What I say to people is; ‘what if I could put you on the pitch with no fear, with absolute full self-belief? What if I could put you on the pitch knowing that if you did make a mistake you wouldn’t even think about it, you’d be straight back into the game two seconds later? What if I could put you on the pitch knowing that when it came to taking that last-minute free, you’d be absolutely focused and composed and full of belief you’re going to put it over? What would that look like?”

Sports psychologist Gerry Hussey is in full flow.

“Most people would say ‘yea, I want that’, so most people have an idea of what they look like at 100%, but how often do we actually hit that? How many people go through life at 50, 60, 70% most days?

“And why do we do that? Because of external factors – oh the traffic was heavy, the weather is bad, I don’t like my job, it was too wet to go for a run, it’s too late to go to the gym. What happens is we surrender control and power to the stuff that we can’t control.”

Taster

This is just a taster of the almost two-hour conversation I had with Gerry when I visited him on his home farm in Glenamaddy, Co Galway. The Irish Olympic boxing team and Munster rugby are just some of the professional sports outfits he works with and his advice for them, in a nutshell, is do what the best version of yourself would do.

Gerry is one of eight children who grew up on a small mixed farm. His father is John and his mother is Elizabeth and she sits in on the interview, noting “they did jobs in the morning before they went to school and they did jobs in the evening when they’d come home...that went for both boys and girls, there was no discrimination!”

But it didn’t always seem Gerry was destined for success. On our visit, Elizabeth revisits his school days.

“He was going to school and he was coming up to his Leaving Cert and he’d no interest in school, he was in no way academic at all...and his passion was sports and boxing. If he hadn’t a match, he had boxing and this evening anyway he had both, so he came in, threw the bag, gobbled the dinner and picked up the sports bag to go out.”

Career choices

Gerry was leaving without having done his homework and his mother had something to say about this: “Now Gerard, I’m going to say this to you and I hope you don’t hate me for it, but if you have to graft with your hands to earn your keep you’ll starve, so you better settle into your books.”

Gerry wasn’t good at woodwork, engineering or technical graphics so a career as a carpenter or any other trade was not going to work, but “all the teachers would say ‘well that’s what he has to be because he’s not academic’” explains the now 38-year-old Gerry.

The obvious career at the time seemed to be the guards. “I had no more interest in being a guard than the man in the moon...but here was this readymade career, all set up with pension, salary, and all I had to do was turn up in Templemore – but I didn’t.”

This was met with an angry phone call from Templemore giving Gerry 24 hours to show up.

“I said to him I won’t be there tomorrow and I won’t be there ever and I left it at that and I remember walking away from that phone call and then I said I’m a new man now. I had allowed myself to put the phone down not having a bull’s notion what I was going to do but I knew I didn’t want to do that.”

Most parents wouldn’t react well to such exploits, but Elizabeth says: “I knew in my heart and soul that he would come in to what he loved himself.”

And so he did – via encouragement from a nun, Sr Norrie, who came down from the local convent for a couple of months to help the students because there was no career guidance teacher in the school.

“She was the first person that could affirm to me that a) I wasn’t stupid and b) I could go to college. She produced this little book about psychology and philosophy – I had never heard of those, but that planted the seed.”

Ultimately, the power source that brings us to life is our passion and when you have someone connected to what they’re passionate about, you just can’t stop them

This ultimately saw Gerry go on to All Hallows College in Drumcondra, Dublin, where he studied this and he excelled because he loved what he was doing.

“For the first time in my life, I realised there were other people of the same mindset as me, free spirits”. He says that he was “literally starving all the way through my school, I was bored”, but when he went to college, he was finally nourished.

“Ultimately, the power source that brings us to life is our passion and when you have someone connected to what they’re passionate about, you just can’t stop them,” says Gerry.

This is certainly true in Gerry’s case. He also completed a masters in Trinity, qualified as a psychologist and received a first-class honours in everything he did, coming away with the student of the year accolade in his college undergrad.

After college, he started looking for a job. “I wanted to move home, but sure there was no one looking for psychologists around here”. (It turns out there actually were vacancies but none Gerry wanted – his job hunt went something like this; “40 hours a week in an office – OUT!! 9-5 Monday-Friday, OUT!! Work in Galway all the time and never travel the world, OUT!!)”

