June 3, 2025 • 28 mins
In Episode 78 of Scoreboard, Chris Titley sits down with Tom Boyd—AFL premiership hero, mental health advocate, and former No. 1 draft pick—to talk about identity, expectation, and rewriting your own story.
Tom opens up about the pressure of being a teenage multimillionaire, the reality behind “that” 2016 Grand Final goal, and why walking away from the game was one of the hardest—and best—decisions he’s ever made.
He shares how mental health challenges forced him to stop, reset, and rethink what success actually looks like—and how he now uses his experience to help others do the same.
From battling insomnia and media scrutiny to launching a new career focused on wellbeing, Tom’s journey is both cautionary and inspiring.
💬 A story about courage, change, and choosing to live on your own terms.
📌 Subscribe for more stories from every corner of the game.
Follow us at:
w: www.scoreboardpodcast.com
insta: @scoreboardpod
y: https://www.youtube.com/@Scoreboardpodcast
p: Partnership opportunities – chris@scoreboardpodcast.com
#sport #business #life #ScoreboardPodcast
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
From the arena to the front office, this is Scoreboard.
I'm Chris Titley, and each episode brings you stories from
the game of sport, where mindset, money and meaning shape
what comes next. Athletes, coaches, owners and
business leaders unpack the moments that matter, because the
Scoreboard isn't just about winning.
It's about life beyond the game.Now let's get to this week's
(00:23):
episode. Hi, it's Chris Titley here.
And on today's episode of Scoreboard, I'm joined by Tom
Boyd. Tom, thanks so much for being
part of Scoreboard the podcast. Absolutely fantastic to be here.
Tom, we're sitting here on Monday the 2nd of June around
midday. How has your weekend been mate?
Yeah, it's been a hectic little period for me.
(00:43):
I typically between sort of April and end of September, just
have an incredible sort of high volume of speaking work.
I do about 100 speaking events ayear.
When it comes to mental health and performance, you adding sort
of ambassador work, a day job with a company called Ever
Perform, specialising in performance and risk, and you
end up with a really, really busy calendar.
So I'm fresh off a trip to Kyabram which is up in the
(01:06):
northern parts of Victoria. Touched Bendigo and Coiambra on
Thursday as well. So it's been a bit hectic, but a
great night's sleep last night and a bit of exercise this
morning and ready to go. You mentioned footy there, I'm
just I'm curious to know your relationship with footy and
whether that's changed over time.
Yeah, for sure. I mean, when you go sort of
through your life as a as a kid,I grew up in the eastern suburbs
of Melbourne, you know, footy fanfare is as much a part of
(01:28):
life as family as in many ways. And as a card supporter growing
up, I certainly had a lot of that.
But very quickly as you sort of work through the ranks of the
junior talent pathways and you start to progress towards being
potentially a professional, thatsort of attitude towards the
game changes. Sort of being about fun and
passion to what can I learn, whocan I watch?
How is it going to prepare me better for a potential life and
(01:49):
professional sport upon being drafted?
Then you have another shift altogether.
We're really, you're starting touse this as part of your
processing power when it comes to improvement, when it comes to
coaching, when it comes to celebrating those things that
you've done really well. And it's a really an all day,
everyday thing. You know, you'll be doing vision
either individually with a coach, with a team, you know, 6
(02:11):
or 8 hours a week at a minimum. So by the time you get through
all of that and you end your career, it certainly feels like
you could be continuing to do all of the hard parts of your
job without the financial rewardby watching too much footy on
the screen. So it took a couple of years.
I'm out of the game sort of six seasons now and certainly
starting to feel much more like a fan again.
(02:32):
I could appreciate the challenges the players have on
the field. I'm a bigger admirer of all of
their accomplishments, but stillhave that sort of inkling of
working back to being a fan oncemore as it's been sort of 15
years or so since I was one in the first place.
Yeah. And Tom the Tom Boyd the the AFL
player versus Tom Boyd the person.
How have you coped with that in terms of the identity in sport?
(02:54):
Well, for starters, absolutely horrendously.
I mean playing footy at the top level, one of the great
challenges I think that happens in an environment as high
performing and as rudimentary asthe AFL in many ways is that you
end up being defined by two things.
One a very variable outcome based sport which delivers the
(03:18):
reference point as kicks, Marks and handballs.
So did you do what you said you were going to do on the weekend
and buy how much or buy how little?
And then what spills out of thatis a completely unable to
control narrative that spills through social media, the
broader media network and the the commentary associated with
the game itself. And I think one of the things
that really I struggled with when I was playing was all of
(03:41):
the inputs to that outcome did not matter one bit if you didn't
achieve what you said you were going to achieve or what people
expected of you. And in the case of me as a
number one pick and a guy signeda massive contract as a 19 year
old, the limit didn't exist in terms of how I was expected to
play on the weekend. And so often I felt like I fell
short and and had to really adjust to that.
(04:02):
You Fast forward to out of the game, however, it's a completely
different thing. The impact that you make with
people on a regular basis is allmuch more appreciated and in
many ways I think the corporate sector could take a leap from
football's booking, trying to make people meeting
expectations, preparing for performance and performance as a
whole as probably the takeaway in terms of what sport does much
(04:22):
better than than. Business and when it comes to
high performance those those words, your definition I suppose
in doing my research is a littlebit different to some people's
high performance and and your own personal high performance
versus what expectations are do you want to talk about that for?
A SEC, yeah. So I think high performance in
any given industry looks the same regardless of how you get
there. I mean, so take a salesperson,
(04:43):
right, somebody knocks their sales targets out quarter after
quarter is someone who would be considered a high performer.
The thing is, though, that the way to get to that goal and the
way to get to that performance sustainably and consistently can
be done really, really differently.
When you're preparing to deal with any adversity and get
through any stressful period, you can do one of two things.
(05:04):
You can learn habits that will keep you there for a long period
of time. You can do it the right way in
short terms, or you can do it the wrong way And you can learn
habits that will sustain your performance for a short period
but often end up being the tail of why people suffer things like
burnout, fatigue and obviously the more significant mental
health components that spill outfrom that later on.
(05:25):
And I think the tale is really, as always, timing, particularly
if you think about sort of big metro metropolises like
Melbourne and Sydney and of course the growing ones around
the country. Is that the story of these high
performing executives, leaders, managers, you name it, within
any industry who get to a point in their life, mid 30s, early
40s, and they have a complete and utter sort of life refresh.
(05:47):
And a lot of that happens when people prepare to get to their
outcomes that they're seeking inthe wrong way.
And it was certainly the path that I took from an early age
where everything that was in my future could be sacrificed in,
in hope that it would improve the success of today.
