Coaching Culture with Ben Herring
Coaching Culture with Ben Herring is your weekly deep-dive into the often-overlooked “softer skills” of coaching—cultural innovation, communication, empathy, leadership, dealing with stress, and motivation. Each episode features candid conversations with the world’s top international rugby coaches, who share the personal stories and intangible insights behind their winning cultures, and too their biggest failures and learnings from them. This is where X’s and O’s meet heart and soul, empowering coaches at every level to foster authentic connections, inspire their teams, and elevate their own coaching craft. If you believe that the real gold in rugby lies beyond the scoreboard, Coaching Culture is the podcast for you.
Coaching Culture with Ben Herring
Reflections: Bens Book Review
A dusty bookshelf turned into a wake-up call. While sorting old favorites, we found a box of Tuesdays with Morrie—and that rediscovery became a fresh look at how culture, love, and emotion shape the way we coach and lead. What starts as a short memoir about weekly visits to a dying professor unfolds into a clear-eyed syllabus for living with purpose when the world keeps pushing speed, status, and more.
We walk through the story’s simple structure—Tuesdays as classes—and pull out the lessons that stick. First, the culture you inherit is not the culture you must accept. When status and achievement drown out meaning, leaders have the right and responsibility to choose a different path. Then we get to the heart of it: love is the point. Not soft or vague, but the kind of connection that builds trust, fuels standards, and makes hard feedback land without breaking people. Love shows up in how a team trains, how a staff supports each other, and how we stay human on tough days.
We close with the most uncomfortable and useful skill: feeling emotion fully and moving through it. Maurie refuses to harden, and that choice becomes a model for performance under pressure. Emotional honesty creates stronger rooms, better decisions, and real resilience. As the book’s final pages remind us, high standards and deep care can live together, and leadership is not only what you demand; it’s what you give. If you’ve ever questioned what you’re chasing—or how to build a culture that actually helps people thrive—this conversation will meet you right where you are.
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If you can SUBSCRIBE, RATE, and SHARE the show and series, you would be doing your bit to grow this show. Very appreciated. Ben
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Today's reflection episode is going to be a little bit different because I was cleaning out the bookshelf the other day, just this week, in fact, and we have a truckload of books. We went through a period there uh is about 10 years ago where we were just reading for Africa. My wife and I love to read, and we were just going through books like they were a tap of water, just just going through them. And we've got boxes and boxes in the attic, which have been shipped around with us all over the world. And I went about just moving those into boxes, and I came across a whole box of my favorite book. Literally a book, a box of books, 20 of them. And I wanted to share it because it's my favorite book. The book is called Tuesdays with Maury by Mitch Albaum or Mitch Album. And I wanted to just talk about my favorite book today. It's a bit of a book recommendation for you. If you need something to read, uh, which is a powerful book and relates to coaching, even though it's not at all a coaching book, I think it's massive. And I'll I'll give you the rundown here. Full disclosure, I will let you know what happens in the book, but it doesn't matter because it is obvious what's going to happen. It's how it's written, how it's organized, and the beautiful content that comes out of it, which really leaves a mark. It's one of those books which is powerful because it's a true story. So here it is, and I and I recommend you read it. It's a short, easy read. No matter what your reading ability is, you'll get through it and probably a sitting, you'll start it and you'll keep going for a few hours till you finish it. It's that sort of book. And what it is is a short memoir built around simply a weekly ritual. One former student goes back to his old professor, Maury, Schwartz is his name. He goes to his house once a week, every week, because Maury is dying of ALS. And they talk every Tuesday. And each class, every Tuesday, becomes a lesson on how to live. And for me, it's so powerful because it's beautifully written by Mitch. He writes his his writing is just simply simple and beautiful. So the setup is this that uh Mitch is himself, he is a busy, successful, always Russian sort of guy. He sees Maury on TV, learns he's dying, and feels this pull to go back. And he's an author. So he starts visiting his old professor, visiting Maury every Tuesday, like he's returning um to university for one last course. So the book is organized like a syllabus, and each Tuesday has a topic, and each visit depend deepens the lesson. And between each visit, I suppose, Mitch reflects on his own stuff and how he's been shaped by work and pressure and chasing stuff and builds on what Maury is talking about. And I just want to run through why I love this book and and the couple of the big themes which I which resonate, and they are human stuff, but for me I also love it because it relates to what I do every day in terms of coaching. And here's number one, here's my first takeaway that I get, and this is one of the themes is the world will sell you a story. The world will sell you a story, more money, more status, more achievement. Maury calls this um like the culture that drags people away from what matters. That the culture that we live in is such at the moment where it's not always highlighting what's truly important in life, it's all this other stuff, the status, the money, the achievement. And sometimes when a dying man on his deathbed is talking about what's really important, it it cuts a little bit deeper, I suppose. So that concept of the world will sell you a story. And for me, it's important because in coaching too, you get sort of um you get told potentially or you get this feeling of what you should be as a coach and what it's all about. And sometimes you get lost up in the results and those sort of things. You forget what coaching actually is, is actually growing people and creating something, a community around a sport and the love of it. And and sometimes the culture of coaching is lost and it gets