A couple of posts ago, we talked about Matt Le Tissier and his prowess at kicking a stationary ball into a large rectangular from 12 yards (if you search the BBC Sport Website at the moment there's a video of him talking about penalty taking being all in the mind...…

Many of the international performers we work with receive feedback dozens of times every day as a result of living primarily in a "practise" environment. This is of course world class practise, often under pressure, always under the scrutiny of a helpful eye or video camera and always focused on…

Seeing Stevie Gerrard scoring another penalty for Liverpool last night prompted a quick web search of successful penalty takers. A BBC Sport Online article argues that Southampton favourite and former player Matthew Le Tissier proved himself to be the spot-kick king, converting 48 of the 49 penalties he took during…

'Fast Execution' is one of the statements that goes towards making up Oblique Strategies and this particular one speaks 100% to everything that being an elite performer is all about. The typical approach we get to see is Fast (or no) Preparation and Frantic Execution. The lack of preparation leads…

There's an often written about concept of "flow" in the world of performance psychology (and there's a good chunk of it in 'flavour of the month' book Drive). The theory says that you reach the much sought after state of flow when there is a perfect match between the level…

  If you see the previous post (clarity of purpose), you'll see how we found our way to Dan Pink's book Drive. For anyone reading the blog who we've had the pleasure of working with in the past, we'd highly recommend you read this book. It'll help bring the 3C's totally…

In a Harvard Business Review blog article is the following paragraph: "Dan tells a story about Clare Booth Luce, the playwright, journalist, and Republican Member of Congress. In 1962, Luce met with President Kennedy, who was, at the time, pursuing an ambitious agenda domestically and overseas. She worried about his diffuse…

Evidently we're worthy of a very grand title in the FT - Business Wisdom! We see it more as stating the obvious... but nice that the folks at the FT think it's wisdom!

Making this week great... On a monday morning, it's a good idea to think about how you're going to benefit from your strengths, rather than just be in possession of them for another week (without them adding anything specific to you). Just as an elite athlete would look ahead to…

So, we talk a lot about strengths on here and playing to your strengths, as well as developing them. One of the benefits of this kind of approach is that it's a completely no risk approach to personal development work. If you identify your strengths and choose to work on…