#99 Surfing huge waves blind, Matt Formston, Multi-Sport World Champion & Business Executive

DISCUSSED IN THIS EPISODE

• Surfing a 51-foot wave while virtually blind, and the preparation, teamwork and trust required to make it possible.
• How Matt’s “Why not?” mindset has shaped his approach to problem solving, resilience and overcoming barriers.
• Building high-performing teams through clear standards, empathy, psychological safety and recognising the unique value each person brings.

RESOURCES

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Transcript from the interview

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SPEAKERS

Graeme Cowan, Matt Formston

Today’s guest is Matt Formston, and what a remarkable life he’s had! When he was five, he virtually went blind, and now he only has between one to 3% of his vision. But his father didn’t allow him to dwell in self-pity. Every time he said he couldn’t do something, his father would say, “Why not? And that became really key to his mindset and his life. We hear about him surfing the largest wave in the world, the Navarre break at Portugal, and we can only begin to imagine how scary that would be. It’s featured in a new documentary by Netflix, which is called Blind Sea. He also works for Optus and has done that for the last 20 plus years. Worked in sales management, and now he looks after the head of a sustainability area. Matt has got lots of insights and tips, especially around problem solving, and it’s interesting hearing his perspective on how to solve the AI stress productivity juggle. There’s a heap to learn from Matt. Enjoy. It’s a real pleasure to welcome Matt Forston to the Caring CEO. Welcome, Matt. Thanks for having me, Matt. What does care in the workplace mean to you?

Matt Formston 01:32
Care in the workplace to me, I just think straight away about standards. You know, I’m big on everybody understanding what the level is and agreeing to that. So if we all have a shared understanding of what our standards are as a team, as a workplace, as an organisation, then it’s then there’s no ambiguity. And without ambiguity, everyone understands what they’re expected to do, and that makes it a safe place for everybody. So that therefore turns into care.

Graeme Cowan 01:57
And how would you describe a standard? You know, is it something that you write out as a team, or how do you come up with what your aim is for?

Matt Formston 02:07
Yeah, I mean, you can call a KPI standard, really, but I mean, it’s let’s use it as an example: a Teams meeting. So, and you could have someone who’s consistently late for a Teams meeting, and people are getting upset that this person, let’s call them Tim, keeps being late for teams meetings, but then if you ask the question, what does late mean? Have we agreed as a team what is late? Is it on time? Is it two minutes late? Is it five minutes late? I know I’ve been in teams where, you know, if you’re five minutes late, there’s a $50 fee that goes to charity. When I was riding, I used to ride for Australia as a professional cyclist, and our head of high performance, Peter Day, his standard was that if you were if you weren’t 10 minutes early, you were late. So if you turned up nine minutes early, you would get a grilling in front of the team, and if you turned up on time, the door would be closed and you wouldn’t be part of the meeting. So it’s just that’s just an example, but it’s a it’s an understanding between everyone of something that’s very clear, so that you know what what the standard

Graeme Cowan 02:59
is. We’re going to get into you know other beliefs you have and other factors that are really important to you and there’s a lot, lot to talk about, but it’s hard to really go too far without reflecting on an incredible achievement of yours, and that is being a blind surfer and surfing one of the biggest waves in the world in Portugal, can you just give our audience a little bit of background about how you went from, you know, being blind and taking on something that 99.9% of people that have good vision are very reluctant to do as well.

Matt Formston 03:43
Yeah. So just to frame it up, Nazare in Portugal is the biggest. Was not one of it. Is the biggest wave in the world. It’s where all the world records are set. It’s one of the most dangerous waves in the world, and it was something that the world media, when I went to do this, said that it wasn’t possible and I would die. I’ve got just for people listening that aren’t familiar with me. I’ve got. I’m not totally blind. I’ve got about 3% vision left in my right eye and about 1% in my left eye. So sweet FA is the technical term, but yeah, I mean, grew up. I lost vision. I suppose you need to go backwards to understand the context of my life. But I grew up with full vision until I was five. Lost 95% of my vision when I was five, and then it continued to degenerate. I played rugby union, rugby league, ice hockey growing up, and then went on to have a business career, obviously, which we’ll talk about. But then I did professional cycling. I was a multiple world champion, world record holder in cycling, four time world champion surfer. And after all of that, I then took on Nazareth. So there’s a lot of capacity I’ve built and a lot of trust in myself. I’m big on trust. I know which we’ll get to, but I think first you need to before you can do trust with someone else. You needed to trust in yourself, and I built a lot of trust in myself because of the things that I’ve done in my past. So when I know that when I take something on, I have the capacity to build teams. I think it’s you know you don’t do anything of that nature by yourself. So I knew I could build the team, I could build the capacity in myself, and I could get the job done.

Graeme Cowan 04:57
What was the team that helped you? Take on that massive wave.

