Performance psychology coach Bruce Durham CMIOSH on how behavioural safety can learn from the Ultimate Fighting Championship – and vice versa.
Contestants in the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) compete using mixed martial arts inside a locked octagonal cage. The fight ends when one person is knocked out or submits or when the referee steps in. If the fight goes the distance, it will come down to the three judges who will have been scoring the fight, round by round.
You may be asking: What have brutal combat sports got to do with keeping people safe at work? What can we in the corporate sector learn from UFC fighters to improve not only our safety performance but also our overall operational performance? And what can UFC fighters and coaches learn from us in the corporate sector to help them to perform better at critical moments?
In this article, I will be sharing three simple yet powerful steps that could help you, and your organisation, to enhance your safety performance rapidly and, in some cases, instantly.
Reacting to threat
I began studying psychology when I was around 10 years old. At the local boxing club, I was terrified of fighting and was beaten up during sparring, so I started to read about fear and how to overcome it. I had a ferocious appetite for learning about performance psychology in and around fighting.
When I was 15, I began to deliver some of the sessions at the boxing club. Those hard-nosed pugilists recognised my limitations as a boxer but would listen to me for hours talking about the psychology of fighting and life in general.
After school, I started working for the Royal Air Force and served in conflict zones including Iraq, Afghanistan and Sierra Leone. I became even more aware of my passion to understand how people react to a threat. How do people respond when they are mentally uncomfortable? Why does one person react like X and another person react like Y in exactly the same situation? And what tools, techniques, tricks and tips could I offer to my team in order to get them to perform as best they could in life or death situations? Just as in the UFC, how could I get performance at its best when the bell rings?
One of the first areas of learning that quickly became apparent was that we cannot be the best version of us by relying solely on ourselves. We increase our safety performance when we support each other. I applied this concept when I was lead safety and performance coach and behavioural programme manager for Siemens and Siemens Gamesa.
While I appreciate that in the OSH world there may be some strong supporters of the Bradley curve, my point is this – the performance of individuals and teams is far more varied and more of a grey area than aligning with four straightforward stages. You simply do not move from the dependent stage to the interdependent stage; it is more human than this.
At any one time, depending on how we are thinking, feeling and acting, we could be flitting from one stage to the other, or we could be straddling those lines, with one foot in either area. In a split second, with a change of thought, our ability to perform and ‘be safer’ could greatly increase, or drastically decrease. We need the support of others in these moments.
With a change of thought, our ability to perform and ‘be safer’ could greatly increase, or drastically decrease
Reflection
Think about yourself here: do you think you are emotionally in control of yourself at all times? Most people we speak to answer ‘yes’.
But then consider this series of more specific questions:
- When was the last time you became annoyed with someone?
- When was the last time you reacted in a way that you later wished you could change and approach differently?
- Have you ever read an email, text or message and found yourself having an argument in your head with the sender?
Every single person that we pose these questions to gives an example of when they have become emotional. This shows us all, including fighters, that it is human to be far more emotional than we think we are.
Like fighters, we can all change how we think, feel and act depending on our inner thoughts at the time, our perception of what is going on around us, the influence of others, and many more variables that ultimately stimulate and provoke us in helpful and unhelpful ways.
Acceptance
Now, whether you’re a fighter, an office worker or laying tarmac, if you have a head and a heart, you can be triggered just as easily as the next person. And if we are triggered in a negative way, this can lower our performance in all areas and can also negatively affect our mental health and wellbeing. If you can empower people to be more in control of their mental state, this leads to a decreased level of physical harm, so it’s a win-win all around.
This knowledge – that we can all be emotionally caught up in the moment – helped create our company name and logo. At Huddle Culture, we truly believe that by being you – by leaning into the strengths and vulnerabilities of being human and being open to the support of others – you can be the best you can be for more of the time. We need the support of the people around us, just like fighters do.
You may be stressed today, but that could be me tomorrow; it’s how the team comes together that’s important. Sharing what you are thinking and feeling and being supported by others often helps in reframing the situation and enabling the best version of you to be present.
If fighters cannot share their thoughts and feelings with their team, and members of the team are not listening and sharing either, they will not be effective when it’s time to perform in the ring.