And that's certainly the way that football tends to bring
(06:11):
what it tends to bring out in people.
And I think for me, the goal is really how can I sustainably do
this, improve and improve my performance over an extended
period of time, become one of the best.
And unfortunately, that takes somuch more than just getting the
outcome on the scoreboard and. In terms of the support network
through that high performing period that you're in of the
AFL, I suppose how important wasthat for people that maybe could
(06:34):
have broken the circuit a littlebit, that were outside of the
game, that prob that cared aboutyou, not really cared about what
you did on the field? Yeah, it's a good question.
I mean, I have, I have a great family supporter.
I've got a wonderful wife who was a partner of mine basically
through my whole football careeras well.
And I think the end of the day it's a bit like leading a horse
to water. If someone doesn't want support
and can't see that support is important, then it doesn't
(06:56):
matter how much is available. It's really an opt in sort of
business. And I think for me, so much of
the reasons why I didn't access more support during my career
and in other examples throughoutmy life has been because, one, I
didn't feel like I deserved it. Two, I felt guilty that I was
having issues given how much positive things were going on in
my life and how good my life looked on paper.
(07:16):
Or two, I didn't understand whatthe actual issue was.
It's very difficult to diagnose something or if you can't
diagnose it, to actually go and seek the right support that you
need. And so often speaking, I
wouldn't interpret the mental health issues that I had as
issues with. You know, there might be, I
might have thought of them as sleep issues, or perhaps I
thought it was just gonna go away or stressful and it really
(07:37):
wasn't that consequential. And I just had to get over it
and get through it. And I think so often that's why
people don't seek that support that they need is because one,
they can't understand or diagnose what the issue might
be, but two, they don't feel like they deserve or can seek
the support that they actually need.
Do you think the modern day AFL player or the modern day
professional sports athlete? They're they're so focused that
(07:58):
they forget about some of these things and then that actually
kind of falls through the cracksand creates a sort of a compound
effect later on. Absolutely.
I mean, let me give you the simplest example, right?
There's probably a slightly incorrect misnomer about the AFL
that they have the access to thebest healthcare professionals in
the world, right? And therefore they should have
the best health outcomes whilst they have access to the greatest
(08:20):
surgeons and doctors and psychologists and psychiatrists
that are available. The decision making tree of what
is important is extraordinarily different than what it would be
applied in public practise. So the example I would give in
my personal sense is that in 2016 I had a shoulder issue
coming into the season and throughout the year I had a
(08:41):
dislocation on my shoulder 15 to20 times.
Basically, every time I stepped on the field it would happen
once or twice. Now that's not a good health
outcome. And so the impetus for the
physios and doctors and myself at the time was how do I get out
on the field for this season andwhat specialist treatment,
(09:03):
rehabilitation or otherwise can I use to be able to perform in
my role for the season ahead? You get to the end of the year,
then you get the surgical intervention, and then you start
on another rehabilitation plan before playing again the
following year. If you take that into the normal
context, if someone had a physical injury like a shoulder
issue that I had, they would deal with it straight away.
(09:25):
You would rehabilitate it. You would be on very, very light
physical duties as you progress back to trying to get your
shoulder into a position that would be sustainably good for
the rest of your life. Whereas in football you
sacrifice much of that's sustainably good for your rest
of your life peace in order to get a more discernible.
So it's sort of just a differentway of thinking about the fact
(09:47):
that, you know, football applieddifferent say life typically
does. And in many ways, whilst
footballers have so many advantages, there are a few
examples where I would say that there are certain disadvantages
that really the football public and the public more broadly
don't quite understand the severity of.
And your shoulder. How's it now?
Well I went back to play in the EFL briefly after I retired and
(10:10):
definitely heard it again. So quite frankly if I was self
diagnosing, which is always a dangerous thing to do, and this
is not based on like doctor Google or whatever.
This is based on my experience and how my body feels.
I probably need 2 shoulder ricos, I'm getting closer to
needing another ankle scope, andI probably need a hip scope
would be my current guesstimate.Not that I've ever actually
(10:31):
spoken about this publicly, but that would be about where I
think my body is at. The question is, is that
conducive or required based on my current physical activities?
And the answer for the moment isis probably no.
I did a podcast recently where they said there's a bit of an
ACL epidemic going on. Do you watch, do you watch
football now and see some of these injuries?
And you're like, Gee, that's, that's really harsh and unlucky.
(10:53):
And and then thinking, well actually, why is this
continuing? Yeah, it's a good question.
I mean, like it comes back down to physics, Yeah.
Like there's a, there's some calculation of a vector of force
that goes through your knee and then there's some calculation of
how much your knee can take froma force point of view.
So, yeah, it's, it's really one of those things where there's a,
(11:14):
there was a philosophy that I heard from a a head physio
during my time in the AFL and essentially it went like this
during pre season. There is an expectation that you
will have one small injury a week and one significant and
season impacting injury a month,right?
And it's not to say that that's the desired outcome.
(11:36):
It is the outcome that will happen invariably if you're
pushing your group to a level that actually puts them right at
the edge of redlining without going over it.
And so between the 50 guys that you have in your list, certain
numbers of those guys will experience that redline earlier
because they're not as fit or ascapable, whether it's an age or
an aerobic capacity or whatever else.
(11:58):
And some of them will experienceit later, But you need to push
the group to get to a point where they're right at that
edge. Otherwise you're not going to be
the best that you can be. And again, this is a very
different theory. I, I would say that is
applicable outside of the world of Aussie Rules.
But if you take it back a step away from redlining and you go
to really that sort of healthy stress level that's conducive to
improvement performance and, youknow, the development of
(12:21):
resilience and the tools required to be resilient.
That's essentially, I think whatone of the great challenges from
a conceptual point of view that we have in today's conversation,
which is, you know, particularlyin younger people, hey, I feel
bad right now. And there's a number of things
that could be contributing to that.
That must mean that the activitythat AI associate with feeling
bad must also be bad. Now that's obviously not correct
(12:44):
from an academic point of view, but even from a practical point
of view, the best and most opportune and desirable and
enjoyable moments in most people's careers are on the
other side of some form of struggle.
And I think in today's day and age, we so typically see, hey,
let's focus on the outcome that we're trying to accomplish
rather than seeing really this struggle along the way to get
(13:06):
there is the bit that you do allof the learning, you develop all
of the fulfilment and satisfaction that you're
ultimately trying to seek. And then the actual outcome
itself ends up being sort of a an extra cherry on the top.
