The Thread #6
Thanks once again for your marvellous support for my work.
The open rates are sitting above 75%, and I can see people exploring the site, reading different posts, and following the threads of the work. I am genuinely grateful for that.
I suspect quite a few of you are reading quietly in the background.
I would love to hear more from you in the comments. Questions, thoughts, your own point of view, criticisms, all of it helps. Chatting around the work is how a real community starts to form, and I would love this to become more of a conversation.
I have no problem coming up with ideas. I could probably post every day, though that may be a little more than anyone wants from me.
I used to mull ideas over while walking Molly, my dog. These days I still go for a walk, though since I don’t stop every few yards to sniff anything, the walks are over much more quickly. Nevertheless, the ideas are flowing.
Here’s a preview of what I’m working on at the moment. I am finalising a piece called Pressure Test: Joe Rogan. Rogan can be divisive, I know, though there is little real argument, in my view, about his mental strength.
I have been studying some of the ways he handles pressure, and there’s a fascinating story around how he’s grown in that regard. I have adopted parts of that approach myself, and they’ve been so helpful I wanted to share them.
I am also working on a piece about momentum in sport and life.
We all recognise it when we see it. A player, a team, or even a person in ordinary life suddenly seems to have the wind behind them. Decisions come faster. Movement looks freer. Belief rises.
Then there is the opposite state, being under the cosh, where nothing seems to go right. Why should this be? Is there anything in it, or is it just a perception? I have been fascinated by these questions for a long time, through sport, pressure, leadership and performance.
My working theory is that momentum is not just a mood. It is a state shift. Pressure tightens the body and narrows perception, and performance is inhibited. When belief, clarity and energy return, the mind opens and the body moves differently.
I have seen this happen in practice, and much of my work in elite sports was helping athletes hit this momentum state. I’ll include a practical example, a half-time talk I helped a football manager shape when his side were losing and flat.
The talk was built around concealed language cues designed to move the players out of that heavy, trapped state and back to belief, energy and possibility. According to him, the talk earned them a lot of points.
It’s the clearest practical example I have of shifting a group from “under the cosh” back into the momentum state.
And finally, after the Roland Garros final on Sunday, I will be publishing the Roland Garros Mental Strength Leaderboard.
Is there something you have in mind that you’d like examined through the lens of the 7 Skills to impress™? I’d love to hear your ideas, and may well work on them for the blog.
As ever, thank you for reading. And please do jump into the comments. I would genuinely like to hear what you want more of, and which ideas you would like me to develop next.
Kind regards,
Mark
