Build your business with small steps to success

England cricket star Stuart Broad shares his journey from dominating the sports field to venturing into the world of hospitality, by opening The Cat & Wickets pub company with his former teammate, Harry Gurney.

When their pub the Tap & Run burned down in 2022, it could have been the end of their journey, but they were determined to come back better than ever.

Even when faced with a entrepreneur’s worst nightmare, Stuart demonstrates how staying resilient and maintaining a positive mindset can propel you towards success.

He offers his top tips on how to grow your business by taking small steps, how to turn crisis into opportunity, and the vital role appreciation can have in driving your team.

This episode is packed with knowledge and inspiration for sports fans and budding entrepreneurs.

Here’s his unfiltered advice below:

• What’s next when your sports career comes to an end?
• Starting a business by chance with your teammates
• Bringing back the community feel to pubs
• Turning a catastrophic pub fire into an opportunity for improvement
• Re-opening the Tap & Run
• Start small to grow your vision
• Don’t build your mindset around achieving success every single day
• Learn the power of appreciation
• Put on the best show for your customers
• Incorporate your personality into your business
• Master the art of perfect timing
• Use self-reflection notes to maintain a positive mindset

What’s next when your sports career comes to an end?

Bex Burn-Callander:

So tell me a bit about when it was in your illustrious cricket career when you started thinking, “What am I going to do next?”

Stuart Broad:

Good question. I think as soon as you approach 30-ish as a sports person, you begin to think it’s quite clear you’re nearer the end than you are the beginning, unless it’s something like golf, where you can maybe play until you’re 55 or 60.

The physical sports are generally your mid-30s when, if you’re lucky enough, you can get to stop. So when you start approaching 30, you’re very conscious that you need to start focusing on something that you might have an interest in going forward.

Mine probably started at 24-25.

We’re very lucky, in cricket we have an organisation called the PCA, Professional Cricketers’ Association, that help you find courses or potential interests that you could take forward, job placements, to learn a bit about.

But the pub company came about just by fate really, just by chatting with a friend in a pub. And he was a GM of a pub and wanted skin in the game, so to speak, and that’s where The Cat & Wickets Pub Company got founded really.

Because I was, what was it, 2017, I was 30. And I was interested in the business world but hadn’t been part of a start-up, and the opportunity arose to start one.

So that interested me a lot. It’s been a hell of a journey. We’ve changed and evolved so much in the 7 years, but also we’ve learned a huge amount as well.

It is an ever-moving industry, the hospitality industry. We always say we’re cautiously optimistic, it’s never like we’re high as a kite and we’re never down there. We’re always cautiously optimistic, but it’s a wonderful industry to be in because you’re surrounded by people.

Starting a business by chance with your teammates

Bex Burn-Callander:

Did you always know that you wanted to go into business with Harry, and did you have conversations when you were teammates about it, or did it just happen again by chance?

Stuart Broad:

A bit by chance.

So Harry’s a trained accountant and he was a cricketer for Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire, and England, but he always said his hero’s growing up were business people.

So he’s always had a big interest in business. And we had a business partner called Dan, Dan Cramp, who was the GM of a pub. And was very successful in running that pub, but as a GM was just on a salary rather than having shareholding.

So we said, “We can make something happen as a trio.”

Dan sets the pub up and runs all the pub stuff. Harry’s an accountant and gets the finances, gets the business side of things. And I can play a role in building PR, being the bank, so to speak, an investor of sorts and having that devil’s advocate mindset of challenging people of what direction were going in.

So that’s where we started. And it went from almost being, I wouldn’t say a hobby, but it was a bit like, “Oh, it would be great to be able to take the family there on a Sunday lunch,” to a couple of years down the line, going, “Well, if we’re going to do it, let’s do it properly. Let’s really restructure the business. Let’s try and have a route that we can go down to grow.”

And now we’re in a place where we’re able to get a third very soon, maybe 5 in the next couple of years, and keep growing from there and scale up.

