Mental strength is built by reviewing failure, says former England rugby star James Haskell

James Haskell built his career in rugby’s hardest environments. A former England flanker, British & Irish Lions tourist, Premiership champion and Six Nations Grand Slam winner, he played through the pressure, scrutiny and setbacks that define elite sport.

His career took him from Wasps to France, Japan and New Zealand, before he became one of rugby’s most recognisable voices off the pitch.

Now a broadcaster, author, podcast host and mental resilience expert, Haskell speaks with the same directness that shaped his playing career.

His message is clear: performance is built through habits, honest reflection, resilience and the ability to learn from failure.

In this exclusive interview with the London Keynote Speakers Agency, James Haskell discusses the behaviours that separate elite performers, why failure needs a process behind it, and how mental strength can be developed long after the final whistle.

Q1: At the top level, what are the controllable habits that separate athletes when talent alone is not enough?

James Haskell: “I think the habits are around what you can control: resilience, consistency, the desire to get better, being prepared to work when others aren’t, reaching out to others for feedback, and having self-awareness.

“There’s no miracle answer to reducing those margins. The honest answer is that if you do all the things that require no skill, those margins are reduced.

“In rugby terms, that means how quickly you run, how quickly you get off the floor, and how much you communicate. Those require no skill. You can do them to the best of your ability.

“Whether you play well, or whether your team plays well, is out of your control. But if you can go to bed at night and be totally honest with yourself, and say, ‘I’ve done these things,’ then you’ve managed what you can control.

“Being consistent, being prepared, being aware, listening, asking how you get better, and seeking the opinions of people who have achieved what you want to achieve are all very important.”

Q2: After a mistake or setback, what separates those who learn from it from those who let it affect the next performance?

James Haskell: “I think people are often scared of failure. There’s a great analogy: you only ever see the final creation of an artist hanging on the wall, in an exhibition, or in a gallery.

“You never see the hundreds of sketches, the failed paintings, and the work that didn’t get to where they wanted it to be.

“The ability to deal with failure, accept it, embrace it, and not be frightened of mistakes is important. Life is a complete smorgasbord of people making mistakes. That’s how they achieve.

“Once you can embrace failure, you need a process to back it up. If I missed a tackle when I played, and I hadn’t put a process into that tackle, I could only look back and say, ‘I missed a tackle. That’s bad.’

“But if I had a process, I could look at where my feet were, where my head was, what sensation I wanted to have, and what little triggers I needed. Then I could say, ‘My footwork wasn’t there. My head wasn’t there.’ If I fix those things, I make the tackle.

“In life and in business, if you put processes around things, then when something fails, you can go back, reflect on it, see where you need to adjust, and move forward.

“You should be emotionally disappointed by failure. You should allow yourself a couple of days to be pissed off. But ultimately, you should then say, ‘Right, this is a chance to reset.’

“It comes back to the things you control. Within that failure, did I do everything I needed to do? If it were a business meeting or a campaign, did I prepare properly? Did I get other people to check what I was trying to do? Did I put a process in place? Did I understand what I was trying to achieve? Did I give it enough time? Did I sleep properly before the presentation?

“When you reflect on the failure, you can look back and ask, ‘Where was the learning?’ If you breach your glass ceiling and can’t get past it, you can reach out to someone else and say, ‘This is the process. This is what we did. On paper, this should work. Why doesn’t it?’ Then they can help you reflect.

“Failure should be seen as an important learning curve once you take the emotion out of it. People become defined by failure when they are worried about taking risks and making mistakes.

“But life is about mistakes. You have to fail to achieve. Every billionaire and every successful company failed before they became successful.

“It should be disappointing. It should not be something you want. But if it happens, you should see it as an opportunity to get better.

“Some people are crushed by failure. But if you fall off a horse, you have to get back on it. If you get injured, you need to pick yourself back up again. If you make a mistake, you have to do it again, because that’s what life is about.

“Ultimately, when you are successful, you have a rich tapestry of things behind you that make up the failure. It gives much more context and wealth to your success.”

