In this episode I talk with Tom Carter the current head of physical performance with the Australian Women’s Rugby 7’s team. In this episode we discuss Toms transition from a professional rugby player into his current role in 7’s. We discuss the way Tom was perceived as a player for the NSW Waratahs and how that has shaped his professional career after rugby and we also look into Tom’s association with other sports such as Cricket and how we as coaches can learn from other sports. Despite the persona we saw in Super Rugby Tom is an incredibly humble and relatively quiet spoken guy, he is hesitant to talk himself up and talk about some of his amazing accomplishments in sport and he is extremely open-minded about learning from other sports such as cricket. He understands that is very easy as a coach to try and make large changes in small amounts of time, but its important to focus on the marginal gains when measuring success. Tom has a growth mindset and uses education to continually get better and improve – despite his background as an elite athlete he remains very humble and he knows he doesn’t have all the answers and can learn from his peers in sport. Tom’s ability to question his processes and ask himself if he started and finished the year with the same ideas and philosophies and if not why not, again shows the traits of a growth mindset and an aspect that is often very important in coaching, the ability to self-reflect. I hope you enjoy this conversation with one of rugby’s great characters.