• 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!

“One important key to success is self-confidence. An important key to self-confidence is preparation.” — Arthur Ashe

My son gets quite irritated with me after sport.

He’ll get into the car after a match and announce that he was terrible.

And I’ll say: “OK. Where’s the data?”

Which, I appreciate, is probably quite an annoying thing for your mother to say when you’re thirteen, you’re tired, you’ve just played a match, and what you actually wanted was some sympathy and possibly food.

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But I spent twenty years in professional sport. And apparently it has made me a deeply irritating parent.

Because “I was terrible” doesn’t tell me very much. What actually happened? Where did it go wrong? What went well? What did you do differently from last time? What happened when you were under pressure? Where’s the data?

One of the things professional sport is exceptionally good at is separating what actually happened from how everybody feels about what happened. And there can be an enormous difference between the two.

A win can contain terrible data. You can win a match and still have played badly. You can lose and have done some things exceptionally well. A player can make a mistake that everybody notices and quietly make twenty excellent decisions that nobody does.

The result matters, obviously. But if the only conclusion you draw from a win is we were brilliant, or from a loss is we were terrible, you haven’t really learned anything. So you review it. You look again. You find the information that’s useful. And then you decide what you’re going to do with it.

The more time I’ve spent outside professional sport, the more I’ve realised how rarely we afford ourselves the same courtesy.

A presentation doesn’t land quite as we’d hoped. I’m terrible at public speaking. We don’t get the job. I’m obviously not good enough. We put something out into the world and nobody buys it. Nobody wants it.

I know that last one particularly well. I run a business now. I can publish something I think is excellent and barely anybody reads it. I can put an offer out and hear absolutely nothing. The temptation is to turn each of those things into a much bigger conclusion. But the data doesn’t necessarily support it.

We don’t have a data problem. We have an interpretation problem.

The psychologist Albert Bandura spent decades studying what he called self-efficacy: our belief that we can handle a particular task or situation. He identified four main sources of it, but the strongest is generally our own mastery experience: the evidence of things we’ve actually done, handled and got through before.

Which is really just the data point again, dressed up in psychology.

The point isn’t to collect evidence that you’re brilliant. It’s to collect evidence that is true.

Sitting there endlessly replaying something in your head isn’t the same thing as reviewing it accurately. Rumination and review are not the same thing. Professional sport taught me the latter. Review isn’t there to make you feel better about what happened. It isn’t there to make you feel worse either. It’s there to make you better informed about what you do next.

Which brings me to failure. I don't think it's true that there's no such thing as failure per se, but that, really, there is only winning or learning and failure only exists if you allow it to. Getting the information and doing nothing with it, that's what turns something going badly into an actual failure. That’s different from something going badly. Something going badly is information. The question is what you do next.

My version of this, the one I’ve carried into my own work, is simple: Analyse. Action. Achieve. What actually happened? What am I going to do with that information? What does better look like now? And then you go again.

Perhaps that’s why my poor son doesn’t get away with “I was rubbish.” Because maybe he wasn’t at his best, but he would not have been rubbish at everything. And even if he was, “I was rubbish” is still an extraordinarily unhelpful conclusion.

So the next time something doesn’t go the way you wanted it to, before you decide what it means about you, your ability, your career, your business or your future, ask yourself the irritating question my children have heard far too many times: where’s the data?

And then an even better one: what am I going to do with it?

I am going to take you back to New Year’s Day, circa 2010, when trolls were trolling under cover, and websites and social media were still whirring from the struggle of dragging themselves into the 21st century. The snow was falling, and a West Country rugby team was sat up north, watching it start to descend.

Once again, our Christmas had been short. No sooner had we broken up for the holiday than we were back in for matches on Boxing Day, and now New Year’s Day too.

My husband, although he wasn’t my husband yet then, that’s a different story, was head analyst and the most technically gifted at the time. We were in the hotel room doing what we always did before a match, getting everything ready so that the second the final whistle went, we could get straight in the car and drive home. Normally, I’d hang around for ages after a match writing up the report, tweeting live scores, updating Facebook, all the stuff nobody automated back then. We actually gave Bath Rugby their first ever Facebook page. I have no idea how many Premiership clubs even had one at that point. I am that old!

Part of getting ahead meant setting up the shell of the match report page in advance. Something like bathrugby.com/match-report/123. It would only actually go live once I gave it a title, so in my head, it was completely private. Not even a holding page. A secret page.

My husband thought it would be funny to put something in the title field while it sat there empty. Something like “Bath bail out of match because they don’t want to play in the snow, otherwise they will lose by 20 points.” I had no idea he’d done it.

Within five minutes, a fan had found it (literally by typing in URL’s until he’d come across it) and dumped it straight onto the supporters’ forum. ‘Look what I found’! I bet he thought he had the scoop of the year!

Cue, total apocalyptic chaos…

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How do you stay calm when there’s no time left on the clock and you’ve only got one shot?

