That is the aim of this podcast is to improve society in any way that we can. 

So yeah, I love that. not going to be so self-deprecating and say, good on us for showing up every 

month and putting this on. I don’t say this very often, 

but David, you’d be amazed at how many people I speak to. More than one, 

many, several times. Somebody has said to me, this is really weird. Your voice is familiar. 

Do you listen to podcasts? And it turns out they listen to the podcast. Lots of financial planners 

who have changed how they do their business because of the financial well-being piece. It has had 

a huge, huge impact. Yeah, but everyone knows you as Chris Budd, the guy who’s talking about 

financial well-being and being really helpful. They just go, ah, you’re a tight-ass Tomo. 

Well, nobody ever says anything to me because I don’t listen to circles. Although I do have a 

couple of mates that do listen to it regularly, actually. And indeed, I have to say, my partner, 

Gail, had never listened to one until recently. And then I kind of basically made her sit down and 

listen to one. We were in the car driving. I said, you’ve got to listen to this. And she was 

really… It’s probably a terrible thing to say. She was surprised at how good it was. 

She said, that’s really, really good. She said, I didn’t realise you had so much to do in it. I 

just thought it was Chris and Tom talking. But you do a lot as well, don’t you? I said, well, we’re 

not going to get a word in edgeways. 

So listen, that’s great. Great interview, Chris. Really, really interesting. I hope you’ve enjoyed 

it at home. And I hope you’ll join us again very soon when we will present yet another one of our 

financial well-being.

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