Amanda Leachman is a former elite gymnast and CrossFit Games athlete who went on to lead at Partner level in a consulting firm. She now writes about what high achievement actually costs and what it can look like when you do it differently.

When I read Amanda’s work, a lot of it felt familiar. Not because I was an athlete, but because I have spent more than twenty years inside high-performance environments.

This piece explores some of the lessons sport teaches that remain just as valuable in leadership, business and life. If you enjoy the ideas we discuss here at Lessons from the Touchline, I think you’ll find a lot to learn from Amanda too.

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There was a season when I would sit in my car in the garage beneath my office until I was ready to lead.

Sometimes that took five minutes. Sometimes thirty.

I was a Partner in a consulting firm, responsible for 150 people, and I had learned something that no leadership training ever taught me: you cannot perform when you’re not ready to take the field.

I learned that as a gymnast at 9 years old.

My name is Amanda Leachman. Kate has generously shared her platform with me to talk about what we carry from sport into the rest of our lives.

I walked into a gym for the first time at four years old and didn’t walk out — not really — for thirteen years. Those years gave me more than athletic skills. They shaped who I became.

Later, that foundation showed up in CrossFit, where it carried me to the 2016 CrossFit Games. And then it showed up in every boardroom, every hard season, every team I’ve had the privilege of leading.

The environments have been wildly different. The skills have been the same.

These are those skills.

1. Create a vision people can feel.

Athletes know what winning looks like. They’ve imagined it. The vision is so clear that they can feel it in their body long before it ever happens. Because the best coaches are masterful not just at describing the goal but at helping their team fully inhabit it.

That doesn’t happen automatically in the workplace, mostly because roadmaps are changing so rapidly that the finish line is harder to see. But the need is the same. People want to be part of something that matters. They want to feel the direction, not just read it in a slide deck.

You don’t need to be an elite coach to do this, but you do need to slow down enough so that you can actually articulate what you’re asking your team to run toward.

Your energy in describing that vision—whether it be a three-year transformation or a 90-day sprint—will be the difference in how your team experiences it.

2. Build a structure so your team doesn’t have to think about what comes next.

When I was training for the CrossFit Games, every minute of my day was accounted for. Every gram of food was weighed. I didn’t negotiate with myself about whether to show up. The system made the decision. I just executed.

That kind of structure, especially in seasons of intensity, isn’t rigidity. It’s freedom. When you remove the cognitive load of figuring out how to operate, you free people up to do the actual work.

Don’t be afraid to set standards for your team. Build predictable weekly rhythms, create clear communication norms, and hold people to them. Because connection to a vision will ebb and flow with the demands of the day. Structure is what holds it in place when motivation doesn’t.

3. Pay attention to details.

In gymnastics, the difference between a 9.8 and a 10.0 was my pinky toe. I am not exaggerating.

Or when I was competing in CrossFit, we knew the event was won or lost in the smallest moments. We practiced 5-second transitions over and over and over because we knew those seconds added up.

But so often in business, detail is the first casualty. We compress, we summarize, we build a 10,000-ft-view roadmap and hand it to teams to execute, and then we wonder why the big vision never quite materializes.

Leading like an athlete means breaking the vision down to its smallest components and then noticing how those components are executed. If it needs work, refine and do it again. If it’s done well, celebrate it. The small things are in fact the big things, and the small winds can sustain a team through the long middle of a hard season.

4. Lead with humility — the kind that isn’t quiet.

There is no ego on a great sports team. Not the good ones.

The teams that go the furthest are the ones where even the leaders can say they need help because, in sport, pushing beyond an individual red line hurts the entire team.

The same is true when we lead in business. The strongest leaders make quick decisions without being precious about them and backtrack just as fast when they’re wrong. They communicate when they’re running low. They step back in when someone else needs a break.

That’s not softness. It’s knowing that the team’s performance is the point, not the appearance of being the one who’s always right.

5. Know the difference between on the field, in the locker room, and off the clock.

Athletes are performers. There is an on-field version— focused, composed, bringing energy because your team needs it. There is a locker room version — more human, building the trust that performance runs on. And then there is the version that exists when you’ve taken the uniform off entirely.

Sitting in that parking garage was my version of knowing the difference. The cost of walking onto the field before I was ready was too high — not for me, but for the 150 people waiting on the other side of the elevator.

