Most people wait to feel ready before they start the hard thing. Ready rarely turns up on schedule, so the hard thing gets pushed to tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, until it is simply not getting done.

In elite sport, nobody waits to feel like training. The session happens at the scheduled time regardless of mood, weather, or how anyone slept the night before. The structure carries the work on the days feeling ready does not show up, which is most days, for most people, including professional athletes.

That is the part people miss. Elite performers do not feel more up for it than everyone else. They have simply built something that does not require the feeling to function. The structure does the job that used to depend on mood.

And there’s a rather useful lesson in that for the rest of us.

If there’s something you keep meaning to get around to, here’s how to build a structure that makes actually doing it considerably easier.

Four steps to getting started (and keeping going)

1. Pick the one thing you keep postponing.

2. Fix it to a time, not a feeling.

3. Shrink the first move until it’s impossible to avoid.

4. Build the environment that makes starting the default.

Step 1: Pick the one thing you keep postponing

Every professional programme has a session players find hardest, usually the least enjoyable, most effortful part of the week. It stays on the schedule anyway, because skipping it costs more than doing it.

Most people have a version of this too, the task they know matters but keep quietly moving to tomorrow. It rarely disappears. It just sits there, taking up mental space every day it is avoided.

What to do: Name that one thing now, and be specific. Rather than a general category like get organised, identify the actual task you have been sidestepping.

Step 2: Fix it to a time, not a feeling

Training happens at a fixed hour because a fixed hour removes the negotiation. There is no debate about whether it is the right moment. The time decides, not the mood.

Most people schedule their hardest task loosely, at some point today, which quietly hands the decision to however they feel when that point comes round. On a hard day, the feeling always loses.

What to do: Give the task from Step 1 a fixed time this week, the same slot each day if it repeats. Treat that slot the way a professional treats a training time. It is not up for discussion once it is set.

Step 3: Shrink the first move until it’s impossible to avoid

Elite performers do not walk into a session thinking about the whole block ahead of them. They think about the first rep. The size of the whole thing is irrelevant to the size of the next action.

Most people stall because they are picturing the entire task, which feels large enough to justify putting it off one more day. The size of the ambition becomes the reason nothing starts.

What to do: Shrink your first move on the postponed task down to something almost embarrassingly small. Two minutes, one sentence, one message. Make it small enough that skipping it takes more effort than doing it.

Step 4: Build the environment that makes starting the default

A training ground is built so the right choice is the easy one. Kit is laid out. Equipment is ready. Nobody has to search for anything or negotiate with a messy space before the work can begin.

Most people work inside environments that quietly resist the task. Phone within reach, tabs open, the workspace set up for distraction rather than the job at hand. Every extra step between deciding and starting is a chance to talk yourself out of it.

What to do: Before your fixed slot this week, remove one obstacle from your environment in advance. Phone in another room, the right document already open, the desk already clear. Make starting the path of least resistance.

Put it into practice

You don’t need an elaborate plan. Just answer these four questions:

1. What is the one task you keep quietly postponing?

2. What fixed time will you give it this week, and what would stop you moving it?

3. What is the smallest possible first move on that task?

4. What one thing in your environment currently makes starting harder than it needs to be?

That’s your structure. Now you’ve just got to use it.

One final thought

You do not need to feel ready. You need a structure that does not ask you to.

Elite performers are not running on a constant supply of enthusiasm. They are running on a schedule that does not check how they feel before it starts. That is the whole trick.

Build the structure once. Let it carry you on the days the feeling does not show.

Want to apply the principles of high performance to your own life?

After more than twenty years working in professional sport, I’m now offering one-to-one sessions to help athletes and non-athletes apply the practical tools, structures and habits of elite performance to their own lives.

Whether you’re navigating a sporting career, finding your way beyond one, or simply looking to perform more consistently in the things that matter to you, we can work together to make those principles useful in your own circumstances.

Explore working with me.

On Friday, in my Voice Note Friday, I mentioned the article published in The Times about alleged unrest within the England Rugby camp and concerns about Steve Borthwick’s leadership. I said something I’ve believed for a long time: there’s usually no smoke without fire.

Since then, Jamie George has given a passionate defence of Borthwick, England have beaten Australia 45–22, and both Borthwick and Maro Itoje have addressed the allegations publicly.

You could be forgiven for thinking that’s the end of the matter.

I’m not entirely convinced.

Having spent more than twenty years working inside professional rugby, including dealing with journalists, players and coaches when stories like this emerged, there are a few things about the past few days that I find particularly interesting.

Inside The Dressing Room this week:

• Why I doubt a journalist at The Times would simply invent a story of this nature.

• How one or two unhappy individuals can create the impression of a divided dressing room.

• Why Jamie George’s response may be entirely genuine without necessarily telling us everything.

• What England’s victory over Australia actually tells us about the situation.

• Why the most important question may be how concerns are raised and dealt with inside elite sport.

Read more

Transcript: “I am going to try something different this week. Welcome to Voice NoteFriday. I am going to try and keep this super bite-sized. So I have already recorded this once. I went to 10 minutes. That is not what I’m trying to do here. I want seriously short, sharp. This is what I’ve been thinking.

This is what I’ve been reading. This is what I’ve been doing. And then a lesson from sport. Because ultimately, that’s the thing that I’m passionate about is allthose lessons from elite sport that you can apply to your own life. I truly believe that you can.

I am on a crusade to tell as many people as possible and help them in somany ways. Become better at performing well. Okay, so let’s get straight intoit. Now, firstly, at the start of this week, I wrote a piece on Substack aboutAustralian rugby and everyone wants a piece of the player, but who’s looking after the person? So give you a really quickrecap of that. Australian rugby and its players are in a dispute over revenue,image rights and insurance. Both sides have legitimate commercial interestshere. But it made me think about the difference between valuing an athletecommercially and looking after them as a person.

And if you have followed me or subscribed to me for a while, you know, I bangon about this a lot. I often think that there is a disconnect between all of thosethings and the person. The athlete is still a person and who actually looksafter them, who protects them and their mental health and their mental fitness. Inprofessional sports teams, you have your S&C, you have your manager, youhave your publicist, you have your person who, you know, the coaches, youhave all of these, but who at the end of the day is the person who looks

after the, you know, mental welfare of that athlete and joins all those dots andmakes sure that they’re not just firing on all cylinders per performance, but isactually, you know, doing okay. I think we’ve become exceptionally good atunderstanding an athlete’s commercial value, especially in this age of, youknow,

the opportunities are huge, but it almost makes it, it’s almost a negative.There’s so, so many opportunities, like who owns that? Who should takeresponsibility for it? And who, you know, who’s looking after the athlete? Arewe... As equally good at understanding their needs. And kind of off the backof that,

I’m going to move to the fact that I this week launched my one-to-one athletementoring. And it’s really for that because I’m deeply passionate about thefact that in an athlete’s career, um, They have their identity. There areopportunities within that sport.

But when they start to come out of that or they suddenly find that due toinjury that their career ends, like what comes next and whether they’re wellenough prepared for that. I spoke to a female, professional female rugbyplayer just this week who was telling me she doesn’t know how to write a CV.

That to me is a travesty. We should do better than that. So that’s one of thereasons I’ve launched my athlete mentoring program. I think there’s a realneed for somebody who can look beyond the athlete’s performance and helpthem navigate everything else that comes with a career in professionalsports.

And I’m also working with people outside sport because I firmly believe youdon’t have to be an athlete to benefit from the principles of highperformance. So I have launched one-to-one high performance coaching aswell. So yeah, take a look at that. Let me know. DM me. I’ve also had somereally exciting conversations this week.

I’m sorry, cough. I’m talking to some people about other potential podcasts,webinars and other collaborations that I’m really excited about. And it’s aweird one because I keep getting to this point where I think I’m going in acertain direction and suddenly other stuff happens. And I think, you know...

It’s weird and it’s kind of magical and it’s almost like the universe is saying,no, you need to be going in this direction. So I’m just following these doorsthat are opening. I’m going through them. So I’m hoping in the next fewweeks I will be able to show you what I’ve been working on.

And I’m really excited because I’m now collaborating with someone who Ithink is amazing and he’s pretty well known over here in the UK. I’m reallyexcited about that. He’s an absolute wealth of amazing, profound insights,thoughts, ideas. He’s really cool. So I’m really excited about that. Thismorning, I published a piece on Lewis Moody.

After listening to the High Performance podcast. It’s a piece that’sparticularly close to my heart. And I actually thought long and hard aboutwriting it because I wanted to make sure I approached it in the right way.Because I’m always very wary of, I guess it’s name dropping. I mean, I workedwith Lewis.

I had the great privilege of working with him. He was an absolute gent. But Ireally hate ever feeling that I’m creating content by piggybacking offsomething someone else has earned. So I think what he says deserves to beheard. I think more people should hear from him. But there were also somereally interesting observations

about life inside professional sport that really stayed with me and I thoughtabout a lot. If you read the piece, you’ll know that I listened to the podcastwhile I was driving to one of my kids’ sports fixtures and I thought a lot andvery deeply.

So I hope that I’ve struck the right chord and I’ve walked that line and thatbalance well. And moving on to rugby. Well, so England rugby. So there arelots of reports over here about the England environment and SteveBorthwick’s management, who I also worked with for many years.

There’s been a lot of talk about players not being able to speak openly. And itraises questions, I think, about the difference between demanding highstandards and creating an environment where people feel unable to challengedecisions. Equally, just because it’s in the press doesn’t make it true.

