Keith Sharpe has been working with cricket for six months now. He isn’t new to the Performance Lifestyle role, having worked previously for UK Sport and English Institute of Sport delivering lifestyle support to a wide range of Olympians in the run up to Sydney 2000 and Athens 2004.

What do you enjoy about your job?

It is a great job for me, it combines two real passions I have. 1 - Elite Performance Sport; 2 - Helping and supporting people achieve and realise their aspirations.

Without getting too deep, I really do believe that you can achieve whatever it is you want, if you truly want it enough and have the personal belief to persist. Working with cricketers who may not know what they want to do when they retire is the perfect challenge for me.

It is so easy to know what you don’t want to be doing when you retire, but finding a path that is right for you is difficult. That is where I see my role in supporting you. By using various career counselling techniques and skills, exploring and arising at a point where someone who didn’t have a clue what they were going to do when they retire has a path to follow is a great feeling.

Helping people to help themselves is what I am about. There are so many ways Performance Lifestyle can support cricketers; unless you have sat down with an adviser, you really don’t know if they could help you.

Since working with cricket, there are many examples I can draw upon to illustrate how Performance Lifestyle is delivered.

Case Study 1 - Tom Huggins, Northants

Trying to combine University and being a Professional
I met Tom towards the end of 2004. He is in his final year of university and he was finding the pressures of university were having an impact on his winter training. He was becoming behind in his studies and as a result didn’t enjoy turning up at lectures to hear negative news about his situation.

As a direct result, this played on his mind when he would arrive at the ground to practice. He wasn’t happy with the fact he was behind; he felt like there was a huge cloud looming and didn’t know how to avoid it, as with his finals and the new season approaching, things were about to get a lot worse.

Managing the Balance
We had an initial chat and looked at a range of things going on in Tom’s world. Together we identified a few basic targets about what Tom wanted, but at the same time also things that needed to be done to alleviate the frustrations.

Two of the big factors were 1: Getting Tom to be motivated to tackle the university backlog of work and 2: Tom’s time-management and self-organisation.

We looked at all the possible options: from the extremes of leaving university, to more realistic solutions. We came up with an action plan which was achievable and manageable for Tom’s current position and have regularly monitored the progress.

Where are we now?
Tom says: “I was basically ignoring my university course to get down and train. Having the support of my adviser made me realise I could balance both Uni and cricket. After a couple of small changes to my daily routine I am now back on track at Uni and looking forward to graduating and really looking forward to playing this season. I am feeling much happier.”

Case Study 2 - Ian Thomas, Glamorgan

The Unknown - Life after Cricket
After my first meeting with Ian, it was apparent that not knowing what career path he was going to take after his cricket career was having a negative impact upon him.

Having a good educational background and a degree up his sleeve, he is typical of a lot of cricketers. He really wasn’t sure what he will do with his qualifications - although he knows what he doesn’t want to do.

Looking to the Future
We did some work with Ian, which started to challenge his thinking and got him to reflect on what it is that he enjoys about the ‘job and career’ he is in now. We then applied that to possible areas that appealed to him away from playing cricket.

This resulted in a few career areas being of interest and gave us some tangible options to look at. We identified Ian could use a couple of days after the summer to experience his different career interests, to get a feel for what they may be like.

Where are we now?
Ian says: “Talking and planning with my adviser has allowed me to concentrate on improving my cricket with the coaching staff, because I now have some guidance and structure towards my life after cricket.”