Your energy becomes their energy. You cannot sustain what you don’t replenish. If you’re always on the field, you’ll burn out. If you’re never on it, you’ll lose the room.

6. Learn to channel the noise.

I’ve stood at the edge of a competition floor when the only thing I could hear was my own heartbeat. The crowd fades. Everything goes quiet except that sound in my ears.

I’ve felt the same thing in high-stakes client meetings. Leading through crises. Navigating politics at the executive level. The platform is different. The stakes feel different. But the skill is the same.

Calm is not the absence of pressure. It’s the ability to perform in its presence. Athletes learn this because they will fail if they don’t. The stakes are the same for most leaders, but it’s a skill that’s not often taught.

And one more thing.

Everything above is about how the skills of sport can make us better at leading in all contexts of life. But there’s a similarity between sport and career that is worth naming.

Regardless of the pursuit, when we focus solely on outcomes, we are at constant risk of tying our worth to what we produce.

I left gymnastics with a list of accomplishments and a quiet, persistent sense of failure. Because my identity was built on outcomes I ultimately didn’t control. When I came back to competition through CrossFit and through my rise in my career, I did it with a different relationship to what the result meant about me.

The pressure didn’t disappear, but my worth wasn’t on the line. That not only made it easier to move on when the time came, but it also made it a lot more fun.

You are not what you do. And the counterintuitive truth is that you’ll lead better — compete better, live better — when your worth isn’t riding on the outcome.

Sport taught me that last. It might be the most important lesson of all.

Amanda Leachman writes The Truth About Achievement — a weekly Substack for high achievers who don’t want to quit the arena, they just want to stop losing themselves inside it. Her memoir, Built for More, is forthcoming. Find her here : https://amandaleachman.substack.com/

"It's not about the name on the back of the jersey. It's about knowing what you stand for." — Phil Jackson

I have asked a lot of people the same question over the years. Athletes at the start of their careers, professionals who have been at the top of their field for a long time, people somewhere in the middle wondering why they can’t quite close the gap between where they are and where they know they could be.

The question is a simple one, but it’s surprising how often people struggle to answer it properly.

Do you actually know who you are trying to be?

Because in my experience, that question is where almost everything else begins.

The performers I watch operate most consistently in elite sport — the ones who keep going when their form dips, or when selection goes against them, or when the pressure becomes relentless — are rarely the most naturally talented people in the room. They are the ones who are clearest on who they are and what they stand for, so that when the difficult moments arrive, they already know how to respond.

Identity

Some years ago, I was asked to give a presentation to a women’s rugby team after one of their training sessions.

The women’s game was in a very different place then. The coverage was minimal, the audiences were small and the idea that women’s rugby would one day fill stadiums and command serious broadcast deals felt, to most people, like an optimistic stretch. But these women were playing seriously, training seriously and beginning to attract a little attention — and with that attention came something none of them had been properly prepared for.

A public profile.

I had been asked to talk to them about media training. About how to handle interviews, how to avoid being misquoted, how a sub-editor could pull three words out of context and turn a perfectly reasonable answer into a headline that bore no resemblance to what they had actually said. About why “no comment” is almost never the right answer and why the way you present yourself publicly matters far more than most people realise until it is too late.

But as I stood in front of them, I found myself talking about something slightly different. Something that went deeper than interview technique or social media strategy.

I was talking about identity.

About knowing, with enough conviction, who you are and what you stand for, so that when the cameras are on, or the attention grows, or someone tries to write a story about you that is not true, you already have a version of yourself that is so clear and so consistent that none of it sticks.

I had my dad’s voice somewhere in the back of my mind as I spoke. He had a saying he applied to everything: ‘a good product doesn’t need advertising’. And for most of my career, I had believed that. I had kept my head down, done the work and trusted that the quality of it would speak for itself. In many ways, I still believe it. When I am working, I work. I don’t stop to collect content or document the moment, because the work itself is what matters to me and that is part of my identity.

But I had also learned, the hard way, that perception doesn’t wait for you to be ready. It forms whether you shape it or not. And if you leave it to chance, other people will shape it for you.

I learned this during one of the most disorienting periods of my career.

I was new to a role inside a professional rugby club, young, female and arriving into an environment where everyone already knew each other and assumptions formed quickly.

For a few weeks I tried to ignore the fact that my going out after matches was causing a stir. I had done it before I started working there, so why should I stop? I was getting my job done. What did it matter? But the rumour mill was relentless and it was actively getting me down. I can’t even remember what tipped me over the edge, but about six weeks in I rang my best friend and told her I just didn’t think I could do it. That it was just too hard.

