Interview with Paul Kingsman | Sound Authors Radio

December 7, 2008

Dr. Kent: Welcome back to Sound Authors. Today is 8-8-08; it’s an Olympic Friday. Tonight is the day everything starts at the Olympics in Beijing. I’m excited to watch, my whole family will be watching. It’s a real tradition for so many of us to turn on the TV and see all of the athletes win these medals. It’s a lucky day for the Chinese; 8-8-08, and a lot of the athletes are hoping it will be a lucky day for them. I’m very lucky today to have a man named Paul Kingsman on the line today and he is going to give us some insight about China and about the Beijing games. He competed in 1984 in Los Angeles and again in Seoul where he won a medal. He’s from New Zealand and now lives in California and he travels the world as a professional speaker and executive coach. Welcome to the show Paul Kingsman.

Paul Kingsman: Thank you.

Dr. Kent: Tell me a little about your Olympic adventure. I need to know what did it feel like for you?

Paul Kingsman: Well 1988 was the year that I was really focused on although you mentioned I went to the 1984 Olympics. I went there when I was very young. In fact I was 17 in 1984 and it’s amazing. the Olympics is such a huge event, its amazing how much you learn the first time and I made a number of mistakes and made sure I was focused on what needed to happen the second time around. Fortunately I got another invite and in 1988 we laid out a great plan. My coach and I did a plan that we believed would win an Olympic medal in the 200 meter backstroke.

So I had a goal time that I’d set to hit bearing in mind that you have no guarantees with that particular time to win a medal but then going to Seoul I was well prepared and was just a fantastic event. Obviously in Seoul after the 1984 Olympic boycott and the 1980 Olympic boycott it was the first real Olympics for 12 years. So everyone knew, I mean it was just a buzz throughout the village that this was the year to really come out and do something. It didn’t matter if you were an Olympic medalist previously or whether you held the world record. No one cared.

The Olympics are the kind of event where everyone there recognizes that you’ve got a front on the day and reputations come from nothing. You still have to produce it on the day. So yeah we had a great time and I won my Olympic medal by four one hundredths of a second. It was a very close race.

Dr. Kent: Do you watch the Olympics in a different way? When you see a television broadcast, when you see a race live, are you watching the same way a writer reads a book after they’ve written one?

Paul Kingsman: It’s funny because the first couple of Olympics after I retired; I retired from swimming in 1990 and the first couple of Olympics I didn’t even watch. I had learned about the performances naturally of our team from New Zealand but I didn’t really get tuned into them. It was one of them even being in Sydney Australia quite close to where I was living in new Zealand but mainly it was so fresh and the experience was so fresh that to know what those athletes were going through and not to be able to take part in it I found quite difficult and so the first Olympics that I watched and really got into was when I came back to the US in 2002 and watched the winter Olympics. I just loved them and actually fell in love with them and I like the winter Olympics better than the summer ones.

This time around I’m going to be watching, in fact even watching it this morning you get a little emotional because you know what these people are going through, you know the pressure, you know the distractions that are there and now its coming down to the final stretch so I’m enjoying seeing the coverage that I’ve already seen this morning.

Dr. Kent: What’s amazing to me is it’s almost like this holy space. It hasn’t been tainted by professional sports too much. These are people that give everything and for what? It’s a day of seeing that one top of the world medal. What drives a person like you to really put everything into this? I was a bit of an athlete growing up but what does it take to push at that extra level? You’re always going into that zone of extra effort and exhaustion. What does it take to be an Olympian?

Paul Kingsman: Well it starts with passion and I’ll come back to that point but you made a great point as far as not really being tainted. I remember in 1988 when they introduced tennis to the Olympics. They had it at the previous games but was starting to grow in popularity and speaking to tennis players and even some of the tri-athletes, their response was I don’t think tennis really needs the Olympics. They have their four match tournaments and then they go on after the Olympics into another million dollar event and earn more money in that one tournament than some of the Olympic athletes will ever see in their lifetime.

So it was interesting to see how the other professional coaches responded to actually being in the Olympics. Some of them were kind of a little standoffish wondering how they feared some of the other athletes were going to receive them. So its interesting hearing a different perspective and what drives a person to get there is firstly passion. It’s not so much these days about finding what you’re passionate about it although it’s important. The biggest issue today facing people is actually protecting what their passionate about because there are so many distractions out there now in our environment that its actually being able to focus on something for the long haul. Obviously as an Olympian you’ve done this.

Any person who gets to the Olympic games have focused on something, have locked onto something over the long haul, have done the hard yards and have still kept that passion, have still kept that desire, you know white hot every day. So that’s the first thing I think that one of the points that sets Olympians apart from other people is that they keep that passion first and foremost every day and all their actions are predicated upon that one thing. Its not that things get done if there’s a chance it’s that the priorities are the things that need to get done. That’s what these athletes have taken care of.