I’ve watched that moment for twenty years, standing close enough to see everything and never once having to take the shot myself.

This week, for the first time, I’m the one with no clock to hide behind.

I’ve set myself a challenge: twenty people into The Performance System by the end of the month. Three are already in. Seventeen to go.

I love a challenge! (I think!)

Twenty is a real number, not a marketing trick dressed up as scarcity. I read and respond to every submission myself, every week, for every person who joins. That’s the actual ceiling for what one person can do properly. Past that, feedback gets thin, or late, or both. I’d rather cap it honestly than pretend I can do it for two hundred…although, now that really would be a challenge.

And this is all, bizarrely, rather uncomfortable for me...

Because, I’ve built my whole career on being the person behind the scenes. Comms, PR, media. I launched rugby’s first ever online TV channel (yes, I am that old) and did all the pitchside interviews myself, so I wasn’t always off camera, but even then I was asking the questions, not the person everyone had turned up to watch.

I built The Performance System in much the same way. Two years building it quietly, testing it on real people, refining what didn’t work, reading and replying to people’s work every week and never really shouting about any of it.

(Quietly working in the background is the bit I know how to do.)

What I don’t find quite so natural is standing up and saying, publicly, this is what I’ve built, this is what I think it’s worth, and this is what I want to do with it.

So that’s what I’m doing now.

The Performance System is twenty years of watching what actually creates high performance in elite sport, pulled together into five weeks/phases and made applicable to how you work, decide and perform in your own life.

Because that’s always been the whole point of this for me.

You really don’t have to be an athlete to operate like one.

I already know the System works because I tested it before I really talked about it. Real people have already been through it. I’ve read their work, watched what changed and seen what happens when someone stops relying on how motivated or confident they happen to feel that day and starts operating differently.

So, I’m not putting something into the world and crossing my fingers that it works.

The bit I don’t know is whether I can get seventeen more people to say yes to it before the end of September.

And THAT is where this gets interesting/terrifying/crazy (delete where appropriate).

Because I spend a lot of time talking about performance. About deciding what you want, setting the standard, doing the work, reviewing honestly and not allowing how you happen to feel about something to dictate whether you do it.

It’s relatively easy to talk about those things when it’s somebody else’s performance we’re discussing. Slightly different when it’s your own.

So, for September, I’m going to put myself through it in public.

This is The Season (as I am now calling it), because it's my test for myself. I'm going to put everything I've got into getting this properly off the ground and hopefully win the championship at the end of it. (Did you see what I did there?)

And rather than appearing at the end of the month with a lovely retrospective about everything that worked, I’m going to tell you while it’s happening.

If it stalls at eight, I’ll say so.

If I try something and it doesn’t work, I’ll tell you.

If I realise I’ve got something wrong, I’ll tell you that too.

And if all twenty places go, you’ll hear that from me as well.

I am not going to just go quiet and brush it under the carpet if things don’t go the way I want. That’s the deal.

There are seventeen places left right now. I’d love for you to join me, from anywhere in the world.

This isn’t feedback in the way most programmes mean it. I read every single submission myself, in full, not skimming for keywords to paste a template response against. I tell you what I actually see: the thing you almost said but didn’t quite, the bit you glossed over because it was easier than sitting with it. Sometimes that means telling you something you’d rather not hear. That’s the job.

You’ll get five phases/weeks of that: someone (ME) reading your actual thinking each week and telling you the truth about it. I don’t have a template response. You’ll come out the other side with a way of running your own life you can keep using long after the five weeks end.

And you'll be joining while I'm putting myself through exactly the same process.

3/20.

Let’s see what happens.

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!

The player who stuck a page 3 photograph on the whiteboard with my name on it during my first weeks at the club, the one who seemed to lead the scepticism about whether I belonged there, was the same player who, two years later, rang me on a Saturday morning before I rang him. When the tabloid journalist called about the drug allegations, he called me first. Not the CEO. Not his agent. Me.

That shift did not happen overnight and I did not engineer it. It happened because, in the intervening months, I had done what I said I would do, kept their confidence when they gave it to me, and shown up the same way every single time regardless of how I was treated.

Influence in elite sport is not positional. It does not come with a job title. It is earned, one consistent interaction at a time. Here is what that looks like in practice.

1. Do what you say you will do, every time

In professional sport, trust is built on predictability. The most influential people in any changing room, coaching staff or backroom team are the ones who are consistent. Not the loudest. Not the most impressive in a meeting. The most reliable. Reliability is underrated because it is unglamorous. It is also the single most effective trust-building behaviour there is.

Try this: This week, make only the commitments you are certain you can keep. Then keep all of them. Do this for a month and watch what happens to how people relate to you.

2. Protect what people give you in confidence

In elite sport, information is currency. The people who hold influence are almost always the ones who are trusted with the things that are not said in public. That trust is built by demonstrating, over time, that what is given to you in confidence stays with you. Once it doesn’t, it is almost impossible to recover.