Let's speak of that outcome for you and what drives AFL teams
now and players is a premiershipand, and multiple premierships,
I suppose, or legacy in in some instances, which is very, very
rare, making grand finals very rare, winning a premiership's
(13:29):
very rare. But the outcome that you got in
2016 of the Western Bulldogs wasa premiership and and you talked
about the struggles along the way.
Can you talk about that day downlooking back and obviously the,
the, the emotions that were there?
I'm, I'm not saying like it was happy or sad.
I'm just I'm curious as to know based on your comments before
about the struggles to get thereand the outcome was a bit, yeah.
(13:51):
Yeah. So it's a great question and
certainly not one that I shy away from.
I think there's been sort of a growing group of older players
who have come out more recently in a really, I would say,
positive movement to share the issues that they face.
And I remember hearing a couple of guys talk about how even when
(14:11):
they were doing X, you know, like that were at the height of
their game, they were, they had these really sort of negative
emotions attached to them. And that wasn't the case with
me. You know, the trickiest part
about trying to explain to people the issues with mental
health in the, in the, the method or I suppose the journey
that I had is it's not linear and it's not this really simple
(14:31):
process of a football going goodand mental health going bad.
Because it'd be way easier to explain if that was the case.
And then you'd imagine that building interventions and
altering the course would be simpler as well.
But like anything throughout theperiod of 2014, fifteen and 16,
I had huge issues off the field.But that wasn't to say that
(14:53):
there wasn't really good moments.
And in fact, the really good months that I had certainly
contributed to me basically going, Oh well, it's all behind
me now so I can forget about it and hope that it never comes
back. And one of those great periods
was the final series in 2016, aswell as obviously the 2016
premiership more specifically. And I remember waking up that
day after going through an incredibly tough preliminary
(15:17):
final against GWS up in Sydney the week before.
And I remember talking to my dadat about must have been 10:00 in
the morning because one of the things that happens on grand
final day is you get there like 3 hours before the game.
It takes you an hour and a bit to get in there, which normally
takes 15 to 20 minutes for me. And there's this whole big
process. So you have almost like 5 times
(15:37):
as much time to Mull over what'sabout to happen.
And what's about to happen is the scariest possible moment as
well as the most exciting momentyou can possibly have.
I would say in in Australian sport and talking to my dad
beforehand, he's a hero of mine,probably the number one person,
definitely the number one personwho's shaped my life.
(15:57):
And it was like in that moment he ran out of advice for me.
He was just like, well, I guess we'll just see how we go.
And that's honest. That's really as silly as it
seems. That was kind of the mindset
like took into it, which was 99.90.
No, no, no, no. Percent of everything that I
could do to play well today is out of my control already.
(16:19):
And now it's about going, this is a once in a lifetime
experience, let's just make the most of it.
Like there's no other point sortof procrastinating or hyper
fixating, which I'd done in so much of my career.
This was the moment in time I felt the most liberty and I
think my performance matched that.
And I think the other thing thatI'll make mention of at this
(16:39):
time is that so much of the emotion that I attached to that
day was actually developed subsequent to the game and the
day itself. Because as a 21 year old,
there's only so much appreciation you can have for a
club and a people like the Western Bulldogs supporters on
what they've been through over along period of time.
But what you can have an appreciation for is the
adulation and those types of things on the day.
(16:59):
And so what's happened since is you get really that respect and
gratitude for what we were able to do for those people.
Because the history of the club has been one that's been marred
with success, successless periods, challenges, club going
broken into administration and so on.
It's been a painful process being a Bulldog supporter, and
we were able to create a bright spark in what's been a difficult
(17:20):
history. I.
Had to chat to Dale Morris on mypodcast and you talked about
visualisation. Were you a visualiser?
Did you get there and go right? This is what's going to happen
and and this is what I think, you know, I'm going to do.
Yes and no. I'm a I'm a very literal person
and a chronic high volume thinker, so I consider pretty
much everything that can possibly happen, good and bad,
(17:42):
but not so much. It wasn't so much a big practise
of mine to go out there and try and like imagine winning an
like. I tried dabbled in everything
over the years but I think for me it was more about getting a
really clear understanding of what good looks and feels like
for me and rather than the visualisation as a key aspect by
(18:03):
itself. And Dale did that tackle.
You kicked that goal. Looking back at a YouTube clip
now, someone shows you that. What do you think?
Well, I'd say that I haven't seen it that many times, but
that would be about as blatant alie as possible.
I watch it probably, I don't know, it probably gets sent to
me 1000 * a year in particular around finals time.
(18:25):
It's part of the the keynote speaking that I do as a frame of
reference say, hey, look how good everything looked on TV.
But here's the rest of the story.
So I see it a lot is my point. And I think again, to refer back
to my previous answer, there's two parts to it.
One, it's an absolutely unbelievable goal that you know,
if you gave me 10 shots at it todo in that moment in time, would
(18:46):
I kick 10 of them? No, but having said that, that's
not to say that that moment in time is reflective of a fluke or
anything like that. I'll give you a reason as to why
it's not in every single training that I ever did from
the ages of 12 to probably, you know, that game at the very
least and certainly beyond it. The coach brings the team back
(19:10):
into the middle of the ground between drills, right?
So the coach goes, great, drill's done, come back to the
middle, let's chat. And at every opportunity that I
could possibly muster, I would go and get a ball before going
back to the middle of the groundso that after the coach finished
addressing us, I could kick a goal from that exact spot.
And everyone who could kick the ball a long way did that.
(19:32):
You know, the Mat sucklings, theTom Campbell's, the Stewie
Crameries, the Bonds, the like we all did that because it was a
way of getting that type of shotin and a little extra that you
could add in over the years. And that's why by the time that
I had that shot, I'd had that exact kick, you know, hundreds
if not thousands of times over the course of my lifetime.
(19:53):
So that's number one. Number two, I think that, you
know, when you really look at it, the moment in time to create
something as special as the first team winning the
premiership from 7th position onthe AFL ladder at the end of the
season in AFL history. I'm not to say that's the only
moment, of course. There's a million other ones,
including Pico's goals only a few minutes later.
(20:14):
That's special. To do the first time the
Bulldogs win a premiership sincetheir first and only in 195462
years later is, you know, unbelievably powerful.
And I think to do it in a way that really marked the moment
when, you know, those supportersI mentioned before could feel
like victors for the first time really in their living memory.
(20:34):
You know, it's all just a compounding effect of special
upon special and the, you know, the trade and the deal and
everything else that comes in between and really a sort of
crowning moment of my sporting career.
Yeah, absolutely. Dale sent me a text earlier
saying that he reckons he could have kicked the goal.
What do you reckon? Dale would could have kicked it
if he had two kicks to get thereis my answer.