Bringing back the community feel to pubs

Bex Burn-Callander:

Because you’d already created the business and you were still playing cricket, were there times when it interfered with your ability to be a professional sportsman? Was there any kind of overlaps or distractions from the business?

Stuart Broad:

Not really. Harry’s always been incredible on that front, and down at the start was very influential in taking that sort of thing off.

Yes, of course, after a game there’d be times where I’d be on the phone quite a lot discussing different supply routes and different styles of how we wanted the pub to be.

And we’ve always had that culture that we’re there to serve the village, we’re there to serve the local community. So we very much listen to everything that comes our way.

So ultimately in our pubs we don’t have TVs, because we wanted it to be a place where the family go for a meal.

And the moment we were discussing it, I’d taken my mum, sister and grandma out for a Sunday lunch, and I think Man United were on the TV in our first pub—when we did have TVs.

And I’ve got my grandma there, my mum, my sister, and I’m not a Man United fan. I was watching Man United and I thought, “What am I doing? I could watch that anytime, just enjoy being with your family.”

So we created that culture, we have Monopoly and Scrabble, and we want people to come and enjoy a Sunday roast and then play a board game instead of being on phones and watching TV.

So that was one of our values that came about from making mistakes, so to speak, early on, that I was engulfed in the football instead of enjoying my family time.

And actually, we found a great benefit to that from the customers, because the atmosphere of the pubs is always great. You don’t have the cheering of a goal necessarily, but you’ve got that talking and that enjoyment, and enjoyment of each other’s company.

And we get a lot of families coming just to spend time together and enjoy that time together, which is what pubs are for really.

Bex Burn-Callander:

That is the heart of what pubs always were, somewhere the community could spend time together and be social. There would be a church and there’d be a pub, and that’s where you’d congregate.

Stuart Broad:

We set one of our mindsets very much on, yes, of course we want your family to come and enjoy a meal for 6, but we also want an individual to come on their own who might not have family close, and grab a pint and sit at the bar on their own, but be able to talk to anyone.

So all our staff, the culture of our staff are very warm, engaging, and we don’t want it ever to be, “Oh, I don’t want to go to the pub on my own and have a pint.”

It’s like, “Come, that’s what we’re here for.”

Ultimately, we’re your friends in the village for you to come and have some interaction with if you’ve had a quiet day or if you’re feeling a bit down, or if you’ve got some news to share.

So that’s the forefront of the mind of the culture of the pub. And if all the staff know that and all your employees know that and buy into that, then it becomes a very warm place to go.

Because if anyone walks through the door, it’s an engagement straight away, “How are you? How are you doing? Sorry, we’re a bit busy at the moment, be with you in one sec.”

All that stuff is a cultural thing for the staff to be aware of.

Harry who is the GM, runs it daily now, he’s very strong on that. We try and work with good people is the polite way of saying it, he’s got another way of saying it, but I won’t swear on the podcast. But ultimately, only work with good people in your staff.

Whether that’s chefs, GMs, front of house, waiters, suppliers, if they’re good people then they buy into the culture of it.

And we see it very much like a sporting changing room, everyone speaks to everyone with great respect. There’s no hierarchy within the staff. There’s no right for the chef to shout at someone who they’re classed as maybe below them in the pecking order, that doesn’t work.

It’s all about being on a level playing field and having good people around. And we feel like that builds the culture.

When you put on an England cricket shirt, you’re so proud to wear the three lions. We want people to wear The Cat & Wickets logo and be proud to work there, and that’s the culture that we’ve tried to drive forward.

Turning a catastrophic pub fire into an opportunity for improvement

Bex Burn-Callander:

And it’s so clear that the ethos behind this business and the mission is it really resonates with people, but you still had a really tough time in many ways.

 Not even touching on COVID, which must have been very tricky, you had a fire.

Tell us about that and tell us how you felt when you found out that your business was literally going up in flames.

Stuart Broad:

Yeah, I remember it very clearly. I was playing a test match in Nottingham, fortunately, so I was sort of on site. It was day 3, day 4.