Try this: Identify one area where you could demonstrate discretion more deliberately. This week, keep something to yourself that you might normally share. Notice what that builds.

3. Show up the same way regardless of the audience

The Head Coach who made my life difficult for years had enormous influence in public and very little real trust in private. The people in the building knew the difference between how he presented himself externally and how he operated internally. Real influence is built by people who are the same in the corridor as they are in the meeting room.

Try this: Think about a relationship where you behave differently in public than you do in private. Ask yourself honestly: is that gap building or eroding trust?

4. Be genuinely useful before you need anything

Influence is not a transaction, but it is reciprocal. The most influential people I observed in twenty years of professional sport were the ones who were consistently, quietly useful to others without keeping score. When they needed support, it was available, because they had built a reservoir of goodwill over time.

Try this: Identify one person in your professional life you want to build a stronger relationship with. Do something genuinely useful for them this week, with no expectation of anything in return.

5. Stay calm when others do not

In a crisis or under pressure, the person who remains composed becomes the person others orient around. This is true in a changing room at half-time and it is true in a Monday morning meeting that has gone sideways. Composure is not the absence of feeling. It is the decision to act rather than react.

Try this: In your next high-pressure situation, make one deliberate choice to slow down before you respond. Take a breath. Ask a question rather than making a statement. Watch how the room responds to you.

Influence is not something you claim. It is something that accumulates, quietly, in the space between how you said you would behave and how you actually did. Build that space carefully and people will come to you first, even when you are not the most senior person in the room.

There is something curious, (or maybe just different), about the way we talk about confidence.

I don’t always notice how differently I think about it until I’m talking to someone outside sport, and that isn’t about one version being right and the other wrong. It’s just how it is when you’ve spent a long time inside elite performance.

We treat confidence like a substance you need to acquire before you’re allowed to do difficult things. Find your confidence. Build your confidence. Wait until you feel more confident. And whatever you do, apparently, don’t start until you’ve got enough of it.

Working closely with professional sport, I don’t think I ever really watched someone and thought, they aren’t confident, at least not in the way we usually mean when we use that word. I know self doubt exists in sport, of course it does, and plenty of it.

Somewhere around the professional or elite level, though, it seems to work differently, and it stops looking the way you might expect it to from the outside.

What I saw instead was ritual. Players would run out, drop to a knee and pray. Others would always pick up a piece of grass. One player always sat in the same seat in the team bus. These were small, repeated, (maybe slightly odd to the outside) behaviours that had nothing to do with confidence and everything to do with control and familiarity.

I can only think of one time that I wonder whether this was different. I was stood in the tunnel watching Toulouse (rugby) run out and these boys were all built like mountains. I can still see it today. They were all seriously vast. I know the backroom staff around me all had exactly the same reaction as me. Oh shit. That reaction belonged to us, though, not to the players. I have no idea what the players themselves were thinking as that team ran out. If I had to guess, it was closer to oh shit, my body is about to take a battering, than anything to do with confidence. That’s a physical thought, not a psychological one, and it’s a different thing entirely from thinking I’m not confident playing these guys. It was another day at the office, that might just give them a few more bruises and pains.

So when I look at it properly, even for me, it wasn’t really about confidence at all. It was about scale, about the very real prospect of getting hurt.

Which makes me think that the longer you spend close to elite performance, the less useful confident and not confident become as categories. It stops being a real distinction, a bit like what Kobe Bryant used to say about failure, that it isn’t really a fixed thing, only a story we tell about a single moment.

Confidence, I’ve come to think, only becomes a thing the moment you force it into a shape it was never in to begin with. Have or have not. Present or absent.

I opened the floor to questions on here a few days ago, and a striking number of you asked about exactly this kind of thing, the surprising parts, the bits of elite sport that don’t match the tidy version we’re usually sold. This is one of them.

Elite athletes are incredibly confident

I understand why we assume they are. We’re watching the finished product. We see someone walk into a stadium full of people, take the kick, make the shot, give the interview, put themselves in a position where failure is going to be very public indeed. It looks like confidence.

What we’re really doing is looking at the action and assuming the feeling must have come first, and that’s the bit I’m not convinced about.

I never once watched someone doubt themselves, and I don’t think that’s because they were hiding it from me. I think it simply didn’t come into the equation. Whether they felt capable of doing the thing was never really the question being asked. They’d trained, they knew the job, they had the reps, and so they did it, regardless of what was or wasn’t going on underneath.

Confidence is data

I said this in reply to someone on this subject and I’ve been mulling over my thoughts on this since:

The older and wiser I get, the more I believe the way we commonly talk about confidence is largely a myth. At its simplest, confidence is your prediction about your own ability to handle something. And that belief that you can actually do something comes from data.

