Sponsored from a young age, fuelled with expectation and ambition, Cooper Chapman spent a decade trying to achieve his dream. In total, he spent seven years inside the top 100 yet never cracked the Championship Tour.

Did he fail? That's a matter of perspective, and Cooper has spent a long time exploring those perspectives.

What he found was that much of the mental training he received to succeed in surfing was also helpful when he came up short. Not only that. As Cooper's pro career was winding down he realised the training he received was also applicable in the real world, and yet many people who needed it weren't receiving it.

So, much as some ex-pro surfers become surf coaches, teaching kids good surfing technique, Cooper began passing on his knowledge, except he teaches good mental technique.

He's put all he's learnt into a book - The 1% Good Club. The title relating to how much effort it takes - just 1% of your day, or 14 minutes - to positively affect the other 99%.

Swellnet: Congratulations on the book, Cooper, It’s a good mix of your story, various anecdotes, and I guess most importantly, advice for younger surfers. That said, how many kids are reading books these days?
Cooper Chapman:  Ha ha…to be honest, I don't think the book is necessarily just for kids. As much as I do a lot of work in the youth space, I expect that the majority of people who read the book will be adults. I think it's a great book for any parents of a young surfer. 

Possibly young athletes will connect with my story, but I didn't read books until I was 21, so I don't expect all young kids to pick it up.

Anyway, it comes in an audiobook for those who don't like reading.

And you talk about the same lessons on your podcast a lot. You’re multimedia these days.
I'm happy with that.

In the popular telling, sunshine and exercise are good for our mental health. That’s something surfers get in abundance and yet surfers aren’t free of mental health issues. What's incomplete about the story?
In general, going surfing is so good for us. Surfing is a great escape, a good way to switch off, to have some time in nature, and most importantly, time off technology. But then again, you can't just run away from problems. 

So sometimes it’s escapism. We feel like we can get in the ocean and get away from our challenges, but then they’re still there when we get back. 

I think it's more about having strategies than just going surfing.

Just before I called, I read a story about Tatiana Weston-Webb taking a break from the tour due to mental health. There's a lot of people talking about mental health, and yet the statistics remain dire. What are we getting wrong?
I think there's so many contributing factors. First and foremost, the world that we live in now is a lot different than the world of ten or twenty years ago when our comparison of ourselves against others was generally just around our local community - now it's against every single person in the world.

Many of us base our identity on external validation - what other people think of us - and it's just been massively amplified over the past ten years. It doesn't really get talked about that much. I believe that's a huge contributing factor. So with that, I think it's so important that we learn the skills to not base our self-worth on external validation, but on the sort of person we are.

When it comes to being a top level athlete, people like Gabriel, Filipe, John John, people who have needed to take time off, their whole world is driven by competition, it's driven by being the best. So I get the need to take a break. If they fall short of goals, then they feel not just like they’ve let themselves down, but also all the people around them.

In my career, I didn't quite get to that very top level, but I think it also happens at every level where you set big, audacious goals and you don't quite reach them. We feel like we're insignificant because we haven't achieved what we wanted to.

Do you think that your average suburban surfer, who can barely get through a boardriders heat let alone the CT, can relate to what pro athletes are going through?
I think so, for sure. I think if you are in any workplace, maybe you’re working your way up the corporate ladder, or you're looking to grow your business, and you set goals then it's very similar to being a professional athlete.

Sometimes you reach those goals and sometimes you don’t. Like, James down the hallway gets a promotion and you don't, so you feel insignificant and that your work isn't good enough.

I think we create control when we try to move from the idea of our career and achievements being our identity, to where your identity is the values you live by.

I think it's the same for all of us when we set goals that aren’t achieved. We feel like we let people around us down, you get that same feeling inside of unworthiness and failure, and that’s whether you're a top level athlete or just a regular person working.

Do you have any religious leanings, or do you consider what you do to have a spiritual angle to it?
It depends on what lens you want to look it through. I'm definitely not religious. I grew up Catholic but never went to church, though I’d definitely call myself spiritual. I believe there’s this underlying theme that all religion comes back to, and that’s just being a good human - trying to be at peace with your thoughts, trying to be at peace with the world. A lot of the stuff that I teach is also trying to find inner peace, and a lot of us really struggle with that.

I think inner peace is the most valuable thing that we can ever get, and I recently heard something good: that world peace isn't in the wheelhouse anytime soon, but inner peace is. I think a lot of us go, ‘well, world peace isn't available to us, so nor is inner peace.’ But everybody has the ability to find inner peace, and I think that comes back to self-exploration and understanding yourself. 

So for me, sure, it might be spirituality, but it’s also just understanding yourself and the world around you a little better.

I recall reading an old interview with a bunch of Christian surfers on the pro tour - one of them was Greg Anderson, who like you is from Narrabeen - and they had a little support group, helping each other and helping other surfers who’d gone off the rails. Like those guys, do you see yourself as a saver of souls?
I think a saver of souls might be stretching it.