And Harry Gurney had a call at 5:20 AM, which in the pub trade is very unusual. You might get a call at 11 P.M., but never at 5 o’clock in the morning.

So I was like, “Hello.”

“Pub’s on fire.”

“What?”

And then he said, “Check your WhatsApp picture.”

So I looked on my WhatsApp picture, and he’d taken a picture from the top of the hill as close as you could get to it. Whole roof’s up.

So it took 8 fire engines to put it out, completely abolished everything really, the whole place was derelict inside.

But it was weird, because by the end of that day one of all the emotions, I spoke to Harry and he was like, “We’re going to bring it back better.”

That was his focus straight away.

I was a bit more emotion, I was like, “Oh no, it’s all gone. We’ll never get it back to what it was.”

But he was like, “We’ll get it back better. We won’t be able to change the print of it, but we’ll be able to design it so it’s more user-friendly, all the little things that make it feel like a warmer pub. Align the kitchen better, so it works smoother,” and that was the mindset.

It took a year to get right, but yeah, 8 fire engines.

Re-opening the Tap & Run

Bex Burn-Callander:

You were insured though, right?

Stuart Broad:

We were insured. Like all insurance, it’s always a bit of a scrap though, isn’t it? But yeah, we got it to exactly where we wanted it to be, and ultimately, came out of it with a positive mindset.

That year, when I’d bump into people it would be, “I was so sorry to hear about your pub,” because it had been on the news.

But then when we re-opened, we had immediate PR because people were like, “Oh, that was the pub that burnt down. Should we go and have a look at what it’s like?”

And because we’d been so strong on making it better, everyone seemed to really love the new fit out and the new style of it.

We did some soft openings to start so we could make sure everything was working fine. And that’s been our mindset throughout the business really, start small so your mistakes are small.

If you go in really heavy without much experience and you make a mistake, then it can be catastrophic, because in every business you’re going to make mistakes.

So the mistakes we made early, we weren’t so heavily invested that it was a real big problem. We could fix it, learn from it, and then put it right in the next pub or the next venture or by the next week.

So that’s what we did with opening the Tap and Run after it burnt down, we opened it to our friends and family. We opened it to the village and asked them to come and give us feedback.

“What do you think? Do you like this? Do you like that?”

“Okay, we’ll put that right.”

“Oh, it’s too hot. Okay, we’ll make sure we fix that.”

All that information, and then bang, we’ll open to everyone.

So we’ve come back as strong as we could ever have wished for. But not by chance, it was because it got redesigned, it got made more user-friendly, better for the customers, great beer garden, and all the staff were buzzing to get it back open.

Start small to grow your vision

Bex Burn-Callander:

Your point there about not taking a risk or not going down an avenue that’s going to be too expensive to double back on or to fix. I’ve spoken to business people, and it’s taken them years to learn that, and you seem to have it straight off the bat.

You are literally driving a path forward that other people, it takes a long, long time, and the hard MBA of life to avoid those mistakes. How did you do that? Did you have great advice, or are you just a natural businessman?

Stuart Broad:

The good thing about having business partners is your constant bounce. You’re always discussing things and very open.

The key to sport changing rooms and to business is you can’t hide anything. You can’t just try and cover a little mistake or something, just be as honest as you possibly can.

So our first pub that we got was I think we could do 50 covers on a Sunday, which is very small. And now we’re up at 250.

But, A, it meant that if you made a mistake, you’d hear about it straight away, because you’ve only got 50 people in the pub or whatever.

But then when COVID came it made it completely impossible for that to reopen, because with 2 metres apart, if you can only get 50 people eating at one time…

Bex Burn-Callander:

Yeah, get 5 people in there.

Stuart Broad:

We had to have more staff than people in there, so that became impossible for us to reopen without making a huge loss straight away.

I can’t remember an exact moment where we decided that we were going to start small, but because we didn’t know much about the industry, we wanted to dip our toe in it rather than go, “We’re going to buy the best, biggest pub in the world and we’re going to make it the best pub in the world.”