She told me to get to Christmas and then decide.

Shortly after, one of the players rang me. He could see what the environment was doing and he offered some advice I really didn’t want to hear. Keep your head down, he said. Stop going out for a while. Don’t give them anything to talk about. Let your work speak for itself first.

I pushed back because it felt deeply unfair that I should have to modify my behaviour when I hadn’t done anything wrong. But somewhere underneath the frustration, I knew he was right.

So I made a decision.

I stopped going out. I refused to be drawn into conversations that had nothing to do with my work. I became very deliberate about how I showed up, how I communicated, how I responded to ‘batner’ and how I carried myself when things weren’t going to plan.

By the end of that first season, the narrative changed. Their perception of me had changed. It wasn’t plain sailing and I won’t pretend it was, but the real sign of it was when they began to ask for my help. The players who had once doubted my reasons for being there were coming to me to help raise their profiles, to get them column inches, to build the kind of public narrative that might catch the eye of a national selector.

What changed wasn’t my talent or my effort. Those had always been there.

What changed was that I stopped leaving my identity open to other people’s interpretation.

Perception

What I understood then, and have come to understand more deeply since, is that the reason the perception work felt so hard in the beginning was because I hadn’t clearly defined who I was trying to be. I was responding to my environment with a pre-conceived idea of how I thought should be, rather than sticking closely to who I actually was.

I was reacting to the environment rather than operating from a clear internal standard.

In elite sport, the performers who operate most consistently under pressure are rarely the most naturally talented. They are the ones who are clearest on who they are, what they will and won’t compromise on and how they intend to show up regardless of the circumstances around them.

But knowing who you are, in work and in our personal lives, has to be defined deliberately. And once it is defined, it has to be lived, not occasionally, not when it feels convenient, but consistently enough that it becomes the thing other people can rely on.

You cannot control directly how other people see you. But you can control your standards, your behaviour and your consistency. And if you do that with enough conviction, the perception takes care of itself.

Who Are You?

The framework I return to, both from my years in sport and in the work I do now, starts with three questions. They sound simple. They are not.

What is your mission?

Go beyond your job title and what you do for other people. What are you genuinely trying to build or become? A writer might say: I want to publish work that shines a light on stories that would otherwise go untold. A professional might say: I want to lead a team that performs consistently without burning people out. What would success look like for you in three years if you were brave enough to say it out loud and mean it?

What are your non-negotiable values?

The things you will not compromise regardless of pressure, convenience or what other people think. The distinction that matters here is between an aspiration and a standard. An aspiration is something you hope to live up to. A standard is something you hold yourself to even when it costs you something. If you say honesty is a value but you regularly soften the truth to avoid difficult conversations, it is an aspiration. Your values only become real when they survive contact with a difficult moment.

What perception supports the person you are becoming?

If you know your mission and your values, ask yourself honestly whether the way you show up reflects that. Does your behaviour on a difficult day reinforce who you say you are, or does it quietly contradict it? If you want to be known as someone who delivers under pressure, are you preparing properly or hoping it will come together on the day?

Once you have answered those three questions honestly, you have to live by all of them in everything that you do. That is the part most people skip. They do the exercise, write down the answers and then carry on exactly as before. But the mission, the values and the perception only become real when your behaviour reflects them consistently, on the days when it costs you something, when nobody is watching and when it would be far easier to let it slide.

When you do that…

You stop reacting to other people’s stories about you. You stop needing their validation to feel confident in your own ability. You stop being blown off course by every difficult moment or piece of criticism, because you have an internal standard that the external noise cannot easily reach.

That is not confidence as a feeling. That is confidence as a way of operating. And in my experience, it is the only version that means anything when the pressure is on.

This framework — defining your mission, your values and your operating identity — sits at the core of Week 2 of The Performance System. If you want to work through it properly, with direct personal feedback from me, the waitlist is open here

Join Waitlist

Welcome to Training Week

One of the more interesting things about elite sport is that coaches often become obsessed with behaviours that appear almost completely insignificant to everybody else.

A player jogging lazily between drills during training. Somebody switching off slightly once an exercise no longer feels competitive. The way an athlete reacts after making a mistake nobody in the stadium would even remember five seconds later. Whether preparation standards quietly disappear after a poor performance. Whether body language changes once confidence dips.