Matt Formston 05:03
Oh, I mean, it’s a massive team, right? I mean, the first team is my family at home, my wife supporting me. You know, with my three children, I’m going away to play sport, and she’s here looking after the family. So that’s a big part of the team. Then my breath coach, who built the capacity within me. The biggest risk over there is drowning. So three weeks after I was there, a man died surfing waves that were sort of half the size of the waves. I ended up surfing Guinness World Record at Nazareth, so someone died surfing, you know, waves that were like 30 feet, and my wave was 51 feet. My Guinness World Record, so they’re real risks. So I had to build that capacity. So Dwayne was my breath coach. So just before I went to Nazareth, I did a breath hold of just under six minutes, so I could hold my breath for six minutes. So Dwayne prepared me to go, and then once I got there, I had a safety team of four jet skis in the water, and everybody there has a different job. It’s not they’re not all just there in a haphazard way. Everyone knows what formation, what they need to do. My tow driver, who tows me into the waves, we have communication, which is clearly articulated before we enter the water, and then we have a spotter on land. So Strodgy, who sits up on the headland, he has eyes in the sky over all of everything that’s happening. So he communicates on my safety team through CB radio. So yeah, it’s a big team, and we’re gophers runners. We’ve got people prepping our gear. There’s a it’s a big team for one person to go and play sport.

Graeme Cowan 06:23
Yeah, definitely. Yeah, and it’s obviously you know I saw I watched your documentary on Netflix, and it’s an extraordinary story. And what I guess surprised me is how long you had to wait for the you know the the waves and the conditions to be right because you know there’s only a certain situation that allows that. Yeah, who made the decision on when to go and how to go?

Matt Formston 06:52
You see, right, the waves just don’t turn up right. The ocean is Mother Nature, and Mother Nature doesn’t play ball sometimes. And I was just very lucky that the you know I was there for a couple of weeks, and literally the last morning I was there, I’d surfed it a few times, but the last morning I was there, we got one of the one of the biggest and cleanest swells that they’d ever had there. So I was very lucky that I was there for that swell. But my team decided to make that decision. You know, as a sighted big wave surfer, and you said before, you know, 99.9% of people wouldn’t surf there. It’s actually 99 point cent of surfers and professional surfers wouldn’t surf there. It’s only, you know, it’s a it’s not many people in the world that would ever surf waves that big, let alone a blind person. So you need to really understand the processes. But for that point, people can watch the waves on so on YouTube and say, “No, that’s not for me. They can then go to Nazare, stand on the headland, look at the waves, and go, “That’s not for me. Hear it. They can then go out on the jet ski, sit in the channel, look at the waves, and say, “Yeah, that’s not for me. They then get towed into the wave because the waves are travelling at you know 50 to 60 kilometres an hour. So you’ve got to match the speed of the wave to get catch this. So you need a jet ski. You can’t paddle into waves that big. So you’re getting towed in with a jet ski. You can then stand at the top of the wave and look down and go, “Yep, that’s not for me. So I actually can’t do any of those things. I don’t have any of that data, so I have to use data from my team, and they have to make that decision. So they have to know what my capability is and what they believe is reasonable, and then I have to trust that they understand what all those capabilities are, and that they’re not going to put me, you know, in harm’s way. Where you know it might sound reckless, but nothing I do is reckless. You know, I’ve set world records in multiple sports, but all of it’s done on data. It’s not done on risk or just on reckless, you know, decisions. So we understand what all the trigger points are. We discuss it as a team. We look at all the data, and then we make a decision as a team. They can give me the visual data, but at the end of the day, I’m the team leader. It’s my body. It’s my life. It’s my children’s father’s life that’s on the line. So I need to make the call at the end of the day.

Graeme Cowan 08:40
So when you were informed by the team that today was a good day to go,

Matt Formston 08:46
yeah,

Graeme Cowan 08:46
how did you feel? You know, getting ready to go out there,

Matt Formston 08:51
yeah.

Graeme Cowan 08:51
You know, you’ve done a lot of preparation, but that’s not the same as actually doing it. So correct, yeah. How did you feel?

Speaker 1 08:59
Look,

Matt Formston 08:59
I so in the movie, I know it looks like one day, but we actually surfed there for three days. So obviously, movies are great because you get to edit things. But so the first day I surfed there wasn’t the giant day. It was you know it was still big. It was still like a 30 foot day. You know, for anyone listening, 30 foot wave is basically a three story building, whereas my big day was you know a five story building. And I’m really good at isolating. Once I’ve made a decision, I have trust in myself and the team that what we’re doing has been done based on data. We’ve built all the elements. You know, we can’t do that thing. You can never surf a 30-foot wave unless you really go to Nazareth or a couple other places in the world. But you can do all the components of it. You know, so you sort of feel all those things put together, but then you put it together on the day, which is I think, is like a lot of things in life, like a business meeting. You know what I mean. You’re not going to actually have the pitch or whatever it is, but you can do the elements of it, and then you’re putting them together on the day. So it was unique in that I’d always been able to isolate noise in my head because of my life experience. What was unique about that particular day was we that the media, the world media, had basically. There was a lot of media saying that I was going to die, and it’s hard. It’s easy to just sort of say ignore that, but when you hear something a lot, you start listening to it. And I knew that me and my team were the best in the world at what we do. We made a decision that it was something that we that was possible. But when you hear that enough, you start listening to it. So I was laying in the water before my first wave, and I actually didn’t have fear for myself. I don’t. People say you must have no fear. I don’t. I don’t know that I have fear the way other people have because I’ve done enough dangerous things in my life and seen that I’m okay that I don’t think I have that unreasonable fear that a lot of people have. But what I did have is I started having a fear for my children. I wasn’t worried about myself dying, but I was worried about my children losing their father, and worrying if I made a miscalculation in our data analysis. But then, once we caught our first wave, I knew that we were we knew what we were doing. We’d made the right call, and then from that point on, it was all just fun.