That was never the mindset. The mindset is to have the best culture of a pub business, in 10 years’ time.

And in sport you might have a great debut, but you don’t become a Lionel Messi in the first year. So it’s very much building up to learn so much about the industry, that when you do go and get your star pub, it’s perfect.

And now the Tap and Run, it’s a beautiful pub. We can get 220, 230 covers in on a Sunday roast, but now our goal is that will be our smallest ever.

So when we grow, it will always be bigger than the last. Because our experience is more, our staff are better, we’re better informed.

We’ve got comfortable with our suppliers, we know the area, we know the industry. We try and get our pubs all within 10, 15 mile radius so we can use the same staff, use the same suppliers, because it’s going back to that good people thing, people we trust, that then we can grow quicker if you know that you can rely on the people around you.

Don’t build your mindset around achieving success every single day

Bex Burn-Callander:

Yeah, absolutely. And then you’ve mentioned a few setbacks during the course of our conversation and how you’ve come back from them.

And I’d love to know where you found that resilience and how you’ve built that up through your sporting career, the ability to dust yourself off and pick yourself up. And can you tell me how you’ve built that in yourself?

Stuart Broad:

Sports, cricket particularly, is full of, it sounds a bit negative to say but I mean it in a positive way, is full of failure really. It’s not every day you can look at yourself in the mirror at the end of the day and go, “I’ve had a great day.”

Probably looking back at my international career, probably only 10% of the days do you actually go back to your room and go, “Yeah, I have succeeded today. What a great day.”

So if you’re building your whole mindset on success every day, you’re going to be a bit angry at yourself because it won’t work like that.

So managing expectations is crucial in professional sport, but you’re also built on dealing with failure and dealing with it in the right way to put it in a performance, if that makes sense.

You’re going to lose games, it’s natural, you’re going to have off days, but how do you make tomorrow better? How do you make the next day better?

And I think that’s built resilience for me over a long period of time. I made my England debut, I think I was 19, just turned 20. I played until I was 37, so think how many games I lost. A lot. How many times I bowled badly.

But ultimately, I’m very much someone who doesn’t dwell on things for a week, it’s a 24-hour rule, and then I take everything I’ve learned. But I don’t watch things back, I take what I felt and then I move forward in the sporting world.

So I’d never necessarily go back and go, “Oh, on this footage, technically, I think that looks not aligned.” I’d go, “That felt like that was doing that, so I need to put that right.”

So I built resilience through growing my knowledge of feeling what I was as a player and putting it right myself, and not being reliant on coaches.

I think sometimes sports people get the wrong mindset, that they think the coach is there to coach them and make them the player. It’s not true.

The player’s there to make themselves the player. The coach is there to facilitate and to help and to guide. But if you don’t know where you want to be, then how’s the coach going to know?

Actually, I was just sat on the Sage Small Business 11 call, I don’t know if you know much about that, but it’s something we’ve put together with 10 other small businesses. To have a community to talk and to help grow, and ask silly questions that you might feel like you can’t ask or employ someone to ask and stuff.

And one of the small business owners came on with the best bit of advice he’d had. And it’s so interesting to just listen to how other people see things, isn’t it?

It’s so good to just pick brains and listen to other people, but he said the best bit of advice he had was an old friend of his say, “Well, know exactly what you want.”

And that sounds so basic, but he said it changed his life. Because he said, “I don’t know, I don’t know what I want.”

He said, “Well, where’d you start it? Where are you going then?”

And from that moment he was like, “Well, I’m going to decide what I want, and then I know I can plot a route to achieve it.”

And I think that’s really important in business and in sport. As a player in sport I knew what I wanted. I knew that I wanted to represent England, but in a winning way. I didn’t just want to get a cap and wear it and go, “I’m proud.”

I wanted to win in the cap and create memories in the cap, and continuously improve and drive the game forward.

In business, if you go into it not knowing where you want to end up or what you want to be, then you can float around and have a slight loss of direction.