Application
‘Think, feel, act’ is the approach we share with UFC fighters and other elite athletes and sportspeople based on our common humanity. Using positive psychology, appreciative inquiry and cognitive behavioural therapy, this approach works on the truest sense of human performance – what we do as humans.
We take it back to basics. And nothing is more basic than this: how we think dictates how we feel, and how we think and feel dictates how we perform. This is the crux of all human behaviour.
Whether you work in construction, the nuclear sector or manufacturing – or if you are a combat sport athlete – the more aware and in control of your thoughts and feelings you are, the better you can control your inner voice. The better you can control that inner voice, the better you feel. If you are generating more positive thoughts and feelings, you are a better version of yourself. You are a happier and higher‑performing version of you.
Self-assessment
Think about you when you are at your best – what are you doing? Chances are you are more calm, more logical, more present, less stressed – but you already know this! The difficult part is, how do we achieve this state? The textbook name of this high‑performing state is the individual zone of optimised function, which we also call the ‘sweet spot’. By getting into your sweet spot more often, everything gets better in all aspects of your life.
And this is where the link is between improving behavioural-based safety and the performance of a UFC fighter. What we measure is muscular output – what did they do or not do? Did they follow the rules? Did they press the buttons in the correct sequence? Did they follow the risk assessment? Did they deliver the blow that they had been drilling to defeat their opponent? These questions all measure and assess what the body did. The aim of any project is ultimately, from a people-centred angle, to improve the muscular output of the person or team.
But this is the end result, and many organisations focus on this too much. To get safer and higher-performing behaviours, more positive muscular output and even happier employees, we need to focus on what creates the output we desire and are measuring.
So, here is the simple yet highly effective three-step process we use for UFC athletes and all our clients. Every single person on the planet follows the basic process of think, feel and then act. This means that we can all get better at noticing, handling and improving our journey through these steps.
- Think – How we view the world, a person or an event creates a narrative in our head. From this moment, the ball is rolling. If we do not have control of this narrative, it takes us over rather than leaving us in control of it. Whether you accept it or not, this initial step is the foundation of all behaviour. Have you ever felt annoyed at someone, only for you to then notice or be presented with a piece of previously hidden information that changes your interpretation of that person or event instantly? That’s how easy it is for our perspective to be changed. ‘Don’t believe everything you think’ is the takeaway message here.
- Feel – The inner narrative that you let play out will generate certain feelings. The story you tell yourself affects your brain, hormones and the feelings that then present themselves. Feelings are so powerful in what we do and don’t do. Combined with these feelings, certain areas of the brain will become hyperaroused and some will be dulled down. This changes your baseline norm. For example: ever felt stressed, then done something you were not meant to, then become even more stressed at making the mistake?
- Act – The muscular output that you show, that your employees display – what you decide to do or not do, and how you do it – these ‘measurable’ parts are all a simple output of the first two steps. The first two steps of thinking and feeling will dictate what you do, what you don’t do, when you do it and how you do it.
Safety performance enhancement
Many other factors need to be optimised for a higher-performing output, but don’t be tempted to try anything else unless you are also helping people with the basics of human performance.
- Do you want to reduce incidents within your organisation?
- Do you want to decrease stress and absenteeism?
- Do you want to help people get more things right first time?
- Do you want to create collaborative and higher-performing teams?
- Do you want people to stop and make safer decisions at critical moments?
All these are helped greatly when you empower people to be more in control of their thoughts and feelings, which leads to greater control of what they choose to do and how they choose to do it.
The larger benefit for you as a safety professional is that this approach doesn’t just improve safety – it encourages these behaviours everywhere. That’s why, in our experience, the operational sides of businesses become avid supporters of the think, feel and act approach.
If people are more calm, more logical, less stressed, more connected and more often in their sweet spot, this shows up in everything that we do, in every task across the business.
Whether working in an office, on-site or a locked octagonal cage – if you can master how you think, feel and act, a better version of you shows up more often. Happier people get more right first time.
So, when we realise that we are all human, with thoughts and feelings, and we embrace that fully, this gives us a huge advantage to optimise our human performance potential in all that we do.
Bruce Durham CMIOSH helps people and teams to be the best they can be by raising awareness of how thoughts and feelings affect everything they do. For more details, visit huddleculture.com