(20:55):
And he'll love that. And and this is like a a Part 2
in golf. And he said that you didn't, you
didn't hear the whistle. Is that right?
Of course not. They actually, and you know,
there's a there's two absolutelyclear reasons, one stupid and
one real. The first one, the stupid one is
(21:15):
I'm far too tall to take advantage and I've been abused
for that before. So I'm, I wasn't, I wasn't doing
that off a ground ball in the middle of the field, let alone
if I'd actually heard it #2 if you actually watch the game,
there's a moment where Gary Rowan marks the ball at the
other end of the ground. I don't know, maybe it's in the
second quarter or must be earlier than that.
And he basically gets a touched ball.
(21:36):
He marks it. No one can hear the whistle.
Everyone presumes it's a mark. He goes back, he lines up, and
then he gets tackled. Like, this is like a 7 to 10
second clip of people not being able to hear what the umpire's
saying. And my point being is that it
was so incredibly loud in that place even prior to the goal
that you couldn't hear anything.And the absolute, like, shaking
(21:59):
of the stadium after that goal went through was just, you know,
breathtaking. And we're coming up to, to 10
years and, and you talked about high performance sport and, and
it's changing and, and it's almost to a point potentially, I
think you, you might have mentioned something like
unsustainable demands in, in your point in time is, is there
a circuit breaker? You also suggested suggesting
about a mental health round. Can you talk about the advocacy
(22:21):
for that and also some change along the way?
As you know, professional athletes come in, come out of
the system. Yeah, for sure.
So let's take the the second part of the question first.
So you enter the league. There really was no conditioning
concept of how to manage life asan AFI footballer before I
arrived there. So I think there's sort of the
(22:43):
skills part. So do you have the skills to
manage the stress? Do you have the skills to talk
to a psychologist or whoever else in your life for that
matter, who supports your mentalstate?
Do you have certain things in your kit bag from a structure,
process and tool point of view to deal with difficult periods
of time? That's like 1/2 of it.
The other half of it is, is the application of all of those
(23:04):
things. So the example I would give
would be what's it actually liketo be selected in the draught
and to walk into a senior footy club like an AFL one at any one
period of time. Really interesting experience,
completely different to anythingyou've done for what's it like
playing your first game? What's it like dealing with the
media? What's it like dealing with the
social side of things? The social media, the
expectations? A lot of this you have to learn,
(23:26):
but there is really no developmental frame of like
what's actually being experienced.
What tools should I have available and when would I like
to use them? And really setting players up
for success as they lead into the league is #1 #2 would be how
to actually transition players through and out of the game more
effectively. Because I frankly don't think
it's done to the degree that it could be.
And in many ways I don't think it's done to the grid that it
(23:47):
should be. As good as the AFLPA are at many
things, I commend them for so much of what they do.
This is the real sticking point for me because I, you asked me a
question about identity earlier.It's not necessarily something
that I've grappled with post footy, but I made the decision
to move on. I made the decision to move on
in the way that I did and towards the goal that I had,
(24:07):
which was working in the mental health space and supporting the
people and process and the communities associated with
football and also more broadly with business and in Australia.
That's what I wanted to do. So identity wasn't a factor as
much leaving the game as it is with so many people.
So there's a lot of work to be still done in that space and I
(24:28):
would argue connecting the dots between the entrance to the
league and the dots through the league and out of it is the
number 1 ticket item that shouldbe on the AFLPAS agenda in terms
of improvement. The secondary part of the
question or the first part that you asked was what about this
mental health round? So there's a couple of layers
here. First and foremost, there is two
(24:49):
major criticisms of a mental health round that's dedicated to
AFL and and an AFL round dedicated to mental health.
The 1st is why haven't the AFL done this already?
All right, One, from an attitudepoint of view, that doesn't make
any sense, right? If you ever want to solve a
problem, the first question is not asked.
Oh, this is not fair. It's not done yet.
(25:10):
Go and do something about it. That would be my first remark.
The second part is that from a practical point of view, the AFL
is not incentivized to do anything other than to pump out
games, create media attention and to recoup the revenue
associated with it through theircollective bargaining agreement.
And to use that to grow the gameof AFL for a future succession,
not only within the league but also to grow the game more
(25:32):
broadly. That's all that matters to the
AFL. So until they are pressured to
change and pressured to bring something to the forefront, they
will not do it. So that's the second part.
The other criticism is we need more action, not awareness.
Well, frankly, the response to that is pretty simple.
Any problem that you have in your life, if you do not focus
on it, you will not improve it. Anything you put on the back
(25:55):
burner from a focus point of view typically gets worse, not
better. And the number one thing that
these programme based organisations who do fantastic
work in the community have been crying out for is 1.
We need more funding and two, weneed an attention.
We need the attention of people so we can make an impact with
the work that we do. So my perspective is the AFL
mental health round achieves those things in droves, and it
(26:18):
does it in three separate buckets #1 is the mental health
rounds needs to seek to reinforce why we are in this
fight and what's important, who we've lost, the issues that we
face and the problems that we need to solve.
The second thing that it needs is a real ability to not only
celebrate the things that have been accomplished through the
(26:39):
AFL community during the year, but also to in a way hold
account the AFL for actually doing those things in the 1st
place. Think of it as sort of the
performance review, if you will,for one of a better term for the
AFL on this topic. And the third thing is to
reinforce, the third thing is toreinforce exactly what needs to
happen next and what problems will be solved in the near to
(27:00):
medium future. That's the that's the role of
the mental health round. And I appreciate there was a bit
in that, but. No, no, that's for sure.
Yeah, no, I think that's mate, you've, you've, you're mapping
it out and you're clear in termsof what is achievable and all
the questions that people are going to ask or stop.
No, no, no, no, no progress, etcetera.
And you've, you've nailed that. I've got one final question for
you, Tom. There's a kids out there playing
(27:21):
footy. There's 15 year olds that want
wanting to become AFL players and AFLW players.
What's some advice you can give to them now in 2025 about being
a professional athlete? Oh, for one, it's an absolutely
awesome experience. I'll never dissuade anyone from
doing it. It's one of the greatest periods
of time in my life. But it is challenging.
And because it is challenging, go out and seek as much
(27:43):
knowledge and as much insight asyou can to how to manage your
mind, your body and your emotions associated with those
two things so that you can do this as successfully as
possible. That's basically the advice that
I'd give to anyone. If you love it, go and do it.
If you're going to do it, understand the risks, understand
the challenges and go and find solutions for it because it can
(28:03):
be the absolute pinnacle of yourprofessional life and something
that reaches and touches so manydifferent people across so many
different colours, creeds and otherwise.