Having said that, it’s very rare that there’s no smoke without fire. So I’mavidly watching this one. I’m really interested to see where this goes. I think itwas Eddie Jones when he was head coach to England that similar things weresaid about him, which is also fascinating because obviously Steve workedunder Eddie for many years.

I’m really intrigued by this one. I am going to watch this space avidly. So that Ido keep this bite size and I’m not rambling on forever, as a little thank you forlistening to my first Voice Note Friday, I thought I’d do something thathopefully is a little thank you.

If there’s an article in the dressing room that you’d really like to read, but it’sbehind the paywall because the dressing room is my paywall. Parts. Send mea message and I think I can release certain articles, can’t I? So I think I can doit personally for you. Just DM me. We’ll see what we can do.

I do want to say thank you for listening to my rambles. Then this is the bit thatI want to make important and the regular feature is about the Friday lesson.Okay. So In professional sport, reviewing performance is essential. No weekgoes by without it. Yet in everyday life, we rarely stop to review our own week.

Like no one ever does it, right? So in professional sport, if you don’t finish amatch and immediately forget about it, you review. I can’t even. So speak, youreview what happened, what worked, what didn’t and what needs to changebefore the next one.

And everyday life, we often get to Friday, breathe a sigh of relief and go,thank God the week’s over. And then you don’t start thinking about next weekuntil Sunday. And then you get the fear and you think, oh, my God, I’ve got somuch to do.

And OK, we can cut that out because you can try this on today on Friday. Youneed to work out what went well this week, what didn’t go as well as as you’dhoped. How did you feel throughout the week? That’s really, really, reallyimportant.

Make note of that and write it down so you can look back at these reviewsand what’s one thing you could do differently next week. Don’t give yourself amillion things that you should do differently next week because it is deeplyoverwhelming. Just give yourself the most important thing. So you don’t haveto change everything next week.

Sometimes the most useful thing you can do is take what you’ve learned fromthis one and make a single adjustment. Anyway, I’ve rambled on enough.That’s it for me. Let me know what you thought about this. Is this a thing Ishould carry on doing? I’d love for you to tell me.

But otherwise, have a lovely weekend and I will be back next Friday.”

I’m rather partial to a good podcast, particularly when I’m driving to one of the seemingly endless sporting fixtures my children have on the calendar.

It’s usually a good opportunity to listen to something interesting while negotiating the English country roads.

This week’s listening was rather different.

I put on an episode of The High Performance Podcast, featuring Lewis Moody, someone I had the pleasure of working with during my years in professional rugby and for whom I have enormous respect.

And I found myself trying to negotiate those country roads through tears.

Lewis is living with motor neurone disease (MND), a progressive condition for which there is currently no cure. Much of the interview concerns his diagnosis, the extraordinarily difficult conversations he has had with his wife and children, and the uncertainty of what lies ahead.

It’s difficult listening at times, particularly when he talks about telling his children. But what also struck me was the way Lewis spoke about what he wants to do with the time and influence he has. He was very clear that he wants to make a meaningful difference to MND research, helping bring about treatments that could significantly slow the progression of the disease.

He spoke about the importance of remaining positive, making an impact and holding on to hope, whilst being entirely realistic about the challenges he faces.

I found that combination of honesty, determination and hope incredibly moving.

For those of you across the pond who might not be familiar with Lewis, he was part of England’s 2003 Rugby World Cup-winning side, a former England captain and one of the most ferociously committed players I’ve ever watched. His nickname was Mad Dog, and if you ever saw him tackle somebody, you’d understand why.

I remember being at a match when Lewis suffered a particularly nasty injury to his eye. After the game, he actually came back out onto the pitch, his eye completely black, seemingly entirely unbothered by the whole thing. The rest of us were looking at him in absolute horror, while Lewis appeared to be wondering what all the fuss was about.

I mean, who does that?!

Well, Mad Dog Moody, apparently.

But amongst everything Lewis shared in the interview, two observations about professional sport particularly caught my attention.

The first concerned the strange way professional sport can keep people young, sometimes at the expense of their personal development. The second was about his decision to stop doing after-dinner speaking, and what audiences actually wanted to hear about his career.

Both brought into focus something I’ve observed throughout my own years working in sport.

Before I go any further, though, there’s something I should probably explain.

NDA in my DNA

One of the things I’ve found quite strange about writing publicly about professional sport is the expectation that, having spent so many years working within it, I should have endless stories to tell about the people I encountered along the way.

And, of course, I do.

But by the very nature of the jobs I held, discretion wasn’t simply a professional courtesy. It was an essential part of the work.

I knew things because people trusted me to know them. I was present for conversations because it was my job to be there. And I witnessed moments that were never intended for public consumption.

Leaving professional sport didn’t suddenly make any of those things mine to share.

I suppose I’ve got NDA in my DNA.

And the truth is, I think there always will be a level of confidentiality that I impose upon myself, regardless of whether anything exists on paper.

It’s an interesting position to find yourself in when so much of today’s content culture encourages people to share everything. The people they’ve met, the conversations they’ve had, the things they’ve witnessed. Proximity to someone well-known can become a form of social currency, and a private experience can become a public story remarkably quickly.

But I’ve never been particularly comfortable with that.

The fact that we have a story to tell doesn’t necessarily mean it’s ours to tell.

And knowing somebody, or having worked alongside them, shouldn’t automatically become an opportunity to establish our own credibility.

Which is why I thought carefully about writing this article.

Lewis has chosen to speak publicly and openly about his experiences, and there’s an enormous difference between sharing somebody else’s private story and reflecting on something they’ve deliberately put into the world.

I’m interested in the latter.

Because what he said about professional sport raised some questions that go far beyond rugby.

The extraordinary world of professional sport

Professional sport is a peculiar environment in which to spend your adult life.

From a relatively young age, athletes enter a world built around helping them perform. Their days are structured, their training is planned, their physical condition is monitored, their meals may be prepared, their travel organised and their professional development managed by an entire collection of people whose jobs exist to help them succeed.

At the highest levels, almost every aspect of an athlete’s working life has been considered by somebody else.

And there are very good reasons for that. The demands of elite performance are extraordinary, and the purpose of the environment is to give athletes the best possible chance of meeting them.

I’ve watched players operate under pressures that most people will never experience. They were expected to make decisions in fractions of a second, manage intense scrutiny, cope with physical pain, deal with selection and rejection, and accept responsibility when things went wrong in front of thousands, sometimes millions, of people.

Nobody could reasonably accuse them of lacking responsibility.

But the responsibility was often concentrated in one very specific area of their lives.

Outside the training ground, the dressing room and the stadium, a great deal was being taken care of for them.

And that creates an interesting contradiction.

You can become exceptionally capable in one environment without necessarily developing the same independence outside it.

Lewis put it rather neatly when he suggested that professional sport has a way of keeping people in a childlike state. Wonderful in some respects, but potentially limiting in others.

I think he has a point.

Because one of the great contradictions of professional sport is that we ask athletes to take extraordinary responsibility for their performance while simultaneously removing responsibility for so many other aspects of their lives.

When the structure disappears

One of the things I’ve always found interesting about professional athletes is how quickly the world around them can change.

For years, everything has a purpose. There is a match at the weekend, a selection to earn, a competition to prepare for, an injury to recover from or a season to complete. Even the difficult periods have a recognisable structure.

Then, one day, that structure disappears.

Sometimes retirement is planned. Sometimes it arrives through injury, deselection or a decision made by somebody else. And sometimes it happens long before the athlete feels ready.

Lewis spoke openly about how difficult he found the end of his playing career. Having spent so much of his life at Leicester, he was told his contract would not be renewed. There was the fallout from the 2011 Rugby World Cup, and then the shoulder injury at Bath that ultimately brought his career to an end.

What struck me was his admission that it took him years to reconcile the way it had all finished.

He had dedicated his life to something, and then found himself having to work out what came next without the environment that had previously given so much of his life its direction.

I think we sometimes underestimate the scale of that adjustment.

We talk about athletes retiring as though they’re simply changing jobs. But for someone who has spent most of their adult life in professional sport, retirement can mean losing far more than an occupation.

It can mean losing the routines that shaped their days, the people they saw every morning, the shared purpose of belonging to a team, the immediate feedback that told them whether they were succeeding, and the identity that had followed them since childhood.

For some, there is also the unfamiliar experience of having to decide what they actually want to do.

Not what the next fixture requires. Not what the coach expects. Not what their contract demands.

What they want.

And that isn’t necessarily an easy question to answer when you’ve spent years being exceptionally good at answering a different one.

I know how consuming the world of professional rugby can become. Working at a club, day after day, is relentless in ways that are difficult to explain to people outside it. There’s always another match, another problem, another deadline, another season. The calendar never really stops, and neither does the expectation that you’ll be ready for whatever comes next.

I eventually reached a point where I needed to do something different. Not because I’d stopped loving rugby, but because I wanted to discover what else I could do beyond it. And even from my position, without the identity and public recognition that comes with being a player, stepping away from that familiar world required an adjustment.

So when Lewis talked about the strange way sport can keep you in a particular state of development, I understood something of the environment he was describing, even though our experiences of it were very different.

The stories we want to hear

There was another part of Lewis’s interview that particularly interested me.

He spoke about his decision to stop doing after-dinner speaking. He had spent time on the circuit following his retirement, telling stories about his playing days, but eventually became uncomfortable with what audiences wanted to hear.

The silly stories. The incidents. The things that happened away from the pitch.

He felt that repeatedly reducing his career to those moments was beginning to make a mockery of the professionalism with which he had approached it.

And I found myself thinking about what a strange contradiction that is.

One of the peculiar things about working in professional sport is how differently the people inside it experience the world from those watching it.