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Q3: What do good leaders in sport and business need to understand about themselves before they can get the best out of others?

James Haskell: “Leadership takes as much work as anything else. A lot of people become leaders without qualifications or any forethought into how to be a leader.

“The first thing about being a leader is that you have to understand yourself. How are you as a person? How do you speak? How do you learn? How do you perform? What are your weaknesses? What are your positives? What kind of leader are you? What kind of leader do you want to be? What has shaped you in your life? Is it your parents, other people, or other bosses? What baggage do you have?

“Once you understand yourself, you have to look at the team. If you’ve got a team full of hippies, or people who are very ethereal and relaxed, there’s no point bringing in regimented discipline and being hardline if you’ve got a load of sensitive sausages in your business. They’re not going to take it.

“You need to look at the team, look at the individuals, learn about them, and ask: what’s my central strategy? How can I deliver that? How can I bring these people into what I need them to do? How do I individually get the best out of each one of them?

“It takes a lot of micromanagement. You might also have to accept that you’re not good at delivering emotional speeches, but someone in your team can put those messages across. A leader is only as good as the people around him. It’s not a solo mission.

“You don’t need Churchillian speeches. You need the right balance of emotional intelligence, IQ and EQ. You need to understand that some people in your team might not be the right people for that job, and you might need to move things around to shape what you want to do.

“You also need to know your own frailty, so you can have people around you who can upskill you. As a leader, you’re not going to be everything. Your team around you is very important.

“You need people around you who can challenge you. But if you don’t have self-awareness, challenges will just feel like an attack. At some point, especially with men, the male ego is a real thing. You need to step back and be reflective.

“My dad taught me a great saying: ‘You can lie to everyone else, but you can’t lie to yourself.’ Everybody knows deep down whether they put the work in, whether they’re difficult, whether they’re aggressive, whether they’re lazy, whether they drink too much, or eat too much food when no one’s looking.

“As a leader, you have to put as much work into your own leadership skill and talent as you do into the job itself. It’s not a 9-to-5 job, it’s a 5-to-9 job. You can’t just be you and do the job. Leadership is a whole separate enterprise that might require you to get better over years.

“The leader you are today and the leader you want to become could be miles apart. It takes time, and you have to work with other leaders and other people to become successful.”

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Q4: What should people take from your talks about resilience, pressure and mental strength?

James Haskell: “It depends on the topic I’m discussing, but I want audiences to come away understanding that there are no miracle answers.

“However exciting the fads, schemes and hyperbole might sound, there are concrete fundamentals that have never changed: control, resilience, self-awareness and feedback.

“I want people to enjoy it. I want there to be smiles and laughs. But more importantly, I want them to take one thing away. It might be, ‘You can lie to everyone else, but you can’t lie to yourself.’

“It might be, ‘What you put in is what you get out.’ It might be the question: ‘Do I ever sit and review my performance? Am I willing to listen to feedback from other people? Do I have self-awareness?’

“I don’t want audiences to agree with everything. I also don’t want everyone to like me all the time, because you would have to be very vanilla, boring and beige for everyone to like what you say.

“I want people to come away thinking, ‘I challenged that. I liked that. I didn’t like that.’ But I want it to make them think.

“I also want men in particular to understand that mental health, or mental strength, is something you have to consistently work on. If you could have fixed it yourself, you would have fixed it yourself. You need to reach out to other people to get tools to make yourself better.

“Your mentality and mind control everything you do. If you can’t see the wood for the trees, or you can’t deal with problems, criticism, anger, your partner, or life, then managing that properly can help you progress.

“If I told people they could get skinnier by injecting themselves with a random drug bought online, 90% would do it. If I told them they could change their entire life by speaking to a therapist or psychologist and building tools, most wouldn’t do it.

“That’s the stupidity of the world we live in. People are always looking for miracles, when there are probably fundamental building blocks that can change your life, your business, or whatever you’re trying to achieve.”

This exclusive interview with James Haskellwas conducted by Tabish Ali of the Motivational Speakers Agency.

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