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: Twenty Years, Five Lessons In Love And Coaching
Download Bens free Culture Playbook here: https://www.coachingculture.com.au/Bens_Culture_Playbook
A 20-year anniversary felt like the right moment to unpack how love, family, and coaching actually work together in real life. I share five lessons that kept our marriage strong and made me a better pro rugby coach: trusting instinct, choosing adventure together, building a home that tells the truth kindly, parenting with intent, and staying fit to protect connection and clarity. It’s the honest version—fast decisions that paid off, moves across continents that stretched us, and late-night debriefs that turned into our best leadership practice.
We start with the story of proposing after just eighteen days and why listening to a strong gut signal can be powerful if you’re willing to back it up with commitment. From there, I talk about the years abroad—Japan, new languages, schools for the kids—and the resilience that grows when your partner turns uncertainty into momentum. The heartbeat of it all is feedback at home: a brave foil who calls you out, asks better questions, and helps you see the person on the other side of your decisions. That habit built our family culture as an environment for growth and made my coaching calmer and more humane.
Parenting four kids taught us to coach different personalities without slipping into nagging. We focused on intent, timing, tone, and the shared good. And we chose health as a daily promise, training together to stay present, confident, and sharp for each other and for the teams I lead. If you care about leadership, relationships, or the craft of coaching, these lessons are practical, lived-in, and ready to use. If the conversation resonates, follow the show, share it with a friend who needs it, and leave a quick review so others can find it.
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Welcome to Reflections. Today is a very special uh week because it is a 20-year wedding anniversary for myself, myself and my lovely wife, Kyle. And she's been right there beside me through massive ups and downs of professional rugby uh coaching the whole 16 years as a professional coach. She's been there the whole time. And I just want to reflect on that aspect for coaches out there, have that little bit of time, uh, mainly for myself, but also just to give listeners, yourselves, a bit a little bit of insight to me and in what made me tick and what's helped uh lasting 20 years in this sort of game, which is not always the case. A lot of my contemporaries, a lot of my peers in this uh industry, you're either indestructible uh relationship-wise, or you you don't have a relationship. Seems to be one of those two extremes. So I just want to give you five points about my my amazing partner, woman that I ever loved immensely, and I reckon I love her more now than I ever have. I tell her that regularly and she always rolls her eyes at it, but I do. I honestly um I'm more passionately in love with her now than I than I have than I ever have been, including our wedding dates. 20 years. Here's five things that um how she has helped shape me as a coach and our journey. Number one, we got married, um, engaged, uh, I proposed her in 18 days after after we sort of had our first day together. We we had known each other previously, but we just decided, I thought about it for about 20 seconds and then proposed her. We're in a in Otago, sitting on a rock, and I just thought this would be a wonderful place to propose to someone, and then I thought, could I? And then I did it. I just said, Would you marry me? And she said, he asked me, and I said, Yeah. And she said, All right. And 18 days before engagement, six months later, we're married, and we were ringing uh friends of ours, and we told a couple that, Did you know we were um dating? And they said, get out of town. And then we said, We're actually getting married as well, the wedding's in a couple of months. And they're like, What is going on? And I just reflect on that because it's something that I've always done as a coach, is just trusting my gut. And I had no intention of that. I just knew something deep inside me that she was absolutely perfect in a whole lot of contexts that I just loved. And just roll with it, roll with the gut and and went with it. And I've and I've always done that. If something feels good, go for it. Back myself. I think the first thing my parents said or my father said to us when we met was, Are you pregnant? Which was not the case. It was years till we had children. But I think that's a pretty powerful story about the ability just to pull trigger on something like that and just go for it. And a lot of people would say that um proposing in marriage is a is a big thing you gotta think about and really make sure of. Well, I've just debunked that for me. Um 18 days proposal, 20 years later, we have four kids, and we've had a hell of a ride around the world. Which brings me to number two. We have had an incredible ride round the world. She has essentially followed my uh journey through the world. At the start, she just said, Look, you're onto a good thing, you're loving what you're doing. I can do my stuff wherever I'm in the world. She's a nutritionist by trade. And she said, I'll follow your footy. And she just she just got on with it. And once I got knocked out too many times and had to park up the boots on playing, and I started down this route of professional coaching. And when you start that professional coaching route, you're away a lot. I was moonlighting every evening, Monday to Friday, then Saturdays and Sundays. I was gone a lot. And then at one point in our career, we had eight months apart where I was in Japan and she was with the kids in um New Zealand. And so apart from that, we were there and she shifted and moved. And she said to me early on, Chase this dream. I I don't mind where we have children as long as we're together on the whole. And we did. We had kids in different continents around the world, and we raised them. She learned Japanese. We sent the kids to Japanese school. And for me, not all partners can survive a place like Japan where you're isolated by yourself, you can't speak to too many people, you've got three kids under five, and it's hard, but she's just an absolute legend that she got on with it, and I'm truly privileged for uh my career-wise, just to have someone that was just able to roll like that. If you find someone like that, get into them. Number three, uh, Kyle has always been my foil. You know, she is a different person to me and offers amazing perspective, different perspective and different angles on everything. Um the amount of times she said, I think you've been a dick on that