Supporters remember the matches, the victories, the extraordinary moments and the personalities. Those of us working behind the scenes remember plenty of those things too, of course. But we also remember the ordinary Tuesdays. The routines. The repetition. The enormous amount of work that nobody would ever consider particularly interesting.

And yet, without those Tuesdays, there would be very few extraordinary Saturdays.

We spend years watching extraordinary athletes perform extraordinary things, and then, when we finally have an opportunity to hear from them, we often want to know about the least extraordinary parts of their lives.

We want the drinking stories, the dressing-room antics, the practical jokes and the things that went wrong on tour.

What we don’t particularly want to hear about is the Tuesday morning in February when it was freezing cold, somebody was carrying an injury, nobody particularly wanted to be there, and they still had another two hours of training ahead of them.

Or the hundreds of hours spent practising the same skill. The repetitive drills. The conditioning sessions. The recovery. The preparation. The endless cycle of doing something again because it wasn’t quite good enough the first time.

And then doing it again when it was.

Those are the things most of us never see. Not because they’re secret, but because they’re not particularly entertaining.

Yet those are precisely the things that make someone like Lewis extraordinary.

Not the ability to produce one remarkable performance, but the willingness to do the unremarkable work required to produce remarkable performances consistently.

We admire exceptional performance, but we’re often less interested in the behaviours that produce it.

And I wonder whether that’s why we so often misunderstand what high performance actually looks like.

We associate it with intensity, excitement, big moments and extraordinary acts of determination. But so much of it is monotonous. It is repetitive, uncomfortable and, at times, thoroughly unglamorous.

The extraordinary thing about an elite athlete isn’t simply what they can do when thousands of people are watching.

It’s what they’re prepared to keep doing when nobody is.

Which makes the after-dinner speaking circuit rather interesting. We invite people to tell us about their extraordinary careers, then encourage them to talk about almost everything except the things that made those careers extraordinary.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with enjoying a funny story. But I can understand why Lewis eventually felt uncomfortable with the expectation that his professional life should be remembered primarily for its entertainment value.

And perhaps there’s another consequence of that expectation.

If we only ever ask athletes to revisit the characters they were in the dressing room, do we make it harder for them to become somebody different when they leave it?

Growing older isn’t necessarily growing up

I keep coming back to Lewis’s observation about sport keeping people in a childlike state.

Because I think it captures something that is easy to miss when we talk about high performance.

We tend to assume that excellence in one area of life indicates maturity in others. We see someone who has achieved extraordinary things, handled enormous pressure and demonstrated remarkable discipline, and assume those qualities must translate naturally into every other part of their life.

But why would they?

The skills required to succeed in a highly structured environment are not necessarily the same skills required to build a fulfilling life outside it.

And this isn’t unique to sport.

It happens in organisations where people become so dependent on established processes that they struggle when those processes disappear. It happens to people who spend decades climbing a career ladder without stopping to consider whether they still want to reach the top. It happens to founders whose businesses become so closely connected to their identities that they cannot imagine who they would be without them.

We become very good at operating within the environments we’ve built around ourselves.

Sometimes so good that we stop noticing how much those environments are making decisions for us.

And perhaps that’s the uncomfortable question Lewis’s observation raises.

Are we developing people, or are we simply developing their ability to perform within a particular system?

Because those are not necessarily the same thing.

What happens to the person underneath?

Professional sport gives people purpose, belonging, structure and opportunities that most of us will never experience. But it can also become so all-encompassing that there is very little space to discover who you might be outside it.

And perhaps that’s the part we don’t talk about enough.

We spend an extraordinary amount of time helping people become better at what they do. We build environments around their performance, remove distractions, create routines and give them every possible advantage.

But how much attention do we give to helping them become people who can thrive when those environments are no longer there?

How often do we encourage independence alongside excellence? How much space do we create for people to develop interests, relationships and ambitions that have nothing to do with the role they’re currently performing?

And how well do we prepare them for the possibility that the thing they’ve spent their lives working towards might one day be taken away, or simply stop being what they want?

These aren’t questions that should suddenly become important at the end of someone’s career.

They matter while that career is still happening.

And I don’t think the answer is to make professional sport less supportive, or to suggest that athletes should somehow manage everything themselves. The support is there for a reason, and much of it is essential.

But perhaps we need to think more carefully about the difference between supporting someone and making them dependent on the support.

Between helping someone perform and helping someone develop.

Between preparing someone for their next match and preparing them for the rest of their life.

The lesson beyond sport

Listening to Lewis, I was reminded that growing older and growing as a person are not necessarily the same thing. Nor are achievement and fulfilment.

You can spend years becoming exceptional at something without ever stopping to consider whether the life you’re building around it is one you have consciously chosen.

And that’s not just a lesson for athletes.

Most of us have something that defines us. A career, a business, a title, a reputation, a role we’ve become very good at playing. Sometimes we’re so busy meeting the expectations that come with it that we forget we’re allowed to decide whether those expectations still belong to us.

One of the things that struck me most about Lewis’s conversation was his willingness to examine those expectations.

To acknowledge that the end of his rugby career had been difficult. To recognise that he didn’t want to keep entertaining people with stories that no longer represented how he wished to remember his professional life. To admit that it had taken time to establish what mattered to him beyond playing.

And to speak about those experiences without pretending he had always known the answers.

There is something important in that.

We often talk about high performance as though it’s a process of continually adding things. More discipline, more preparation, more resilience, more achievement.

But perhaps part of growing as a person is learning what we no longer need to carry.

The expectations that belonged to somebody else. The identity that once served us but no longer does. The belief that because we’ve spent years becoming something, we must spend the rest of our lives being it.

What I took from Lewis wasn’t simply the importance of finding purpose after sport. It was the importance of recognising that our purpose is allowed to change, that our achievements don’t have to dictate our identity, and that we can be immensely proud of something without allowing it to determine the rest of our lives.

When I think about the people I worked alongside in rugby, I don’t simply remember what they achieved. I remember the people they were when there were no cameras, no crowds and no particular reason for anybody outside the building to be interested.

Perhaps that’s why Lewis’s observations stayed with me. They were a reminder that professional sport can give people an extraordinary life, but that the person living it matters just as much as the performances we ask them to produce.

Perhaps the real measure of a high-performing environment isn’t just what it enables people to achieve while they’re in it, but who it equips them to become when they leave.

And perhaps the real measure of our own success is whether, when the roles and expectations fall away, we’ve built a life that still feels like ours.

There is so much more to Lewis’s conversation with and Damian Hughes than the aspects of professional sport I’ve explored here. His honesty about living with MND, his family and the challenges they face deserves to be heard in full.

Lewis also speaks about his determination to make a difference to MND research and his hope that treatments will become available that can significantly slow the disease’s progression. I hope you’ll take the time to listen to his interview and, if you can, learn more about the work being done to support people living with MND.

Listen to Lewis Moody on The High Performance Podcast or buy Lewis Moody’s new book Fronting Up here

I’ve been having some really interesting conversations recently.

If you’ve been reading my articles over the last few weeks, you’ll know I’ve become rather preoccupied with the gaps that exist around professional athletes.

The young footballer released from an academy with no idea what to do next. The professional athlete surrounded by coaches, agents, medical teams and support staff, but with nobody necessarily looking at the bigger picture. The athlete approaching retirement who has spent so long being defined by their sport that they haven’t really considered who they might be without it.

And I keep finding myself asking the same questions.

Why are we waiting until somebody retires before helping them build a professional network?

Why are we leaving athletes to work out their personal brand, commercial opportunities or career options on their own?

Why can somebody be surrounded by an extraordinary number of people, all responsible for different parts of their career, and still have gaps that nobody seems to notice?

And, perhaps most importantly, why does so much support seem to arrive after somebody needs it?

Now, I’m not suggesting there aren’t some brilliant people doing brilliant things in sport. There absolutely are. I’ve worked alongside plenty of them.

But the more conversations I’ve had, the more I’ve started to wonder whether we’re sometimes making this unnecessarily complicated.

Because quite a lot of these gaps are actually rather practical.

Someone needs an introduction. Someone needs help understanding how to present themselves professionally. Someone needs to think about what happens beyond their sporting career. Someone needs an independent perspective, a bit of structure or simply somebody to sit down with them and work out what they’re missing.

And then I had a bit of a moment.

Hang on. I can do that.

In fact, I’ve been doing versions of it for more than twenty years.

I’ve spent most of my professional life inside elite sport, working with athletes, coaches, executives and organisations where the expectations are enormous and the pressure is constant.

A huge part of that work involved spotting problems, identifying what wasn’t working, bringing the right people together and finding practical ways forward.

Sometimes that meant dealing with a crisis. Sometimes it meant challenging a decision. Sometimes it meant noticing something that everybody else had overlooked.

And sometimes it meant asking a question that nobody else had thought to ask.

What’s missing here?

The more I thought about it, the more I realised this applies just as much outside professional sport.

I see it with business owners, leaders and ambitious professionals too. People who are capable, experienced and often very successful, but who are so busy dealing with everything in front of them that they don’t necessarily have the time or space to work out what they need.

Why is this taking so much effort? Why do I keep running into the same problem? Why am I doing something this way when there might be a better one?

Often, the answer isn’t another qualification, another motivational speech or somebody telling them to work harder.

It’s identifying the gap and doing something about it.

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So, I’ve decided to do exactly that.

I’m opening up two ways to work with me directly.

1:1 Athlete Mentoring

For athletes who want somebody independent in their corner who understands professional sport but can also see beyond it.

We can work on professional identity, career development, personal branding, commercial opportunities, building connections and preparing for life beyond sport. Or we can simply work out what support might be missing and how to put it in place.