Gerry eventually got a job that suited all his interests in Garbally College in Ballinasloe. He worked as a career guidance counsellor and could also train boxing, rugby and GAA teams in the school, and was an experienced gardener. He started doing a HDip at night while working there and, alongside all this, he was also training a football team in Longford and was up in Dublin several nights a week helping the Olympic boxers.

Boxing

His involvement in Irish Olympic boxing started when Gerry was recruited by high performance director Gary Keegan.

“In 2002/2003, Irish boxing was at a serious crossroads after many years of underperformance at international level,” says Gerry. “We had fallen off the standard completely.”

But Gary Keegan had this “crazy, mad” dream that Irish boxing could be the number one boxing nation in the world. He started advertising that Irish boxing was now launching its new Olympic high-performance programme – something that “was just in his head!” Gerry says. “He had this vision and he started asking people to do interviews.”

Gerry went and did an interview and by the time it was over, Gerry was also certain Ireland was going to be the number one boxing nation in the world.

“So I thought Gary had this highly detailed plan to implement this, but then when I accepted the job, I realised there was no plan. He was entrusting me to come up with the plan.”

We’re going to hit Beijing and nobody will know how to handle us

Gary also hired two coaches, Billy Walsh and Zauri Anita, and grew the support team over time.

“Gary said to Zauri and Billy; ‘when he builds these human beings, you give them the boxing skills and we’re going to hit Beijing and nobody will know how to handle us’ - and we believed it,” says Gerry.

“But of course there was no salary, even though I was giving up two or three days every week, and that’s why I kept that and teaching going for a little while.”

This was until one flight home from Pescara in 2007 when Gerry was sitting beside John Joe Nevin, who asked him why he was in a bad mood. Gerry explained it was because he was thinking about going into work the next day and John Joe said: “Gerry, you’re telling us about following our dreams about leading with our passion and putting ourselves in the place where we come alive – I think you need to do the same.”

That was on Sunday; Gerry had handed in his notice by Wednesday. “So a week later, I came back to John Joe. ‘John Joe’ I says, ‘good news for you, I left the job.’ ‘Good man Gerry’ he said, ‘fair play to you. How are you going to pay the bills?’

“I said ‘I haven’t a clue’.

“John Joe says ‘that makes two of us. I don’t know either, but this summer we’re going to be at the Olympic Games and that’s all that matters.’ And that’s how boxing and psychology became my full-time role.

“We focused on that until 2008 and we went to the Olympic Games and we won three medals. Those medals that were won in Beijing were probably the cheapest Olympic medals ever won in the history of any sport in any game.”

And so Gerry Hussey’s world changed forever.

“You wake up the next day and massive sports clubs are literally like ‘when can we get you down’. I’ve companies ringing me up, ‘can we bring you to the UK’. Everybody wanted to know what the secret was and then you’d kind of worry, thinking ‘Jesus, do I have a secret, do I have a model?’”

Poweful mindset

While he may have found it hard to define what it was, Gerry certainly had something. From 2008 to 2012, he worked with a number of Ireland’s top Olympic athletes and teams, many of whom then went on to set standards previously unattained. The role of psychology and mindset was becoming accepted as an essential part of athlete and team development.

Gerry is certainly adept at helping boxers create their most powerful mindset, but can he do the same for farmers – in their day-to-day work?

“It’s like a young rugby player loves rugby and that’s why he becomes a professional rugby player and once he becomes a professional rugby player, he’s introduced to nutritionists, speed coaches, strength and conditioning coaches, psychologists, video analysis, media, there’s contracts, there’s agents and suddenly you think, God this thing’s a monster.

“So a lot of young fellas grow up and they just love farming. Suddenly then it’s about schemes, it’s about bookkeeping. So what I would say to them is you have to have an open mind, because no more than rugby, to make it a professional existence, there has to be professional systems put around you, so you have to upskill and learn.

“But once you learn to use them, you realise that they’re actually there to benefit you and farming has to become professional and, at the same time, what I would say is not to lose the passion for why you started.”

Gerry is clear in his belief that passion should be central to whatever career we do and there’s no doubt he’s very passionate about the path he’s chosen to take.

“Long after we’ve moved on and I’ve nothing to do with Irish boxing, I’ll be watching television and I’ll hear that Irish boxing is after winning seven medals at the Olympic Games, they’re after winning three world titles and it’s just the norm. But I’ll know I played a small little role in creating that norm.”

Your role was far from small, Gerry.

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