Dan Carter: The Autobiography of an All Blacks Legend

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Whether you're a business looking to work on your culture, a leader on a steep learning curve, a person navigating change in their life or just someone of any age trying to get that little bit better every day, I hope that my experience can spur you on to greater heights, and master the art of winning. I wanted to be vulnerable about the difficulty of finishing something that you love and you feel like you were put on this planet to do. It's quite a challenging process, and not just for sports people. I wanted to document it, and I talked to various people to help me navigate this change.” My international career had ended, but I didn’t want to finish playing. Like anyone who devotes themselves completely to a discipline and becomes hooked on the buzz that success brings, I couldn’t imagine a life without rugby, and I had other things I wanted to achieve in the game.

But it wasn’t easy to just stop when he had led such a structured life. In our Author Access interview and in his new book "The Art of Winning" Dan admitted he struggled with his identity, leading to anxiety, self-doubt, and feeling rudderless. They asked me if I wanted to continue and I was like, look, I’m in my 30s now, I’ve got a couple of children. There’s a time to move aside.”When I returned, I’d lost my place in the team and had to settle for a spot on the bench. But I learned to adapt to a new role within the squad rather than face up to the writing on the wall. And then I joined Kobe Steelers in Japan, on what I knew would be my final contract, where I was reunited with my coach and mentor Wayne Smith. We won the Japanese Top League in my first season, and I felt I was playing great rugby again. I first thought seriously about retirement in 2013, at the age of 31. Suffering from constant injuries, I felt that my body was giving up on me, no longer able to cope with the demands of professional rugby. But retirement was a dirty word to me, conjuring up the kind of images no one needs in their head: Washed up. Has-been. No good anymore. I dreaded retirement, feared it, avoided it at all costs.

I found the decision to retire so difficult, despite all my success, that it took an unprecedented set of global circumstances and the unvarnished truth from a 5-year-old boy to make me see that I was finding any excuse to keep playing to avoid retirement. But there was nowhere to hide anymore, and over the course of that year I came to accept that my days as a professional rugby player were over.My experiences held value not only in rugby, but beyond. My confidence grew when organisations like AstraZeneca, who were trying to develop a Covid vaccine at the time, and a team at the Nuffield Department of Surgical Sciences, part of the University of Oxford, wanted to hear my thoughts on managing pressure. I also spoke in Paris with the general managers of Louis Vuitton, at the invitation of their CEO, Michael Burke, about the importance of humility in a team environment. But along with the triumphs of his signature World Cup win, his performance against the Lions in 2005, and an unprecedented run of Bledisloe Cup successes, there was also the pain and doubt he felt during a prolonged period of injury and rehab following the 2011 World Cup.