Belonging: The Ancient Code of Togetherness: The International No. 1 Bestseller

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One of the wisest books about winning you'll ever read... Powerful lessons beautifully expressed' - James Kerr The most important question every leader must answer: What is the optimal environment for this group to perform to their best? The answer always contains a component of belonging. The challenge. To create an environment where everyone feels like they belong, regardless of who they are and what they believe. While the book and Owen are largely oriented around sport teams and situations, ‘Belonging’ is as significant (if not more so) in the realms of the workplace, home and wider whānau (family). Working with the NATO Command Group, Eastwood invoked whakapapa to reflect on previous NATO Command Groups, looking at the challenges they faced when the sun shone on them and the legacies they ultimately left. They then previewed their own legacy as the sixteenth leadership team and articulated this in writing with a whakapapa legacy statement. I feel that a Rory McIlroy or a Harry Kane, they want to be connected to something bigger than themselves and to have a special bone-deep relationship with people around them. And I’m yet to find an example where that’s not true,” Eastwood says.

A maori spiritual adviser adds that a healthy culture would take a moment of pain, and then ‘carve the story into our walls’, so that the current group, and future descendants, can learn from our experiences. Gareth Southgate’s England Football Team– https://www.theguardian.com/football/2021/jul/09/whakapapa-maori-belief-helping-england-find-team-spirit It starts with belonging. And we needing to understand that we have this not only a psychological but biological need to belong. Once we have a sense of belonging, our anxiety levels start to come down and our dopamine levels, oxytocin levels, you know this stuff better than me, Michael, they become imbalance and we get into this optimal state where we can go and compete from. So belonging is somewhere where we start from. For me, a critical factor of high-performing teams is this idea of a vision and they visualize it as deeply as an individual visualizes their own performance. Having a shared vision

Owen has worked with some of the very best teams and organisations both in the UK and abroad. Of Maori descent, that’s also a driver that’s fuelled his thinking around purpose, leadership, role models, success and much more. For the last five years he’s been a consultant to Gareth Southgate’s England team as well as recently consulting with the new Premiership Rugby Champions, Harlequins and thee are stories about those teams as well as many more examples along the way. That means no complex models, no fancy diagrams. Eastwood draws on our “evolutionary super strength” to connect and belong that seems so blindingly obvious, you wonder how it ever dropped out of sport. Working “in the shadows”, offering a sounding board to captains, coaches and chief executives, Eastwood urges them to embrace emotions. In Māori culture, the principle of Whakapapa places oneself in a wider context that links to land and tribal groupings and heritage. It offers a sense of immortality, attaching ourselves to something permanent in this impermanent world. But it’s also important that ritual and traditions have a presence beyond the induction of new members to keep everyone connected and maintain their collective sense of identity. These may include a ritual to commence a new campaign, closure on certain events or chapters, and rites of passage events such as milestones and, importantly, beloved members transitioning out of the team.

A copy of Eastwood's new book, Belonging , was given to every England player when they reported for duty at the European Championships' - Telegraph But there is another world. Where the hormone soup recipe is wrong and doesn’t allow us to be at our best. Clearly here is no performance benefit in this. Social Anthropologist, Harvey Whitehouse, says that sharing difficulties or pain can create ‘identify fusion’, and have two tangible benefits for the group. Firstly, the group creates more intense togetherness through the sharing or a mistake or a difficult moment; secondly, reflecting on the painful moments often creates practical lessons for the future. Whakapapa is a Maori idea which embodies our universal human need to belong. It represents a powerful spiritual belief—that each of us is part of an unbroken and unbreakable chain of people who share a sacred identity. Owen places this concept at the core of his methods to maximise a team's performance.Eastwood believes responsibility for culture must sit at the top of sporting organisations. He argues that boards should be setting the “cultural blueprint” for their sporting environments, not leaving it up to the whims of the latest head coach. Abraham Maslow’s ‘Hierarchy of Needs’ model says the base need for humans is physiological survival. The next level is safety, then our need for belonging. These are the three base needs. Once they are met, we move to the psychological need for esteem and then self-actualisation. Neither do we exist merely to execute plans or strategies or KPI’s disconnected from an Us story. That is soulless. In some ways, Eastwood, who has also worked with the British Olympic Association, the Royal Ballet School and the command group of Nato is the secret weapon. On Thursday, in the aftermath of Wednesday’s victory, he was in dialogue with Southgate. But the quote I liked most was his reflection on how the team grew. ‘What was important was that we lived it together’.

At this stage a paradox plays out. We enter self-preservation mode as our mind begins to think about surviving rather than succeeding.

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If you want to get the best out of people in the Ryder Cup team or football team or Royal Ballet School or whatever, you have to connect them to something bigger than themselves and connect them to people around them.” Connecting to the future requires asking what the team’s vision is - what they are working towards and what the environment needs to enable and drive towards.

Humans need to belong, it is an element of performance. “We try to signal to players that this is a place where you belong. You are respected, this is a safe place, we want you to be yourself and express yourself.” We do not want our leaders’ personal beliefs forced upon us - we want our tribe’s authentic values articulated. And we don’t want rules - we want values to aspire to that define what it means to be part of our tribe.An understanding of the environment and its impact on people is more important than charisma and passion. Plus clarity of thinking. “Humans flourish in environments where the leadership is consistent and composed; they don’t tend to thrive in environments where there are wild mood swings and inconsistency of behaviour.”