E200: Willie Anderson: Rugby, Leadership and His Battle with Alcoholism

But what about that day you retired? I know we didn't talk about this on the call because people talk about that transition from playing and then feeling a bit like, you know, what am I doing? How was that for you? Did you know it was time? How did you cope with that?

I suppose in ways, well, in fairness, in ways, there's nothing like playing, never will be anything like playing the game at that level or any level, you know, if you love the game of Gaelic or soccer or rugby or hurling or camogie or hockey.

I was very fortunate because the whole way through, because we were like the Gaelic footballers, we had another job.

My other job was teaching, or I was coaching for the IRFU, or if I was captain of Dungannon, which I was a few times, you were the captain and we didn't have coaches and the captain coached the team.

So I was doing a lot of coaching outside of playing so you were coaching all the time and then when I came to it I transferred easily and I had to do a bit of work on it because it was I had a look at myself fairly tough and I got, you know, I was put through the wringer a bit for my coaching aspect because I was, I wasn't, you know, I was too maybe authoritarian.

I was not maybe as sympathetic to players, understanding, you know, and I had to go through a bit of a process to get myself in line of being a better coach and a better person.

And that helped, that definitely helped.

How

did you do? Was that through like outside training? Yeah,

just another person, another guy and me went through a bit of a process of our personality and how our personality affected us and how it affected, not only affected us in a positive way, but affected us in a detrimental way.

And it was a tough, very tough process and I'm glad I went through it because then it made you look at personalities when you were coaching players, rather than the person, rather than look at their personality because their personality will dictate how they're going to react and how they're going to react under pressure and then how to motivate them.

That was massively important to me.

And was that an outside training?

Yeah, just a guy that we'd met, me and another fella, and he literally put us to a ringer.

Right.

Yeah.

But as in a structured ringer or was it a casual?

Well, it was structured in a way because it was through the Enneagram.

We worked through the Enneagram, which a lot of people don't know about, but a lot of companies in America, you know, they use the Enneagram as profiling people.

And then I was profiled and...

And then I had to work on my profile.

I had to work on my personal profile.

So can you profile people now when you see them?

I have a fair good understanding of how people are.

I normally see the personality around the person sometimes.