To an outsider, those things can look minor, even obsessive.

Inside elite environments, they are treated very differently.

Because coaches understand something most people only realise much later: small private behaviours rarely stay private forever.

Eventually, they show up somewhere visible.

The athlete who cuts corners repeatedly in recovery often struggles physically under pressure later in the season. The player who loses emotional control quietly during training usually loses it publicly eventually too. The person whose preparation fluctuates depending on mood often becomes inconsistent when performance matters most.

What appears publicly under pressure is usually rehearsed privately long beforehand.

That applies far beyond sport.

A lot of people imagine confidence, discipline and composure as qualities people either naturally possess or somehow suddenly access when life becomes demanding enough. But more often, behaviour under pressure simply reveals the standards somebody has been rehearsing repeatedly when nobody was paying attention.

That is why invisible habits matter so much.

The way somebody speaks to themselves privately.
The promises they quietly break with themselves.
The corners they cut when nobody notices.
The standards they relax once external accountability disappears.

None of those moments feel particularly important in isolation.

But repeated often enough, they stop being behaviour and start becoming identity.

And this is often where people become confused in everyday life. They focus heavily on visible outcomes:

• confidence

• success

• consistency

• discipline

• leadership

• self-belief

Without paying much attention to the invisible behaviours underneath them that are quietly shaping those outcomes every day.

Because confidence is rarely (if ever) built purely through thinking differently.

More often, it is built through evidence.

Evidence that you follow through.
Evidence that your standards remain steady privately.
Evidence that your behaviour does not completely collapse once motivation disappears.

Inside elite environments, standards are rarely about perfection. They are about predictability. Coaches want to know:

Which version of you are we getting repeatedly?

Inside this week’s training, I’ll walk you through:

• why invisible behaviours eventually become visible results

• the hidden standards that quietly shape identity

• how private inconsistency damages self-trust over time

• why elite environments obsess over seemingly small behaviours

• and the practical standard-building framework to use this week

Read more

You don’t need a stadium or a training ground to use the same principles that professional coaches use every single day. In professional sport, coaches don’t try to fix everything at once. They pick one skill, drill it until it’s solid, and then move on. That single focus builds confidence and that confidence is what carries athletes into competition.

It’s called the small wins principle, and it is just as powerful off the pitch as it is on it.

What counts as a small win?

Ticking one thing off your to-do list.

Making one positive choice about your health.

Sending that email you’ve been putting off.

They might feel insignificant in the moment, but your brain doesn’t see them that way.

Every time you complete something, even something tiny, you boost your brain’s motivation system. Do it consistently and it compounds.

The reason most people don’t feel that is because they aren’t tracking it.

So the habit is simple.

Keep a daily wins journal, note them on your phone, or stick a Post-it above your desk. Then go back and read them when you feel stuck. That’s when they do their real work.

A lot of people feel like they aren’t making progress not because nothing is happening, but because they’re only looking at how far they still have to go.

What small win are you going to notice today?

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"Individual commitment to a group effort — that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilisation work." — Vince Lombardi

Life can sometimes feel like a rugby match.

No matter how many times you get tackled and taken to the ground, you just have to keep getting back up and carrying on. It’s exhausting and it can leave you battered and bruised, but you still get up. You keep going.

Hits come in all forms. A relationship. A health scare. A job that grinds you down. A public humiliation you didn’t see coming. The important thing — the only thing, really — is that you don’t stay sprawled out on the floor.

Professional sport teaches you this faster than almost anything else. Because in elite environments, the hits are constant, they are public and there is no option to quietly withdraw and recover in private. You get up. You keep going. Or you don’t last.

I know this because I lived inside it for twenty years.

And some of those hits were ones I genuinely did not see coming.

There was a Head Coach I worked with early in my career who had a particular talent for public humiliation. On one memorable morning, he called my name across a dining hall in front of the entire squad and proceeded to tear into me in front of everyone. Had I quit? Couldn’t I do my job anymore? Was it all just too much hard work for me?

I stood there, in front of the entire squad, and kept my face completely neutral.

What I felt, walking back to my office afterwards, was something considerably different. Humiliated. Angry. Slightly shaky, if I’m honest. The kind of feeling where you close the door and just stand there for a moment wondering what on earth just happened.

