Dr Jon Rudd, Ireland National Performance Director for Swimming & Diving
Olympic Gold Medal & World Record Coach
Dr Jon Rudd is a highly effective national and international leader, director and high-performance coach with a broad experience in successful sporting and educational environments, including the development and coaching of high-performance athletes to win Olympic gold medals and set World records.
Jon enriches staff capabilities, develops innovative performance programmes and collaborates with international sports federations and national Olympic committees.
He demonstrates exceptional planning and problem-solving skills while readily adapting to change, working independently and often exceeding expectations.
Jon is able to cultivate a strong working rapport with agencies and providers to boost operational performance. He thrives on overcoming challenges and leading others to success in extremely high-pressure, high-stakes scenarios.
He has strong and focused leadership, with a high level of emotional intelligence, balancing consideration for the facts and the opinions of the team in delivering decisive action.
Tell us about your current role and what you like about your career or areas of focus.
I work for Swim Ireland as the National Performance Director for swimming and diving, which means I have the remit to oversee and lead the Olympic teams in those two sports.
I also lead a programme aimed to develop and foster the athletes that will be relevant for Ireland in the future Olympic Games in both 2024 and 2028. As for my background, I'm a doctor of psychology, but I wouldn't consider myself to be an expert by any stretch of the imagination. I don't think you ever are in that field.
And I'm an Olympic Gold Medal coach and a World Record producing coach in swimming. I'm also a teacher in a former life. I was a physical education teacher who also taught English.
I ended up on a senior leadership team in a school but my career diverted me more into performance athletics.
What inspires you, motivates you, helps you to make each day count?
I took a lot of inspiration from my parents, there's no doubt about that. My dad was a very good football player, but in Ireland, they’d call him a soccer player, right? Because we get confused between the two sports if we don’t do that!
He was a great soccer player, and he played Cricket. So then he managed to redefine himself as a swimming coach because I wanted to be a swimmer, my brother too, and he kind of gave up his own interests and his own pursuits to help us kids become better at the thing that we thought we wanted to really try and excel in.
And my mother did something similar, she started to get involved in the governance side of swimming with committees, county boards and all of those kinds of things. And I took a lot of inspiration from that for sure, because of how my parents were willing to change their life for the betterment of their children.
And I suppose I've also taken a great deal of inspiration from people in my field that have had great success. But I've also always resonated really strongly with the mavericks in sport, but wouldn't necessarily consider myself and to be a maverick.
I loved Brian Clough when he was coaching soccer. I really enjoy Geoffrey Boycott's commentary on cricket, and I loved watching John McEnroe play tennis.
It was those characters that always gave me a buzz because they were outside of the norm. And I think that to be truly excellent in anything whether that be in sport, whether that be in music, whether that being drama, whether that be in business, you can't be ordinary.
To excel, you have to be extraordinary. You have to break some barriers and you have to smash through some glass ceilings and those people did that. And I took those principles into my coaching.
I certainly took it into my school teaching, there's no doubt about that. I would say that my lessons were odd. And I didn't like being pinned down by national curriculums and whatever else. I liked the lessons to flow and to have an organic feel as to where we will go on on a particular topic. And certainly, that side of life has always inspired me, those people who bucked the trend, like Alex Higgins in snooker. They were successful because of it.
What are you most proud of in your life?
The obvious answer in my professional life would be the coaching of an Olympic gold medal, which is the ultimate thing professionally. But there's more than that.
I would say the thing that I'm most proud of in my life are my family, my four kids who are extremely successful. That's probably an exaggeration, but they are successful, and that is extremely invigorating to me as a person, and keeps life extremely dynamic.
I take a great deal of enjoyment and pride in seeing what they achieve. And they all do different things with their lives. There isn't a trend amongst the four kids. And three of them swam, and two of them still do.
I wouldn't say that they are/were necessarily world-class, but they loved it and it helped define their lives.
And my daughter is doing extremely well in the world of graphic design. My eldest son will probably go into swimming coaching. But my middle son is in drama college and learning how to be an actor. And that's always been his thing.
There's a massive dichotomy amongst my kids. And I think I'm really proud of that, and we, as a family, have allowed each one of them to progress and develop their own wants and needs, rather than being directed down a particular route because it's what we as parents maybe once have been successful in.
So I'm extremely proud of that situation but professionally, the coaching of an Olympic gold medal, I don't think that can ever be surpassed in a coach's highlights, and one of the reasons why I've stopped actively coaching now, I think it is because of ticking that box. And then I was like, What next? Do I just do it again? And I was like, I don't know, it’s the is chasing the dragon thing, maybe it isn't as good the second time.