Dr. Kent: Let’s say you just arrived in Beijing last week, you’re in the middle of China, a place you’ve never been before. You’re a first time Olympian at age 17, what’s going through your head?

Paul Kingsman: Well I can tell you what was going through some of the heads and what shouldn’t be going through your head. First of all what’s going through your head and what should be going through your mind is I was doing this since when I was nine years old and now is my chance and I need to make sure I don’t blow it. I need to make sure I don’t blow all those years of training in the last couple of days.

For instance in the 1984 Olympics I was young and a little silly and you go from training for six hours every day all of a sudden into a tape situation where you’re only going into the pool maybe ½ hour 45 minutes a day. You’re body’s not burning all those calories and all of a sudden you got a 24 hour buffet in the games village with everything imaginable. So very quickly in 1984 I stuck on probably four or five pounds in five days just through lack of discipline.

What’s key now is for the athletes to realize it’s going to be hot, it’s a dry muggy atmosphere, we need to keep off our feet, we need to be staying indoors, and so if you combine the fact that now you’re tapering, you’re not training six hours a day, you’re just touching the water. At the same time you have to train yourself to lie still and rest when your body is feeling like its ready to bounce off the walls. It’s very difficult and so you’ve got to be very disciplined to handle that and stay focused and avoid those distractions.

Dr. Kent: What event was it when you won your bronze and take us through it? Were you expecting it? Was that your goal? What happened?

Paul Kingsman: My goal time was to swim a time of two minutes. When I was nine years old I saw the 1976 Olympics and I actually wrote down that I wanted to go to the Olympics and win a medal. So I had that goal right from when I was nine. By the time 1988 came around I was 21 and I had been swimming over here at Cal Berkley in northern California for a couple of years and so I’d been watching the world rankings. I knew who was doing what and our goals was to swim that two minute event but there were no guarantees.

I think that’s something that you need to understand going into an event especially like the Olympics. There are just no guarantees and anything can happen. Any one of the finalists can come out and win a medal but we believed that two minutes would be good enough to win a medal. So that was the objective. I was racing the first day of the swimming competition. I marched in the opening ceremonies because it was six days before I swam. So during those five days you’re trying to get out of the environment, you don’t want to go along to the swimming pool to watch and it’s a tough one because you hear about team spirit but at the same time if you go along to the pool, the atmosphere is such that it just saps you.

Over those five days I was very measured with everything I did. I swum my heat in the morning and made the final to come back and swim at night. Then I rested during the day and that’s very difficult because your body is still very tired, its sore from the morning swim and you know now you’re in the top eight in the world. A lot of people at that stage will back off and say hey top eight in the world is pretty good. A lot of other people won’t do it and so that’s when they settle at that point for a lesser performance than what they could do. So I came back that night to swim. I didn’t feel great when I was warming up and that’s something else these athletes will have to battle.

You have to plan for years and years before the actual point and things just don’t feel as magical as what you’re expecting them to feel. But I got through that point. I qualified seventh in the final so I was out in lane one. It was a four lap race, the world record holder, the top three guys went through the first lap in under world record pace and watching the footage you can see the video on my website they were way ahead of me. At the end of the second lap I turned in fifth place so it was, you know you’re starting to get tired, you’re starting to get sore but we’d prepared for that third lap especially. Down the third lap I still remember that point in the race and you’ll see the athletes go through that point when you watch the Olympics.

The question hits you, what are you going to do now? And you ask it and you answer it in a split second. The body is fatigued and you got to make that call. Are you going to go and just take the pain for the next 40 seconds or are you going to hold off and have a decent swim. And I remember thinking, just go. Just go. When I turned off the third turn, as soon as you hit either end of the pool you hit the touch pads and the score board lights up and because I was out in lane one I was at the top of the scoreboard so when I pushed off the third turn I accidentally saw I was in fourth spot and I remember thinking someone’s going to die but its not going to be me. Just keep going and going.

I remember seeing the first guy hit the wall, I saw the scoreboard light up which meant somebody won the gold and then saw the scoreboard light up again so the second place was gone. In coming into that wall on the last stroke you’ll break your fingers, you’ll break your hand, and you don’t care. I remember lunging and just hitting and looking up and seeing the scoreboard and looking up and seeing lane one P. Kingsman… 3 and it registered that I’d won a medal. The feeling of excitement and then just exhaustion. It was like somebody dropped a piano on you, just this heavy hit of fatigue. They took the three of us out to get us ready for the medal presentation and one of the guys from radio new Zealand came bursting into the room where I was at.