I’m not a technical coach, psychologist or agent. I’m not trying to replace any of those people.

I’m interested in the spaces between them.

1:1 Coaching for High Performers

For ambitious professionals, business owners and leaders who want to work more effectively, make better decisions and create more structure around what they’re trying to achieve.

We look at what’s working, what’s getting in the way and what needs to change.

Not endless conversations about motivation or confidence. Practical thinking, honest conversations and useful action.

Both are built around the same principle.

Spot the gaps. Build what’s missing.

I don’t think everyone needs a coach or mentor. And I certainly don’t think everybody needs another person telling them how to live their life.

But I do think there’s enormous value in having somebody who can stand outside your immediate environment, see things differently, challenge your thinking and help you work out what to do next.

Even the highest performers need someone to think things through with. Especially when everybody else comes to them for the answers.

And perhaps that’s the thing I’ve realised after all these years.

Sometimes the most useful thing you can offer somebody isn’t another complicated solution.

It’s noticing what they need in the first place.

• Why a breakdown in negotiations between Rugby Australia and its players has brought the value of professional athletes into sharp focus.

• What the dispute over pay, image rights and insurance tells us about the competing interests within professional sport.

• A moment from my time at Bath Rugby when everybody seemed concerned about managing a player’s story, but I was more concerned about the player himself.

• Why representing an athlete, employing an athlete and genuinely looking after an athlete are three very different responsibilities.

There’s something rather revealing about a professional rugby player’s image appearing on a billboard.

To the supporter, it’s the face of somebody they admire. To the sponsor, it’s an association worth paying for. To the club or governing body, it’s a commercial asset that helps generate revenue, sell tickets and attract investment.

And to the player?

Well, it’s their face.

I’ve spent more than twenty years working inside professional rugby, and one of the things I’ve become increasingly interested in is the number of people who have a professional interest in an athlete.

Clubs, coaches, agents, sponsors, governing bodies, broadcasters, commercial departments and, of course, supporters.

All of them have a stake in what that athlete does, how they perform and what they represent.

But those interests aren’t always the same as the interests of the individual.

And this week, Australian rugby has provided a rather interesting example.

What happened?

Rugby Australia and the Rugby Union Players’ Association have failed to agree a new collective bargaining agreement after the previous deal expired on Saturday, 31 October.

The negotiations have been going on for months, with disagreements over player payments, the distribution of revenue and the conditions under which professional rugby players work.

There is a considerable amount at stake.

Australia is preparing to host the 2027 Rugby World Cup, an event expected to generate substantial revenue for the game.

The players’ association has challenged Rugby Australia’s proposal not to share the reported A$100 million hosting fee directly with players. Rugby Australia argues that the money is needed to support the long-term future of the game, including community rugby, development pathways and high-performance programmes.

There are disagreements over insurance arrangements, too, including career-ending injury cover and private health insurance premiums.

But perhaps the most interesting development came on Sunday, when the players’ association announced its intention to commence legal proceedings concerning the commercial use of players’ rights now that the previous agreement has expired.

In other words, the argument is no longer simply about how much players should be paid.

It is also about the terms under which Rugby Australia can commercially use players’ names, images and associated rights now that the collective agreement has expired.

The Wallabies, meanwhile, are in the UK preparing for their autumn fixtures.

Professional rugby carries on.

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• Why the allegation involving Tadhg Furlong and Gavin Coombes raises difficult questions about reputation, fairness and the court of public opinion.

• What happens behind the scenes when a serious allegation becomes public, but the facts are still being established.

• Why the comments made by both head coaches reveal the difficult balance between loyalty and respecting a disciplinary process.

• Who looks after the players at the centre of a controversy, and why supporting someone isn’t the same as deciding they’re right.

There’s a particularly uncomfortable moment in professional sport when an allegation becomes public, but nobody yet knows exactly what happened.

Journalists want answers. Supporters have opinions. Social media has found the footage, slowed it down and reached a verdict.

Meanwhile, the people responsible for establishing the facts are still doing their jobs.

Welcome to another week in professional rugby.

What happened?

During Saturday’s Leinster–Munster match at the Aviva Stadium, Gavin Coombes complained to referee Andrew Brace that he’d been grabbed in the groin area.

The referee consulted the TMO, but the footage available during the match didn’t substantiate the allegation.

Tadhg Furlong has since been formally cited over the incident, which occurred in the 37th minute. The citing falls under Law 9.27, which prohibits conduct contrary to the spirit of good sportsmanship, including grabbing, twisting or squeezing an opponent’s genitals.

The disciplinary process is now being arranged.

If found guilty, Furlong could face a significant suspension, potentially affecting his involvement in Ireland’s upcoming Nations Championship fixtures.

There is precedent. In October 2025, South African forward Jan-Hendrik Wessels received a substantial ban following a similar allegation during a URC match.

A citing, however, is not a finding of guilt.

And that’s where things get interesting.

Two players. Two reputations.

If a player believes something unacceptable has happened to him on a rugby pitch, he should be able to raise it without fear of ridicule or dismissal.

Equally, the player accused deserves a fair hearing before anybody decides what happened.

These two principles aren’t contradictory.

Yet we’ve become remarkably good at choosing sides before we’ve established the facts.

And in professional sport, the consequences of that can be enormous.

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• Why Rassie Erasmus’s decision to use all eight replacements against Australia raised questions about the relationship between tactical ambition, medical decisions and the laws of the game.

• The moment I heard a coach call for a visibly unsteady player to remain on the pitch after a head knock, and why I can still remember it years later.

• What happens when coaches, doctors and players have different views about whether an athlete should continue competing.

• The curious contradiction I experienced in rugby communications, where coaches sometimes withheld injury information while medical staff could be considerably more forthcoming.

• The question I never thought to ask while working in professional sport: why do we assume we’re entitled to know somebody else’s medical information?

Rassie Erasmus has never been particularly interested in doing things the conventional way. His willingness to challenge rugby’s established thinking has helped make South Africa one of the most formidable teams in the world, and his approach to substitutions has become almost as recognisable as the Springboks themselves. A decision during South Africa’s 42–38 defeat to Australia in Perth on 27 September, however, brought an uncomfortable question back into focus.

Erasmus sent all eight of his replacements onto the pitch in the 47th minute. It was an extraordinary tactical gamble, designed to change the momentum of a match that was slipping away from South Africa. Erasmus subsequently explained that the decision had been a reaction to the situation rather than something planned before the match. The gamble didn’t produce the result he wanted, and using every available replacement so early created complications when an injury became an issue later in the match.

What happened with Eben Etzebeth was particularly revealing. The Springboks lock left the field in the 64th minute after suffering a blow to the neck, returning approximately three minutes later. Questions then arose over whether he had left for a head injury assessment or for another medical reason. With South Africa’s replacements already exhausted, that distinction mattered because the laws governing injury replacements treat those circumstances differently.

Erasmus subsequently explained that he had understood Etzebeth was undergoing a head injury assessment, but that the player’s departure had been recorded differently. He denied suggestions that South Africa had deliberately manipulated the replacement rules, and pointed to a breakdown in communication between medical personnel and match officials.

There were calls for the incident to be investigated, although I haven’t seen a confirmed ruling establishing that anyone acted improperly. I wasn’t there, and I don’t know what conversations took place between the medical team, coaching staff and match officials. It would be wrong to suggest that Erasmus knowingly overruled medical advice or deliberately exploited the rules when neither allegation has been established.

What the episode does illustrate, though, is how quickly a tactical decision can create a much more complicated situation when a player’s physical condition becomes part of the equation. The coach has made a decision designed to win the match. The medical team has responsibilities that extend beyond the scoreboard. The player wants to compete, and the laws of the game determine which options remain available.

When those priorities begin to collide, who actually gets to say no?

It’s a question that takes me back to something I witnessed during my own time in professional rugby. I can still remember a player staggering around the pitch after taking a blow to the head. He was visibly unsteady, struggling to keep his balance, and there was absolutely no mistaking that something was wrong. And I can remember hearing a coach calling for him to stay on.

It was many years ago, but the memory is remarkably clear. I couldn’t tell you what the score was that day or even why the match was particularly important. What I remember is watching a player who plainly needed medical attention and hearing somebody whose job was to win a rugby match insisting that he should continue playing.

During my time in professional rugby, I witnessed plenty of things that would make people outside the sport uncomfortable. Some were simply the realities of a physically demanding profession. Others were the result of a culture in which extraordinary toughness was expected, pain was often regarded as something to overcome, and being available for selection could become almost as important as being fit to play.

Broken fingers were routinely dealt with on the pitch. Players would have them manipulated back into position and, depending on the circumstances and medical assessment, carry on. I saw players continue through injuries that would have sent most of us straight to A&E, and I watched medical teams work in environments where their decisions could have an immediate and very public impact on the outcome of a match. The incident involving the player who had suffered a head knock stands apart in my memory, though, because it exposed something that sits at the heart of professional sport.

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Today, the Six Nations joined Substack.

To some people, that might simply be another sporting organisation turning up on a new platform, but for me it brings back rather a lot of memories.

I can remember when it was still the Five Nations!

Winter afternoons watching rugby with my dad. England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland and France. With Welsh blood running through our family, Dad and I had a particular affection for both England and Wales, which made certain fixtures rather more complicated than others.

Rugby was just always there, part of growing up and part of family life.