We started The Cat & Wickets pub company a little bit like that, a bit like, “It’s a hobby, it’s fun. It’s great to have a Sunday roast in a good pub.”

Whereas now we’re like, “No, we want 10 pubs in 10 years,” and we want to be set up so that every pub gets bigger every time we get one.

But the culture never and the quality never leaves us, it’s actually the quality gets better in every pub. The worst thing that could happen is we have a great pub, we get a big one, and you go to it and go, “Oh, it’s not quite as good.” The business has to be in a place where the quality continues.

So we know exactly where we want to be, and we’re not there yet, we’ve got 2. But we know where we want to be, and that’s how I can see how the sport and business links.

Bex Burn-Callander:

How many pubs do you want to have? What would be the golden number that you’re aiming?

Stuart Broad:

I think the aim in the short term is 5 as quickly as we can with retaining quality, but we’re not going to make a mistake on a pub. We always research everything about it.

So we’re not just going to rush in and think, “Oh, that could be a good pub.” We need to know that that’s something that we could develop and do really well.

And there’s a lot of pubs coming up at the moment. It’s a tough industry, like I mentioned to you, cautiously optimistic.

It’s not an industry that you can go into knowing that you’re going to be a success, but there are opportunities to turn brilliant buildings and brilliant pubs that have been amazing to communities into exceptional pubs that people fall in love with again.

Bex Burn-Callander:

It’s interesting that you’ve gone from sport, where you live on a knife edge, to hospitality, where you live on an knife edge. You don’t go for an easy life.

Stuart Broad:

No, I should do really, really, shouldn’t I?

Learn the power of appreciation

Bex Burn-Callander:

Everything that you’ve learned while building this business, there must have been some outstanding lessons that you might think would be useful to people who are running cricket clubs, local cricket clubs, because a lot of them are really struggling at the moment.

How would you suggest that they make their businesses more resilient and attract more people, and just keep becoming more sustainable as a business, as a going concern?

Stuart Broad:

Ultimately, I’ve grown up through cricket clubs, Egerton Park in Melton Mowbray was mine. And one thing that is so evident in cricket clubs is that community feel, is that it’s a people’s place. It’s where people volunteer to do everything.

I used to turn up at Egerton Park, and to set the game up, just to be able to start, you’d need to put the flags around the boundary, you’d need to put nets across the river at one side. You need to open the scoreboard, you need to paint the lines.

So everyone would just muck in. And I think you gain respect for teammates and friends at cricket clubs like that when people just crack on and muck in and do their thing, don’t they?

And I used to drive to away games in the second team from memory with an accountant who would do all the books of the cricket club, just as a favour, as a voluntary thing.

And the communities of cricket clubs are so strong, but again, they’re based on great people, aren’t they, and respect. And that’s where Egerton Park was so superb.

And the same faces who have played there for 20 years, are still playing there now, when I’ve been through and finished a whole international career, they’re still playing there with the same people, which is a great sign.

So I suppose the advice for cricket clubs is continue to value everybody and realise how much it takes to put on a Saturday afternoon of cricket, but realise people love doing it as well.

So feed off that and feed off the energy of the good people that are around, because people want to feel valued.

If you are scoring or opening the score box, or doing the tees or pulling the pints, if you get satisfaction out of doing that and you feel valued and loved around there, and you’ve got a social life from doing it and you make friends from doing it, then that community will continue.

If people are rude to you or don’t make you feel welcome, or criticise your work, then you’re not going to keep doing it, are you?

So it’s all that same things that motivate a sports team, a changing room, or a business, to drive people forward is be as good a person as you could possibly be and feed positive energy into the place.

Put on the best show for your customers

Bex Burn-Callander:

On that point of being the positive leader and driving the culture, do you feel like leading a business is similar to leading a cricket team, or are there quite fundamental differences there?

Stuart Broad:

I think it’s very similar. Harry Gurney, who is MD of The Cat & Wickets, he sees it as virtually exactly the same actually.