So I moved into this current position to try and allow other coaches to feel that same euphoria that there is when you achieve that as a coach. So my job now is to help, support and coach the coaches to be able to achieve the same thing. And that really drives me now on a day to day basis and it fills me with enthusiasm.
What do you wish you had known when you started out?
You wish you knew what you’re getting into, that's for sure! When it comes to using your life in this way. And any successful professional will probably say the same thing no matter what business they’re in.
To get to the top of the game, there are difficult questions to be had around balancing your life, between your family, social aspects, and wanting more success. And being driven by that.
There's no doubt about that, particularly in the early days. This is all-consuming, but that wasn't a problem, because I didn't have a family, I didn't have kids.
When you’re a lone ranger in the world you can still be sitting on the laptop at 10 or 11 o'clock at night. Making sure that everything's right for the following day or the following week, or month. And there's nobody tapping you on the shoulder saying, “Hey, what about us?”
But there's a point in time where you've got to get that balance, right. When I started coaching, there was no ambition from me. This is absolutely honest. There was no ambition to get to the top of the tree.
I started coaching just as a means to an end, as a student. I needed money. And I didn't want to pour pints in a bar or stack supermarket shelves. So I retired from a sport that I knew something about, and I coached the way that I had been coached.
No formal qualifications, no mentors, no guidance. I just got on with it. And it wasn't right. And there were some athletes at that time that if I had known what I know now, they would have been more successful, and I'm sorry about that. But that's just the way that life is, as you're evolving as a professional.
But, one thing that I did do, and that was to learn from my mistakes. And try to not make the same mistake again. I think that making mistakes is acceptable, but making the same mistake twice is unacceptable.
I think the biggest reflection back is “Do you know what you're getting into Jon?” Because it is now swimming, swimming coaches and the alarm going off at four o'clock in the morning, and sometimes it's not walking back through the door until eight or nine o'clock at night and it's six days a week. And it's weekends away with athletes, and it's time away from regular life, but we go back to the earlier point. If you want irregular success, you can't have a regular life.
What do you feel is the most common reason for people failing or giving up?
I think that with the snowflake generation, the. millennials, I think that there's a lack of patience. People want to be working at the cutting edge too quickly, and that there's a lack of understanding as to what it takes and is necessary to get there.
And this is a huge generalisation and other people out there may take offence to this, but generally speaking, what I'm seeing in society is people not willing to learn the trade, to do the hard yards, and earn their stripes. They want to go from ‘I finished my degree’ to the following day, ’I'm at the top of the pile’.
I was in the same coaching programme in the same city for 27-years. And the absolute reason for the success was patience. Perseverance over that 27 year period.
But if I'd broken that 27 year period down into five or six periods, of five or six years in different programmes, so still make the same 27-year investment into the sport it wouldn't be the same, I wouldn't have achieved what I've achieved now, because you need to build a system.
Strategically, you can't build something if you're going to bounce from one position to another in a flighty manner too regularly. And if you’re looking for success that somebody else has built and piggyback on it, rather than build it yourself, it’s never as successful. I think that's absolutely key; patience and perseverance.
And when you get the knockbacks, which will come, you dust yourself off and you go again. Accept that it's not a linear journey. There's going to be peaks and troughs on that journey. And you ride the peaks and enjoy them.
There's going to be difficult times and you build up your resilience and your hardiness to deal with those difficult times.
What are your thoughts about social media nowadays?
Social media is the devil and the angel sitting on your shoulder.
So, if you look at it in a positive sense, I don't know that we'll ever operate as a society again without it. We’ve seen it. We've got it, and we live with it.
And we must think about it carefully, every letter we type, every word we type into a tweet or every Instagram post, every Facebook post, whatever it might be. We have to be careful that we do things rationally.
Then it's an extremely positive tool that can do wonders for your profile, understanding, engagement, new business. Something that we would never be able to do at that level or degree, and to that extent on a worldwide basis without it.
At the same time, it can be an absolute poison and cancer within society. If it's used irrationally, without thought, and delivered at points in time when our emotions are low and black.
The worst thing that you can do when you’re emotionally high or low is, pick up your phone and hit social media with the way that you are feeling.
I think you've got to be at a point of homeostasis all the time when you think about your social media. You've got to be in a balanced mind and a balanced mood.
I mean, I use social media, I use it. I use it a lot. And I think I use it wisely. And, I think that I always have in the back of my mind, that the moment I post something, it is there forever. Somewhere along the line, if you do something that might help you get a little bit of venom out of your system, and make you feel better it can reappear years down the line and bite you.
You've got to be mindful of that all the time. This is a message that I give out to my athletes, and I used to give out to the kids that I taught in school.