Graeme Cowan 10:52
And it is you know an extraordinary situation. So, as a blind surfer, do you feel the waves with your feet? Is that how you know how to progress along it.

Matt Formston 11:02
Yeah, look, wave. So I grew up surfing from the age of five on a bodyboard. My dad used to just push me in, so I learned how to feel the wave on my tummy as I was laying on my, you know, my chest and my stomach, running along the wave on a bodyboard. And I did that for about six years, and then I stood up when I was about 11, and I’ve been so I’ve been surfing now, you know, for more than 30 years, standing up, so I’ve just-it’s 1000s and 10s of 1000s of hours of standing up and feeling alive. So yeah, I’m feeling with my feet, and then at Nazare, because I was going so fast, the boys noticed that I was actually not turning the way I normally would. So they then navigated me with the whistle. So they have an orienteering whistle we use, and and so they blow the whistle for me to let go of the rope to let me know when I’m there, confident I’m in the right spot and it’s the right wave, and they’ve towed me in, and then they blow the whistle a second time and I turn across the wave and then I feel and go up and down the wave and surf the wave, and then when the wave is about to close out or the end of the wave’s coming, you know they blow the whistle a third time and I and I kick out.

Graeme Cowan 11:58
Amazing, having a child go virtually blind at five is a big thing for any parent to really contemplate. How did your mother and father approach that? How do they guide you from that crisis?

Matt Formston 12:15
Look, it’s really unique, and obviously they come up a lot. As a keynote speaker, obviously talk about my context, which is my parents and that change in my life, you know, losing my vision, and I’ll say because the word the word can’t was banned in our house, so there’s no such thing as can’t, and I think a lot of people will say my parents said the same thing, but what was unique that my parents did, I’ve now found out which not which sort of no one all seems to have had this this experience is, and this is the title of my book. Why not? So my dad would say, you know, I’d say, for example, we went fishing, and I’d say to to dad, you know, a hook’s come off my line. Like, can you tie the hook on? And he’d say, you do it yourself. I say, but I can’t because I’m blind. I can’t see the hole. And he say, so why not? And I say, well, because I can’t see. I can’t see the hole. He say, it’s not. That’s too small. So, well, what’s another way? And so he’d keep asking why not, why not, and I just keep explaining my why not until he got more and more specific, and then he’d start saying, okay, so what’s another way you could do that rather than seeing it? So I’d say, well, I can’t, I could feel the hole. Okay, so I run my fingers along the shaft. I can feel the hole there, right? And then how do you? And then, but then I’d say, but I can’t get the line in. Why not? And then I get really specific On the line with the whole, and as you go through the why not process, you get more specific on the problem. You find solutions to each thing, and then you have a solution to your whole problem. So that was my whole life. Everything we was just you know why not until we found the solution. So you know I use drop saws. I use all sorts of things that seem unreasonable for a person who’s blind, but we stop really quickly in life when we see a problem, but when you are able to just sit down and go through the problem and get be comfortable with the fact that it is a challenge, it’s a barrier, it’s whatever you want to call it, but get really get you know lean right into it and find out what it is. You get really specific on the problem, and then you can find the solution. And that was the thing that now that I’ve I’m able to reflect on that as a businessman, that was the unique part of my childhood that I suppose made me the man that I am today.

Graeme Cowan 14:05
It’s incredible perspective that you know your dad brought to you and brought to your mindset, and I suspect it also required a lot of patience from both you and him. Like the things you’re describing wouldn’t be sorted out overnight, right?

Matt Formston 14:21
No, absolutely not. You’re right. Absolutely, a lot of patience. But my dad was a sales and marketing exec in the alcohol industry. He dealt with object. He had a sales team and marketing team. He dealt with objections for a living, like sitting in boardrooms with you know football professional football teams working on whole of business food and beverage deals, right? So his his whole life is objections. So when his eight-year-old son says, “Dad, I can’t do my homework, probably not the biggest challenge he’s dealt with that day, but it was certainly a challenge for me, and I I think it set me up well for my business career because having dialogue with Dadder and trying to convince him of things was pretty tricky.

Graeme Cowan 14:53
Yeah, I bet.

Matt Formston 14:54
Yeah.