He often talks about representing the badge of The Cat & Wickets pub company, it’s a very sporting term. But if you can feel pride in putting the outfit on, then you’ll feel pride in your work and you’ll want people to have a great time. And you want people to praise your work.

If you’ve hosted a table and they’ve had the best night ever because it’s the parent’s 50th, you want them to remember that day. And you can be a big part of making them have a special day.

And that’s definitely the culture, almost seeing yourself in the entertainment industry.

In cricket, you are in the entertainment industry, people are giving up their weekends to come and watch you at Lord’s or the Oval or something.

And it’s the same in the pub industry, people are giving up their time to come and experience what you’ve got to show them. So make it the best show you possibly can.

I say give them everything they want, if anyone watches this…

But if they want something different with their food then we do everything we can to accommodate that, or they want something different for a birthday.

Or they let us know it’s their birthday, bottle of champagne on the table, all that sort of thing is part of what we’re there for.

And our staff buy into that incredibly, they know that the customer comes first. And we as business owners know that our employees are the most important thing, because if our employees are happy, then the customers will be happy.

Incorporate your personality into your business

Bex Burn-Callander:

And you were such an entertainer in cricket, you are so famous for flipping the bales or edging the ball and refusing to walk. The amount of noise and response online to some of your antics, and a lot of it was hilarious.

Do you feel like you are able to express yourself in the same way now and still be cheeky in your own way, or is that consigned to your cricket career?

Stuart Broad:

Good question, yeah. We’ve actually filmed a few little idents for the pub, where I’m washing the floors or pulling the pints, and Harry’s stunned I’m there.

Or I’d be saying, “Come on Harry, all hands-on deck. Go and wash the dishes.”

So very tongue-in-cheek and a bit of fun, because I remember I pulled the first pint in our first ever pub, and I said, “That’s the last time I’m going to do that. That’s for the professionals.”

I’m very happy drinking them on the other side. As I played, I did often get energy off the crowd and look for the mischievous thing in the game that could create a bit of a story outside the cricket.

So there’s always that mindset, on the board of the pubs, I play the devil’s advocate. I’m always the, “Why, what are we doing that for? What’s the reason? Can you explain that?”

And that’s my role, but never in an awkward way or a difficult way, but I like playing that role of questioning. I need a reason for that.

I’m quite stats driven. I like the analytics of everything, but with that I need to know why. I need to know what’s the reason we’re spending that money on that, is that going to really help us?

Although I took my cricket extremely seriously, I wouldn’t say I take myself overly seriously.

So I’m not offended by anything. Genuinely I don’t get offended, I’m very much open for a bit of cheeky conversation on the odd occasion with the business.

Bex Burn-Callander:

I’m not going to try and test that thesis, how can I offend Stuart Broad? Not doing it.

Master the art of perfect timing

Bex Burn-Callander:

I wanted to ask a little bit about adaptability, because you seemed very good in your career at taking the best at what coaches were offering, at what people were saying to you, from analysing your own game and shifting focus and adapting to new situations, do you feel you’ve been able to do that in business in the same way and be very reactive?

Or do you feel like you’ve had to, I don’t know, move a bit more slowly in that way? As you said earlier, small steps rather than big, full-scale pivots.

Stuart Broad:

I think small steps, but we’re very curious. We’re always looking at ways to improve the business. I think if you get comfortable in your environment, you get slow.

So we’re never a business that’s going to rest on our laurels and be like, “Oh, things are great now.” Because if you slow down, then the pub down the road is going to be trying something different and can hop ahead of you.

We’re definitely stepping in a bit more into obviously how important social media is, what’s the right times for us to post certain things? No point posting a gin and tonic at 11 o’clock on a Tuesday morning.

Bex Burn-Callander:

I don’t know, there might be a market for that.

Stuart Broad:

But we’re definitely on the mindset that you want someone in the village to click on your Instagram and go, “Wow, I fancy that now. Can I get down to the pub and have that now?”

So can you encourage 2 for 1 at some stage, or make something look so attractive at the right time that people are finishing work or fancy socialising?