Then, as I got older, came Twickenham (or Twickers, as rugby folk like to call it). From my early teens, Dad took my sister and me to watch England play. He was MD of a company that sponsored a local rugby team, so we had good seats, and the ritual rarely changed: a Mexican for lunch first, then swept up in the crowds and dragged down the road to the stadium. By the time I was at university, there was usually an invitation to have “a drink with your old dad” as well, which more often than not ended with me three sheets to the wind on my way back to the East End.

It was at Twickenham, watching England play, that I decided I wanted to work in sport.

I was standing high up in the stands when England scored a try and the whole place went wild. Dad put his arms round my shoulders, I put mine round his waist, and we jumped up and down together in utter joy. And a little voice in my head said, “I want to do this!”

I didn’t know what that meant, exactly. I didn’t want to be a rugby player and I certainly didn’t have a career plan. I just knew I wanted the keys to that moment, and to be part of whatever it was that made tens of thousands of people feel the way they did inside that stadium. Even the opposition fans around us gave us a sly smirk and a clap. (I think we won that match. I honestly can’t be sure, because the score was never the memorable part.)

Somehow, that little ambition turned into twenty years working behind the scenes in sport, much of it in professional rugby.

Fast forward to 2020, and the Six Nations came back into my life in a rather different capacity.

A PR agency had won the Guinness account, which included work around the men’s Six Nations, and needed someone who knew the rugby world: someone who understood the landscape, knew the people and could introduce them to the right individuals. They asked me, and so began one of my favourite contracts.

Afternoons and evenings of networking on what can only be described as a fairly royal scale. Conversations, introductions, connecting people, opening doors and making things happen. I was essentially a professional networker. I wish that was actually a job, because I would love that!

The highlight was a big black tie dinner for the rugby journalists, commentators and media managers. I hadn’t seen many of them for years and I was more nervous than I’d like to admit, yet everyone remembered me, looked after me and let me bother them at their tables to introduce my client. We even ended up on a table right by the awards podium. A few weeks later, the client asked me to track down some fans who had been particularly supportive of Scotland during the World Cup, and a couple of phone calls through my contacts later, I had a new friend at Scottish Rugby.

I loved it. Partly because I have always enjoyed bringing people together, and partly because it was a wonderful reminder of how much of sport happens away from the pitch: the relationships you build, the trust you earn and the people who remember you years later.

Then covid hit. We went into lockdown, the championship was disrupted and my services were suddenly no longer needed. I was gutted. The agency were a great bunch and I’d loved every minute of working with them.

Somewhere in the middle of it all, I occasionally thought about that little girl watching the Five Nations with her dad.

I wonder what she’d have made of it!

So yes, I’m rather pleased to see the Six Nations join us here on Substack today. Sport is full of stories that deserve to be told: the ones we see on the pitch, certainly, but also the thousands that unfold around it. The people, the relationships, the traditions and the extraordinary memories that stay with us long after we’ve forgotten the score. (I clearly have, in at least one case.)

The Six Nations has been part of my life as a supporter, a daughter and someone lucky enough to work in rugby. And now, rather wonderfully, we’re sharing a little corner of the internet too.

Welcome to Substack, Six Nations. I’m delighted you’re here. 🏉

And to everyone else, I’d love to know: what’s your earliest Five or Six Nations memory?

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From Masterclass shown live on October 12th.

Confidence is a feeling. Capability is evidence. Self-belief is trust.

This masterclass replay is about learning to tell the difference, and using some of the principles I’ve taken from more than 20 years inside high performance environments to stop self-doubt making decisions for you.

As promised, you can also complete The Self-Belief Reset here:

[COMPLETE THE SELF-BELIEF RESET]

It’s designed to help you separate the thought from the data, look at the evidence you actually have, and create a performance reframe that gives you something useful to act on.

And if this has made you think differently about your own performance, The Performance System is where I take this work much further.

[EXPLORE THE PERFORMANCE SYSTEM]

Kate

• Why Jamie George’s description of a 21-year-old professional rugby player who doesn’t know right from wrong should concern us all.

• The extraordinary double standard in professional sport, where players are expected to demonstrate exceptional discipline on the pitch but are sometimes excused for dangerous behaviour away from it.

• The story of Jacob Dunne, whose single punch at 19 killed another man, and why his experience should be compulsory reading for anyone responsible for young athletes.

• What genuine duty of care looks like when a player gets something seriously wrong, and why protecting somebody is very different from excusing them.

• The uncomfortable question facing professional sport: are we developing responsible young adults, or simply exceptionally talented athletes?

In June, I wrote about a young Saracens rugby player whose name had become tangled up in a nightclub incident involving England cricketers Ben Stokes and Gus Atkinson.

At the time, the investigations were ongoing, and much of the attention was focused on Stokes, Atkinson and the fallout for England cricket. I wrote about the wider consequences of the incident, particularly how easily young players can find themselves caught up in stories dominated by much bigger names.

What emerged afterwards was far more serious. Totoa Auvaa had reportedly thrown a punch aimed at Atkinson, missed him and struck a member of the England and Wales Cricket Board’s security staff, who required stitches. The security guard chose not to involve the police, and Saracens subsequently concluded an independent review without imposing formal disciplinary sanctions.

Four months later, I’m writing about the same young rugby player again, and this time my sympathy is considerably harder to find.

Auvaa, 21, a Samoan forward in Saracens' senior academy who made his competitive first-team debut against Northampton Saints last month, has been released by the club following another incident, this time in St Albans. Police are investigating an allegation that a man in his twenties was punched in the face during an altercation in the early hours of Sunday morning.

Saracens have confirmed that Auvaa has left with immediate effect, saying his conduct fell short of the standards expected of everyone representing the club, on and off the pitch.

There are still details we do not know about the latest incident, and those matter. I wasn’t there, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

What this sequence of events has done is bring me back to something said about Auvaa in June, which I find more troubling now than I did at the time.

His teammate, England international Jamie George, was asked about the young player after the nightclub altercation. George described him as a “good kid” who had made a mistake. He talked about how hard it must have been to leave Samoa and find himself in London, the importance of surrounding him with role models, and the club’s responsibility to support him. All reasonable sentiments, on the face of it.

Then he said this:

“He doesn’t know right from wrong at the minute.”

I have read that sentence several times and I still can’t get past it. If a professional rugby player genuinely doesn’t know right from wrong at 21, we have a much bigger problem than a young man having a bad night.

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“Everyone made me believe I was going to be a footballer.”

That’s what someone who spent his childhood inside elite football told me recently. By 14 he was training several times a week, playing matches, missing things with his friends, and had been scouted by professional clubs. Football wasn’t simply something he loved doing. It was what he believed he was going to be.

Then he was released. The training stopped, the matches stopped, and so did the routine that had shaped his life. He told me his love for football simply died.

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the question his story raises. When somebody is surrounded by coaches, staff and support, and still falls through the gaps, whose job is it to notice?

I don’t think the answer is more support. Elite sport already has a lot of it. What I keep coming back to is whether that support is connected.

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We organise performance around functions

Think about an elite athlete. Depending on the sport and the level, they might have coaches, analysts, doctors, physios, psychologists, nutritionists, strength and conditioning staff, agents, player care, governing bodies, unions and commercial partners around them. Each of them brings expertise, and many of them are exceptionally good at what they do. Organisationally, that makes complete sense.

The athlete in the middle of it doesn’t experience their life in departments, though. Their injury affects their confidence. Their contract affects how secure they feel. Their relationship with their coach affects their performance, their performance affects their identity, and their home life comes to training with them every day.

We separate those things because organisations need structure. The person experiences all of them at once.

Stephen Erikson, who has spent years around the NBA, describes that network as the Athlete Matrix. We’ve become very good at building expertise around people. I’m not sure we’re as good at building the connections between it.

Adding expertise also adds gaps

As high-performance environments get more sophisticated, we add expertise. We spot a need and bring in someone who understands it better, whether that’s psychology, nutrition, data, welfare or player care. That’s genuine progress, and I’d never argue against it.

Every new specialism also creates a new boundary. Another handover, another place information has to travel, and another chance for everyone to be doing exactly what they’re supposed to be doing while something important happens in the space between them.

A network of brilliant people is not necessarily a brilliant system.

So I’ve been trying to work out where you would actually start, and I’ve come up with four places.

1. Design around the person, not the organisational chart

Organisations naturally ask who owns performance, wellbeing, development, medical and people. Those are necessary questions, and somebody has to answer them.

The more revealing exercise is to start from the other end. Take one person and walk through what this environment feels like from where they stand.

Where are the handovers, and where does information stop? Who picks up the thing that doesn’t fit into anybody’s remit, or never shows up on a dashboard?

You learn far more about a system from what happens between its parts than from what each part says it’s responsible for.

Try this: Pick one person in your team and trace an ordinary week from where they stand. Count the handovers, and mark every point where information about them could stop.

2. Someone needs to see the whole

This doesn’t have to mean creating another job. It means being able to answer “whose job is it to notice?” with a name.

Who is close enough to recognise that somebody whose numbers still look good is behaving differently? Who sees that the athlete coming back from injury has been physically cleared but no longer trusts their body, or that the player approaching the end of a contract is dealing with far more than their next employment decision?

Having support available matters. But availability relies on the person knowing what they need, knowing where to go and being willing to ask.

Good systems need to be capable of noticing first.

Try this: Think of someone whose results look fine at the moment. Ask yourself who, by name, would notice if something changed for them, and whether that person knows it’s their job.

3. Design for the moments when performance changes

High-performance systems are very good at progression. Identify talent, develop it, improve it, move it forward.

Some of the most important moments, though, come when that trajectory breaks: injury, deselection, loss of form, release, retirement, a contract that isn’t renewed.

That’s where the footballer’s story sits. Releasing players is part of academy football. Selection is necessary, deselection is necessary, and high performance can’t exist without judgement.