Graeme Cowan 14:55
In terms of your career, can you just I guess let our listeners. Know about your journey.

Matt Formston 15:01
Yeah,

Graeme Cowan 15:01
I think you’ve been most of your career with Optus, but just you know, from starting to where you are now, what were the significant elements along the way?

Matt Formston 15:11
Oh, look! Well, when starting, I started my first business when I was 10, washing cars, and then I had a little crew of my mates that would work for me, so I started outsourcing, and so that was entry level. I did labouring growing up, so you know, and then I built satellite dishes, so many different jobs. And then I suppose my first role with Optus was just on a managing a sales team, so in a in the call centre, and I’ve just worked my way up through the company. So there was one point in my career where I was a business analyst. I thought that was I love making changes for our people and for customers, and I thought that was a way that I could solve a lot of problems. But it was the biggest learning in my career because I it was absolutely terrible. Worst 12 months of my life. It was all reading. I thought it was all meetings and influencing people. It turns out it’s all reading and writing documents, which are two things that I’m just you know they’re not my they’re not my go-to as a blind person. So I learned so much about my career in that point, and from that point, I went back to. I’d been in operations management before that role. I went back into to sales after that, but in strategic accounts, so working with large banks and you know Hewlett Packard, PepsiCo, you know global accounts, and spent a lot of my career in that area. And then about nine years ago, moved into sustainability. I run sustainability. I’m the executive there for sustainability. I chair the Optus Disability Network. But parallel to that, I’ve obviously had a career. I’ve been on multiple boards, and I’ve chaired things like the you know the Parisurfing Australia committee. I’m currently on the Evidence Advisory Committee for the NDIS. So I’ve got a very very blended portfolio of roles that I’ve had across, you know, Optus, but also outside Optus in the Australian business community, and obviously I’ve got my speaking and executive coaching career outside that as well.

Graeme Cowan 16:51
Yeah, and with your experience with teams, what do you think? You talked before about standards.

Matt Formston 16:57
Yeah,

Graeme Cowan 16:57
what do you think are the really important, I guess building blocks to having a great team.

Matt Formston 17:04
I’ve already talked about the standards thing, but I think one thing that I think your listeners might be interested in is something that I’ve been reflecting on recently. I’m a big fan. You know, we talk a lot about diversity and inclusion. Obviously, I get asked about that a lot because I’m blind, and I’m and I think the two words need to be separated because they’re different things. Diversity is one thing, and I think it can be an absolute asset. If you look at a board, you certainly don’t want nine males that all grow up in the same street on the board. You know what I mean? That’s not going to help anybody with good critical thinking. But I think also having the word inclusion makes it a bit muddy because having inclusion targets at a decision level can create you know negative things around people saying, “Do they get the job for the raise? There’s all sorts of bad stuff. So, I think those two things need to be separated out. And through the process of me really articulating that, I think it’s the individual’s responsibility to articulate their what how their diversity brings value. So, for me, I’m blind, for example, right? So, I because of because I’m blind, I have to problem solve every day. Like everything’s hard. Finding lunch is hard, so everything’s problem solving for me. So I’m a world class problem solver. I’m a world class communicator because I have to use verbal communication for everything I do. I, you know, so there’s all these things that I, because of my disability, I’ve actually grew up, developed these capabilities that I’m better at than everyone else. Because well, not everybody, but most people, just because of the nature of my experience, I’ve had to lean into those skills more. But I think a lot of us think the diversity think it’s the response. It’s the responsibility of the business to understand what your diversity. So because you have a because you’re you know you come from a different country or you’re a different gender or whatever your difference is, it’s actually not the business’s responsibility to what to see that value. It’s your responsibility, and I think as businesses, there’s an opportunity for us to help people identify what that value is, and I’m not seeing businesses help people. And I think there’s some training that we can do in businesses to say, okay, find your difference, find how it brings value, and then lean into that. Because I think when we do that better, we’re able to help people find their superpowers. We talk about diversities as you know having superpowers. There, there absolutely is so much value there, but we’re not extracting it because we’re not giving people the ability to extract it and to let and to lean into it. We

Graeme Cowan 19:07
have some helpful resources that you can find at wecare365.com.au. The first is our mental ill health calculator, which is a quick and simple way to work out what poor mental health costs your organisation in lost productivity and employee turnover. You will also find our building a mentally healthy culture checklist, which shows how to launch a great initiative and keep that momentum going. These resources can be found at wecare365.com.au. and one of the great ways to understand your or everyone’s unique gifts is your top strengths. You know, there’s great tools like the Gallup Clifton Strengths Finder and that sort of thing. Yeah, have you seen that work well in terms of how to build an understanding of.

Matt Formston 20:01
Look, I have, but I’ve only seen it work really well at a leadership level, and you know, at a leadership board level. I think you lean into it at those levels to say, you know, how do we as a team utilise this? I don’t see it work well at scale, though. And I think you know, you look in large corporates where there’s 1000s of people, and we have, you know, there’s compliance training. A lot of that compliance training is not extracting this value. I think there’s an opportunity to do this at scale, where you say to people, “How do you lean into looking at your background and your life experience? How can we use that better in our business to extract the value that you bring to our organisation?