Fair enough. Religious term anyway…
I mean…if I’m honest…maybe it is. I've had countless messages that my work has saved people's lives. I think more so than a saver of souls, I’m just pushing people towards hope and showing them there’s a different world and a different mindset that they can live in. 

For instance, I just finished doing a podcast with this young kid, his name's Noah Wallace, who's grown a big social media profile doing surfing content called Surfing with Noz.

It was cool to hear him talk about his love of surfing. But he also opened up to me about how much anxiety he's carried from a childhood memory and now he's scared to travel and finds it really difficult. 

So to hear him open up and be like, "Oh, I feel safe getting to share that and now be able to share it with your audience through your podcast," I love that I've built this platform for people to be vulnerable and share more about their experience.

Then people can relate to it and go, "Oh wow, this kid has this profile and this social media that looks so perfect. I wish I had his life. He's got it so easy." But no, he's also just opened up that he struggles with panic attacks, anxiety, and struggles to travel outside of his local community because of this fear.

This platform can really give people a space to be open and be sharing and show that we're not all these strong people living this great life. We all have insecurities, we all have challenges that we're trying to face. 

So yeah, I wouldn't say I'm a saver of souls, but I think I'm trying to show that there's another way to do it. You may be in this hard, get over it, blokey-bloke surfing world, but you can also have your insecurities. You can also be a good human. You can also be grateful and not always look for the negatives out there.

You can look for the positives as well.

Can I play devil's advocate for a moment?
Please do.

You were earlier saying we shouldn’t compare ourselves to other people, but then you’ve just said you can compare yourself to people like Noah because he's putting himself forth as someone that struggles.
I think there's a difference between comparing yourself while wishing your life was theirs, and feeling empathy that somebody else is struggling.

OK.
In that comparison, there’s a connection. You feel like you’re not alone.

There’s a saying that wisdom is healed pain. Does that mean that suffering has a good purpose?
When we're going through challenges, it always feels terrible and hard. But quite often, when we look back through life, a lot of our growth comes from those challenging moments.

Everyone reading this interview has already gotten through each challenge in their life so far, so we can be resilient. We can look back and learn from those hard times. 

I say to people, ‘knowledge is knowing, but wisdom is doing’. So wisdom, for me, is the ability to put into action all the lessons that we've learned. Many of us continually make the same mistakes, we continually struggle because we don't make changes. So a big part of my work is to give people the tools to make some changes and improve their life.

As I mentioned in an earlier question, mental health is an open topic now - many people talk about it and give advice on how to manage it. Do you see the younger generation adopting these good habits?
Yeah. One thing that's very noticeable is that the younger generation have slowed down on drinking alcohol. There's a lot of data showing 18 to 24 year olds drink the least amount of alcohol in our recent history.

Younger people are becoming more health conscious, but then again they’re also comparing themselves more to anyone online, so there's some good things happening, and some damaging things too.

It's a hard one. A lot of the young people that I speak to are definitely more open to the stuff that I talk about. They open their minds to it and constant exposure helps.

When I was 16 to 18-years old, I was [doing mental training] with Barton Lynch but I didn't fully take it on. But good lessons trickle down so they’re worth doing. So what I'm trying to do is expose kids to mindfulness, and to gratitude, and to kindness. Maybe they won’t take to them straight away, but maybe they’ll revisit them when the time is right. They’re tools they’ve got, just sitting there waiting to be used.

Much of what you write is sunny and optimistic. Do you think there’s a place for younger people to express darker humour and darker emotions?
(pause)...I don't fully understand the question, to be honest.

Well, part of Australia's culture is taking the piss and paying out on each other. For better or worse, that's what it is. But also, melancholy and sadness are valid emotions. Do you think it’s healthy to wallow in the weeds?
Oh, absolutely. I think we really need to express the range of our emotions, but I think we need to do it in a healthy way. So often when we want to get angry or we want to get sad, we get told when we're a kid, like, "Oh, don't get angry, be tough."

And we push down all this emotion and then when we're adults, it comes out in rage or anger or a mental breakdown. In the work that I've done, sometimes with psychologists, or by doing breath work and mindfulness training, is that we need a healthy place to express our anger or frustrations or sadness.

As for the first part of your question, I love a bit of banter. I love a bit of sarcasm. I love taking the piss. I don't want people to think, "Oh my God, everything has to be so serious." Not at all. I take the piss all the time, but it's just about finding that balance and having the maturity that we need to be there for our friends sometimes.

Maybe I'll pull back on giving it to them at the moment because I can see something isn’t right. That’s when it’s time to build a bit of curiosity about how they're feeling rather than just continually taking the piss out of them. 

It’s definitely worth having safe spaces where you sit around with your mates and go, "Actually, how are you going at the moment?"

'The 1% Good Club' by Cooper Chapman is published by Wiley and available online