What that conversation made me see is that performance systems make the decisions, and people live with the consequences.

Making the right performance decision and handling what it does to the person on the receiving end are two different responsibilities, and a good system needs to be capable of both.

So I’d like to see development systems judged not only on how well they identify people and move the best ones upwards, but on what happens to the people the pathway moves on without.

How do they leave, and do they understand why? Who stays in contact, and what have we helped them build beyond their ability to perform?

Those moments are part of the performance system, and they deserve to be designed as carefully as the rest of it.

Try this: Look at the last time someone left, was moved on or missed out. Ask what they were told, who stayed in contact afterwards, and what they took with them.

4. Measure the experience, not just the provision

This is the part I find most interesting.

Organisations can quite reasonably point to what they provide: player care, psychological support, development programmes, wellbeing provision, transition support, an open door policy.

All of that can be true, and the person at the centre can still feel completely unsupported.

The more useful question is whether they experienced it as support.

Did they know where to go, and did the different parts of the system connect? Did somebody notice before they had to ask, and did they understand the decision made about them?

And when they left, did they believe their performance had been rejected at a particular moment, or that they had?

Those are very different experiences. Particularly when the person is 14.

Try this: Ask a few people what support they think is available to them, and compare their answers with what you believe you provide. The difference between the two lists is where to start.

Perhaps I’ve been niching down in the wrong direction

There’s a slightly personal reason all of this has been on my mind.

I’ve spent months trying to become more precise about what I do. High performance, leadership, self belief, sport, business, Lessons from the Touchline. Find the niche, define the offer, make it easy for people to put you in the right box.

It’s sensible advice.

The trouble is that the conversations I’ve found most interesting recently refuse to stay in one box. I’ve found myself talking about athlete welfare, sports technology, women’s sport, talent development, transition, identity, leadership and performance, and for a while I worried that meant I was going in too many directions.

I’m beginning to think I had it backwards.

The subject isn’t my niche. The lens is.

Twenty years inside professional sport has given me a particular way of looking at performance.

I’m interested in where performance, people and systems meet, and increasingly in what happens when they don’t meet quite as neatly as somebody intended: the handovers, the assumptions, the good idea that doesn’t work in the environment it was designed for, the person everyone is supporting but nobody can see in full.

Experience doesn’t only make you an expert in what you’ve already done. Eventually it gives you enough data to recognise patterns in things you haven’t done yet.

So, what does better look like?

I don’t think there’s a neat answer, and I’m wary of anyone who claims there is.

The principle I keep coming back to is simple: don’t just add more support, connect what already exists.

In practice, that means the four things above.

• Design from the person outwards, rather than the organisational chart inwards.

• Make sure somebody can see the whole, not just their part.

• Design for the moments when performance goes off track, not only the ones when it goes to plan.

• Judge support by what the person in the middle experiences, not by what the organisation provides.

None of this is unique to sport. Swap the athlete for someone who has just missed out on the promotion they spent ten years working towards, and almost all of it still applies.

We’ve spent years learning how to build environments that produce exceptional performance. The more interesting question now is whether we can make them just as good at seeing the people producing it.

High performance shouldn’t force a choice between the performance and the person.

The best systems should be capable of seeing both.

Which of the four would make the biggest difference where you work? Leave a comment, I’d love to hear.

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• Why I want to go back to the boy I introduced you to last week

• The one sentence from our conversation that I think deserves much more attention

• What happens when the adults around a talented child start believing the dream too

• Why having no Plan B looks rather different when you’re barely old enough to understand why you need one

• And what we owe children when the dream ends before they’ve worked out who else they might be

  ---

Last week, I told you about a former academy footballer I’d been speaking to. He was released at 14. Within roughly a year, his love for football had gone, and so had the training, matches and structure that had filled so much of his life. He started spending more time on the streets, and his life went in a very different direction.

There was one line in our conversation I want to come back to, because there is a much bigger question inside it.

“Everyone made me believe I’m going to be a footballer.”

He said it without any arrogance, as a plain description of his childhood.

He had been the best footballer in his school and his borough, and he’d been scouted by major clubs. Football filled most of his week: training three or four times, matches, and missing things with his friends because football came first. Adults repeatedly told him how talented he was. By the time he was 14, football was no longer simply something he did but where he believed his life was going.

The word that matters most in that sentence is everyone, because children don’t construct these ideas about themselves entirely on their own. Parents, coaches, scouts, teachers and academies all do some of that construction too. They are the adults who spot the talent, select the child, praise the performance, move things around to accommodate training and reinforce, quite reasonably, the possibility that this child might be capable of doing something exceptional.

Nobody has to say, “You are definitely going to become a professional footballer.” The environment can start saying it for them.

And then the same system that had helped build that belief released him.

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First things first, I want to tell you about my free Confidence and Self Belief masterclass on October 12th.

For 30 minutes, I’m going to take you inside some of what high performance environments have taught me about confidence, capability and self belief. Why confidence is far less important than we make it, what to do when the voice in your head is louder than the evidence in front of you, and how to stop a feeling determining what you think you’re capable of.

You’ll also leave with The Self Belief Reset, a practical tool you can use whenever doubt starts getting in the way of performance.

It’s free, online and starts at 6pm UK time on Monday 12 October.

Register here →

Now, onto the article…

Confidence has become a prerequisite for an extraordinary number of things.

Apply for the job when you feel confident enough. Speak up when you’re confident in your opinion. Start the business when you’re confident it will work. Put yourself forward when you’re confident you’re ready.

There is a fairly obvious problem with this. Confidence is a feeling, and feelings are notoriously unreliable.

What sport knows about feelings

Spend enough time inside high performance environments and you see the problem with building performance around them.

A player can feel brilliant on Friday and terrible on Saturday. An athlete can prepare meticulously for months and still stand on the start line questioning whether they can do it. A team can produce all the evidence in the world that it is capable of winning and still experience doubt.

None of that changes the underlying capability. The training still happened. The previous performances still happened. The evidence hasn’t disappeared because the feeling changed.

And the match isn’t going to wait until everyone feels confident again.

Three things we muddle together

That distinction fascinates me, because we routinely mix up three very different things.

Confidence is a feeling. It’s how sure you feel, right now, about what’s in front of you. It moves with sleep, mood, the last conversation you had and whether the morning went to plan.

Capability is evidence. It’s what you have actually done, the skills you have built and the problems you have already solved. It doesn’t move nearly so quickly.

Self belief is trust. It’s the decision to back the evidence when the feeling isn’t cooperating.

When we muddle them, a lack of confidence starts masquerading as evidence of a lack of capability. I’m not sure I can do this becomes I can’t do this. Those are two completely different statements. The first is a feeling. The second is a conclusion, and it usually hasn’t been tested.

How high performance environments deal with it

High performance environments have to be better than that. They are built around preparation, repetition, standards, review and evidence. After a performance, the questions are broadly the same:

What happened? What worked? What didn’t? What does the data tell us? What do we change? What do we repeat? How do we perform again?

There is plenty of emotion in elite sport. Of course there is: pressure, nerves, disappointment, fear, excitement, doubt. Ultimately, though, performance requires action in the presence of all of it. The review doesn’t pretend nobody felt anything. It simply doesn’t let the feeling write the report.

There is an enormous amount we can learn from that.

Nobody is collecting your data

Outside those environments, we don’t tend to collect our performance data particularly well.

You probably don’t have an analyst recording every good decision you’ve made. Nobody is producing a highlights reel of all the occasions on which you dealt with something difficult. There isn’t a weekly review of the problems you solved, the judgement you showed, the risks you took that worked, or the things you did despite being unsure of yourself.

So something goes wrong on Tuesday and suddenly Tuesday gets to rewrite the entire story.

One rejection becomes perhaps I’m not good enough. One difficult meeting becomes I’m terrible at this. Someone else’s success becomes I’m behind. Nerves become I’m not ready. A lack of confidence becomes I’m not capable.

That’s bad analysis. Nobody in an analysis room would judge a season on one match, or a player on one mistake. Yet that’s exactly what we do to ourselves.

And it can have enormous consequences, as some of the things that hold us back most powerfully aren’t external. They’re the conclusions we draw about ourselves. We don’t apply, we don’t ask, we don’t say the thing, we don’t take the opportunity. We wait to become a version of ourselves who feels sufficiently confident to act.

Another way to look at it

High performance gives us a different approach, and it comes down to three steps.

Separate the feeling from the evidence. Notice the feeling and name it, then put it to one side. Alongside it, write down what you actually know: what you’ve done before, what you’ve prepared, what has gone well in similar situations.

Interrogate the data. Ask yourself whether your conclusion rests on one moment or on a genuine pattern, and what you would say to a teammate with exactly the same record.

Decide what the performance requires. The question isn’t whether you feel ready. It’s what this moment needs from you, and whether the evidence says you can give it.

• What happens when the dream ends at 13

• Why being surrounded by support doesn’t necessarily mean somebody is looking after you

• The gaps I’ve started noticing from academy sport right through to the very top

• What Nick Kyrgios, a conversation with someone from the NBA and a former Crystal Palace academy player have unexpectedly got in common

• And the question I haven’t been able to shake: whose job is it to notice?

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I’ve had a strange run of conversations recently, and they all seem to share the same theme.

Individually, I found them interesting, but when I put them next to each other they became rather difficult to ignore and really rather exasperating.

Last week, I spoke to someone who had once been absolutely convinced he was going to become a Premier League footballer.