He told me then that I had won that medal by four one hundredths of a second. When I’m talking to large groups of people you just hear this huge sigh and a whole bunch of people are sitting there just shaking their heads because basically what I had done was swim for 13 years. I hit my goal time, which was two minutes and that medal was decided by four one hundredths of a second. So there’s a big commitment to that race and to that medal and that’s what I speak a lot about now is overcoming distractions and staying focused. The reason why is because again if you see the video of my swim, the guy that came fourth to me right at the very end literally on the last three strokes looked across at me. On two of his last three strokes, he was a German swimmer, very talented swimmer but he looked on the last couple of strokes and that cost him easily four one hundredths of a second.

So you see the price of distraction, you see the cost of distraction and we do that in our lives every day. In fact I was talking one time to a group and I had a young student stand up. He said to me, “So what you’re saying is that basically if he hadn’t have looked you wouldn’t have even had a medal.” To which I said, “Yes, that’s exactly right.” And that’s what we do everyday in many different ways. We’re trekking along one path, we know we need to tend to things and we just get distracted. So that’s how I’ve used that story now because I see the price of distraction and for me fortunately it turned out well with a bronze medal in the Olympic Games.

Dr. Kent: Talk a little about your career now. You talked about your speaking and you’re a coach and motivational speaker and you’ve worked with many corporations over these last years. How does this tie into your life plan? You’re such a focused athlete and then you went into corporate America and now you’re speaking. How does all that tie together?

Paul Kingsman: Well when we came back here to the US I got involved in the financial services industry starting at Morgan Stanley and I’ve been speaking since I was 17. I’ve probably been speaking a lot longer than that but started speaking professionally to groups when I was 17 and loved being able to teach groups and talk to people and help them. I always thought if I was 24 years old and I could talk with a 16 year old about different issues in life or swimming issues I’d save that kid eight years of possibly banging his head against the wall. So

I’ve always enjoyed teaching people and having them realize hey, what I did in swimming I did because I had God given talent and that but you also have abilities in different areas. It doesn’t have to be necessarily as glamorous as the Olympics, that’s not the point. The point is whatever you’re going to do, do it well and do it excellently and figure out what’s involved in doing it excellently. It has no relationship to beating anyone. When I’m speaking this is a point that I make. That I never wanted to go into a race doing anything less than to win but I’ve never gone into a race wanting to beat anyone. They’re two different things.

So when I’m talking to people I enjoy talking with them about how to bring out excellence and in today’s culture that is just not going to happen unless you can stay focused and get rid of those distractions. So when I’m talking with groups its normally groups within the financial services industry, but I talk to different business groups all over the country about those very things. They then understand, hey if this is the same thing in business then they realize why I also address the issues in family life. Whether it be careers, whether it be in relationships. It doesn’t matter, the main thing is to keep focused on those things that you really want to see happen in your life and then be prepared to do the work. So that’s how that now fits into what I’m speaking about and talking to various groups about.

Dr. Kent: Now do you have a book?

Paul Kingsman: Currently I’m working on a book. It’s about overcoming distractions and you’ve heard about the book The Law of Attraction? This one is going to be predicated on the Laws of Distraction and how they hinder us and ways to overcome them. Because the people that I’m speaking to out there as soon as I mention distraction, the very first thing they say is boy if you can help me get through this or help me get through the amount of emails I’m bombarded with or help me set up a system where I stay focused everyday on what’s important. How to prioritize properly and follow through.

So that’s the book I’m currently writing. While it will be obviously for the financial services industry, it’s applicable to everyone. Whether it be relative to raising family, bringing up kids, relationship issues, it’s coming back to not getting distracted. How do we avoid getting distracted and in our culture that’s the biggest obstacle today. Because companies are getting better and better at getting their messages out and our attention spans are getting reduced all the time. It’s not their fault for advertising or anything like that; it’s our fault for not being disciplined. So those are the kind of things I’m going to be dealing with when the book comes out.

Dr. Kent: I find it fascinating to speak to an Olympian of course you always get that but I’m curious about a person like Michael Phelps. He’s gone from sort of no one knew who he was until last Olympics and he’s kind of come in and out of the spotlight. How does a person like Michael Phelps be a celebrity while at the same time still be at the top of their game?

Paul Kingsman: That’s a great question and fortunately with what we’re seeing so far in Michael Phelps is we’re seeing that happen. I was watching him interviewed this morning and he has tremendous poise which is something you don’t find or rather something you find in athletes that sets them apart. Guys like Tiger Woods have it. Ali was another one that had that poise, that presence of mind and that high level of self awareness. When I’m coaching people and coaching groups those are some big key areas and Phelps clearly has poise. He’s aware of his environment, he’s aware of his situation, but just like Tiger Woods, its hey this is only going to have so much influence on me because first and foremost this is what I’m about.