I’ve realised I’m more of a data nerd than I ever thought I was. I’m definitely not the spreadsheet kind (I leave my Performance Analyst husband to do that). But I mean Life data. What you’ve survived, what you’ve already done a smaller version of, what you know because you’ve done it before and it didn’t finish you.

We talk about confidence as though it is something you need in order to act, when really, most of the time, action is how you get it. You do something. You survive it. You do it again, and you get slightly better. You discover that the thing you thought might finish you did not, in fact, finish you, which is always useful information, and slowly you accumulate evidence. I can do this.

That evidence doesn’t come from being told you could, or from repeating it to yourself in the mirror before breakfast, or from managing to manufacture precisely the right frame of mind before you started. It comes from having receipts.

Professional sport runs on this, whether anyone in it calls it that or not. Nobody waits for a player to wake up on Tuesday morning feeling sufficiently sure of themselves before training. Nobody says, shall we perhaps leave tackling today because Dave isn’t quite believing in himself? You train, you repeat, you review, you correct, and you go again, and over time you build a body of evidence you can draw on when the stakes are much higher.

What happens when it feels like the confidence has gone

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Last week I threw open the floor on Substack and asked what people actually wanted to know about life behind the scenes in professional sport. After more than twenty years inside it, I take things for granted that might not be remotely normal to anyone outside that world.

When people watch elite sportspeople performing on television, what do they typically miss about what makes that person elite? That was the question one reader put to me, and my honest answer was rather unglamorous. It’s the boring bits. The repetition, the graft, the monotony, the thousands of things that happened before anyone switched the television on. One of the biggest misconceptions about elite performance is that it looks extraordinary. Building it usually doesn’t.

Nobody televises Tuesday

We see Saturday afternoon. The eighty minutes, or the ninety. The race, the final, the putt, the kick. We don’t see Tuesday morning. We don’t see someone practising the same skill again and again and again. We don’t see the gym sessions on the days they’re tired, the recovery, the analysis, the meetings, the food, the sleep, the treatment, the hours spent preparing for an opposition they’ve played before and will play again.

What we really don’t see is the absence of negotiation around any of it. Training isn’t something an elite athlete wakes up and decides whether they fancy doing that day. They just do it. There are days when motivation is high and everything feels good, and there are days when it isn’t, and they still do it.

I’ve watched this closely enough over the years to be convinced it’s one of the biggest gaps between how we think performance works and how it actually works. We massively overestimate the importance of feeling motivated, and underestimate the importance of having done the reps.

Then comes the moment everyone sees

Another reader asked what happens when there’s no time left on the clock, an athlete has one shot, and an entire hostile crowd is willing them to miss. How do they stay calm?

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In a professional rugby club during the business end of the season, you might have forty-eight hours to prepare your media strategy for the opposition. There was no room for a meeting with biscuits and a discussion. You had to make the call, move on it, and trust that your first instinct was the right one.

The CEO at my first club, ran on a simple rule: when he asked you to do something, it was expected immediately. Not the next day. Not in an hour. Now. He didn’t say it twice. I learned that the hard way, early on, and I never forgot it.

What that environment did, over time, was build my decision-making muscle in a way that nothing else had. I became very good at trusting my first read of a situation because I had no alternative. The deadline demanded it. And here is what I found: the first decision was usually right. The delay was rarely what improved it.

1. Recognise that most delays are not decisions, they are avoidance

In elite sport, the difference between a good decision and a delayed one is usually fear, not information. Most of the time, you already know what the right call is. The pause is not strategic thinking. It is avoidance dressed up as due diligence.

Try this: The next time you find yourself delaying a decision, ask one question: do I actually need more information, or do I already know what to do? If you already know, act.

2. Build your decision-making criteria in advance

Elite sport coaches do not decide their values under pressure. They decide them in pre-season, write them down, and refer to them when things get hard. The decision framework exists before the decision is needed. Under pressure, you return to the criteria rather than trying to construct them from scratch.

Try this: Write down your three non-negotiables: the things you will not compromise on regardless of the pressure. Keep them somewhere visible. When a hard decision arrives, measure it against these first.

3. Trust your pattern recognition

A significant part of elite decision-making is pattern recognition. An experienced coach does not calculate every possible outcome in real time. They recognise the shape of what is happening, because they have seen it before. This is not luck. It is the result of deliberately reviewing past situations and logging what they taught you.

Try this: After any significant decision, write down what you noticed, what you chose, and what happened. Over time, you are building a personal library of pattern recognition that makes the next hard decision faster.

4. Set a decision deadline

Pressure creates urgency, but not all urgency is external. In professional sport, teams set internal deadlines that are shorter than the external ones, because the quality of a decision made with time to act is better than one made at the last moment. The deadline is not imposed. It is chosen.

Try this: For any decision you are sitting on, set yourself a deadline that is twenty-four hours earlier than the one you actually have. Use the extra time to act, not to continue deliberating.