Graeme Cowan 20:36
Yeah, spot on. And another word, I guess, for inclusion is blogging. Yes, it’s a fundamental human need. We all want to belong to somewhere, whether it’s our family, our community, our sport, or whatever. Yeah, the fundamental human need. What ways can we build that sense of belonging in a team, and especially a team which may be remote and aren’t all together face to face? What sort of things do we do to build that belonging?

Matt Formston 21:03
Well, I think the word belonging is-it’s really about value, right? You want to feel like you’re adding value because belonging and just being in the room is very different to adding value and being feeling like you add value. And if you’re in a business, you’re really there to add value. You would hope. So I think it’s about how you people are being seen, and how their value is being recognised. Because the belonging part can work if we’re just saying, you know, seeing people, giving people space, and all those things. But actually acknowledging their value and how they contribute, I think that’s the best way to show people value. But I think then it’s also I’m a really big believer in it’s a two-way street with all these things, so I think the individual then also needs to ask the leader, or be given the opportunity, or be given the instruction to ask the leader how to how do I showcase how I add value and therefore create my own belonging.

Graeme Cowan 21:55
Yeah, I I was involved as a starting board director of Are You Okay, and served on the board for 15 years, yeah, and what I often share that in my keynote, and just in terms of a team that really bonded and grew, didn’t mean it was easy all the way. There were lots of setbacks and what have you, but then I ask people to reflect on a great team they’ve been in, and it could be their current team, previous team, when they worked at McDonald’s, when they had their job washing cars or whatever, and what was it that made it different and great? And I usually have people to vote. You know, anonymous QR code vote 10 factors. What are the top three that people choose,

Matt Formston 22:42
yeah.

Graeme Cowan 22:42
And in 95% of the cases, the top three are: we cared about each other, we had each other’s back, and we encouraged each other.

Matt Formston 22:51
Yeah,

Graeme Cowan 22:52
and you know they’re very fundamental human needs, aren’t they? You know, and that has to come before great strategy and great execution.

Matt Formston 23:01
Yes, and I think where you find that as well is there’s great clarity around what the strategy, you know, what the purpose

Graeme Cowan 23:07
is. Yeah,

Matt Formston 23:08
I think unless the team are really clear on the purpose, all of those things don’t turn up because people get confused around what they’re doing.

Graeme Cowan 23:15
Yeah, and that comes back to your standards, doesn’t it? You know, really being very specific.

Matt Formston 23:19
Yeah,

Graeme Cowan 23:20
yeah. We you touched briefly on psychological safety before, and you know it’s been shown to be the number one predictor of innovative and successful teams.

Matt Formston 23:30
Yeah, how have

Graeme Cowan 23:31
you got about building psychological safety in the teams that you’ve led?

Matt Formston 23:35
Look, I think there’s two parts of it. The standards part, I just can’t understate it enough. I think when there’s clarity around what the expectations are, what the standards are, and it’s agreed as a team what those standards are, and that can be anything from you know what if it’s if there’s a certain time turn up or there’s not. It’s not just a you know we think this is what it is. We’re all really clear on, and it’s even having conversations. I do this now with my teams. I say, well, what are our most important standards? And even if we’re setting up a partnership with an external party, like what are our key? You’ll say what are your key success metrics, but they’re really. And then once we say what are those success metrics, I will say what are the standards that determine that. What are we going to accept? What are we not going to accept? And the the most important part with the standard is what’s the absolute part where you won’t accept it. What’s the part where you just say no, we’re not doing that anymore? Because that’s what a real standard is. Because you can say it’s up here, but then if people observe you doing it down here, then the down here is actually the standard, right? It’s not what you say; it’s what you do. So the standards part is, I think, the most important thing for psychological safety because it gives people clarity on where, like, what the guardrails are. But the second thing I think is for leaders to be to have empathy. I’ve built. I did a podcast with Mark Boris, and Mark sort of picked up through the chat. He talked about my ears. Was a bit rude, actually. He said, “Mate, I feel like your ears looking at me. They thought they’re like satellite dishes. But he said, “Like your superpower is empathy as a leader, and I really think it is. And I didn’t realise until that time just how much of a superpower it is. But I really, I’m really. Inquisitive about my people, all the people I work with, people that lead me, people that you know that I lead, and I think there’s more that people can do around empathy and really understanding their people and what drives them. And to your point around those successful teams, I think where there’s true empathy from everybody involved, people are truly inquisitive about each other. That creates a really safe place because people then feel comfortable to bring all parts of themselves and to fail, and that’s I think that’s a really big part of psychological safety as well as everyone being truly inquisitive about each other.