‘Imagine that your post is 12 feet high, and 10 feet wide, and on the side of a building, one that your grandmother walks past every day to get to the supermarket. Do you want her to read it?’ And if the answer is ‘no’, then you don’t tweet it.
I think that's a strong message that we can put out to young people. You might think that it's private, you might think that it's amongst your group. But somewhere along the line, someone's taking a screenshot of that, and someone's kept it, and someone is going to remember it.
You say something, and it can be forgotten. But when you write something, it's never forgotten. And those things we've got to remember.
What is your favourite social media platform and why?
I kind of deviate. I've been an avid Facebook user for well over a decade. And the crucial thing about Facebook is that I've got my personal Facebook set to private. That's important to me.
I live in a country that isn't my country of birth, and my friends from school, from university, and from previous professional life, are spread all over the world. Facebook for me, it's like sitting in a pub with my mates having a drink, and chatting to them. Because that's how we use it.
And it's great that suddenly, I can see a friend of mine who used to be a singer in a rock band he’s and chatting away to a guy that's an Olympic coach in sport. They would never have met each other without it, but they're chatting about something that they both engage with, and meet each other through me because they're friends of mine on Facebook.
I think that's the only way that you would ever bring together this weird and wonderful collection of your friends from different parts of life. They’ve never physically met each other, but here they’re together, to have a chat about something that may be quite benign and nothing of importance on Facebook, but that's great.
Since I started working in Ireland, I started tweeting. And I quite like tweeting now. For getting quick and instant messages out there, and for sharing other good messages that other people may use or be inspired by.
I use LinkedIn more as a professional platform, for my coaching, my work within sport. And not only the work I do with Swim Island, but the work I do with the World Swimming Coaches Association and various other bits and pieces too.
I can't say I've got a particular platform that’s my favourite because it's horses for courses. You know, if I'm chatting with my mates, definitely Facebook, quick professional messages, Twitter, more in-depth articles around professional life, LinkedIn.
What skills do you feel have helped you personally to become successful?
There's no doubt that in the vast majority of success in life, unless you have people skills, you aren't going to get very far. There are very few things where just working independently and not engaging well with other people equals success.
And so I think I’ve developed from quite a brash ‘go-getter’ as a young person, to someone where soft skills, and getting people to buy into a dream, and getting people to buy into a journey, has been really, really important.
And that's a natural evolution that I've seen in my own skills, over a period of time. That only comes with a fair few knockbacks on the way. But that's crucial too.
Perhaps the best way I can put it is “Don't talk the talk, you've got to walk the walk.” So don't expect people to do things that you're not necessarily willing to do yourself and then more.
Perseverance, and diligence, and dedication, to the task and time management, personal organisation. And delegation, but not an abdication of working with others. That's really really important.
Giving people a purpose to what it is they're doing with you and for you, but don't brush the responsibility off your own shoulders. Ultimately, if you're leading, you’re leading and you're accountable.
Working out how to get the best out of people, and what their skills are, and how you enthuse them to the task at hand. That's a huge part of any success I would suggest.
And I also would say, to not to expect to be an overnight sensation. You've got to do the time. You've got to ensure that you are willing to see a lot of projects through, even though the light at the end of the tunnel sometimes can be very small or very distant.
As long as you understand that it may take 10,000 hours, or 10 years to have success in whatever it is that you're striving towards.
If you buy into that, then buy into that properly. You cannot start getting impatient along the route, simply because (and irrationally), you think that something should fall into your lap, because things don't fall into your lap, or rarely so. You've got to make it work for you over time.
Do you have any sort of thoughts or maybe possibly positive messaging relating to the global pandemic that we've all found ourselves in?
I think that lockdown has had a number of positive effects on society. Let's not get away from the horrendous situation, hundreds of thousands of people have died. And that's heartbreaking and cataclysmic.
And so I don't want to downplay that at all, for anybody who's lost a loved one, and for them to hear me say that there might have been some positives come out of this, they could quite rightly take offence to that.
And the second thing is that we're going to have a huge economic and financial strain placed upon society, in every country, in every province of every country.
And we're going to be reeling from that for years and years to come. And people are going to find that they're out to work, or that financial circumstances within their family are extremely difficult. And we wouldn't want to wish that on anybody either.
However, we have learned, I think, that there's more value in life than queuing up to spend our money on clothes, and trinkets, and whatever else we might do on a Saturday afternoon, that would have been our traditional way of life. All of that was taken away from us.
And that we're back to a time of wholesomeness where we have had to be a family unit together, and the family unit had to learn, to support each other and so on through these difficult times.
We were rushing around from office to office, meeting to meeting, and although we had to continue with our business, suddenly we were able to do it from home. In front of the laptop as we are now.