So go ahead and do it. Just do it with your eyes wide
open. Tom, thank you so much for
having a chat today on Scoreboard.
I really do appreciate your yourjourney and sharing your journey
and your insights in terms of the, the transparency and
(28:23):
openness around mental health aswell as little highlights of
your career, et cetera. And looking forward to following
the progress. Looking forward.
I really enjoy the LinkedIn updates and the articles that
you write and and hopefully can get to share them and support
them in the future and looking forward to catching.
Up awesome. Appreciate you having me.
Thank you.
From the arena to the front office, this is Scoreboard.
I'm Chris Titley, and each episode brings you stories from
the game of sport, where mindset, money and meaning shape
what comes next. Athletes, coaches, owners and
business leaders unpack the moments that matter, because the
Scoreboard isn't just about winning.
It's about life beyond the game.Now let's get to this week's
(00:23):
episode. Hi, it's Chris Titley here.
And on today's episode of Scoreboard, I'm joined by Tom
Boyd. Tom, thanks so much for being
part of Scoreboard the podcast. Absolutely fantastic to be here.
Tom, we're sitting here on Monday the 2nd of June around
midday. How has your weekend been mate?
Yeah, it's been a hectic little period for me.
(00:43):
I typically between sort of April and end of September, just
have an incredible sort of high volume of speaking work.
I do about 100 speaking events ayear.
When it comes to mental health and performance, you adding sort
of ambassador work, a day job with a company called Ever
Perform, specialising in performance and risk, and you
end up with a really, really busy calendar.
So I'm fresh off a trip to Kyabram which is up in the
(01:06):
northern parts of Victoria. Touched Bendigo and Coiambra on
Thursday as well. So it's been a bit hectic, but a
great night's sleep last night and a bit of exercise this
morning and ready to go. You mentioned footy there, I'm
just I'm curious to know your relationship with footy and
whether that's changed over time.
Yeah, for sure. I mean, when you go sort of
through your life as a as a kid,I grew up in the eastern suburbs
of Melbourne, you know, footy fanfare is as much a part of
(01:28):
life as family as in many ways. And as a card supporter growing
up, I certainly had a lot of that.
But very quickly as you sort of work through the ranks of the
junior talent pathways and you start to progress towards being
potentially a professional, thatsort of attitude towards the
game changes. Sort of being about fun and
passion to what can I learn, whocan I watch?
How is it going to prepare me better for a potential life and
(01:49):
professional sport upon being drafted?
Then you have another shift altogether.
We're really, you're starting touse this as part of your
processing power when it comes to improvement, when it comes to
coaching, when it comes to celebrating those things that
you've done really well. And it's a really an all day,
everyday thing. You know, you'll be doing vision
either individually with a coach, with a team, you know, 6
(02:11):
or 8 hours a week at a minimum. So by the time you get through
all of that and you end your career, it certainly feels like
you could be continuing to do all of the hard parts of your
job without the financial rewardby watching too much footy on
the screen. So it took a couple of years.
I'm out of the game sort of six seasons now and certainly
starting to feel much more like a fan again.
(02:32):
I could appreciate the challenges the players have on
the field. I'm a bigger admirer of all of
their accomplishments, but stillhave that sort of inkling of
working back to being a fan oncemore as it's been sort of 15
years or so since I was one in the first place.
Yeah. And Tom the Tom Boyd the the AFL
player versus Tom Boyd the person.
How have you coped with that in terms of the identity in sport?
(02:54):
Well, for starters, absolutely horrendously.
I mean playing footy at the top level, one of the great
challenges I think that happens in an environment as high
performing and as rudimentary asthe AFL in many ways is that you
end up being defined by two things.
One a very variable outcome based sport which delivers the
(03:18):
reference point as kicks, Marks and handballs.
So did you do what you said you were going to do on the weekend
and buy how much or buy how little?
And then what spills out of thatis a completely unable to
control narrative that spills through social media, the
broader media network and the the commentary associated with
the game itself. And I think one of the things
that really I struggled with when I was playing was all of
(03:41):
the inputs to that outcome did not matter one bit if you didn't
achieve what you said you were going to achieve or what people
expected of you. And in the case of me as a
number one pick and a guy signeda massive contract as a 19 year
old, the limit didn't exist in terms of how I was expected to
play on the weekend. And so often I felt like I fell
short and and had to really adjust to that.
(04:02):
You Fast forward to out of the game, however, it's a completely
different thing. The impact that you make with
people on a regular basis is allmuch more appreciated and in
many ways I think the corporate sector could take a leap from
football's booking, trying to make people meeting
expectations, preparing for performance and performance as a
whole as probably the takeaway in terms of what sport does much
(04:22):
better than than. Business and when it comes to
high performance those those words, your definition I suppose
in doing my research is a littlebit different to some people's
high performance and and your own personal high performance
versus what expectations are do you want to talk about that for?
A SEC, yeah. So I think high performance in
any given industry looks the same regardless of how you get
there. I mean, so take a salesperson,
(04:43):
right, somebody knocks their sales targets out quarter after
quarter is someone who would be considered a high performer.
The thing is, though, that the way to get to that goal and the
way to get to that performance sustainably and consistently can
be done really, really differently.
When you're preparing to deal with any adversity and get
through any stressful period, you can do one of two things.
(05:04):
You can learn habits that will keep you there for a long period
of time. You can do it the right way in
short terms, or you can do it the wrong way And you can learn
habits that will sustain your performance for a short period
but often end up being the tail of why people suffer things like
burnout, fatigue and obviously the more significant mental
health components that spill outfrom that later on.
(05:25):
And I think the tale is really, as always, timing, particularly
if you think about sort of big metro metropolises like
Melbourne and Sydney and of course the growing ones around
the country. Is that the story of these high
performing executives, leaders, managers, you name it, within
any industry who get to a point in their life, mid 30s, early
40s, and they have a complete and utter sort of life refresh.
(05:47):
And a lot of that happens when people prepare to get to their
outcomes that they're seeking inthe wrong way.
And it was certainly the path that I took from an early age
where everything that was in my future could be sacrificed in,
in hope that it would improve the success of today.
And that's certainly the way that football tends to bring
(06:11):
what it tends to bring out in people.
And I think for me, the goal is really how can I sustainably do
this, improve and improve my performance over an extended
period of time, become one of the best.
And unfortunately, that takes somuch more than just getting the
outcome on the scoreboard and. In terms of the support network
through that high performing period that you're in of the
AFL, I suppose how important wasthat for people that maybe could
(06:34):
have broken the circuit a littlebit, that were outside of the
game, that prob that cared aboutyou, not really cared about what
you did on the field? Yeah, it's a good question.
