Rugby sells itself on pressure, but Andrew Mehrtens is more interested in what happens before the big moment: the habits, trust and clarity that allow players to make decisions when the game is moving faster than thought.
A former All Blacks fly-half, Canterbury and Crusaders standout, and RugbyPass Hall of Fame inductee, Andrew built his career in a position where hesitation could change a match.
Across more than 70 appearances for New Zealand, he became known for control, precision and decision-making under pressure, before later moving into commentary, coaching and business.
As an experienced rugby speaker, Andrew now draws on that experience to explain why high performance is less about sporting mythology and more about ordinary people doing the basics extraordinarily well.
In this exclusive interview with the High Performance Speakers Agency, he discusses split-second decisions, team culture, mental focus and what businesses can learn from the demands of elite rugby.
For exclusive stories and all the detailed rugby news you need, subscribe to The Rugby Paper website, digital edition, or newspaper from as little as 14p a day.
Decision-making under pressure
Question One: As a fly-half, how did you handle the pressure of making decisions in real time with the game unfolding around you?
Andrew Mehrtens: “I think the key to making decisions is knowing you’ve got the backing of your group.
“You’re out there on a rugby field with 14 players there to support you. Hopefully, normally 14 if there aren’t yellow or red cards involved.
“In the position of fly-half that I was playing, you’re constantly making decisions.
“You’re not always going to make the absolute perfect decision, but it’s important for the team to have a call, a decision, a direction to go in, and that it’s clearly communicated because even if it’s not the best option at the time, if everyone piles in, they can make the best of it.
“Just having that confidence and having the awareness that you’ve really got to make a call because, in life as well, at times you have to make a call.
“What I understood after a few years of playing rugby was stressing about trying to make the perfect decision every time was actually counterproductive and it makes you inhibited.
“Going with your gut feel, it’s not going to always be absolutely correct or perfect, but going with your gut feel at least gives you an early decision and you can get that to the other people around you and you can make something of it.
“It’s important not to be scared to make a decision.”
Team vs individuals
Question Two: What separates a high-performance rugby team from a group of talented individuals, and what can business leaders learn from that?
Andrew Mehrtens: “I think the first thing to say is that rugby and sport is not some mythical thing that has special values that don’t apply in life.
“The best rugby teams I ever played in were just living good normal human values and they can exist in any context. Absolutely.
“Sport wasn’t different. There was a lot of focusing on the basics and doing it very well.
“When you get to that international level or high-performance level, it’s really a lot about the internal motivation from all the players to absolutely get the best out of themselves.
“But to focus on always trying to be better, working on the basic skills till you can do them almost in your sleep.
“Practice is a big part of it as well. But I remember the best coaches I had always said, look, you’re not extraordinary people.
“You’re ordinary people trying to do ordinary things extraordinarily well.
“That was an important lesson for any group in rugby, that you’re just trying to do the basics really, really well and working hard on those constantly.
“The high performance comes from your motivation to be the absolute best you can day in, day out, particularly when you’ve got teammates relying on you.
“And that you’re not looking for any secret ingredient, really.
“That’s the important thing in business as well. So many of the values that you live in sport apply in business and vice versa.
“A lot of good sports teams go to good business organisations to learn what are they doing well that we can take away from that as well.
“When you’ve got the human factor in there and there’s interdependence between teammates and colleagues, a lot of the dynamics are very, very similar even though the action is different.”
Handling mistakes
Question Three: When mistakes happened on the pitch, how did you reset mentally and stay locked into the next phase of play?
Andrew Mehrtens: “When I was playing, rugby went from amateur to professional and suddenly there was a whole new world of, firstly, a lot more training daily, but also a lot more of the mental approach. There was a lot more work on applying yourself mentally.
“Visualisation was important. Visualising your role on the field, picturing when things are going well, picturing when things are going badly.
“So you don’t get any surprises when you’re on the field because when you’re on the field, you almost recognise that situation because you visualised it.
“Coping strategies were probably an early buzz word in rugby 30, 40 years ago. Just how do you bounce back from adversity on the field? Not just a result, but actually a mistake on the field.
“That’s another reason it’s good to have your teammates around you that can lift you up.
“They put pressure on you because we all want to perform, but they can also lift you up when you’re a bit down on yourself.
“The important thing is to move on pretty quickly. What you’ve just done has no effect really on what you’re about to do.
“So it’s just concentrating task by task and retaining that focus. That’s a big mental part of it.
“It’s sometimes hard because everyone gets caught up in daily life with a lot of the background noise and with stresses and things.
“Just focusing on what you can do at any given moment, what your next task is, is a mental skill that needs to be practised.”
The reality of elite sport
Question Four: When you speak to audiences now, what do you want them to understand about the reality of elite sport and high-performance culture?
Andrew Mehrtens: “I hope that people take away, if they’ve thought that international sport or high-performance sport is something different from normal life, absolutely, it’s not.
“Like I said before, it’s not extraordinary people by any stretch. It’s ordinary people doing ordinary things and trying to do them extraordinarily well.
“That’s the key, that there are so many ingredients that you have to use, particularly in a team sport where you’ve got lots of interdependence.
“You’ve got to really focus on things that work in any context, but you’ve only got 80 minutes to apply that to the actual real test at the end of the week.
“In a lot of respects, business is more difficult. You’ve got a wider variety of people, probably in a corporate environment.
“Most of the time in rugby, you’ve got very similar people with similar experiences in their life through the junior grades, and as they build up, go through academies or whatever, they’ve got a very similar motivation.
“So in a lot of respects, that rugby environment is easy versus a corporate environment.
“But then it can be difficult in that you’ve got to apply all these different things so that your performance is concentrated into 80 minutes at the end of the week.
“There’s nothing special really about high-performance sport. It’s just taking pride in your own job, taking pride in your teammates doing their job well as well.
“In the best environment I was in, we took a real pride in everybody’s statistics. Not everybody can get the glory of scoring the try in the corner to win the match.
“But if, as a team, you can recognise the little jobs that went into creating that opportunity for the person to score the try.
“You look back at the thankless tasks of players putting their body on the line to try and protect the ball so that you don’t lose it to the other team. All those little things.
“If you can take pride in people doing those roles really well, then I think you’ve got a really effective culture.”
This exclusive interview with Andrew Mehrtens was conducted by Tabish Ali of the Motivational Speakers Agency.
The best betting sites
You must be logged in to post a comment Login