Compassion can produce better performance – just look at the Lionesses | Catherine Bishop

Sarina Wiegman stood by Lauren James but how many elite athletes experience that depth of support in moments of crisis?

If you want to see a high-performance team with compassion at its heart, there are regular 90-minute(-plus) masterclasses from the Lionesses free on UK screens at the moment. We’ve seen a few individual athletes start to role-model self-compassion publicly over recent times, ranging from Simone Biles to Ben Stokes. Now we are seeing the power of compassion in team performance.

Compassion has not been a traditional hallmark of sport. With its UK roots in 19th-century British public schools and universities, modern sport developed as way of creating strong military leaders, training them in the resilience defined in those times by grit and a stiff upper lip. Fear and harsh criticism were essential to toughening up players and soldiers alike. The “tough guy” narrative was dramatised and reinforced by 20th-century media stereotypes and Hollywood’s heroes and became engrained into sport and society.

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