I mean, I have, I have a great family supporter.
I've got a wonderful wife who was a partner of mine basically
through my whole football careeras well.
And I think the end of the day it's a bit like leading a horse
to water. If someone doesn't want support
and can't see that support is important, then it doesn't
(06:56):
matter how much is available. It's really an opt in sort of
business. And I think for me, so much of
the reasons why I didn't access more support during my career
and in other examples throughoutmy life has been because, one, I
didn't feel like I deserved it. Two, I felt guilty that I was
having issues given how much positive things were going on in
my life and how good my life looked on paper.
(07:16):
Or two, I didn't understand whatthe actual issue was.
It's very difficult to diagnose something or if you can't
diagnose it, to actually go and seek the right support that you
need. And so often speaking, I
wouldn't interpret the mental health issues that I had as
issues with. You know, there might be, I
might have thought of them as sleep issues, or perhaps I
thought it was just gonna go away or stressful and it really
(07:37):
wasn't that consequential. And I just had to get over it
and get through it. And I think so often that's why
people don't seek that support that they need is because one,
they can't understand or diagnose what the issue might
be, but two, they don't feel like they deserve or can seek
the support that they actually need.
Do you think the modern day AFL player or the modern day
professional sports athlete? They're they're so focused that
(07:58):
they forget about some of these things and then that actually
kind of falls through the cracksand creates a sort of a compound
effect later on. Absolutely.
I mean, let me give you the simplest example, right?
There's probably a slightly incorrect misnomer about the AFL
that they have the access to thebest healthcare professionals in
the world, right? And therefore they should have
the best health outcomes whilst they have access to the greatest
(08:20):
surgeons and doctors and psychologists and psychiatrists
that are available. The decision making tree of what
is important is extraordinarily different than what it would be
applied in public practise. So the example I would give in
my personal sense is that in 2016 I had a shoulder issue
coming into the season and throughout the year I had a
(08:41):
dislocation on my shoulder 15 to20 times.
Basically, every time I stepped on the field it would happen
once or twice. Now that's not a good health
outcome. And so the impetus for the
physios and doctors and myself at the time was how do I get out
on the field for this season andwhat specialist treatment,
(09:03):
rehabilitation or otherwise can I use to be able to perform in
my role for the season ahead? You get to the end of the year,
then you get the surgical intervention, and then you start
on another rehabilitation plan before playing again the
following year. If you take that into the normal
context, if someone had a physical injury like a shoulder
issue that I had, they would deal with it straight away.
(09:25):
You would rehabilitate it. You would be on very, very light
physical duties as you progress back to trying to get your
shoulder into a position that would be sustainably good for
the rest of your life. Whereas in football you
sacrifice much of that's sustainably good for your rest
of your life peace in order to get a more discernible.
So it's sort of just a differentway of thinking about the fact
(09:47):
that, you know, football applieddifferent say life typically
does. And in many ways, whilst
footballers have so many advantages, there are a few
examples where I would say that there are certain disadvantages
that really the football public and the public more broadly
don't quite understand the severity of.
And your shoulder. How's it now?
Well I went back to play in the EFL briefly after I retired and
(10:10):
definitely heard it again. So quite frankly if I was self
diagnosing, which is always a dangerous thing to do, and this
is not based on like doctor Google or whatever.
This is based on my experience and how my body feels.
I probably need 2 shoulder ricos, I'm getting closer to
needing another ankle scope, andI probably need a hip scope
would be my current guesstimate.Not that I've ever actually
(10:31):
spoken about this publicly, but that would be about where I
think my body is at. The question is, is that
conducive or required based on my current physical activities?
And the answer for the moment isis probably no.
I did a podcast recently where they said there's a bit of an
ACL epidemic going on. Do you watch, do you watch
football now and see some of these injuries?
And you're like, Gee, that's, that's really harsh and unlucky.
(10:53):
And and then thinking, well actually, why is this
continuing? Yeah, it's a good question.
I mean, like it comes back down to physics, Yeah.
Like there's a, there's some calculation of a vector of force
that goes through your knee and then there's some calculation of
how much your knee can take froma force point of view.
So, yeah, it's, it's really one of those things where there's a,
(11:14):
there was a philosophy that I heard from a a head physio
during my time in the AFL and essentially it went like this
during pre season. There is an expectation that you
will have one small injury a week and one significant and
season impacting injury a month,right?
And it's not to say that that's the desired outcome.
(11:36):
It is the outcome that will happen invariably if you're
pushing your group to a level that actually puts them right at
the edge of redlining without going over it.
And so between the 50 guys that you have in your list, certain
numbers of those guys will experience that redline earlier
because they're not as fit or ascapable, whether it's an age or
an aerobic capacity or whatever else.
(11:58):
And some of them will experienceit later, But you need to push
the group to get to a point where they're right at that
edge. Otherwise you're not going to be
the best that you can be. And again, this is a very
different theory. I, I would say that is
applicable outside of the world of Aussie Rules.
But if you take it back a step away from redlining and you go
to really that sort of healthy stress level that's conducive to
improvement performance and, youknow, the development of
(12:21):
resilience and the tools required to be resilient.
That's essentially, I think whatone of the great challenges from
a conceptual point of view that we have in today's conversation,
which is, you know, particularlyin younger people, hey, I feel
bad right now. And there's a number of things
that could be contributing to that.
That must mean that the activitythat AI associate with feeling
bad must also be bad. Now that's obviously not correct
(12:44):
from an academic point of view, but even from a practical point
of view, the best and most opportune and desirable and
enjoyable moments in most people's careers are on the
other side of some form of struggle.
And I think in today's day and age, we so typically see, hey,
let's focus on the outcome that we're trying to accomplish
rather than seeing really this struggle along the way to get
(13:06):
there is the bit that you do allof the learning, you develop all
of the fulfilment and satisfaction that you're
ultimately trying to seek. And then the actual outcome
itself ends up being sort of a an extra cherry on the top.
Let's speak of that outcome for you and what drives AFL teams
now and players is a premiershipand, and multiple premierships,
I suppose, or legacy in in some instances, which is very, very
rare, making grand finals very rare, winning a premiership's
(13:29):
very rare. But the outcome that you got in
2016 of the Western Bulldogs wasa premiership and and you talked
about the struggles along the way.
Can you talk about that day downlooking back and obviously the,
the, the emotions that were there?
I'm, I'm not saying like it was happy or sad.
I'm just I'm curious as to know based on your comments before
about the struggles to get thereand the outcome was a bit, yeah.
(13:51):
Yeah. So it's a great question and
certainly not one that I shy away from.
