Whole new ball game
Andrew Strauss on mental toughness and his new business venture
Sir Andrew Strauss is a photographer’s nightmare. “If you could just face the camera, Andrew,” the snapper pleads, his patience clearly wearing thin. The former England cricket captain – now turned businessman – seems incapable of speaking to someone without looking them in the eye. A question from anyone other than the photographer breaks his pose.
It is the kind of old-fashioned manners drilled into public schoolboys like Strauss, who attended Radley College in Oxfordshire. No doubt he also learnt the importance of facing adversity. As of late, the 42-year-old has had more than his fair share.
Strauss is picking up the pieces after his life was torn apart by the death of wife Ruth in December 2018 from cancer. The cricket community rallied behind the father-of-two with the inaugural Ruth Strauss Day during the Ashes Test match at Lord’s last summer to raise money for a foundation in her name.
While Strauss still does a few “bits and pieces” with English cricket, these days he largely divides his time between charity work and Mindflick – his company that takes the psychological lessons of dealing with pressure on the sports field and translates them into everyday life: work, home or even school.
“In some ways, my personal circumstances have made it harder for me to focus fully on Mindflick,” Strauss explains as the sun sets on a cold and blustery day at Lord’s. “The [Ruth Strauss] Foundation is a big part of my life now and always will be. That’s something I am very proud of. But that doesn’t take away my real deep-rooted desire to try to help people perform better.”
A quick browse of Mindflick reveals little evidence that the business is trading on the back of Strauss’s success on and off the cricket pitch.
He scored more than 7,000 runs for his country in 100 test matches – and captained a team at rock bottom in early 2009 to the top of the world rankings two-a-half years later.
Post-retirement, as England’s director of cricket, he was credited with putting the building blocks in place for a landmark victory at the World Cup last year – a feat that was at the heart of a “summer of cricket” that captured the nation.
Mental-physical parity
He may be chief executive of Mindflick, but specialist help comes in the form of a phalanx of sports psychologists.
These include Pete Lindsay, previously performance psychologist at Manchester City, who is in charge of developing psychological tests, and Mark Bawden, English cricket’s former team psychologist, as head of consultancy.
“Previously, I saw psychology in the way a lot of people do. You go and see the head doctor when you are in a bad place mentally and if your performance is suffering,” says Strauss.
“It was only in the latter part of my career that it really dawned on me that mental skills were the same as technique or physical skills – something that I had to practise on a day-to-day basis to get the best out of myself. And as captain I had to understand the people in my team better if I wanted to get the best out of them.”
Strauss and his team have developed Spotlight, a tool that profiles people either individually or in teams. It is all about how you function when the going gets tough, he explains.
“You can’t just wait until the context suits you. You have to shift yourself to suit the context,” Strauss says.
“Context drives behaviour. You behave differently at work than how you are at home. You will behave differently when you are under real pressure as opposed to when you’re relaxing on the sofa. And, most particularly, we need to understand ourselves under pressure.”
‘ Context drives behaviour. You behave differently at work than how you are at home. We need to understand ourselves under pressure’
A duty of care
Strauss segued seamlessly into management after hanging up his pads in 2015 by taking over as England’s director of cricket. He resigned in October 2018 to spend more time with Ruth.
Given everything he has had to deal with at home, it might have been easier to return to the safe haven of cricket – whether through coaching or in the media.
“That’s not me,” he says. “I’m always looking for different ways of challenging myself. I feel like I’ve had a great opportunity in cricket to do a number of different jobs.
“I think any other jobs in cricket, you are moving further away from the performance side. And performance is what I know, and I feel I’ve got something to offer. And that’s part of the motivation to drive Mindflick forward.
“I think it is very, very hard to be able to replicate what you have done on a football pitch, or on a rugby pitch, or on a cricket pitch when you retire. You have to find another avenue to do that. Some people like to stay within the game; for me that feels a little bit narrow.”
It is no easy task for elite athletes. In most sports, their careers are usually over by the time the mid-30s come knocking.
“I was lucky to come straight out of cricket and go straight into this director of cricket job at the ECB,” Strauss says.
“It’s a real challenge and I would argue that sport doesn’t prepare people well enough for that transition … it definitely does not.”
There is a “duty of care” on sports teams to help professionals transition, he says. “It’s not like a normal corporate environment where someone is going to go on until 65 or 70. You know that someone’s career is coming to an end in their mid-30s, by and large, and I think it is irresponsible to say, ‘That’s your issue and we’re not going to help you prepare for that while you are playing for us’.
“Having said that, players are not proactive enough. And it’s too easy to go, ‘Ah, that’s for something down the road’. Players need to be better at understanding that they have a lot of time, use that time constructively to make sure that transition is as easy as it’s going to be.”
Mindflick works with a broad spectrum of clients, from sports clubs to students and especially company boards. Strauss is “still doing work for the ECB [English and Wales Cricket Board] as well” but his business is evidently his passion. And he’s the boss.
Given he deals with the top brass at blue chip companies on a regular basis, which cricketers does Strauss think would make a good boss?
“I’m going to fudge the answer a little bit,” he says sheepishly. “I look at some of the good leaders I played with: Michael Vaughan was definitely one. I think back to Justin Langer when he was captain of Middlesex. Andy Flower, a fantastic leader of men.
“All of those guys would have been very good CEOS, but probably in certain businesses at certain times.”
‘I think it is very, very hard to be able to replicate what you have done on a cricket pitch when you retire. You have to find another avenue’