Graeme Cowan 25:32
Yeah, it’s a great point. I remember when I first read a New York Times article called “What Google Learned in Its Quest to Build a perfect team, and you know they talked about actual case studies, and it was often the leader sharing something which was quite vulnerable. You know where they didn’t know everything. They gave one example where a one of the leader had was going through cancer treatment, but he hadn’t shared it previously with his team, and you know, it just the room moved when that level of responsibility is shared.

Matt Formston 26:07
Absolutely,

Graeme Cowan 26:08
and I once gave a keynote in Melbourne, and this was with the the CEO of a very a large division of you know 12,000 people or so, and he shared how he’d been homeless and living in a car 20 years before.

Matt Formston 26:26
Yeah,

Graeme Cowan 26:26
you know, it was mainly through circumstances. You know, he had to leave the marital home.

Matt Formston 26:31
Yeah,

Graeme Cowan 26:32
he had assets, but he had no cash. But talking about doing that for you know two or three nights just was eye opener for many people. Yeah, and you know I’m sure when people hear the things you’ve done, and we’ve talked already about the surfing, but also cycling as well. You know there must be many stumbles along the way to reach the level that you reached.

Matt Formston 26:55
Yeah, I think humanising is is super important, right? Because we, you know, I think people sometimes look at leaders as it’s almost they’re almost unlike robotic, you know. I mean, they see the strategy, they see the purpose, they see the emails, they see the email banner. But when you hear the story about being someone being homeless, I remember going to the Australian Disability Network’s annual conference a couple of years ago, and they had a panel. It was a crazy panel. I think it was the CEO of some of the you know Australia’s biggest logos, Coles, Australia Post, Vega Logos. There’s five of them, and they all shared a personal story about disability, and it just humanised them to the audience. It was a very powerful moment. Yeah, but you’re right. Look, my, I get like I’m an order of Australia. I’ve got a Netflix movie. I’ve got world titles in multiple sports, business achievement. What are these things, right? They all came from the fact that I actually, which we haven’t talked about. For me, my personal down was almost 10 years. So I got bullied at school. School was awful. I lost sport. I lost myself through my late teens. This is all shared in my book, which is the first time I’ve ever shared my my whole story, and I lost myself. I ended up chasing other people’s acknowledgement, other people’s, you know, whatever it is, but I basically got into drinking and pub fighting and chasing girls and just wanted other people’s approval, and I did that for about 10 years. Almost ended up dead or in jail. There’s a moment in the book where I’m, you know, I’m covered in someone else’s blood, and that was Christmas Eve. I woke up the next morning and was sitting at the Christmas table wondering if the police were going to turn up at my house, and I built myself back out of that, basically to find my wife. I had multiple failed relationships, and was really keen to have the. I mean, I had a beautiful family. I grew up with my parents and my siblings, and wanted that for myself. And I was making excuses all the time through these failed relationships and blaming the other person. And I got to this point in my life where I, you know, I just took accountability for myself, and I built myself out of that. Over two, that was in 2008. I had a good job. I had a property in Sydney, and I had all on paper things looked great, but I just wasn’t happy, and I wasn’t proud of myself. So from 2008 to 2010, I took a whole bunch of accountability. I built these eight standards that are in the book, and then from 2010, I met my wife in 2010, and from that, and I got selected to write for Australia that year. And from that year on, I’ve won a world title, broken a world record, or won a business award every year since that year because of those standards I built in my life. So my greatest achievement is not the order of Australia medal. It’s not all the things that I’ve done. My greatest achievement is rebuilding myself because I literally almost ended up dead or in jail.

Graeme Cowan 29:21
Could you give a couple of examples of those standards?

Matt Formston 29:24
Oh, look, the first one is two gears, one engine. So that that comes from my parents. You know, my dad was this guy who everything was like all strategy, measure twice, cut once. Everything was planning, and you know, but quite slow. Whereas my mum is this person who still to this she’s 75, and we still have to run, walk to keep up with it. My kids have to run, walk to keep up with her. She was hairdresser, just fast, fast. And I looked at, and in both of them, I learned these two things that you know you can be fast, and once you decide to do something, you need to execute furiously. But there’s a lot of value in planning, so don’t. And that standard is to not to know what gear you’re in. Like if you’re in planning, then be in that. Don’t try and execute while you’re in strategy mode. But once you make a plan, you need to execute and don’t look back and be confident that your plan has been made correctly. So there’s a whole there’s a whole thing around the two gears, one engine. The future is already real. Is another one. You know, when I went to break the world record, I worked with a lady called Louise Laffey, and I did a lot of visualisation. And I think we think about visualisation purely as a visual image in your head, but Lou got me to feel myself standing on the podium before I become a world champion. I wasn’t a world champion at this point. I’m going to I’m going to world championships, and Lou would say, “Hey, I want you to feel the the way it’s standing on the podium, feeling that it’s going to be hot. You’re going to be in Mexico. Feel the heat on your skin. Listen to the Australian anthem being played. You got salt on your skin because you’ve just broken the. You know you’ve just beaten everybody in the world. So just feeling in my heart what it felt like, feeling the temperature in the room, feeling the weight of the metal around my neck, feeling the emotions about what I felt about my family in that moment. So you’re living in the moment of this thing that you haven’t done yet, and by doing that over and over again, I spent you know minutes, 20 minutes a day, for months before I actually did this. So I lived in this moment where I was a world. I was a world champion, even though I wasn’t, and I felt like a fraud. It felt awful at the time. But the more you do it, the more comfortable you get with it. So then, when I turned up to this race in Mexico, I was already a world champion. All I had to do was do the effort, and I. And that day, I broke a world record and became a world champion by living in the moment and living in that resonance and feeling that energy of being in it, so that’s you know that the future is already real as that standard. There’s all these you know the the trust is the last standard that’s the eighth standard. I built this this formula which is standards times consistency times time, and and trust is I believe it’s the foundation and it’s the amplifier of high performance. If the unless you have trust in your team and yourself and your customers, it’s literally the thing that makes or breaks everything.