I think there's been sort of a growing group of older players
who have come out more recently in a really, I would say,
positive movement to share the issues that they face.
And I remember hearing a couple of guys talk about how even when
(14:11):
they were doing X, you know, like that were at the height of
their game, they were, they had these really sort of negative
emotions attached to them. And that wasn't the case with
me. You know, the trickiest part
about trying to explain to people the issues with mental
health in the, in the, the method or I suppose the journey
that I had is it's not linear and it's not this really simple
(14:31):
process of a football going goodand mental health going bad.
Because it'd be way easier to explain if that was the case.
And then you'd imagine that building interventions and
altering the course would be simpler as well.
But like anything throughout theperiod of 2014, fifteen and 16,
I had huge issues off the field.But that wasn't to say that
(14:53):
there wasn't really good moments.
And in fact, the really good months that I had certainly
contributed to me basically going, Oh well, it's all behind
me now so I can forget about it and hope that it never comes
back. And one of those great periods
was the final series in 2016, aswell as obviously the 2016
premiership more specifically. And I remember waking up that
day after going through an incredibly tough preliminary
(15:17):
final against GWS up in Sydney the week before.
And I remember talking to my dadat about must have been 10:00 in
the morning because one of the things that happens on grand
final day is you get there like 3 hours before the game.
It takes you an hour and a bit to get in there, which normally
takes 15 to 20 minutes for me. And there's this whole big
process. So you have almost like 5 times
(15:37):
as much time to Mull over what'sabout to happen.
And what's about to happen is the scariest possible moment as
well as the most exciting momentyou can possibly have.
I would say in in Australian sport and talking to my dad
beforehand, he's a hero of mine,probably the number one person,
definitely the number one personwho's shaped my life.
(15:57):
And it was like in that moment he ran out of advice for me.
He was just like, well, I guess we'll just see how we go.
And that's honest. That's really as silly as it
seems. That was kind of the mindset
like took into it, which was 99.90.
No, no, no, no. Percent of everything that I
could do to play well today is out of my control already.
(16:19):
And now it's about going, this is a once in a lifetime
experience, let's just make the most of it.
Like there's no other point sortof procrastinating or hyper
fixating, which I'd done in so much of my career.
This was the moment in time I felt the most liberty and I
think my performance matched that.
And I think the other thing thatI'll make mention of at this
(16:39):
time is that so much of the emotion that I attached to that
day was actually developed subsequent to the game and the
day itself. Because as a 21 year old,
there's only so much appreciation you can have for a
club and a people like the Western Bulldogs supporters on
what they've been through over along period of time.
But what you can have an appreciation for is the
adulation and those types of things on the day.
(16:59):
And so what's happened since is you get really that respect and
gratitude for what we were able to do for those people.
Because the history of the club has been one that's been marred
with success, successless periods, challenges, club going
broken into administration and so on.
It's been a painful process being a Bulldog supporter, and
we were able to create a bright spark in what's been a difficult
(17:20):
history. I.
Had to chat to Dale Morris on mypodcast and you talked about
visualisation. Were you a visualiser?
Did you get there and go right? This is what's going to happen
and and this is what I think, you know, I'm going to do.
Yes and no. I'm a I'm a very literal person
and a chronic high volume thinker, so I consider pretty
much everything that can possibly happen, good and bad,
(17:42):
but not so much. It wasn't so much a big practise
of mine to go out there and try and like imagine winning an
like. I tried dabbled in everything
over the years but I think for me it was more about getting a
really clear understanding of what good looks and feels like
for me and rather than the visualisation as a key aspect by
(18:03):
itself. And Dale did that tackle.
You kicked that goal. Looking back at a YouTube clip
now, someone shows you that. What do you think?
Well, I'd say that I haven't seen it that many times, but
that would be about as blatant alie as possible.
I watch it probably, I don't know, it probably gets sent to
me 1000 * a year in particular around finals time.
(18:25):
It's part of the the keynote speaking that I do as a frame of
reference say, hey, look how good everything looked on TV.
But here's the rest of the story.
So I see it a lot is my point. And I think again, to refer back
to my previous answer, there's two parts to it.
One, it's an absolutely unbelievable goal that you know,
if you gave me 10 shots at it todo in that moment in time, would
(18:46):
I kick 10 of them? No, but having said that, that's
not to say that that moment in time is reflective of a fluke or
anything like that. I'll give you a reason as to why
it's not in every single training that I ever did from
the ages of 12 to probably, you know, that game at the very
least and certainly beyond it. The coach brings the team back
(19:10):
into the middle of the ground between drills, right?
So the coach goes, great, drill's done, come back to the
middle, let's chat. And at every opportunity that I
could possibly muster, I would go and get a ball before going
back to the middle of the groundso that after the coach finished
addressing us, I could kick a goal from that exact spot.
And everyone who could kick the ball a long way did that.
(19:32):
You know, the Mat sucklings, theTom Campbell's, the Stewie
Crameries, the Bonds, the like we all did that because it was a
way of getting that type of shotin and a little extra that you
could add in over the years. And that's why by the time that
I had that shot, I'd had that exact kick, you know, hundreds
if not thousands of times over the course of my lifetime.
(19:53):
So that's number one. Number two, I think that, you
know, when you really look at it, the moment in time to create
something as special as the first team winning the
premiership from 7th position onthe AFL ladder at the end of the
season in AFL history. I'm not to say that's the only
moment, of course. There's a million other ones,
including Pico's goals only a few minutes later.
(20:14):
That's special. To do the first time the
Bulldogs win a premiership sincetheir first and only in 195462
years later is, you know, unbelievably powerful.
And I think to do it in a way that really marked the moment
when, you know, those supportersI mentioned before could feel
like victors for the first time really in their living memory.
(20:34):
You know, it's all just a compounding effect of special
upon special and the, you know, the trade and the deal and
everything else that comes in between and really a sort of
crowning moment of my sporting career.
Yeah, absolutely. Dale sent me a text earlier
saying that he reckons he could have kicked the goal.
What do you reckon? Dale would could have kicked it
if he had two kicks to get thereis my answer.
(20:55):
And he'll love that. And and this is like a a Part 2
in golf. And he said that you didn't, you
didn't hear the whistle. Is that right?
Of course not. They actually, and you know,
there's a there's two absolutelyclear reasons, one stupid and
one real. The first one, the stupid one is
(21:15):
I'm far too tall to take advantage and I've been abused
for that before. So I'm, I wasn't, I wasn't doing
that off a ground ball in the middle of the field, let alone
if I'd actually heard it #2 if you actually watch the game,
there's a moment where Gary Rowan marks the ball at the
other end of the ground. I don't know, maybe it's in the
second quarter or must be earlier than that.
