Ranking World Cup managers by the inspirational quality of their language Most football pundits judge managers by tactics, style of play or results. My focus is on a different quality altogether. For thirty years I worked in high-pressure environments, from firearms operations to hostage and siege negotiations, before coaching senior executives and elite athletes. I…
How to turn your body’s stress response into a performance and health asset Maya checked her watch twenty minutes before the board presentation. Her fitness tracker showed her heart rate was up. She already knew she was stressed, and seeing it confirmed didn’t exactly help. She’d been preparing for three weeks and knew her material….
The Science of What Is. The Art of What Could Be. A Premier League academy striker had gone weeks without scoring. The club’s coaching staff had worked hard on the problem, going back through videos of his movement, his positioning, his technique, finding things to correct and working on them in training. They had been…
What the language of two finalists revealed about pressure and performance In the fourth set of this year’s Roland Garros final, Alexander Zverev started cramping. A TV commentator suggested it was nerves expressing themselves through the body. Zverev received medication, was handed a time violation, and the match tilted briefly towards Flavio Cobolli, who took…
What the language of tennis’s biggest stage reveals about confidence, pressure and performance. Carlos Alcaraz wasn’t at Roland Garros this year. He pulled out injured before the draw was made. But the quote that has come back to mind across these two weeks came from him, said months ago after the longest semi-final in Australian…
When winning starts to feel like survival, even the most extraordinary talent needs safe hands around him. Victor Wembanyama is twenty-two years old and has just dragged the Spurs to the NBA Finals in only his third season. He was crying on the floor after the Game 7 win over Oklahoma City, and when the…
How world-class athletes and coaches tune mental strength for victory João Fonseca Didn’t Believe He Could Win. He Just Played. In the immediate aftermath of an intense challenge, when the athlete is at their most authentic, the raw truth comes out. João Fonseca had just beaten Novak Djokovic at Roland Garros, coming back from two…
A study into the secrets of Jensen Huang’s incredible success. In 2016, Jensen Huang sat across from his board of directors and asked them to bet the company, and he meant it literally. NVIDIA would abandon its existing roadmap, redirect its engineering towards a market that did not yet properly exist, and spend billions doing…
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…