But here is what I also knew in that moment. I had people. Colleagues who had watched what happened and would check in on me later that day. Friends outside of sport who would remind me who I actually was when someone in rugby was trying to make me forget. A family who had absolutely no interest in rugby politics and who would listen that evening without any of it meaning anything more than it needed to.

I had my Bomb Squad.

During the 2019 Rugby World Cup, South Africa’s Director of Rugby/Head Coach Rassie Erasmus reconfigured his bench in a way that divided the rugby world and ultimately won them the trophy.

Instead of the traditional five forwards and three backs, he selected six forwards and two backs. The idea was straightforward but revolutionary at the time. Rather than starting strong and fading, South Africa would maintain their physical dominance for the full 80 minutes. Fresh, powerful forwards arriving when everyone else was exhausted. A pack that got stronger as the game got harder.

It worked. They won the World Cup.

But the tactics were only part of the story. He asked them to stop thinking of themselves as starters and replacements. To stop seeing themselves as first choice and backup. Instead, he asked them to think of themselves as two integral units of the same team. Equal in value. Equal in purpose. Both essential to the outcome.

That reframing changed everything.

Because the Bomb Squad wasn’t just a tactical selection. It was a collective commitment to the same goal, regardless of when you were called upon or what role you played.

The thing about the Bomb Squad that makes it so powerful as a concept is not the physicality of it. It is the timing.

They don’t send their reinforcements on at the beginning, when everything is fresh and the outcome still feels possible. They send them on at the moment when the game is hardest. When legs are heavy, lungs are burning and the opposition can smell an opportunity.

That is when the Bomb Squad arrives.

And that is exactly how it works in life too.

Your Bomb Squad are not necessarily the people who are with you at the start, when everything feels exciting and the energy is high. They are the people who show up at the difficult part. When the hits have been coming for a while. When you are tired and bruised and starting to wonder whether it is worth carrying on.

They are the people who come on when you need fresh legs and hold the line until you find yours again.

So who is in your Bomb Squad?

Think beyond your network and the people who wish you well from a distance. The specific people you would call at the difficult moment. The ones who would show up without being asked. The ones who tell you the truth when you need to hear it and back you completely when you need that instead.

In professional sport, every player knows exactly who is on the bench and what they bring. There is no ambiguity. No assumption. The roles are clear, the commitment is mutual and everyone understands that the team is stronger for having them there.

Most people drift through life without ever being that deliberate about it.

They assume their people know they are valued. They forget to look after the relationships that matter most when things are going well, then find themselves reaching for support in a crisis and discovering the connection has quietly faded.

But here is the thing. Your Bomb Squad can only do so much.

You have to start the game well. You have to back yourself first — keep your focus on the direction you are heading, not on the person trying to knock you off course. Criticism will come. Difficulties will come. The question is whether you let them stop you or whether you adapt, find a different route and keep going anyway.

I stepped away from sport when Covid hit and threw myself into helping my husband with his family’s furniture business — a 140 year old store that suddenly had no footfall and needed someone to overhaul everything from the ground up. I felt completely out of my comfort zone. I knew nothing about interiors. But I knew PR, I understood people, and I backed myself to see things through a different lens.

It felt like a step sideways at the time. Looking back, it was exactly the kind of pivot that keeps you going when the direct route is blocked. I found my way back to sport. I do both now. It hasn’t always been easy, but I kept going.

That is what resilience actually looks like from the inside. No drama. No heroics. Just the refusal to stay sprawled out on the floor.

Your Bomb Squad needs maintaining. It needs honesty. It needs the kind of mutual commitment Erasmus was asking his players for — not just when it suits you, but as a consistent way of operating together.

Because when the hits come, and they will, you are not going to win on your own.

But you have to be willing to keep playing first.

Back yourself. Identify your people. Look after them.

And make sure they know, without question, that you would do exactly the same for them.

The Performance System is a four week programme that takes the structure elite sport runs on - the structure, clarity, standards, focus and self belief - and puts it directly into how you operate in your own life.f you are ready to perform at a higher level, with greater focus, stronger habits and a clearer sense of where you are going, the waitlist is open now. You can join here from anywhere in the world.

Welcome to Training Week

Most people know what it feels like to carry one bad moment around for far longer than necessary.

A difficult conversation changes the tone of the entire day. A mistake at work suddenly makes somebody question themselves far more than the situation really justified. One awkward interaction sits in the background of their thinking for hours afterwards. They become quieter, more reactive, more withdrawn or more emotionally drained without fully understanding why.

