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

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Why would you turn a blind eye to such a valuable lessons within our Us story? When a culture’s resilience is questioned through a mistake or malpractice, the story must be “carved into the walls” so that our descendants can learn from them. Why has his work had such an impact in different fields? It’s so refreshing to hear the traditionally “soft” language that Eastwood uses – emotions, spirituality, connection, vulnerability, wellbeing – set convincingly in the arena of “hard” performance at the highest level under the greatest pressure. As an Olympian now engaged in cultural change in sport, and calling for the redefinition of success beyond medals and the greater prioritisation of athlete and coach wellbeing, I am keen to understand how we can share Eastwood’s approach that so seamlessly entwines performance and wellbeing.

Players for a team, for example, may be given their national team shirts and asked to write on them what it personally meant to play for that team. This visual activity is effective. An interesting read on high-performance cultures with a solid set of principles built on primal instincts rather than MBA speak. Loses its focus for the final third of the book where it begins to feel slightly rushed but a very interested read nonetheless. He has recently been asked to work more and more within education, for obvious reasons: as recent research and reports have revealed, more and more pupils and their families - and indeed teachers - feel like they don’t belong in schools. That’s causing huge issues with the attendance and behaviour of pupils, the engagement of parents and the retention and recruitment of staff. Exclusive webinar for schoolsWhat we don’t do is try and build some so-called performance environment and then clean it up afterwards.” A copy of Eastwood's new book, Belonging, was given to every England player when they reported for duty at the European Championships' - Telegraph What about tomorrow then? Eastwood won’t be there; he’s never been to an England game, he doesn’t need to, he’ll watch at home in the Cotswolds with his family. Will they succeed though? “A successful team has a clarity about its higher purpose. The England football team has a purpose to inspire and unify the English nation. For me personally, I believe this team is successful already, because no matter what happens on Sunday, they’ve done that.” When our need to belong is met we can focus on a team’s shared mission. We are comfortable being vulnerable in our quest to get better. We feel secure enough that others can point out where we could be better. Our own identity and that of the team coexist.

In whakapapa terms, as the sun arrives on each generation their high purpose is passed on to them and they ask the question: what do we need to do to promote the wellbeing of our people? Therein lies their mission. At this stage a paradox plays out. We enter self-preservation mode as our mind begins to think about surviving rather than succeeding. We have become disconnected from each other. It all started with the Industrial Revolution where wee moved from workers possessing multiple skills and dynamically performing them, to production lines where rows of workers each performed a distinct role. Somewhere along the line here we’ve lost our humanity.

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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. In BELONGING Owen Eastwood reveals, for the first time, the ethos that has made him one of the most in-demand Performance Coaches in the world. Drawing on his own Maori ancestry, Owen weaves together insights from homo sapiens' evolutionary story and our collective wisdom. He shines a light on where these powerful ideas are applied around the world in high-performing settings encompassing sport, business, the arts and military. One of the wisest books about winning you'll ever read...Powerful lessons beautifully expressed.' - James Kerr When our Us story is weak, we are weak. We should talk about how to do tasks, but it’s integral not to forget the what and why too. When asked to describe the culture he had observed, he said “there is no coherent culture … the coach is king or queen. If my child was to come here, I would have no clue what their experience would be, it would completely depend on who they end up with as a coach”. Eastwood is clear that this is a failure of leadership at the top, “deferring and subcontracting culture to coaches”.

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.” 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. Beyond kin, this concept of Whakapapa frames our connection to any group we belong to. It is a universal idea and one that Eastwood has coached on around the world. Slowly we have lost touch with our primal instincts as a creeping shift has taken place from ‘our’ purpose to ‘my’ purpose with individualistic societies in the Western world. These values - getting ahead of everyone else - work against our need to belong. They push a mindset of seeing ourselves against rather than with others.

Throughout his Ryder Cup captaincy, Donald repeated: “My main job is to create the environment for these guys to thrive in.”