Denis Walsh: Shane O’Sullivan on the power of visualisation and belief

To explain himself, Shane O’Sullivan tells two stories. When he was 14 the manager of the school team in De La Sale arranged an audience with Liam Griffin. From an All-Ireland winning coach the players expected to hear solutions for their day-to-day hurling problems, and maybe a few yarns, as a sauce on the side: instead Griffin gave them a life lesson about the power of the mind.

About how Niamh Fitzpatrick, the Wexford team psychologist, would sit with Billy Byrne for half an hour, just visualising scenarios, even though Byrne was in his mid-30s by then, and maybe thought he had seen these movies before.

O’Sullivan was the captain and at the end of the talk he was asked by the team manager to say a few words of thanks to Griffin, in front of the group. “I would have been shy at the time and I remember my heart dropping. I did it anyway, and for some reason I plucked up the courage to ask him: ‘do you have any book where I could read more about this?’

“I’ll never forget it – he said read a book called The Inner Game of Golf by Timothy Galloway. I went into the Book Centre in Waterford and they got it for me from America. I read it cover to cover. I’ve never stopped reading it since.”

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The other story is about his late father. In his adult life Pat was a hugely successful businessman and a colossus in Ballygunner, an endless source of leading and driving and giving and doing. In primary school, though, Pat was tricky. The principal was a Dundalk man called James McGinn, who landed in Ballygunner in the early 1950s, when it was a scattered rural parish, with no GAA club. What he saw in Pat was potential and self-sabotage, and rather than let the riddle pass, he tried to solve it.

[ Battle of the serial winners as Ballygunner and Na Piarsaigh go head to head ]

“He was wild as a young kid. He was in and out of school and mitching and getting into trouble – just always in trouble. Then Mr McGinn took him under his wing and kept him back in a class on his own, for two years, beyond his primary school years, because he knew he needed help. He taught him two things – one was maths, because he knew he had strength in maths. And he gave him confidence.

“He gave him a book called, I Am, I Will, I Can. Again, it was about the power of the mind. It was the first book my father ever read. That was long before I was born, but when I was growing up, looking at him, and seeing how he dealt with success and failure – in business and in sport – and how he just navigated life, always having the mind set to respond and grow. And how all of that was so effective in the realisation of his dreams – he just instilled those things in me.”

When Shane O’Sullivan was 21 he started his own business as a performance coach. He had spent three years in UCC studying Maths and Economics, shaping for a career in teaching that he knew in his heart wouldn’t be for life. So, after UCC he enrolled for a masters in Applied Sport and Exercise Psychology in Waterford IT. “I just said, ‘right, I’m going to go after what I love.’”

He was still a student when he set up Inspiring Excellence. At first he had a short client list: mostly GAA players, but some golfers too, and a couple of business people who were attracted to his moxie. “I started off mostly with high performance sports players, and because I was playing at a high performance level [with Waterford] I suppose I had a bit of credibility there. You’re going into a Munster championship match and you’re practising what you preach.

“But I suppose the people that come to you [in the beginning] believe in you first. At the time there were businesses who would have been willing to invest in you because they see a young person with the courage to take on a role. [For me] it was like jumping out of an aeroplane and finding out how to fly on the way down.”

While the business was growing, teaching was his day job. After 10 years, though, his client list needed his full attention. Right now, Inspiring Excellence has more than 15 retained coaches, working on three contracts, on three continents. On Monday afternoon, O’Sullivan took two sessions with clients in the United States; for three days this week he was engaged, on-site, with a Spanish company based in the Midlands: flying.

“That’s why I mentioned Liam Griffin and my Dad. Without them I would never have had the passion for this in the first place.”

In his hurling life, stuff happened fast. He was just 16 when he played in his first senior county final with Ballygunner, more than 20 years ago now. Two years later, he made his championship debut for the Waterford seniors, tossed on to the bonfire of an All-Ireland semi-final against Kilkenny, a precocious understudy for the suspended John Mullane.

“It’s eerie when I think about it. I was 16 when Waterford played Clare in Croke Park in 2002 and we lost. I remember being up in the Cusack Stand looking out over the pitch when the game was over, and whatever came over me [I said to myself]. ‘the next time Waterford are in Croke Park, I’m going to be playing.’ I was playing corner forward two years later, which was the next time we played in Croke Park.

“I reflected on it recently and I thought: ‘would that have happened if I didn’t have the belief, or if I didn’t put that intention out into the world?’ I don’t think it would have. Obviously, a number of actions have to be associated with things, but that was one of the first times in my life that I really experienced the power of visualisation and belief. When you get that so young you can start creating other things.”

His Waterford career finished in 2017; by then O’Sullivan was 32, with mountains still to climb. Ballygunner had started winning county finals in a terrifying sequence – nine now and counting – but in their history they had lost more Munster club finals than anybody else, too, and no Waterford club had ever won the All-Ireland. In their empire-building phase, those were the frontiers that occupied their sight.

Once upon a time, every battle was local. When O’Sullivan was a boy the club didn’t own their own pitch until he was 10. Their first dressingroom was a Bell-Lines cargo container, with a hole in the roof. “I’ll never forget the town teams coming out and they’d have a laugh off us. But they’d hammer us as well. Like, we used to get awful hammerings.

[ Ballygunner light the fuse for an explosive club championship ]

“To come from there, when we could barely field a team, to where we are now – to see the evolution. It didn’t happen by accident. The hairs stand up on my neck just thinking about it.”

Losing shaped them too. O’Sullivan lost his first three senior county finals; six out of the first eight. “Fergal Hartley [clubmate and former Waterford player] said to me one day: ‘do you know who has the most county final losses in the history of Waterford?’ I said, ‘no’, and he said, ‘me’. And I kind of laughed, and he said: ‘do you know who’s second?’ ‘No’ ... ‘You.’”

As family, they are rooted in it. On the panel O’Sullivan has seven nephews, six of them starters. One of them is his godson. His brother, Darragh, is the manager. His late father was chairman of the club for years, and chair of the development committee; Shane’s brother Billy assumed those roles when the time came. Service and devotion was the example; followed.

“My mother has a massive scrapbook of all hurling cuttings and I remember flicking through it one Christmas and finding a player profile of me when I was in primary school. I was asked: ‘what’s your goal in life?’ ‘To win an All-Ireland club.’”

Done. Next? Again.