The role of a mentor to motivate individuals in sports has resurfaced after the appointment of Olympic medallist Susanthika Jayasinghe to promote women’s cricket by Sri Lanka Cricket.
She is a sports icon no doubt but it remains to be seen what impact she could make for cricket when she has failed to inspire athletes to follow in her trail for more than two decades.
It is a much misunderstood concept so much so that even sports authorities have failed to grasp the importance of it. Appointments like Jayasinghe though bizarre may have been done in good faith but when the country is in the throes of a debilitating economic crisis, it is difficult to motivate athletes who are desperate for survival like any human being.
There is no guarantee that a brilliant player may turn out to be a good coach or administrator. It is important to get to the crux of the matter if you want to resolve any crisis without having a frog-in-the-well attitude.
A Sri Lankan engineer Nalaka Hewamadduma who graduated from the University of Moratuwa after many years of study has come to the conclusion that ‘Resilience, Collaboration and Well Being’ (RCW) are the ingredients that uplift the state of humans.
A product of Ananda College, Hewamadduma took a curious interest on how the human body functions from a young age. An avid sportsman gaining University colours in seven sports – athletics, weightlifting, soccer, rugby, swimming, volleyball and elle. He migrated to Canada in 2009 before returning to serve his Motherland in 2015 being president of the Weightlifting Federation till 2020. He opened a leadership development company in 2003 which operates in 15 countries including the US and Canada. More significantly he authored a book ‘Art of Well Being’ published in the US a decade ago which is considered an authentic document on South Asian and Asian behaviour. It was re-launched in Sri Lanka with an edited version recently.
“Since I passed out as an engineer and being an athlete, I always wanted to explore my body. What I did was use my engineering knowledge to analyse the body. Then I realised that by doing that the performance can be improved. I first applied the theory to myself and I achieved results. Then I thought if someone else did the same things, they also can achieve the same results. That is why I have developed this concept model,” he said.
“Then I slowly moved out of typical conventional engineering and applied these concepts in what I call now ‘People Engineering’,” said Hewamadduma, 58, who obtained his MBA at the Sri Jayewardenepura University.
He feels the values of Resilience, Collaboration and Well-being (RCW) are not being appreciated by the people who matter. Only netball has benefitted with national coach Thilaka Jinadasa hiring his services during their victorious Asia Cup campaign in 2009 and 2018.
“I help people help leaders and managers in organisations to build RCW. Currently that is one of the key requirements and essentials needed even in Western countries because we are in turbulent times globally,” he said.
“After covid since 2022 the world has changed because lots of machines have taken over the jobs done by humans before. Now with 5G technology and Artificial Intelligence, all the routine work has been taken over by machines. Today for people to survive and thrive, they need to build RCW,” he felt.
He was of the opinion that the failure of the Sri Lanka cricket team was a lack of leadership. “We can clearly see even in cricket that the team members don’t have clarity of direction. Then that leader has to be sensible. That means the leader should build a healthy emotional culture and create an emotionally safe workplace for the team members. The leader should be able to motivate and develop the potential of each member of the team,” he said.
Hewamadduma pointed out that Argentina and France came to the FIFA World Cup final because they had a collaborative mindset.
“Most commonly in the Sri Lankan context, we can see win-lose relationships instead of win-win. People make other people lose. At the moment Sri Lanka Cricket is having trouble in appointing selectors. They are dragging back and forth for a couple of weeks because a win-win relationship is not there,” he said.
“Players are playing for their own results. Sometime back we have seen certain players who were of high performance but they played a very individual game. They wanted to score the highest number of runs or wickets but the team lost. We have seen many occasions where they played individualised games and the team didn’t win as a whole,” he said.
According to him it is a misnomer that being healthy and well-being are the same. “There is a difference between health and well-being. Health is a noun and well-being is a verb. Definition of health according to WHO is a state of physical, mental, social and spiritual well-being. Well-being is very much important. We cannot be Resilient and Collaborative without Well-being,” he pointed out.
“Well-being has many factors which are simple. I identified this need about 10 years ago and wrote a book ‘Art of Well Being’ taken up by a leading publisher in the US, Hay House. It is available on major platforms such as amazon and ebay. That book has been given authority in North America as well because it is a unique methodology based on authentic Sri Lankan and South Asian behaviour,” he said.
The seven steps which can be used to develop well-being are right perception, relaxation, right eating, right breathing, right exercises, right relationship and right thoughts.
“Perception means the way we look at ourselves. Actually our body is like a machine. When we look after a machine, there are certain things we do regularly. Even (human) body is one of the most complex machines ever. So we have to treat it in the same way but most people, including national and international athletes, don’t take care of the body,” he said.
“Our bodies need a good sleep. Our cricket team has similar issues. They don’t take that rest. If someone is awake in a night club or party till the morning, they cannot perform the same way the following day. That is why we have to take care of our body as a machine,” he said.
“Usually experts say if we can take a five-minute break every hour, we can work non-stop for 10 to 12 hours but a timely break is important. What most people do is they work continuously 4 to 5 hours and by the time they take a break, they have burnt out. So frequent rest is very important so that they can work for long hours. This applies for sports people as well as corporates,” he said.
He recalled how his athletic coaches Laxman de Alwis and SMG Bandara advised to take proper rest. “They were very particular about taking the right rest in between the training schedule. Now I don’t see it happening among the emerging athletes. Lot of injuries, burnouts occur without proper rest,” he said.
“There are a lot of concerns about right food but at the same time we need to pay attention to how we eat. We all know whatever we eat, if proper digestion happens only, it can be absorbed into the body, proper metabolism happens. For digestion to happen there are certain measures we have to take while eating,” he said.
“We know digestion starts in the mouth. When we masticate food or when we chew food, digestion starts but most people quickly swallow the food. They don’t take time to eat. When we chew food only, digestion happens properly and then all the nutrients will be absorbed into the body,” he added.
“Breathing is the least considered habit I have seen in Sri Lanka both in corporate as well as in sports. Proper breathing is very important for our internal functions to happen because it is not only oxygen intake in the body. We need to pay attention to breathing and how we breathe. Breathing happens with the lungs. We need to expand our lungs to maximum and then only oxygen will go around the body. Same way we have to pay attention to inhalation. Exhalation is also important because when we exhale properly then the wastage or impurities in the body will go out,” he said.
“Right exercise is putting our bodies in mobility mode, especially our joints. It should function properly so that the blood circulation happens,” he said, recommending aerobic exercises like walking, cycling, swimming, etc. “It will always keep our body in the right vigour,” he said.
He also stressed that proper warming up and warming down were essential when doing sport specific training in a particular sport. “I can still remember my coach RB Wickremasinghe saying all have to pay attention to warming up. Their attention shouldn’t go anywhere else other than their body. They never allowed us to chit chat while warming up. Now we see people with headphones and mobile devices. They are connected somewhere else when they are warming up. That is why injuries have cropped up and are very common,” he said.
“Similarly warming down to stop our regular routine schedule, we have to spend at least 15 minutes to warm down. Then only the body will come to its natural or normal state before we leave the ground,” he added.
Last but not least generating nourishing thoughts is crucial for high performance. “Thoughts cannot be destroyed but can be replaced with or without our knowledge. If we generate toxic thoughts, we immediately have to replace them with nourishing ones. Pay attention to thoughts generated in our mind. By doing that we can always have nourishing thoughts,” he said.