5. Debrief the decision, not just the outcome

A good decision can produce a bad outcome. A bad decision can produce a good one. Elite sport separates these. What matters for future performance is the quality of the process, not just whether it worked out. Reviewing your decision-making honestly produces better decisions next time.

Try this: After a significant decision, ask: was this the right process, regardless of the outcome? What would I do differently? This is where decision-making improves.

Pressure does not make decisions easier. What makes decisions easier under pressure is the work you do before the pressure arrives. Build the framework, trust the instinct, act before the delay becomes the decision.

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Last week, Nick Kyrgios posted an apology on Instagram. He had tested positive for cocaine, from a sample taken in Mallorca back in June, and the ITIA provisionally suspended him with immediate effect from the 4th of August. He said he made a huge mistake and he takes full responsibility for it.

I read it and recognised the shape of it immediately, because I have been on the other side of that exact headline and reading about it is a completely different thing to living through it.

I have watched one of the biggest personalities and most high-profile players I ever worked with test positive for cocaine. The club had only just been informed, as had he, and what none of us knew was that he had agreed to go live on Sky Sports News to talk about it himself, before the press got hold of it. The journalist who was about to interview him rang me directly, giving me five minutes’ notice before he went on. She refused to tell me what was going into the interview.

His agent had arranged the interview without telling the club and, what burnt the most, without telling me. I understood why they might recommend that decision, because if the press got there first he would be caught on the back foot and lose control of his own story entirely. But equally, he knew I had only ever had his best interests at heart. What it said to me was ‘we don’t trust you’. I rang him and just about managed to ask “are you okay?”, before the agent took the phone from him and cut the line off.

My office was five minutes from the stadium with no television in it, so I picked up my laptop and ran down to the ground, and sat in the player’s dining hall watching the interview unfold.

My phone rang off the hook during the interview and long after it too. It rang so many times that it drained the battery completely.

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In professional rugby, the week runs to a fixed rhythm. Match on Saturday. Sunday off. Monday: team analysis, press releases, media schedule. Wednesday: press conference. Thursday and Friday: match preparation. Saturday: match.

Nobody asked whether they felt motivated on a Monday morning. The week had a shape and everyone operated inside it. The habit was not a decision you made each day. It was built into the structure of the environment.

That is the thing most people misunderstand about habits. They treat them as a matter of willpower and discipline, something you summon when you feel like it. Elite sport treats them as a matter of system. The habit runs whether motivation is present or not, because the structure makes not doing it harder than doing it.

Here is how to apply that logic outside of sport.

1. Design your environment before you rely on your willpower

Willpower is a finite resource and it depletes across the day. Elite performers do not rely on it for the things that matter most. Instead, they design environments where the right behaviour is the path of least resistance. The training kit is already packed. The session is already in the diary. The decision has already been made.

Try this: Identify one habit you want to build. Now ask: what would make not doing this harder than doing it? Change one thing in your environment this week to reflect that answer.

2. Attach the new habit to an existing one

In professional sport, new behaviours are rarely introduced in isolation. They are attached to existing routines, slotted into the rhythm of the week so that the existing routine triggers the new one. This is why elite environments produce consistency. The new thing does not require a new decision. It rides on top of an old one.

Try this: Choose one thing you already do every day without thinking about it. Attach the habit you want to build to the end of it. Same time, same place, immediately after. Repeat for three weeks.

3. Make the standard specific, not aspirational

Vague habits do not stick. “I want to exercise more” is not a habit. “I walk for twenty minutes every morning before I open my emails” is a habit. Elite sport runs on specificity because specificity is measurable, and what is measurable can be held to.

Try this: Rewrite one habit you are trying to build in precise terms. When, where, how long, how often. The more specific, the more likely it survives a difficult week.

4. Review it weekly, not just when it breaks

One of the most important habits inside elite sport is the weekly review. Not because the team is behind, but because the review is what catches drift before it becomes a problem. Most people only notice a habit has slipped when it has been gone for weeks. The weekly check catches it in days.

Try this: At the end of each week, ask one question about the habit you are building: did I hold it this week? A yes keeps momentum. A no is information, not failure. Adjust accordingly.

5. Separate a missed day from a broken habit

Elite athletes miss sessions. They get ill, they travel, life intervenes. What separates the consistent performers from the inconsistent ones is not that they never miss a session. It is that a missed session does not become two, and two does not become a fortnight. One missed day is one missed day. The habit resumes the next day.

Try this: Decide in advance what your response to a missed day looks like. Not guilt, not a restart, not a recalibration. Just the next day. Write it down before you need it.

The habits that produce consistent performance are not built on exceptional discipline. They are built into ordinary structure. Design the structure well and the habit runs itself.

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That summer was, and will forever be, seared into my memory. Thinking back to it now still gives me a physical response in the pit of my stomach. A mixture of stress, unfinished business and a lack of closure. Here is the story as it played out for me.