I’d say we’re definitely, without a cricket pun, pushing the boundaries internally for us, but without being too extravagant outwardly because it’s the pub trade. And ultimately your customers do like familiarity, they like consistency, they want consistent quality.

So if you try too many things at once, you can lose that rhythm to the flow of the pub. And actually you go to a pub because you know what you’re going to get a lot of the time, don’t you?

You know you want good quality, you know you want a nice Sunday roast, a couple of beers, a bottle of red or whatever, great dessert, a nice view, all that sort of thing.

If you try and overcomplicate it too much, you could lose sight of what you do really, really well.

But within the board we’re constantly going, “What’s our next thing? What’s our next thing? What’s our next thing?” Because that’s an important mindset to have.

Use self-reflection notes to maintain a positive mindset

Bex Burn-Callander:

On mindset, how do you look after your mental health? How do you maintain a positive mindset?

There’s been a lot of sad news in the cricket world this week. How do you look after, I suppose, yourself, your mental strength?

Stuart Broad:

Actually, I write notes, I don’t like that saying journaling, because it does sound a little bit wishy washy. But I always have throughout my cricketing career and continued since moving away from that, I just jot down things on my mind first thing in the morning, if it’s 5 minutes with a coffee or something.

And it’s generally of the rhythm of, what’s important for me today? What am I grateful for? What’s on my mind?

Because it gives me a drive for that day, so in cricket I might have written, engage the crowd today, so I know that’s my target. So actually if I do engage the crowd, my goal’s achieved, doesn’t matter if I get no wickets.

What’s important, a lot of the time, it’s about making other people feel uplifted. Or in the cricketing culture, under Brendon McCullum, what wasn’t appreciated is walking into a room, “How you feeling mate?” “A bit tired.”

Because then if I sound a bit tired, then you suddenly feel, “Actually, I might be a bit tired,” and it’s a bit of a knock-on effect.

So even if I was feeling really tired, I’d write in my notes. So I’d write, “Be aware that you’re feeling tired,” because I’m always really honest in them, “Be aware that you’re tired, but actually when you get in the room, praise something straight away so it’s a positive thing.”

So you walk in, and it’s, “How are you feeling?”

“That’s the best coffee on the circuit that, isn’t it? How good’s the coffee at breakfast, it’s unbelievable?”

And then bang, you’re into the day. So that doesn’t mean that you’re not tired, but it means that you flip your mindset into believing that.

You’re accepting your tired, but actually can you give off a positive energy?

So I still try and do that as much as I can. Actually, I notice if I haven’t done my notes for a couple of days or just been here, there, and everywhere, I can find my mind does keep thinking of a variety of different things, whereas actually if I write it down, it’s out my brain onto paper.

And then I can refer to it or see it. But I write how I want my mind to operate in that day basically, which means that I’ve got something to reflect on a little bit and review against a bit.

There might be times when I’ve been a bit too busy on my phone when Annabella’s at home, and that makes me feel sad when I do that.

So I then write it down and say, “Just be aware, you don’t need to be on your phone. Your daughter’s the most important thing, you don’t need to be anywhere near your phone.”

And then the next time I think, “Oh, I’ll just check that.”

Then it will click in, “Actually, I don’t need to check it. Nothing’s more important than what’s in this room right now.”

Bex Burn-Callander:

It does. That’s fantastic advice. That’s really beautiful advice, and I think that’s something that everyone can do. Just focus on small, achievable wins for that day, and don’t try and do everything.

Stuart Broad:

Every 4 years in my career, I wrote a brainstorm with a big goal, whether it’s the next Ashes or whatever, and I’d circle it.

And then I’d over time, write little things that I would think would be important for me to get that. It might be, “Need to be working really hard in October, fitness is everything,” or, “Blah, blah, blah.”

But I check that once every quarter, 2, 3, 4 months, it wouldn’t be a daily thing. Whereas my notes, it would try and be daily, and I could flick through them.

Even if it was one line that was annoying me. Bang, and then it’s not annoying me, it’s annoying the paper. That was my theory.

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