one, when I'm talking about something I've done at coaching, has been remarkable to have someone in your life that can say that to you. And from a coaching perspective, you're dealing with people all day long, especially in the pro setting where you're at there's up to a hundred people in an organization. You're not going to get everyone right. And when you come home and you've got someone at home who's got a really different perspective, can say, Well, have you thought of it like this? What do you think they would be thinking in that situation? Those type of comments has been an amazing sounding board for me to have that sort of on tap at home. It's just been wonderful uh for coaching. But just in general, we chat about absolutely everything. We probably talk a couple of hours every day in terms of just after we put the kids to bed, we just too the fat about philosophies on life and where we can get to and how we can grow each other and what we're going to embark on and the journeys and the loves and all that stuff. And I think to have someone uh as a coach particularly, but anywhere in life, I think it's the point of finding someone to live with is to have that ability to help grow you. Uh like I often talk about culture as an environment suitable for growth. And a great family culture is when the two adults, or however many adults you've got in your family, are actually growing each other with their talk. And I reckon it's often forgotten. We actually lose it. And it's not just in coaching professions, it's it's in all households. We're like ships in the night sometimes. But finding that opportunity to actually talk, to be sounding boards for each other and whatever you're doing is is coaching and it's practicing what you're going to be doing to your athletes. You're practicing talking with someone about how to grow and how to get better. The more you can do it in your home setting, oh shit, it goes a long way. And I love it, and I'm super grateful that I've got someone that lights my boat up and stimulates my mind and my intellect that I can do it. Privileged to have 20 years of that, and I've grown immensely because of her import. Number four, and the reasons why I love this woman is that we've navigated four children together. Now, I appreciate a lot of people navigate children, but I have loved my experience with her. So we know the sort of context of this is the two girls are very much like me, a little bit looser, a little bit more creative, a little bit uh just sort of roll gut feels and just have a go and see where we go. The two boys are a bit more like her, sort of uh well planned, disciplined, nowhere, a lot of structure, enjoy meritocracy and things like that. We've had a lot of discussions about the kids. Um, and particularly when we've blown out with the kids, as all parents will do, when you lose your rag because shit's just getting too stressful with four children pulling on your jeans, uh, wanting to go toilet after you've just asked them if they wanted to go toilet, just as we've gotten in the car for a long car ride, that kind of thing. Pulling each other up, being able to practice that skill set of being able to deliver sort of feedback in a way which is received well, knowing when to deliver it, knowing when the tone to take, knowing if it's appropriate or not, and then doing it. And likewise being able to receive it, being able to understand that they are saying it, your partner is saying it for the benefit of good. And it's important that we say that that this concept of nagging is not in a relationship. And I know that is the norm for a lot of people's relationships, and I reckon it's something you should really stamp out. We don't feedback is not nagging, feedback is constructive, like we give players and our teams feedback direct, it's for a purpose, it's to grow and get better. It's not for your own benefit, it's for theirs and the teams. And I think that sometimes that's missed in your home life, where it's just a nag both ways. So I'm grateful that we've managed to avoid that one. And we haven't just avoided it by accident, we've been really conscious and deliberate around not doing it and pulling each other up when we feel like it has been. And that's been huge for my coaching because it's the same principles, it's just doing it with someone you love instead of um someone that's playing a game of rugby. Number five, the reasons why this woman's been wonderful for me is being able to stay in good physical shape. I want this woman to uh be really connected with me for the rest of my life. And a big part of me is wanting to do that little bit to actually make sure I'm in good nick. Go to the gym regularly, like work out, go for runs, eat well. We actually do this together because we're both on the uh of the same opinion. We want to look good for the other person because it looking good feels good. And and we want to stay tight, we want to enjoy what we see in the other person. That's just sort of human nature. It's very easy to let things slip, and I I I don't particularly want to. Why would you want to? And I enjoy exercise, and if that's my motivation, man, bring it on. I take that all day. Sometimes I go on little missions where I'm just waiting for her to go, gee, you're in good nick at the moment. And that's why I keep doing it. And it's yeah, it's not vanity, it's just uh it's just a source of connection, which I love. And I just think it's it's often missed in relationships. And certainly as coaches, a lot of my contemporaries and good buddies of mine fall out of shape pretty quick. And I like when I'm running a uh coaching group that I love to be driving, that we all stay in the best possible physical nick we can. Because not only is it good, like good for your physical interaction with your partner, but it actually keeps you in a better coaching mindset. When you're fit and healthy, you're thinking better, you're you're able to receive stuff better. The head swirls that you naturally get in diminish or reduce in their length of time. So having a reason for um stay in great shape, which I do, has been absolute godsend for me. And we're still going strong 20 years on. That's my my little love message to my beautiful wife Wall, or Kyle is her name. Um hope everyone has uh a significant partner in their life or that they can turn to when they need need some support and motivation to get you through some of those times. Navigate, navigate all sorts of things, be sounding boards for all sorts of things. Having the ability to you know follow each other around and see different parts of life, get context on stuff. Until next time, people, what a pleasure it is to chat to you just before, the day before, the 20th wedding anniversary I will have. Until next time, stay super sharp.