For years, the All Blacks, New Zealand’s famous rugby union team, had been underperforming. After winning the first Rugby World Cup in 1987, the regular pre-tournament favourites would lose three semi-finals and one final in the next four editions, before going out in the quarter-finals in 2007. Something had to change.
And it did. Working with Gazing Performance, using their ‘Red2Blue’ principle, the All Blacks learned how to transform the stress and anxiety of pursuing that second World Cup title (the red head) into the clear, focused mindset needed to deliver it (the blue head). It was a factor talked about heavily in the aftermath of New Zealand’s triumph on home soil in 2011 and it significantly raised the profile of Gazing Performance, so much so that it would eventually come onto the radar of Parkinson’s father.
When that happened, the Parkinson family were moving. Denis, Erica’s older brother, had been scouted to play for Porto’s academy, meaning it was only a short flight for their father to head to London to meet with Martin Fairn, the CEO of Gazing. It was there that he inquired about the possibility of the company working with both Denis and Erica in some one-to-one mindset coaching.
“I said, ‘I’d be delighted if they want to do it and if you want to do it’,” Fairn recalls now, speaking to GOAL. “So I met with them both. Denis was, ‘Yep, yep. I’m on it’. Very studious, very clear, very emotionally intelligent as a young man. And Erica, as a 12-year-old, said, ‘What’s he doing? I want to have a go at that’. And if you’ve met Erica, you know that’s how she is.”
