We’re doing a lot of work with sales teams right now as they seek to thrive rather than just survive - and as you’d expect with sales teams, the concept of winning is coming up a lot. I think a lot about what winning means and when it’s tough out there, when the attention is [...]
So, just before the Olympics, we were chatting with some of the athletes about the opportunities still left to mentally sharpen up and get the most out of the remaining preparation days. We challenged them to answer the following:“If out of all of the days you’ve had to prepare for Beijing, you knew that tomorrow [...]
We’ve just finished the 2 day kick off to the athlete at work® programme and really enjoyed some interesting conversations around performance in these testing times. One of the most interesting discussions was around the perceived pressure to get more done in less time. Wouldn’t we all like that? So, when we talked about being [...]
It was interesting watching a clip of Cathy Freeman yesterday reflecting on her gold medal success at the Sydney Olympics, in front of 112,000 people, carrying the hopes of a nation and performing under a huge weight of expectation.In the midst of all of that hype, excitement, pressure, hope and expectation, as she warmed up, [...]
Do you know that people perform better when they are clearly focused on playing to their strengths, rather than focusing on how not to have their weaknesses exposed? Pretty obvious really, but there’s a big assumption that everyone has their finger on the pulse of their strengths. In our experience, that’s not the caseWe also [...]
One thing that we know from working with the highest level athletes is that they value and actively exploit recovery in order to perform better. This contrasts with the views that we hear in the corporate world, where is appears there is a perception sometimes that sleep and downtime are an inconvenience to getting a [...]
… are yours worth catching? (Great line that we’ve seen attributed to Aussie cricket great, Steve Waugh, but I’m sure it came from somewhere else first!).Actually, do you even know your attitudes? If you’re not fully aware of those attitudes, then you’re probably not realising how you’re infecting people around you! When the conditions around [...]
“It’s subtle this performance coaching stuff, but it works. This time last year if circumstances had been the same I’d have been sh*!ing myself and unhealthily pessimistic. This year I’m still pessimistic, but understand that this pessimism is actually useful. If I use it appropriately, it helps me to perform better. Also, last year, I’d [...]
…while all others around you are doing a good impression of something without a head, requires a lot of mental toughness. Like anything that’s difficult, the more you prepare for the challenge, the more of a fighting chance of success you have when the key moments actually arrive. So, given that the playing field has [...]
Under pressure, we know that people’s focus tends to narrow down onto just a few things and very often, this actually means missing out on some really important information that’s in the world around you. We think we’ve noticed quite a lot of attentional narrowing onto those wonderful things called “goals” and it hasn’t all [...]