He wasn’t being ridiculous. He was 14, and he’d been playing at a high level for years. He’d been scouted by professional clubs and brought into an elite football environment. He was so good, in fact, that he was a local celebrity, and good enough that the adults around him were investing in the possibility of him becoming a professional footballer.

Football occupied most of his week. He missed things with his friends because training and matches came first. Everyone around him knew him as the brilliant footballer and, more importantly, he knew himself as the brilliant footballer.

“Everyone made me believe I’m going to be a footballer,” he told me.

So he hadn’t really contemplated anything else.

And when you’re 14, I’m not sure how capable you are of maintaining the distinction between:

I’m very good at football.

People think I could become a footballer.

and

I am going to be a footballer.

Especially when the adults around you, like the people at the professional club who signed him, are helping to make that possibility feel very real indeed.

Then he got injured. Frightened that other players were going to take his place, he started playing again before he’d fully recovered. Eventually, he was released.

I asked whether anyone had sat down with him beforehand and really explained what he needed to develop, and whether someone had helped him understand the gaps in his game and what he could do next.

“Not really.”

And that was pretty much that. The system he’d been part of, what he’d assumed was all just going to happen and how he’d envisaged his life had all simply moved on.

He hadn’t.

Afterwards, he didn’t want to kick a football. His love for it, he said, simply died.

The boy who had thought he was going to be a superstar suddenly had an enormous hole where football had been, and something he hadn’t had for years: time. The evenings that had been filled with training, the matches, the weekends and the things he’d missed with his friends were all gone.

He lived in an area where there were postcode wars and gangs. After a blow like that, he found it increasingly hard to deal with, started spending more time on the streets and ended up involved with gangs, robberies and selling drugs.

About a year later, he was facing the possibility of a custodial sentence. He received probation instead.

I’ve found myself telling people this story ever since, because, honestly, what?!

We take a child. We identify him as exceptional. We bring him into an elite environment. We let the idea of becoming a professional footballer start to feel like his future.

And then, when that possibility disappears, what happens to the child?

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There is something about writing these Sunday updates that makes me a little unhinged.

I spend the rest of the week being Professional Kate. Writing sensible things about high performance. Drawing on twenty years in elite sport. Occasionally citing research. Using words like ‘execution’.

Then Sunday comes around and apparently all bets are off.

Which explains both the slightly deranged AI generated image accompanying this post and some of the language I’m about to use.

More on the chocolate Labrador later.

Anyway.

Last Sunday I told you the score was still 3/20.

A week later, I can exclusively reveal:

It’s still 3/20.

At this point, the dramatic weekly score reveal may be losing some of its jeopardy.

I did say I’d tell you exactly what happened, even if it wasn’t going particularly well.

And this week, quite a lot happened.

Just not, irritatingly, the bit where people bought The Performance System.

I may have given myself a slightly ridiculous job.

This week, I sat down and got everything that is currently occupying space in my head out of it.

The Performance System. Lessons from the Touchline. The free masterclasses I want to create. Another business I’m building. Angela Reed, the furniture and interiors business my husband and I own, which is 145 years old and going through a period of significant change. A property project. Financial decisions. Children. School. Content. Exercise. The normal administrative nonsense of being a functioning adult!!!

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I also did a big interview with The Times.

Sadly, nobody wanted my thoughts on high performance.

They wanted to talk about my childhood.

Cue the entirely unscheduled surge of pent up emotion afterwards. Excellent use of a working day.

Then on Thursday I did my first ever Substack Live!! Eek! Did you come and watch?

And somewhere amongst all of this, I’ve been trying to work out why The Performance System isn’t selling more quickly.

Which has resulted in me doing what I suspect quite a lot of us do when something isn’t working as quickly as we’d like.

Adding things.

Surely the answer to something not working quickly enough is to work harder at it?

And then Instagram decided to get involved.

Instagram, which has spent quite a lot of the past year behaving as though I no longer exist, suddenly sent a surge of people to my website.

Aha!

Traffic.

People clicking.

People actually making it to The Performance System.

Surely this was the moment.

Reader, it was not.

Nobody bought it.

Which brings me to this week’s considered, evidence based analysis:

WTF?

Annoyingly, it’s also useful information.

If nobody was clicking through, I could reasonably conclude that I’m not getting The Performance System in front of enough people, or that what I’m saying isn’t making them curious enough to find out more.

People did click, though.

They got there.

They looked.

And then they left.

So now I have a different question.

Why?

And, actually, I genuinely want your help with this.

I’ve spent two years building The Performance System. I know it inside out. I know what I mean when I describe it. I know what happens inside it. I know what people who’ve completed it have told me.

Which possibly makes me the least qualified person on earth to tell whether the sales page makes sense to somebody encountering it for the first time.

So I’m recruiting you (please and thank you).

Go and have a look at The Performance System.

Pretend you’ve never heard me explain it. Forget that you like me, if indeed you do.

Then come back here and tell me why you wouldn’t buy it.

Seriously.

Don’t be nice. Be useful.

I’ve even created the sort of rigorous customer research methodology you’d expect from someone who spent twenty years in high performance environments.

This is either an admirably transparent piece of customer research or a small business owner having a public breakdown.

We’ll see.

I realised something else this week, too.

I’ve been behaving as though I’ve spent an entire month trying to sell twenty places.

I haven’t.

I announced this challenge on 8 September on Linkedin!

And if I’m being completely honest, I didn’t really start pushing The Performance System until around the middle of the month on Substack.

So I’ve essentially given myself about two weeks to launch something, work out the messaging, create the content, learn what people respond to, send traffic to the page and sell twenty places.

Very reasonable. No notes.

This doesn’t mean I’m moving the goalposts.

I said twenty by the end of September.

The score is 3/20.

Unless something fairly spectacular happens over the next few days, I’m not going to hit it.

What I do need to be careful about is the story I tell myself about that number.

There’s a considerable difference between:

“This isn’t working.”

and

“I haven’t given this very long to work.”

And I suspect I’ve occasionally been treating the first as fact when the second is much closer to the truth.

Which brings me back to all those things I’ve been adding.

I know where that leads.

I’ve watched versions of it happen in professional sport.

A team isn’t performing, so everybody wants to fix it.

More meetings. More analysis. More training. More information. New ideas. Different tactics.

Some of those things might be exactly what’s needed.

The problem comes when you change so many things at once that you have absolutely no idea what made the difference.

Or when all the extra activity starts taking capacity away from the things that were working perfectly well in the first place.

Activity can feel remarkably similar to progress when you’re in the middle of it.

They’re not the same thing.

So I’ve stopped posting on LinkedIn every day. I tried it. My reach got worse rather than better. I’m going to post less and make the things I do publish worth reading.

I’m still creating the masterclasses, but I’m not going to rush them out simply because I publicly announced a target and September is disappearing.

I’m going to keep talking about The Performance System, keep showing people what the work actually looks like, and keep learning from what happens.

And rather than invent another seventeen things I could do to make people buy it, I’m going to ask the people who aren’t buying it why.

Which sounds painfully obvious when I write it down.

Most useful things do.

So.

3/20.

I’m still going for twenty because I said I would.

At the beginning of this experiment, though, I was looking at that number and asking:

What else can I do?

Now I’m asking two rather better questions:

What is the evidence actually telling me?

And:

Have I given this enough time to know?

Somewhat irritatingly, those are exactly the sort of questions I’d ask somebody going through The Performance System.

Turns out I might need to take my own programme.

PS. I don’t have a chocolate Labrador.

I asked AI to create an image that captured my week and it apparently decided the situation required one.

This is, frankly, the most intelligent thing AI has suggested to me all week.

I now want the dog more than I want the other seventeen sales.

Kate

Here’s one more try…Join The Performance System

I’ll be back next Sunday if I haven’t gone totally loopy to tell you whether I managed to scrape anyone in before the actual end of September.

A caller once rang Dr Claire-Marie Roberts, then performance director at Coventry City, and asked whether she knew how much of the atmosphere was oxygen.

She did. It’s 21 per cent, which she recognised as GCSE chemistry.

The product he was selling was oxygen in a can.

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She told the story in an interview with the Guardian on Tuesday, and it made me laugh. It’s also a neat illustration of something I recognise from twenty years working in professional sport.

Roberts spent nine years at the Premier League and two as performance director at Coventry City before joining McLaren this summer. At Coventry she was receiving up to fifty LinkedIn messages a week offering devices, supplements and technologies that promised remarkable results.

Her concern is the gap between what the science supports and what clubs actually do. Clubs can be persuaded by good marketing, while players who are desperate for an edge are understandably attracted to anything that might give them one.

Cryotherapy chambers are one of her examples. They are commonplace in elite sport, despite what Roberts describes as limited evidence for their use, and she points to research suggesting they may even blunt some of the muscular adaptation training is intended to produce.

Sleep and nutrition, she points out, remain the most important tools for recovery.

Her point isn’t that innovation is a bad thing. Elite sport has benefited enormously from advances in sports science, medicine, technology and data. Her point is that the pursuit of an advantage can become more seductive than doing the basics exceptionally well.

Where the one per cent came from

The phrase “marginal gains” is most closely associated with Sir Dave Brailsford and British Cycling.

The idea was that if you broke performance down into its component parts and improved lots of those things by around one per cent, the combined gains could become significant.

The stories that travelled were the memorable ones: riders taking their own pillows to hotels so they slept better, and being taught to wash their hands thoroughly so they didn’t pick up illness.

Those stories are true, and the thinking behind them was sound.

But they weren’t happening in isolation.

They belonged to a much larger performance programme built around training, coaching, equipment, talent identification, planning and standards.

Somehow, as the idea travelled beyond cycling, the colourful details became the story.