I had told everyone I was finally going to relax that summer. I was desperate for it. It had been a tough year, with a few scandals already, and I had finally made plans. Ah, plans, a thing that normal people took for granted, but for me were like gold dust, or maybe mythical. I just never got any.

Unlike the coaches and the players, I was not classed as backroom staff, so the usual block of summer weeks off to just relax and go on holiday never technically applied to me, but I had promised myself something close to it anyway. I was going to work ordinary hours and enjoy going out in the evenings with my friends.

To celebrate my time off, I had organised a day with my oldest, childhood friend, starting with lunch and shopping. I had barely seen her in months, because the rest of the year simply did not allow for it, and she was one of the few people who accepted my crazy, relentless existence.

I was just getting out of the shower when my phone rang. It was a senior player, and he was ringing to tell me he had just got off the phone with a tabloid journalist who was about to report that several of the players had been snorting cocaine on the team bus. He had given the journalist my number. He wanted to know what he should do. I remember feeling relieved to get that call, because it meant I was not going to be caught off guard by whatever was coming next, but equally, I also remember that it made me feel physically sick. I asked him to trust me completely, to tell me exactly what he had been asked and exactly what he had said, and then to tell me the truth about the rest of it. He did. That was the last quiet moment of the day, for weeks.

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Walk into an elite rugby environment and you would probably expect the loudest voices to belong to the coaches. Sometimes they did. But over twenty years, I learnt something that surprised me every time I thought I had finally got used to it. The people who changed performance the most were often the ones nobody outside the building even knew existed.

Take the Analyst. A player comes off the pitch on Saturday convinced he has had a brilliant game, and by most obvious measures he has. He made his metres, he hit his tackles, he looked good doing it. Then, on Monday morning, the Head Analyst sits down with him in a small room with a laptop and twenty minutes of footage, and says almost nothing dramatic at all. No big speech. Just clip after clip, quietly paused and rewound, showing him the three moments in the game where he drifted out of position half a second too early, or where his decision looked good in real time but was actually the wrong one. By the time that twenty minutes is over, his understanding of his own performance has completely changed. Nobody in the stands saw that conversation happen. It rarely gets mentioned anywhere, not in the papers and not even in the changing room afterwards. But it is often worth more to a player’s actual development than the match itself.

Then there is the physio. I watched more than one physio tell a player flatly that he was not training that day, while the player argued, and sometimes while the coach argued too, wanting him out there because the group needed him. The physio stood firm anyway, and it was rarely because it was easy or because it made them popular in that moment. It was because they were the only person in the building whose entire job was protecting that player from himself, even when everyone around them, including the player, wanted the opposite decision. Weeks later, when that same player was still fit and available for the game that actually mattered, nobody remembered the argument in the treatment room. They just saw a player who was fit. That decision, made quietly and defended under real pressure, often mattered more than anything that happened on the training pitch that week.

The media manager is where I think I have something to say that genuinely nobody else is positioned to say. People assume media work in sport is about interviews and social channels, and mostly it is presented that way from the outside. It rarely felt like that from the inside. More often it was about being the person who stood slightly apart from a player after a brutal loss, reading whether he needed five minutes of silence or a joke before he could face a camera. It was noticing, before anyone else in the building had clocked it, that somebody had quietly had enough, and adjusting an entire day’s schedule around that without ever explaining why to the group. It was absorbing pressure from journalists, from broadcasters, from the club itself, hours before anyone else in that building even realised the pressure existed, so that by the time it reached the players it had already been softened. I got that call wrong sometimes too, and had to live with what that cost someone. None of that shows up in a match report. Almost none of it shows up anywhere at all.

And then the kit manager, who was usually the first person into the building in the morning and the last one to leave at night. Boots checked. Training kit ready before anyone else had thought to want it. The single missing strapping roll found from nowhere twenty minutes before kickoff. Nobody ever noticed the kit manager on a good week, and that was entirely the point. The best support roles in elite sport tend to become invisible precisely because they are so consistently excellent that there is never a moment where their absence would be felt.

I will be honest that it took me years to properly notice any of this, because for a long time I was far too busy trying to be noticed myself. I wanted my name mentioned. I wanted to matter in a way other people could see. It took watching enough analysts, physios, kit managers and, yes, other media people quietly do extraordinary work without ever asking for credit, to realise that the wanting itself was probably getting in my own way more than anything else was.

This is where I think the whole thing becomes bigger than sport. We live in a world that is genuinely obsessed with visible success. Promotions people announce. Followers people count. Headlines, recognition, the things you can screenshot and show someone else as proof that you matter. Elite sport taught me, slowly and repeatedly over twenty years, that some of the most valuable people in any high performing environment receive almost none of that. They are not chasing it either. They simply make everybody else better, and they seem to need very little in return for doing it.