And often, the original situation itself was not actually catastrophic.

The problem was that they never properly reset from it.

Inside professional sport, this becomes very obvious very quickly because pressure is constant and mistakes are unavoidable. A player can train brilliantly all week and still allow one mistake early in a match to completely destabilise the rest of their performance.

You see it happen in real time.

Decision-making becomes rushed. Frustration leaks into communication. Body language changes. Attention drifts away from what is actually happening and towards anger, embarrassment or self-doubt about what has already happened.

At that point, the original mistake is rarely the biggest issue anymore.

The emotional carryover is.

That is one of the biggest misconceptions people have about high performance. They assume elite athletes are mentally strong because they do not wobble emotionally. In reality, everybody does. Pressure affects everybody. Confidence fluctuates. Frustration appears. Self-doubt creeps in.

What separates people is usually how quickly they regain composure once those emotions arrive and whether they allow one difficult moment to start shaping everything that follows afterwards.

The same thing happens constantly outside of sport too.

People carry stress from work into conversations at home. They overthink small interactions for days. They lose momentum after one setback. They catastrophise mistakes that should have been recoverable. And eventually, they start operating emotionally instead of clearly.

Over time, that starts affecting:

• confidence

• communication

• focus

• patience

• relationships

• decision-making

• consistency

• self-belief

  ---

Inside elite environments, emotional control is not treated as a personality trait people either have or do not have. It is treated as something trainable. The ability to steady yourself quickly enough that pressure, frustration or self-doubt does not start controlling your behaviour unnecessarily.

That matters far beyond sport.

Because a large part of everyday performance comes down to how well somebody can reset themselves once pressure enters the system.

Inside this week’s training, I’ll walk you through:

• the reset process used in high-pressure environments

• how emotional carryover quietly damages performance

• the difference between reacting and recalibrating

• why overthinking keeps people emotionally stuck

• and the practical reset framework to use this week

Read more

Someone asked me this week how I got into sport in the first place.

It’s a question I have been asked before, but I don’t think I have ever properly answered it. Probably not honestly, anyway.

The short answer is that I fell into it sideways, through a series of moments that I didn’t plan and couldn’t have engineered if I’d tried. The longer answer involves my dad, a rugby match at Twickenham, a stranger by a pool in Italy, a polo ball I nearly didn’t go to, and a freezing cold night in Newbury where I got the job that changed everything.

But let me start at the beginning.

I left university with a First in English and Drama and grand designs on becoming an actress or a journalist. Neither of those things happened, largely because I didn’t want to sleep on sofas waiting for auditions, and my dad made it fairly clear he wasn’t funding drama school. Which, looking back, was probably the right call for everyone involved.

So instead I found myself marketing a Management Diploma for a university, slowly watching my soul leave my body from behind a desk, instant messaging my friend across the office just to stay sane.

I knew I was made for more than that. I just didn’t know what more looked like yet.

Then came Bob Jones.

My dad took me for lunch with him when I was in my early twenties. Bob ran a multi-million pound PR agency and he’d started it all after reading a book about how to run a PR agency. No formal qualifications. No years of experience. Just a book, a belief in himself and a willingness to start.

That lunch changed how I thought about everything.

I had always assumed you needed certificates and credentials and proof on paper before anyone would take you seriously. Bob dismantled that idea completely. What you actually needed, he told me, was belief, drive and gumption. I didn’t know what my version of that looked like yet, but I started paying attention differently after that.

The moment I actually knew came at Twickenham.

My dad had taken my sister and me to watch England play Australia. He’d been doing this since we were young teenagers — he was MD of a company that sponsored a local rugby club, which meant good seats, which meant we went. Most of the time, if I’m honest, I wasn’t that invested in the rugby itself. I was invested in spending time with my dad.

But on this particular afternoon, England scored a try and the crowd went completely wild.

We all leapt to our feet. My dad put his arm around my shoulders, I put mine around his waist, and we jumped up and down together in utter joy. And in that moment, with 80,000 people losing their minds around us, a voice in my head said very clearly:

I want to do this.

I didn’t mean to play rugby. I meant the keys to that moment. The electricity of it. The thing that makes complete strangers put their arms around each other and jump up and down in the rain.

I didn’t have a plan. I didn’t have contacts or experience or a clue how you actually got a job in professional sport. But I had a fire in my belly that told me anything other than this wasn’t going to be acceptable.