And he basically gets a touched ball.
(21:36):
He marks it. No one can hear the whistle.
Everyone presumes it's a mark. He goes back, he lines up, and
then he gets tackled. Like, this is like a 7 to 10
second clip of people not being able to hear what the umpire's
saying. And my point being is that it
was so incredibly loud in that place even prior to the goal
that you couldn't hear anything.And the absolute, like, shaking
(21:59):
of the stadium after that goal went through was just, you know,
breathtaking. And we're coming up to, to 10
years and, and you talked about high performance sport and, and
it's changing and, and it's almost to a point potentially, I
think you, you might have mentioned something like
unsustainable demands in, in your point in time is, is there
a circuit breaker? You also suggested suggesting
about a mental health round. Can you talk about the advocacy
(22:21):
for that and also some change along the way?
As you know, professional athletes come in, come out of
the system. Yeah, for sure.
So let's take the the second part of the question first.
So you enter the league. There really was no conditioning
concept of how to manage life asan AFI footballer before I
arrived there. So I think there's sort of the
(22:43):
skills part. So do you have the skills to
manage the stress? Do you have the skills to talk
to a psychologist or whoever else in your life for that
matter, who supports your mentalstate?
Do you have certain things in your kit bag from a structure,
process and tool point of view to deal with difficult periods
of time? That's like 1/2 of it.
The other half of it is, is the application of all of those
(23:04):
things. So the example I would give
would be what's it actually liketo be selected in the draught
and to walk into a senior footy club like an AFL one at any one
period of time. Really interesting experience,
completely different to anythingyou've done for what's it like
playing your first game? What's it like dealing with the
media? What's it like dealing with the
social side of things? The social media, the
expectations? A lot of this you have to learn,
(23:26):
but there is really no developmental frame of like
what's actually being experienced.
What tools should I have available and when would I like
to use them? And really setting players up
for success as they lead into the league is #1 #2 would be how
to actually transition players through and out of the game more
effectively. Because I frankly don't think
it's done to the degree that it could be.
And in many ways I don't think it's done to the grid that it
(23:47):
should be. As good as the AFLPA are at many
things, I commend them for so much of what they do.
This is the real sticking point for me because I, you asked me a
question about identity earlier.It's not necessarily something
that I've grappled with post footy, but I made the decision
to move on. I made the decision to move on
in the way that I did and towards the goal that I had,
(24:07):
which was working in the mental health space and supporting the
people and process and the communities associated with
football and also more broadly with business and in Australia.
That's what I wanted to do. So identity wasn't a factor as
much leaving the game as it is with so many people.
So there's a lot of work to be still done in that space and I
(24:28):
would argue connecting the dots between the entrance to the
league and the dots through the league and out of it is the
number 1 ticket item that shouldbe on the AFLPAS agenda in terms
of improvement. The secondary part of the
question or the first part that you asked was what about this
mental health round? So there's a couple of layers
here. First and foremost, there is two
(24:49):
major criticisms of a mental health round that's dedicated to
AFL and and an AFL round dedicated to mental health.
The 1st is why haven't the AFL done this already?
All right, One, from an attitudepoint of view, that doesn't make
any sense, right? If you ever want to solve a
problem, the first question is not asked.
Oh, this is not fair. It's not done yet.
(25:10):
Go and do something about it. That would be my first remark.
The second part is that from a practical point of view, the AFL
is not incentivized to do anything other than to pump out
games, create media attention and to recoup the revenue
associated with it through theircollective bargaining agreement.
And to use that to grow the gameof AFL for a future succession,
not only within the league but also to grow the game more
(25:32):
broadly. That's all that matters to the
AFL. So until they are pressured to
change and pressured to bring something to the forefront, they
will not do it. So that's the second part.
The other criticism is we need more action, not awareness.
Well, frankly, the response to that is pretty simple.
Any problem that you have in your life, if you do not focus
on it, you will not improve it. Anything you put on the back
(25:55):
burner from a focus point of view typically gets worse, not
better. And the number one thing that
these programme based organisations who do fantastic
work in the community have been crying out for is 1.
We need more funding and two, weneed an attention.
We need the attention of people so we can make an impact with
the work that we do. So my perspective is the AFL
mental health round achieves those things in droves, and it
(26:18):
does it in three separate buckets #1 is the mental health
rounds needs to seek to reinforce why we are in this
fight and what's important, who we've lost, the issues that we
face and the problems that we need to solve.
The second thing that it needs is a real ability to not only
celebrate the things that have been accomplished through the
(26:39):
AFL community during the year, but also to in a way hold
account the AFL for actually doing those things in the 1st
place. Think of it as sort of the
performance review, if you will,for one of a better term for the
AFL on this topic. And the third thing is to
reinforce, the third thing is toreinforce exactly what needs to
happen next and what problems will be solved in the near to
(27:00):
medium future. That's the that's the role of
the mental health round. And I appreciate there was a bit
in that, but. No, no, that's for sure.
Yeah, no, I think that's mate, you've, you've, you're mapping
it out and you're clear in termsof what is achievable and all
the questions that people are going to ask or stop.
No, no, no, no, no progress, etcetera.
And you've, you've nailed that. I've got one final question for
you, Tom. There's a kids out there playing
(27:21):
footy. There's 15 year olds that want
wanting to become AFL players and AFLW players.
What's some advice you can give to them now in 2025 about being
a professional athlete? Oh, for one, it's an absolutely
awesome experience. I'll never dissuade anyone from
doing it. It's one of the greatest periods
of time in my life. But it is challenging.
And because it is challenging, go out and seek as much
(27:43):
knowledge and as much insight asyou can to how to manage your
mind, your body and your emotions associated with those
two things so that you can do this as successfully as
possible. That's basically the advice that
I'd give to anyone. If you love it, go and do it.
If you're going to do it, understand the risks, understand
the challenges and go and find solutions for it because it can
(28:03):
be the absolute pinnacle of yourprofessional life and something
that reaches and touches so manydifferent people across so many
different colours, creeds and otherwise.
So go ahead and do it. Just do it with your eyes wide
open. Tom, thank you so much for
having a chat today on Scoreboard.
I really do appreciate your yourjourney and sharing your journey
and your insights in terms of the, the transparency and
(28:23):
openness around mental health aswell as little highlights of
your career, et cetera. And looking forward to following
the progress. Looking forward.
I really enjoy the LinkedIn updates and the articles that
you write and and hopefully can get to share them and support
them in the future and looking forward to catching.
Up awesome. Appreciate you having me.
Thank you.
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.