How my rugby union career has given me the staying power needed for business world: Charlie Beech

However it happens, it’s an experience ripe for mistakes, false starts and difficult realities.

In common with so many who have transitioned out of a professional sporting career, my whole life had been about sport — in my case, rugby union — from an early age. Once you’re in the pro system, everything becomes about supporting your talent, and your reality is centred around your sport and your performance.

So, when it’s time to go, and the structured support you’ve become used to falls away, it can feel like the rug has very quickly and sharply been pulled from under you, and the ground on which you now find yourself standing is pitted with uncertainty.

The resilience that sport gives you in the first place is what sees you through.

I’ve had to physically drag myself off the ground, sweating and bleeding, more times than I can count in my life.

The trait that’s enabled me to keep getting back up isn’t about physical prowess — it’s about the mental ability to keep going, to not give up in the face of adversity, to back myself and have the will to keep moving forward even when the people watching from the sidelines are starting to waver.

It’s this resilience that makes pro athletes so well-suited for the business world which, as we know, has a habit of throwing any number of curve balls in any given week.

For the last year, I have been posting on LinkedIn every Monday about the parallels to be drawn between the (now semi-pro) rugby game I play most Saturdays, and the challenges of business I arrive at on a Monday morning.

I’m told my honesty is refreshing and that the end of each post — “Keep going!” — has been encouraging and reassuring for many.

Since I founded Front Row Support, which supports and champions athlete transition, I’ve seen other businesses come and go.

People with arguably more innovative ideas, more business experience, more financial backing and higher levels of business acumen have gone by the wayside. Whilst I’m not implying a lack of strength in those who have closed or lost businesses, I am more grateful than ever for the resilience that has been instilled in me from an early age by professional sport.

It will now forever be in my nature to not be the one who blinks first; to always pick myself up after every blow; to put a smile on my face and go again.

Because in sport, as in business, the key to success is to find something you care about enough to hold onto and never let go, no matter what the world may throw at you.

Keep going.

Charlie Beech is Founder of Front Row Support. He previously played rugby union for Wasps, Bath and Yorkshire Carnegie.