Graeme Cowan 31:47
Yeah, yeah. I want to jump back just a bit. You know, you talk about a time when you were in very self-destructive mode. You talked about a time when you were at a Christmas dinner and you’re afraid the police might turn up.

Matt Formston 32:00
Yeah,

Graeme Cowan 32:01
and then you talked about taking accountability. Yeah, was that overnight or was it over a period of time that you changed your life?

Matt Formston 32:11
It was over a period of time. It was yeah. So that was that that incident, the Christmas incident, was sort of when I was about 20, and then it was probably in my you know my late 20s, you know almost 30 years old when I made that change. So over time, I sort of you know I wasn’t still in that self-destructive wanting to fight everyone mode, like because obviously I got bullied at school, and the way that I resolved that is I learnt that if someone bullied me, and because and bullying’s this thing, and people were judged, and you know so you know, so these days it’s obviously not cool to to fight or whatever. But bullying is this thing that’s not. If you go to the teacher and say, “Miss, that they said how many fingers am I holding up? or they were throwing things at me in class, they’re all little things, right? They’re not really that person’s not going to get in trouble for that because it’s not really the the biggest thing. But when you’re the person that’s dealing with it, 20 examples of that every day, it’s exhaustive. It’s a mountain of little things that just crush you. So when you find, you know, I someone eventually someone said to me like Santa’s not real. That’s actually how it happened. The violence started, and I said say that again because I was 10 years old. I still believed in Santa, and this kid ended up saying still saying Santa’s not real. Santa’s not real, and I punched this kid in the nose, and that kid never bullied me again. So I was standing up for Santa, but what it actually taught me was actually these bullies. If you hurt them, they don’t come back. So I learnt that through school, and I became very good at fighting through school. And I took that out of school because I thought everyone out of school was trying to get me. You know what I mean? Because I thought in school it was always you know people would delete my work. I had a laptop at school. I was one of the first kids in Australia to have a laptop because I could type, touch type, and then I’d walk away to do to talk to a friend. I’d come back and someone had highlighted and deleted all my work. So it was just school was awful, and I took that. I thought everyone was out to get me out of school and kept fighting, and it was very hard to get out of that mentality that the whole world was out to get me, and I needed to escalate everything straight away to to resolve problems, yeah. So it took a long time, and my I didn’t pick relation, I didn’t pick women well, partners well, and I just jump into any relationship, and so there was it was a big learning process for me and getting better and better. But it was that there’s a moment in my book where basically I was I was staying in my I just bought my second property in Sydney, you know, on paper everything looks great, but I wasn’t happy, and I just had another failed relationship. I was staying with my sister; she was away working. She was, you know, she was doing really well with her career at the time, and I sat in this room and I wrote down. I was so, what do I want in life? And I wanted to have this this partner, and I wrote down a list of 12 things that I wanted, and had this crack, like this almost this cracking in my head, of you know, this aha moment. But it actually felt like a physical crack in my brain, and I realised that I wasn’t six of the things out of those 12 things. I wasn’t six of them. So how was it reasonable for me to want to have this part, this life partner, with all these things when I wasn’t those things? So so from. That point on, I went. Well, I need to take accountability to become those things, so that it’s reasonable for me to expect someone that has those things in my life. And that’s that was the turning point where you know that was basically that was the overnight moment.

Matt Formston 35:12
But it was until that point, I’ve been getting better. Like I wasn’t fighting all the time, and I wasn’t quite drinking as much, and I wasn’t partying ridiculously. But I still wasn’t. I still was doing some of those things. You know what I mean. So that overnight, from that point, I just worked really hard on myself and brought all those standards into my life. Didn’t make you know. I I realised that I didn’t you know make excuses for things. Whenever I said this is my standard now, I’d never. I would never negotiate on that. I just hold the line on that.

Graeme Cowan 35:37
Yeah, it’s a great example. And the 12 things you wrote was that in one sitting or was it over one sitting? One sitting, yeah. Yeah, and

Matt Formston 35:45
the ridiculous thing is I can’t see the things I wrote, so it was just the process of writing them down to to do that. It was I was in this room. My sister didn’t have a TV, and so she had a notepad, and it was just a it was just yeah, it was a process of doing it that helped me get through it.