We kept the pillows and forgot the programme.

The unremarkable 80 per cent

After twenty years working in professional sport, I think one of the biggest misconceptions about high performance is that the people at the very top know a secret that everybody else doesn’t.

Mostly, they don’t.

They know an enormous amount, of course. The expertise surrounding an elite athlete can be extraordinary, from strength and conditioning, nutrition and analysis to psychology, medicine and recovery, with coaches who have spent entire careers understanding the smallest details of their sport.

Underneath all of that sophistication are some remarkably unremarkable things: preparation, repetition and recovery, clear standards, doing what you said you would do, reviewing what happened and then doing it again.

None of it makes a particularly sexy Instagram reel.

Perhaps that’s why the one per cent has travelled so well outside sport. We have become fascinated by the routines of successful people: what time they wake up, what they eat, which supplements they take, whether they meditate, which productivity system they use, and whether they plunge themselves into freezing water before breakfast.

We look at someone performing at an extraordinary level and ask what they’re doing that we’re not.

It’s a reasonable question. I’m just not convinced it’s usually the right one.

Knowing isn’t the problem

We usually already know quite a lot about what would make us better at the thing we’re trying to do.

We know the work that needs doing and the conversation we’re avoiding. We know whether we’re well prepared, which habits help us perform and which don’t, and what we said mattered to us.

The problem is rarely that nobody has told us about the revolutionary supplement.

It’s that knowing and consistently doing are two completely different things, and elite sport understands that extremely well.

Elite sport doesn’t leave consistency to motivation. There are training schedules, standards, reviews, analysis, feedback and accountability, a whole infrastructure built around performance.

Nobody expects an athlete to turn up and simply feel like doing the work.

And yet in the rest of our lives, we start a business, take on a difficult project, try to change something about ourselves or decide we want to achieve something ambitious, and somehow expect ourselves to produce the same consistency with a goal in a notebook and a vague intention to “be more disciplined.”

How to check your 80 per cent

Before you add anything new, work through this audit.

1. Write down what good looks like.
Make it specific enough that you’d know by Friday whether you’d done it. In elite sport, “get better” isn’t enough of a performance target on its own. Training has to translate that ambition into something specific enough to work towards.

2. List the behaviours that produce it.
Keep it to three to five things you would do in a normal week if you were serious about the goal. They’ll usually be obvious, and that’s the point.

3. Score yourself honestly for the last fortnight.
For each behaviour, count how often you actually did it. Elite environments review constantly. The point isn’t to produce a flattering score; it’s to establish what’s actually happening.

4. Close the gap before you add anything.
If you’re doing the basics half the time, a new app or supplement won’t fix that. Better structure might: a fixed slot in the diary, a weekly review, someone who will ask whether you did what you said you would.

5. Only then go looking for the one per cent.

When the one per cent does matter

None of this means the one per cent doesn’t matter.

At the very top of sport it can matter enormously. When two athletes are separated by hundredths of a second, and both have spent years doing the fundamentals exceptionally well, a legitimate marginal gain can be the difference between first and fourth.

That’s the part we seem to have missed when we borrowed the idea from elite sport.

The marginal gain comes after you’ve earned the margin.

You don’t optimise your way around inconsistent execution.

So the next time you’re tempted by another system, hack, supplement, app, morning routine or piece of advice promising to unlock another level of performance, ask yourself something first.

What do I already know works, and am I actually doing it consistently?

The thing standing between you and better performance may well be one per cent.

But I’d check the other 80 first.

PS. This is exactly why I created The Performance System. Over five weeks, we’ll work out what you’re working towards, establish the standards and actions that will get you there, and build a review process so you can see what’s working, what isn’t and what needs to change. Every week, you also get direct feedback from me on your progress.

If you don’t need another one per cent, but you do need a better structure for the other 80, you can join The Performance System here.

Imagine, if you will, a busy match day at The Rec in Bath.

It’s called The Rec, because that’s short for the Recreation Ground, although, it’s quite apt, because if you have ever been to the rugby ground in Bath, you’ll know it isn’t as state of the art as it should be. Which is ironic, because it is situated in the middle of one of the most beautiful cities in the world, a UNESCO World Heritage Site no less.

That was where I worked in my early to late 20s and where my formative years in sport were carved, learned, earned and moulded. I was the Head of Media and PR, which meant I dealt with the press, covered all aspects of the media (including websites and socials), wrote the match reports, and got players in front of journalists and cameras the moment they were needed, usually while everyone else was still catching their breath from the final whistle. Whilst it always makes me jealous to learn that there are teams of people who cover all these aspects rather than just me, it sounds simple enough written down like that. It rarely was.

On one particularly fun matchday afternoon I had about thirty seconds to get one of our players out of the changing room and in front of a television camera. It was a live match, so there was no scope to wait around when it was time for the interview. If you’ve ever worked around live television, you’ll know that thirty seconds is not really thirty seconds. Thirty seconds is now.

There was a producer waiting, a live slot coming, and a player in the changing rooms, apparently oblivious to the fact that several people’s jobs currently depended on him walking through it. And I wasn’t allowed in. Fair enough, really. It was the changing room. They were quite possibly all naked. So, as I had done plenty of times before, I hastily found the Team Manager, asked him to go in and get the player for me, and waited outside, with the floor manager shouting at me that we had 15 seconds left.

And then the CEO appeared. He came round the corner, saw me standing outside the the changing room door, walked straight over, grabbed me by the arm and pulled me away. “You can’t be near the changing room,” he said.

I tried to explain to him that I had 10 seconds left to get a player out but none of it seemed to matter to him, because the accusation underneath what he was saying wasn’t really that I had broken some important operational rule. It was closer to: you’re trying to see the players with their clothes off. When, actually, I was just doing my job and no one had ever thought to create a system to help me do it. And the CEO had turned it into something sexual. What chance did I stand against that kind of thinking if even the man at the top couldn’t see past his own view of me?

Welcome to the dressing room!

‘Five seconds’ shouted the floor manager…

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Last Sunday I said I’d tell you exactly what happened. Even if it wasn’t going particularly well.

So here we are.

The score is still 3/20!

I would love to tell you that my grand declaration last week resulted in people rushing to join The Performance System. It didn’t. In a particularly excellent piece of irony, one of the things I decided to do differently this month was write on LinkedIn every day. I have. And as the week’s worn on, my impressions have got steadily worse, as though the algorithm heard my ambition and personally decided to humble me for it.

Brilliant.

I said I’d write these updates whatever happened though, rather than quietly disappearing and reappearing at the end of September with a beautifully constructed explanation of everything I’d learnt. So this is the slightly less polished version.

I’ve found this week hard.

Last week a tech entrepreneur asked me about my “start up.” I could have actually looked round to see who she was talking about.

I have never once thought of Lessons from the Touchline like that. But she’s right, obviously. That is what I’m doing. Building a business from scratch. Creating the product, working out how to sell it, writing the emails, making the content, watching the numbers, changing things when they don’t work, and trying to convince people that something I’ve spent two years building is worth paying for.

It’s exciting. It’s also terrifying, in that way that only comes from doing something you actually care about.

And I’m not doing it in a lovely quiet vacuum where this is the only thing that needs my attention.

You might not know that my husband (also from rugby) and I also own a 145 year old furniture and interiors business. But here in the UK retail has taken a battering, and running it at the moment is tough. We’re making big decisions there too: streamlining, changing things, adding new things, trying to work out what retail actually needs to look like next rather than hoping it all quietly reverts back to 2019.

Then there’s family. Children. Life. And my ongoing, faintly obsessive commitment to moving my body, by which I mean literally moving it. Running, lifting weights, getting outside, because I know myself well enough to know that everything gets harder the moment I stop.

I am, to use the technical term, knackered.

Now, I could quite happily spend the rest of this post giving you a blow by blow of my week, but this is meant to be a sports informed publication, so at some point I had to give myself a talking to and go back to what I actually know.

And this bit, I do know.

When a team gets a result it doesn’t want, it doesn’t get to decide the season’s over because everyone feels a bit rubbish about it.

You review.

The framework I use is ridiculously simple: Analyse. Action. Achieve.

So I analysed.

The Performance System hasn’t suddenly become something I don’t believe in because I haven’t sold another seventeen places this week. I know what I’ve built. I know the work that’s gone into it. And I’ve seen what happens when people actually go through it.

What I’ve had to question is whether I’ve done enough to help people understand what working with me is actually like.

I don’t think I have.

That’s a very different conclusion to “this isn’t working,” even if it feels almost identical at 11pm on a Thursday.

Once I’d separated those two things, the action became obvious.

And without sounding even more salesy, I’m creating two free masterclasses. One on Self Belief, one on The Structure of High Performance. I want to give you some time with my thinking, rather than expecting a LinkedIn post or an Instagram carousel to do all the heavy lifting for me. I don’t have dates yet, I’m giving myself time to get them right, but they’re coming and soon. Obvs, trying before the end of the month (I better get a move on).

And that’s probably the biggest thing I’ve learnt this week.

When something isn’t going the way you expected, the temptation is to make a judgement. It isn’t working.

Analysis asks a much better question: what, specifically, isn’t working?

Those two sentences take you to very different places.

So the score remains 3/20. I’m still going for twenty. I’m considerably more tired than I was when I announced it, and my LinkedIn algorithm has chosen this exact moment to take me down a peg. But I’ve analysed. I’ve taken action. And now I go again.

Which, annoyingly, is exactly what I’d tell you to do.

See you next Sunday,

Kate

Join The Performance System →Join The Performance System

I’ll be back here every Sunday this month with the next instalment, whichever way the score is going…wish me luck!