I think the deeper thing sitting underneath all of this is not really about analysts or physios or kit rooms at all. It is about ego, and what happens to performance when enough of the right people in a building have learned to set theirs aside. One of the biggest surprises of elite sport was not how many brilliant people there were, because you expect that walking in. It was how many of those brilliant people were completely comfortable never being the centre of attention, never being named in the report, never being the reason anyone in the stands was cheering, and somehow doing exceptional work anyway, week after week, without that recognition ever arriving.

Whenever people ask me what actually made the biggest difference inside elite sport, they usually expect me to name a famous player or a well known coach. Sometimes I do. But just as often, I think about the analyst nobody outside that building ever knew existed. The physio who protected a player from himself when it would have been easier to let him have his way. The kit manager who never once missed a detail, in either direction, for years. The media manager who quietly absorbed pressure so somebody else could walk out and perform like none of it existed.

They never lifted a single trophy. But I have never once seen a trophy get lifted without every one of them standing somewhere just out of shot, having already done their part.

There was a player, not from my own club, who I watched become the most talked about young talent in the entire sport within the space of about a season. He was young, good looking, and played a genuinely exciting brand of rugby, the sort that gets pundits leaning forward in their seats. He was also, at that stage of his career, inconsistent in the way most very young players are. He made mistakes on the pitch that a more experienced head would not have made. None of that seemed to matter to anyone writing about him. The press had already decided he was the next great one, the heir to the players everyone in the sport measured greatness against, and once that decision had been made publicly and repeatedly, the actual evidence in front of them stopped changing anyone’s mind.

I was there for the afternoon that turned all of that into something else entirely. It was a Premiership play-off, at the opposition’s ground, a huge knockout occasion with a European place riding on it. Partway through the match he was caught underneath a tackle awkwardly, his leg trapped beneath him, and it was immediately obvious from his reaction and the reaction on the pitch that this was not an ordinary injury. I remember the specific, sickening quality of it, the way a couple of players nearby had to turn away, one of them genuinely looking as though he might be sick. It was a fracture dislocation, the kind that ends a season on the spot and leaves a room full of hardened professionals visibly shaken. We lost that day. It was not a match we should be proud of, results wise, and I fully expected the press pack afterwards to want to talk to our players about a defeat in a match that mattered. No journalist did. Every single one of them wanted to talk about the other side’s injured golden boy, on a day we had actually been the story in every sense that should have counted.

By the time I stood in that press conference room, he had already had one brush with the press that had nothing to do with rugby at all. He had been dropped from an England squad before he had even won his first cap, sent home over a nightclub visit in the build up to a match, and the story ran for days with a seriousness that the same story about a more established player would probably never have earned. What followed, later that same year, only deepened the pattern. That autumn, he was in a very public, very high profile relationship with a well known television presenter, the kind of tabloid pairing that simply did not happen to rugby players at that point, and photographers who had never previously had any reason to be near a training ground started turning up to his regularly. Within weeks of that relationship becoming public, there was a training ground bust up with a senior teammate too, over missed tackles in a contact session, that left him with a bloody nose and made the papers within days. None of it, taken on its own, was necessarily remarkable, although was certainly negatively, but taken together, inside a single calendar year either side of that injury, it meant he had stopped being a promising young player having an inconsistent season and become something else entirely, a story that ran with or without him.

It did not stop after that season either. Across the decade that followed there was a nightclub incident in Australia that cost him a fine, a curfew breach that saw him stood down by his own club, a genuinely serious accident on a night out that put him in hospital, a drink driving arrest, and a fine years later after he admitted an assault on tour. Each one was different. Each one made headlines that had nothing to do with what he could actually do with a rugby ball, and after a while it became genuinely difficult, even for people who followed the sport closely, to remember which specific headline belonged to which specific year.

None of that, though, is actually the part that changed how I did my job for the rest of my career. That part happened somewhere else entirely, somewhere press officers only ever really talk about among ourselves, and it is below for paying members of The Dressing Room.

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My first match report at a professional rugby club was, by any measure, a disaster. I had written it the way I thought a match report should read — upbeat, celebratory, generous about the players. I had praised performances that had not happened. I had described moments of brilliance that, on the footage, did not exist. I had written a puff piece, and I had no idea I had done it.

The Head Coach was brutal. The attack coach pulled me aside, sat me down with the Head Analyst, and walked me through the entire match on video — point by point, moment by moment, showing me exactly where reality and my version of it had parted ways. The players, who had gathered nearby, smirked. I sat there and took it.

The inner critic in that room was deafening. You don’t belong here. You don’t know what you’re doing. They all know it. Every person in that building now knows it. And the temptation — which I felt viscerally — was to agree with it. To shrink. To start quietly planning my exit.

I didn’t. And what I learned in the weeks that followed is the same thing elite sport teaches every performer who stays long enough to find out: the inner critic is not telling you the truth. It is telling you a story. And you can choose not to follow it.