Graeme Cowan 36:02
You mentioned before, Matt, that you’re an amazing problem solver, which you learnt a lot about over the years. Every workplace, including Optus, is facing big problems at the moment, and you know, there’s a guy called Darren Moglia. He wrote his from Enterprise Works, but he’s looking at productivity and well-being.

Matt Formston 36:25
Yeah,

Graeme Cowan 36:26
and one of the things that he showed, and this wasn’t just his research; it was drawing on Gallup as well.

Matt Formston 36:32
Yeah,

Graeme Cowan 36:33
but for the last five years, productivity has declined per capita.

Matt Formston 36:38
Yeah, the

Graeme Cowan 36:39
last five years, stress has increased each year, and over that period, AI is playing a bigger role in people’s workplaces. So there’s a big problem there. It’s a stark problem. How would you go about helping Optus to solve that problem?

Matt Formston 37:01
Look, when I’ve seen that done badly myself or created the most amount of stress, obviously what the AI is doing is creating a lot of market change, right? So you might have set your strategy in January, and then you realise by March that you actually need to change the strategy because because of AI, the product changes, market’s changing, right? There’s all these things. So you start chasing the market, yep, and therefore changing your strategy, and therefore you’re changing the stresses for your people. They’ve heard in January what the strategy is, and then all of a sudden it’s changing again. So that change, there’s a change in the market, but then there’s change in their internal environment as well. Where I’ve seen it work better is where if you’re locked into your five-year strategy, you may have to slightly change the strategy at a high level, but your people don’t need to hear about that all the time, right? They don’t need to hear about the market noise; they’ll see it. But if you’re telling them to change all the time, and you’re going, let’s focus on peripherals, let’s focus on the core, and you keep chasing things, it creates a lot of stress for people. Whereas if you can hold the high-level strategy for them, and hold the stress for them as a leader, and just let them get on with their tasks, or let them change slightly. It actually reduces that the stress for them, and I think that’s that’s one of the biggest drivers of all the stress, and is creating this you know loss of productivity as well. Because every time you tell people to change, then there’s a changing in gears. You’re losing productivity as you change focus, as a leader, if you can get more clear on really what are the big ticket items and focus on those, and let your people work on those things, it actually changes that stress level for them.

Graeme Cowan 38:32
Yeah, that’s some great insight there. I always finish the same way. Time’s gone very quickly, but knowing what you know now, and you know it’s been an incredible life through lots of highlights and challenges and everything. What advice would you give your five-year-old self? You know who just, you know, found the vision deteriorating dramatically. What advice would you give that person knowing what you know now?

Matt Formston 39:03
It’s a really tricky question, and I’ve obviously asked this question a number of times. And the answer would be, I would tell that person not to worry about other people’s opinions too much, or at all. But the craziest thing is that even if you told my 25-year-old self not to listen to other people’s opinions, I wouldn’t have listened to you. So that would be wasted advice. So I think we all need to learn. You know, I’m a parent now. You know, that’s the hardest leadership anyone has, leadership job. But you know, I see in my kids as well. I can give them all the advice in the world. Like I’m an executive coach. I coach, you know, professional athletes, football teams, the defence force. Multiple people ask me around their strategy and leadership and tactical things, right? So, but my 10-year-old child doesn’t think the dad knows anything, so he’s going to have to learn for himself. And I think that’s the thing. You know, we all have to live and learn by ourselves. But I would say to that five-year-old, the advice I give the five-year-old will be different to the advice I give the 18-year-old version of myself. But the five-year-old. Version of myself, I would just say, just always know that you’re adding value and always try hard because I think they’re the two things. If you keep adding value and you keep trying, things get easy.

Graeme Cowan 40:09
And how would your message differ for the 18-year-old you?

Matt Formston 40:12
The 18-year-old for me, because I was very out of control at that time. So the 18-year-old version of me, I would say, don’t be so hard on yourself, and things will get better if you keep trying.

Graeme Cowan 40:23
Great stuff! A lesson for all of us. Thanks so much for being part of the Caring CEO, Matt. I’ve really enjoyed our chat.

Matt Formston 40:31
No, thank you so much for me, and I thank you for the great questions.

Graeme Cowan 40:35
Thanks for joining us today. We hope you’re inspired to strive for a culture of care that also leads to great results. If you’ve enjoyed this interview today, please rate us on your favourite podcast platform, and don’t forget to subscribe so that you don’t miss an episode. We also welcome any comments. If you’re interested in seeing details about our scalable We Care 365 mental health training programmes, please visit us at weekcare365.com.au. Our goal is to make these programmes accessible, practical, and ongoing. You can also find me Graeme Cowan on LinkedIn, and I’d love to hear from you. And finally, if you’ve come across a senior leader who has impressed you, and you think that’d be a great guess? Please email us at support at weekcare365.com.au. Thanks once again for listening today.

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