The 7 Skills to impress™
The 7 Skills to impress™
A regular note on confidence, composure and charisma under pressure, from 7 Skills to impress™ This week My dog, Molly, died in my arms. She was 16. Six days later, my mother died from leukaemia. They were both loved right to the end, and lived long fulfilled lives, so while there is sadness, it doesn’t…
Phil Parkinson is seen as blunt and old-school, but underneath the reputation is a language craft that consistently builds belief and performance under pressure The year is 2015. Bradford City are facing Chelsea in the FA Cup, two goals down at half-time before scoring just before the break to make it 2-1. League One against…
Researchers at University College London published a paper in PNAS attempting to model happiness mathematically. Their conclusion was surprisingly compact: happiness depends partly on the gap between what we expect and what actually happens. The brain, they argued, is not simply reacting to events. It is reacting to the difference between reality and prediction. At…
One NBA playoff game. One football team in crisis. One shift in attention that turned both around. The Miami Heat were down in the third quarter of Game 2 of the 2012 Eastern Conference Playoffs. LeBron James was having a poor game by his own standards. The Knicks were ahead, the crowd was loud, and…
Why success and trust grow faster when someone is willing to go positive first There’s a podcast I keep returning to, and the subject is Peter D. Kaufman. He runs Glenair and edited Poor Charlie’s Almanack, so he’s spent a long time thinking carefully about how things actually work, not just in one field but…
And how disagreement, diversity of thought and honest debate help us find more useful answers Pick any topic. Climate policy. Whether pineapple belongs on pizza. The best way to raise children. Now watch what happens when two people who disagree try to talk about it. Within minutes, both sides are working harder to win than…
What his language reveals about staying confident, resilient and performing under pressure There is a phrase Joe Rogan uses to describe himself that has stuck in my mind. He calls himself a professional learner. Three ordinary words. But they reveal something important about how he keeps his nerve when hostility and pressure ramp up. I…
What a Breakthrough in AI Revealed About Why Confidence Can Be Consistent Meera had just finished presenting to the board. By any measure, it had gone well. She had answered questions clearly, stayed composed when pushed, and left the room with thanks from the chair. But walking back to her desk, one moment played on…
What drives David Goggins, Gordon Ramsay and Steven Bartlett: and why success may never feel like enough David Goggins has run ultramarathons on broken feet, smashed the world record for pull-ups, and trains for hours before most people are out of bed. He has been described as the toughest man alive. And yet if you…
Why You Become Your Parents Under Pressure, Even When You Swore You Wouldn’t Amara was halfway through a sentence when she stopped. She’d been telling her daughter to hurry up, which was fine, she told herself. They were late. The bag wasn’t packed. The shoes were somewhere. But it was the specific words she’d used,…