Whereas without this pandemic, you and I might have met somewhere in the middle of Dublin, had a coffee to talk about this. And we would have been travelling in, travelling out. It would have taken another half a day to complete this process.
Whereas now, you've explored this and I've clicked a button and we've still managed to achieve what it is that we were trying to achieve. So we will learn to use 21st-century resources better.
I also think that sort of ethically and morally, nations have come together for the betterment of society as a whole.
Telling people you can't come out of your house for weeks and weeks on end. It doesn't go down well, but when you're told it's to protect vulnerable people and society at large and to protect the health service, and to ensure that people aren't catching a horrible virus that could kill them, 99.9% of society has said, okay, I can buy into that. I'll do that.
I think that kind of spirit. That kind of bonding within a society is something that only something like this brings to the fore. And 21st-century Western society life is often a selfish one, and this has changed that. At least for now.
We have not regressed, but we progressed in a way. To a wholesome society where those things were less relevant and less important.
And we went back to basics of right, let's make sure the family is cared for, let's make sure we have food on the table. And let's make sure that we spend some time together. That we have more wholesome entertainment in an evening because there is only so much Netflix you can watch.
And I think that that's a really good thing. Without looking at things like the pollution that's dropped in places like India and China dramatically because cars aren’t driving so much.
There are all of those side benefits that are wonderful for the world at large. So, yes, it's terrible that all of these people have died and families have been torn apart by this crisis with these deaths, and that the economy of our nations is going to be in question for quite some time.
But I think it's brought to the fore in our minds what life is truly about. And it will be a sad state of affairs if when we get back to whatever regularity looks like that this is forgotten. And we just go back to the way that it was before.
Is there anything new that you are working on or involved in that you would like to share?
The new thing is that the Olympic Games is now happening in 2021 instead of 2020. And our sport is quite regimented and organised in terms of what happens and it is this that drives us.
The Olympics moves, so then the World Championships moves. When the World Championships moves, then the European Championships moves, and then all of the Junior Meets at the international level shift too.
So we're in a very fluid situation. Remember that we're having to be reactive to what's happening at this moment in time and we’re not as able to be as productive as we would like to be, because we don't have the information that we necessarily need from the various international governing bodies to be able to plan.
For some people, this might be daunting, but it's also quite exciting because you have to think on the hoof. And it's kind of a game-changer and a leveller. Because the hugely powerful nations out there in our sport and the smaller nations with fewer results and lower populations are all in the same boat.
At this moment the advantages are going to come from intuition, innovation and quick thinking. And they’re not necessarily just going to come from how many dollars you've got in the bank account.
And that's quite exciting for us because we would consider ourselves as a team, to be at the forefront of that. We are a dynamic and flexible, and an innovative group of people.
And the other thing, new for me, personally is, the work I'm doing with the World Swimming Coaches Association. I'm the Vice President of that. And we're putting the European branch of that into place.
So at the moment the World Swimming Coaches Association is one body and would be seen to be quite USA-centric because that's where it was created. But through my engagement with others and with the Board, we've decided that we're going to have devolved responsibilities on a continental level.
And Europe will be the first continent of that. And I'm taking a lead on progressing that with the European nations to get that in place, and we were just about to get it moving, constitutionally set up and everything else, and then COVID hit and we all had to take our foot off the gas and put our daily workings in order.
But the moment we get to September or October and we start to get past these difficult times, this will get rejuvenated and picked up again. And I'm quite excited about that, as it has something very fresh and new for my profession.
When it comes to your life chosen career is there a phrase, quote or saying that you really like?
Well, I don't know who this can be attributed to, because I don't know who originally said it. But my favourite quote of all time, and I use it quite frequently is, “It's not the size of the dog in the fight. It's the size of the fight in the dog.” And that has always resonated with me really, really strongly.
I'm just a regular guy from a northern working-class city in England. I certainly was not born with a silver spoon in my mouth. You know, everything that I've achieved, and we achieved as a family, is through hard work. Through education. Through taking opportunities when they come along.
And there's nothing truly special or outstanding about me, as an individual. But you know, whatever success people may think I've had in my professional life, it's come from inside. It's intrinsic.
There's a fire burning in there. I don't do anything unless I'm going to do it properly. And I'm going to do it to the nth degree. And we're going to see what the outcome of that is. And I don't take on projects unless I can have that internal reflection on what's going to occur that I'm truly going to deliver.
And so it doesn't matter who you are, or how big you are or where you are from. If you've got that in you, you have got that internal burning passion, to be successful, and to achieve excellence within your life in whatever field that may be, then that's the quote, as it always resonated with me. “It's not the size of the dog in the fight. It's the size of the fight in the dog.”