1. Understand what the inner critic actually is

In professional sport, performance psychologists do not try to eliminate self-doubt. They help athletes understand it. The inner critic is not a character flaw. It is your nervous system doing its job, scanning for threat, trying to protect you from exposure or failure.

The problem is that it cannot distinguish between a genuinely dangerous situation and a presentation you are nervous about. It fires the same way in both.

Try this: Next time the inner critic fires, name it out loud or on paper. “That’s the threat response.” You do not have to believe it. You just have to recognise what it is. Naming it reduces its power immediately.

2. Do not wait to feel confident before you act

This is the mistake most people make. They wait for the inner critic to go quiet before they move. It rarely does. Elite performers do not wait for confidence to arrive. They act, and confidence follows.

Every professional athlete I worked with experienced self-doubt before big performances. The ones who performed consistently were not the ones who felt most certain. They were the ones who had trained themselves to act regardless.

Try this: Identify one thing you have been delaying because you do not feel ready. Do the first step today, before you feel ready. The feeling follows the action, not the other way around.

3. Give yourself a single instruction, not a pep talk

When the inner critic is loudest, a long internal monologue about your worth and capability does not work. Your brain is in threat mode and it cannot process complexity under pressure.

What works is a single, short, physical instruction. Don’t flinch. Shoulders back. Head up. One step. Elite sport uses cue words for exactly this reason. They bypass the noise and give the body something concrete to do.

Try this: Choose your cue word or phrase now, before you need it. It should be physical and specific. Something you can do with your body in the next three seconds. Write it down and use it the next time the critic fires.

4. Control what the outside sees

Professional sport has a phrase for this: the poker face. It does not mean pretending everything is fine. It means understanding that your body language is communicating before you say a word, and choosing what it says.

Sitting in that video review room, being walked through every error in my match report while the players watched, every instinct I had was telling me to fold. To look at the floor. To make myself smaller. What I chose instead was to sit up straight, hold eye contact and take notes. Not because I felt fine. Because I understood, even then, that how I carried myself in that moment would shape how everyone in the room read what came next.

Try this: Before your next high-pressure moment, take thirty seconds to set your posture deliberately. Shoulders back, head level, pace steady. You are not performing confidence. You are giving your nervous system a different signal to work with.

5. Build the evidence base the critic cannot argue with

The inner critic thrives on vagueness. “You’re not good enough” is hard to disprove when you have not been keeping score. Elite sport is obsessive about evidence, not because athletes are insecure, but because concrete evidence is the most effective counter to doubt.

When you know specifically what you have done, decided and delivered, the critic has less to work with. It cannot tell you that you always fail when you have a record that says otherwise.

Try this: At the end of this week, write down three things you did well. Specific, factual, no hedging. Do this every week for a month. You are building an evidence base that the inner critic cannot easily dismantle.

The inner critic does not go away. In twenty years inside elite sport, I never met a high performer who had eliminated self-doubt. What they had done was learn to operate alongside it, to give it less airtime, and to act before it had the chance to negotiate.

That is available to you too. It is a skill, not a personality trait. And like every skill, it improves with practice.

In Santiago del Estero on the 18th of this month, there was a wall with a furious man on one side and a party in full swing on the other.

Felipe Contepomi, the Argentinian head coach, was trying to get through his post match press conference. Through the wall, England’s changing room was in full voice, music blaring, players singing, Henry Pollock at the centre of it, bare chested, drink in hand, dancing for cameras that England Rugby’s own media team had put in the room. Four minutes in, Contepomi stood up, said he was leaving because of the lack of respect being shown, and walked out.

I want to be careful about what I am actually taking issue with here, because it is not the celebrating. England had just won 31 24 in one of the most chaotic Tests of the year. Seven players were yellow carded across the match. Argentina were denied a try in the final minutes that looked, on replay, close enough to have changed the result. Before the match, Pollock had already been filmed winding up Argentina’s fans from the team bus. During it, Ellis Genge needled the crowd by mimicking Enzo Fernandez’s chin cupping celebration from football’s World Cup semi final only days earlier, in a stadium already wearing Maradona shirts and waving Falklands banners. It was a strange, brutal, needle filled afternoon of rugby, and if you have ever played or worked in a changing room after a win fought that hard for, you know exactly what that room sounded like. I would never tell a team not to enjoy it.

What I would say, and what nobody around that England squad seems to be saying, is that there is a difference between celebrating and managing how that celebration is going to look to everybody who was not in the room. Steve Borthwick was asked afterwards about the discipline that had nearly cost his side the game. He waved the question away, telling reporters they were the “negativity committee” and that the team deserved credit rather than scrutiny. Contepomi, for his part, did not stay to be questioned about any of it either. He simply left.

That is as far as the public story goes. What actually explains it, what it cost people who were nowhere near that room, and where I genuinely land on Pollock himself, all of that is below for paying members of The Dressing Room.

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