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Matt Comyn has a super skill, just ask Anthony Seibold
Manly Sea Eagles coach Anthony Seibold has forged a close relationship with the Commonwealth Bank CEO. It is a friendship where they learn from each other’s worlds.
Anthony Siebold likes to start the day with exercise, followed by a sauna and a cold plunge. Louie Douvis
Sally Patten and
Lap Phan
Updated Feb 25, 2025 – 9.54am,first published at 5.00am
Ask Manly Sea Eagles head coach Anthony Seibold what he has learnt from his friend Matt Comyn, the chief executive of Commonwealth Bank, and he is quick to point to Comyn’s ability to turn his attention instantly to different topics and audiences.
“The thing that really impressed me was how well he prepared, and how well he was able to pivot from performance moments to performance moments,” Seibold told the
15 Minutes with the BOSS podcast before the start of the 2025 National Rugby League season this weekend.
“When I observed Matt, he was doing an interview with the media, then he was able to pivot, get up on stage in front of a couple of hundred people and deliver a key message. Then he was back with key staff back at the Commonwealth Bank.
“Each moment, he was able to take a breath, pivot and then perform in the next moment,” Seibold says.
The coach has no doubt passed on a few of his own tips to Comyn over the years, as he has developed techniques for dealing with intense pressure, including the harassment of his family and motivating players, learnt from mistakes, and realised that a “don’t worry about it, she’ll be right” attitude just won’t cut it.
Listen below or stream 15 Minutes with the Boss on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
Here is an edited transcript of Sally Patten’s conversation with Seibold.
Sally Patten: As we head into the 2025 season [I see that] in the last 11 seasons, you’ve made the finals. What are your goals for 2025?
Anthony Seibold: Our goal for 2025 is to repeat the finals performance. It’s been a decade since our club has made the finals in two successive seasons, so that’s one aspiration.
But our whole preseason preparation is about taking the club to the next level, and the next level for us is to become a top four side. That’s the opportunity we’ve got in front of us.
What time do you get up? What does your morning routine look like?
I’m up at 5am every day. I try and do some sort of exercise, whether it’s in the gym at our Centre of Excellence, whether it’s riding my pushbike, and then I have breakfast, generally speaking, at the Centre of Excellence, where we’re based.
I try and get a sauna in as well. I find that a sauna and a cold water plunge are a really good way for me to start my day.
So do you do the whole sauna/ice bath thing?
I do. At the Centre of Excellence, we’ve got a 14-seat sauna, and we’ve got the cold water plunge pool right next to it.
There’s a lot of research around saunas and promotion of cardiovascular health, but also the human growth hormone. When you train in the gym, there’s some research around having benefits of a sauna, post gym.
The cold water immersion is very good for your mental health, and I feel really good after I do it. That’s a really positive way for me to start the day.
We talk about having a better week, and I work with a personal coach who talks to me about having a better morning, and that is essentially why I’ve got this routine.
Can you tell me about a pivotal moment in your career or something that happened that changed the trajectory of what you were doing?
I was head coach at
Brisbane Broncos. It was the second club in the NRL that I was head coach for, and I had, I suppose, what you’d call a failure there. I had a six-year deal and I finished after about 18 months.
That really changed the trajectory because I had to endure a failure in the public eye, which was quite challenging. But I feel like I’ve learnt a lot from that particular failure. I think any person who has been able to reach some sort of elite level in their industry has had to endure some failures and had to show perseverance and resilience.
So that changed the trajectory. I moved codes and I moved countries. I went from living in Australia, working as a head coach in Australia in the
National Rugby League, to working with English Rugby Union, which is a totally different code in a different country.
How do you cope with the pressure, which I assume you would’ve got from the media and fans. Yours are such high-profile positions, right?
It’s perceived pressure. That’s probably the one thing that I would say. Surgeons, people who operate on others, that’s where I perceive pressure to be because it’s life and death.
The perceived pressure comes from the speculation in and around the media. Unfortunately, during my situation at Brisbane, it spilled over into some
harassment and defamation on social media.
From a mental point of view, I was in a really dark spot. So that wasn’t born out of the pressure of the results. I could swallow that because essentially, I knew that I gave everything, and it wasn’t working, so I could quite comfortably walk away.
The thing that was really challenging was the harassment of my family, the harassment of me on the social media platform. That was the difficult thing to move on from.
That must’ve been really difficult because those attacks were really very personal. Did you have the tools to ignore them and calm yourself down?
I don’t think that I had the mental skills tools to be able to do that at the time, but now I have someone whom I have worked with and a lot of it is around, how I can move on.
Often are your own worst critic. That inner talk can be crippling at times for people.
And also the idea around the use of breath. I didn’t have those tools four or five years ago when I was working at the Brisbane Broncos.
So breathing is a useful tool?
It is for me. I do a lot of box breathing, nasal breathing in for four seconds, hold it for four seconds, breathing out for four seconds through your mouth and then holding for four seconds and doing reps of that. That really helps me clear my mind and helps with down regulation.
One of the things [about] being a leader is how do you separate work [and] home? I have strategies to not only start the day, but to finish my day and how I down regulate from being a head coach to being a dad or a husband. I’m really deliberate with that.