I’m about swimming fast and I’m about getting the job done. So he hasn’t lost that. You can tell that by how he’s speaking. You can tell it by how he’s focusing on things. Obviously people, it’s a tough one because when people talk about winning eight gold medals he’s in a tough position because if he wins eight gold medals he’s done what everybody expected him to do. If he wins seven gold medals and a silver medal, he missed. So that’s a tough situation to be in.

Having said that, I think he’d be the last to see it that way. I think he’s a very focused athlete and I’m hoping he has a dream performance in these Olympics. But I mean it’s incredible to think if he wins eight gold medals over two Olympics he would have 16 Olympic medals, which is phenomenal in this day and age.

Dr. Kent: A question for someone like you, I’m speaking with Paul Kingsman of course and you have a bronze medal. There’s such a difference between I guess the media coverage in this country and in other countries. In one of the Olympics I was fortunate enough to be in the Middle East and there was no commentary. We got to watch the Olympics and there was zero commentary. It was uncommon because I got to hear the actual announcers at the events and there’s so much stigma attached to these events. Oh, will Phelps win all of the gold and yet a bronze medal. If I had a bronze medal that would shape my life just as it in some way shaped yours.

Paul Kingsman: I preach like that and that is the label of competition at the Olympics. When you go to the Olympics its an historic event and then to go to that next level up where you become an Olympic finalist and the top eight in the world and then an Olympic medalist which very people do and then obviously a gold medalist, yeah it’s a special thing and that was one of the aspects I did appreciate it a lot more when I came to the US. There tended to be a lot more recognition over here than probably in new Zealand even though it’s a smaller country of the fact that winning an Olympic medal.

So yeah, when you compete against the best in the world, I’ll never forget the feeling at the opening ceremony where they say “ladies and gentlemen, gathered before you are the greatest athletes on the planet” and that’s like whoa! And I’m one of them and that suddenly starts to sink on. Hang on we’re talking about the best athletes in the world here. So yeah it’s a big deal but you’ve got to remember too that once your events finished the next day, you’re a normal person and life goes on and the sun shines and away you go again.

Dr. Kent: Tell me a little more about what you do everyday with speaking and coaching and how we can find out more about what you do online?

Paul Kingsman: Typically with speaking I go in and speak to sales teams or speak on awards trips or speak to companies that are looking for ways to stay focused, to overcome those distractions and I talk a lot about passion. Obviously protecting it and I talk about priorities. People can say they’re passionate about stuff but how do you prioritize and then follow those things? Then I talk about practice. What does practice look like for you? What does it need to look like for you?

For an Olympian it’s a six hour day and its hard work but what does practice need to look like for you? Then we get to performance. What happens on the day of performance when you sit in front of a prospect that you want to make a client, when you get to pitch for a big deal out there? What’s going through your mind on that day of the performance and how do you cope with those kinds of things happening? I speak to groups about that and some people that specifically want to look at coaching and say look, these are my priorities and I’m struggling to keep on track, or these are my priorities and I want help and I want assistance and so that’s how I work when I’m coaching.

My website is paulkingsman.com. That’s the site and it has actually the video footage, the Olympics swim on there. If you watch closely right at the end you’ll see the guy in lane four actually look across at me. So that’s what I’m involved in doing now and I’m loving it.

Dr. Kent: It’s so amazing that four hundredths of a second plays such a big role in your life.

Paul Kingsman: It’s a great point and it’s a point often that people make when I’m speaking is that it changed my life. When I think if I was five one hundredths of a second slower that medal would now be in Europe and life would be very different. But having said that, I didn’t realize that guy actually looked until only four or five years ago when I was watching the video of the race.

Now it makes a big difference and I wonder and this is what drives me when I’m speaking, I wonder how much of a difference distraction has made on other peoples lives and that’s what I really want to help them overcome because I’m sure when I meet the people that I meet out there. You see incredibly talented people that could go on and do great things, it’s just a matter of avoiding those distractions and staying focused.

Dr. Kent: Well, it’s been an honor speaking with Paul Kingsman. He’s got a book coming out at some point about the laws of distraction and he has a website online paulkingsman.com. I’m really excited for the Olympics and I guess you must be too.

Paul Kingsman: Oh I am yeah. I’m looking forward to watching. I think there will be a few late nights and a few early mornings.

Dr. Kent: Wonderful, well it’s been such an honor and come on back after the break we’re going to speak to the musician Marcus Rill. Have a wonderful day Paul.

Paul Kingsman: It’s been a real pleasure, you too, thank you.

Dr. Kent: Come on back in just a minute, we’re going to listen to a little of one or Marcus Rill’s songs called Straighter Road. Come on back to hear him talk about it.

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