lost into this bigger thing of the drive to win all the time. And a certain at most levels, it's just not needed or wanted, but we forget it. So I think it's the same principle. The second massive theme is love is the point. Love is the point, relationships, family, friends, community. Maury keeps returning to this concept that it's it's not trite, it is it is the whole point, the whole point of what we're living. And I think it's important to keep coming back to that. A lot of teams use that word love as is a driver for connection. Brendan Venter at Saracens used to have the word love emblazoned on the collar inside the shirt, just to remind everyone that's what you're putting on, like a degree, like a massive amount of love. And that that's what's needed when you're going out there and playing a game of rugby. Love is the point, it's the passion, it's the enjoyments, the camaraderie, all that stuff. That's the big stuff. And sometimes that gets disguised with other stuff. And the last one, the last thing that I love that Maury talks about is not fearing emotion, feeling it fully, learning from it, and then moving through it, rather than letting it sort of harden you, and and in in your old age, particularly, to see an old man go through such uh a painful, horrendous way to go out. Um, and he felt it and he made it clear that he felt it and he learned from it, and then he moved through it and didn't let him self become bitter and twisted and all that stuff, which is easy to do. And I I I think that's important too in in in our profession as coaches, even if it's not a profession, if it's a hobby, don't fear the emotion, like embrace it uh uh and learn from it and and let people see it, and that that's a cool thing. So that that's that's kind of the the big themes that I got out of. There's there's a lot more because every chapter is a different uh learning, but the ending is is powerful because ultimately you don't come back from ALS, um, he declines, and but a spirit always stays sharp. And the final couple of Tuesdays, man, they're just tender and raw. Um and I and after Maury dies, the Mitch is left sort of carrying this course forward, sharing what he learns, and he's written this book about it. Um and and kind of he sums up the book at the end, which I think is relevant for coaches. He says it's a reminder, this book of Maury is a reminder that high standards and deep care can live together, and that leadership is not only what you demand, it's what you give. And I thought I thought that's a lovely way to finish a book. The leadership is not only what you demand, it's what you give. Now, for me, this book really stood out, and and I've left a couple of teams um and moved to other teams, and my parting gift to all the staff, um, and the reason why I have a box of 20 books is I bought a hundred of these books. That's how much I valued it and thought it was an outstanding book. And I gave them away to all the staff, and and some of those organizations had 30 or so staff and gave all the staff this book as my sort of parting shot and say thank you for the time together because it's a beautiful book. And whether you're into beautiful reads or not, if you're gonna read a book which is just a lovely read and that'll it'll do something to you, go get the book and have a good time. And I want to leave you today with some just a couple of quotes, three quotes from the book, just to just to give you a little bit of insight to the the kind of tone that Mitch takes writing about Maury. So here are here they are. Here's quote number one, which I think um really really laid something on me. The culture we have does not make people feel good about themselves. And you have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn't work, don't buy it. I love that quote. If the culture doesn't work, don't buy it. That's for me, that's cool. It's just that like you you want a coach culture that you agree with, that you think is they've got the right ethics, all that stuff. If it's not working, don't buy into it. I think that's cool. As a person myself, I love trying to create cultures and and you want ones which are which have a lot of goodness to them. And if it doesn't work, be strong enough to say, hey, I'm not gonna I'm not gonna buy into it. They talk about in the book some things in in culture you buy into it, whether you agree with it or not, like traffic lights. You go, uh, I know where they're there, they serve a purpose. Yeah, okay, fine. But there's other stuff which which doesn't, which will pop up regularly. Here's quote number two. So many people walk around with a meaningless life. They seem half asleep, even when they're busy doing things they think are important. I I mean I again the just something about these in the context of these that are in the book, but it does seem like that sometimes. Turning up to jobs and just being okay with them. And I love that um volunteers volunteer to coach rugby because they love it. And that's that's so awesome to hear. The the job, uh, an eight or five may not be enjoyable at all, but the little bit that isn't actually important is coaching an under-14 rugby team. Just to get that connection to help young kids enjoy running around with their mates. I love it. Now the last thing, number three, is is this slightly longer quote, two sentences instead of one. If you hold back on emotions, on the emotions, if you don't allow yourself to go all the way through them, you can never get to being detached. You're too busy being afraid. Take any emotion, love for a woman or grief for a loved one, or what I'm going through, fear and pain. If you hold back on the emotion, you're too busy being afraid of it. I really enjoy this. I enjoy this from a coaching perspective because often we're taught to be um have different sorts of emotions instead of being actually what you're emotional about. And um I personally have had a couple of things which got me a little bit where um I had to make presentations to um players and and some old staff members and it I choked up a little bit and I was a little bit shocked that it happened. But um when it did, it was kind of like, wow, that's that's a breakthrough for me. Not always been that way. So people, I hope everyone's well. And if you've got a bit of time and you want to do some reading, um jump on Amazon or wherever you get your books and um have a read of that one, the library. Tuesdays with Maury, Mitchell Bauman. If I'd love any comments, if you loved it, if you read and love it, and you want to chuck a few quotes back at me, hit me. Love to hear them. Till next time, stay well.