When you talk about down regulation, does that mean to de-stress?
Yes, that’s exactly it. It’s an opportunity to take a breath and [finish] one part of your day before you start another.
Is there anything else you do to fend off the inner critic?
I’ve got a strategy which is called the FOP strategy. Essentially when the negativity or the negative self-talk comes on, I’ll say, “F off please. You can come back later on, but not right now.”
That is something that I have been working on hard with our mental skills coach. Our players actually use the same strategy.
The other way I try and silence that inner critic is through journaling. I write down one thing I’m grateful for, how I’m feeling, and being really, really transparent about how I’m feeling.
If I’m feeling a little bit crappy, pardon the language, I write that down. And then [I write down] one thing I’ve learnt that day.
Gratitude is an excellent thing to think about because you focus on the positive. I think that’s really important for us to reflect on at times.
What is the best piece of career advice you’ve ever received?
Be curious. It’s come from a couple of different leaders in a couple of different industries. It’s been a pretty common thread across leaders I’ve met in my time. Being curious is actually being open-minded to find a better way of doing things.
If there’s one idea that I can bring back [from meeting people] and add to either my skill set or add to the program, then I feel like we’re going to continue to improve and get to that next level.
So, be curious, is an important piece of advice.
Are there one or two things that you can point to that you’ve learnt through observing Matt Comyn?
He treats himself as an elite executive. He tracks his sleep. He’s very deliberate around his routines around training and meals etcetera.
The thing that really impressed me was how well he prepared, and how well he was able to pivot from performance moments to performance moments.
When I observed Matt, he was doing an interview with the media, then he was able to pivot, get up on stage in front of a couple of hundred people and deliver a key message. Then he was back with key staff back at the Commonwealth Bank.
Each moment, he was able to take a breath, pivot and then perform in the next moment. I thought he was exceptional at that.
What’s the most underrated skill that has helped you in your career?
The ability to check for understanding [of] information.
A lot of information gets passed on to players. If you know anything about learning and memory and retention, then you [learn you] need to [hear] it more than once.
One of the ways to do that is retrieving information. At the end of a meeting, for those people who work in the corporate space, turn and share with a colleague beside you what are the one or two takeaways that are important for you from this meeting.
I call it checking for understanding.
Another way to do that is the next time you have a meeting, link it the previous meeting. Let’s just say you have a meeting every Monday. You’ll link the previous Monday’s meeting to this meeting. “These are our one or two key takeaways from last Monday’s meeting. So this is what we’re going to start with.”
One thing I do know is that forgetting is the opposite of learning, and that’s because you don’t retrieve the information or check for understanding.
How many times do you think that you need to reinforce the message to get it through to the player group?
The research suggests that in a given week, it’s three to four times that you need to retrieve.
If we’re playing a big game against the
Penrith Panthers or the Melbourne Storm, we really try and narrow our focus to three key things rather than 10 key things.
We’ll retrieve those three things three times that week at training. We feel that gives us our best opportunity for that game strategy to be embedded into the players and then to be retrieved on game day, which is the most important day in our week.
What’s the most common piece of advice, work advice or life advice that you think is actually BS?
I think when someone says, “don’t worry about it”. You do worry about it because you care.
I do worry about it because you put a lot of time and effort into it. I’d rather come up with solutions.
I guess really in your line of work, if you don’t get it right and you lose a game, you’ve got to pick a team up, I imagine, because they’re feeling down in the dumps. How do you do that? How do you pick up the team?
So there are a number of ways you can do it. You don’t always have to go to the negative.
If you lose a game and you’ve got five or six days before your next game, if you just hammer the guys all week with negativity, that’s not going to help.
What I do is say, “OK, what are we doing well?” I really try and reinforce those things and the use of shout-outs. We didn’t get the result on the scoreboard, but point to someone who helped you on the weekend, just show positive reinforcement. [If] we do this and we do it for longer, we’ll get the result that we want.
What is your favourite party story you like to share?
When I was playing in the English Super League, I was playing for a team called London Broncos. At the time it was owned by Richard Branson.
London is soccer crazy, not rugby league crazy. But at the time, Richard Branson was trying to ramp up the support of the London Broncos.
He organised for about seven or eight of us to open the Brit Awards, which is the music industry awards night in Britain, in the year 2000.
They had seven or eight of us London Broncos players literally playing the [Japanese] kodo drums to start the Brit Awards.
That same night Robbie Williams, the Spice Girls, Tom Jones and Natalie Imbruglia [played]. So that’s my favourite party story. I’ve performed on stage with Queen and I’ve met Robbie Williams backstage.
If we gave you 12 months off unencumbered and you could do anything you liked, what would you do?
I’d go sailing in Croatia for about three weeks of the European summer. It’s something that I’m going to do when I finish coaching. I learn so much from travelling.
The other one is I’ve got an ambition to live in Manhattan for six months with my wife and just experience living there day to day for a period of time.
I love the vibe of Manhattan and particularly Lower East and around Dumbo, which is just the other side in Brooklyn.