My dad had taught me that, his whole life. He wasn’t the kind of father who threw balls in the garden or stood on the touchline at school sports day — if I’m honest, there were times I would have swapped the international matches just for a bit more of the ordinary, everyday version of him. But those big occasions, the Twickenham afternoons, the crowds, the electricity of it all, were his way of showing me the world and what it could hold.

Why not, not why should I?

He said it about life. About opportunity. About the instinct to reach for things rather than talk yourself out of them. It wasn’t always comfortable — there was a time, years later, when I had to turn down a job at the Rugby World Cup in New Zealand and work in South Africa in the same week, and he rang me almost immediately to ask why on earth I wasn’t going. I was early pregnant and barely functioning, but that barely registered as a barrier to him. The opportunities were always more visible to my dad than the obstacles, and part of me loved him for it, even when I wanted to throw the phone across the room.

And without those moments, without that philosophy drilled into me from the stands at Twickenham and a hundred conversations I didn’t always want to have, I genuinely don’t know where my life would have led.

Because the answer to that question, it turns out, is everything. Sport gave me a career I loved, a sense of who I was and what I was capable of, and — perhaps most importantly of all — it gave me my husband, who I met at Bath Rugby and who I am fairly confident is the best thing that ever came out of a lost end of season match. We now have two children who I would run through a thousand walls for, which feels like the most unexpected and wonderful result of that voice at Twickenham saying I want to do this.

I just hadn’t anticipated quite how much doing this would give me back

From the Twickenham moment, I did what I now recognise as the thing that changes everything: I started telling everyone what I wanted.

Loudly. Repeatedly. To anyone who would stand still long enough to listen.

I volunteered to help a friend who was trying to break into women’s motorsport, writing letters to sponsors and newspapers on her behalf and building a portfolio from absolutely nothing. She gave me a book about sports marketing and sponsorship, which I devoured. I found a GB Pentathlete through a sports network and offered to help with his marketing in exchange for dinner and the occasional bottle of wine. I joined a polo club specifically to meet people, then didn’t watch a single polo match all year — which, in hindsight, was quite an efficient approach to networking.

Then there was the holiday in Italy.

I was sitting by the pool when I got chatting to a lovely couple, and did what I always did at that point — told them exactly what I wanted to do with my life. The man looked at me and said, almost casually, “my best mate runs his own sports agency, let me give you his email.” I emailed him the moment I landed back in England. He wrote back to say he had nothing for me at the time, that there was no scope to take anyone on, but he encouraged me to keep going and not give up. Whether he meant it sincerely or was simply being polite, I chose to take it as genuine, and it bolstered my resolve more than he will ever know.

I should also mention that I later met the author of that sports marketing book — the one my racing driver friend had given me — completely by chance, in a shopping mall in Cape Town, South Africa. The world, it turns out, is considerably smaller than it appears from behind a university marketing desk.

Meanwhile, I cornered a player from Newbury RFC in the gym — the poor man was trying to get his weight sets in — told him what I wanted, and walked away with an introduction to their Head Coach. I organised events, wrote press releases, contacted local journalists and worked with their sponsors, all for free, because I understood that experience was the currency I didn’t yet have.

And then came the polo ball.

My friend dropped out at the last minute and I nearly didn’t go. A voice inside me said I had to, so I rang her, told her to throw on a black dress and get over to mine, and off we went, sticking out like sore thumbs among people who had probably been pressing divots together every weekend since childhood. But we found our people — a group of equally random strangers — and one of them, Chris, worked at Swindon Town FC. Within a week, he had told me the Bath Rugby press officer was leaving and that I should get in touch.

I had coffee with her. She suggested I come to a pre-season friendly between Bath and Newbury a few days later and meet the CEO during the match.

It was pouring with rain. It was dark. I was brewing the cold of all colds. I stood on a balcony in Newbury and had a five-minute conversation with a man who asked me if I understood rugby and if I could write match reports.

I said yes to both. I understood rugby mostly, and I had never written a match report in my life, but I went home that night and wrote one anyway — just to prove to myself that I could — and a couple of weeks later I started at Bath Rugby. My baptism of fire, as it turned out, was exactly that.

So did I choose sport, or did sport choose me?

After decades of reflection, I think sport chose the version of me that was already there — the one my dad had been quietly building since he first took me to Twickenham. The one who believed, somewhere underneath all the uncertainty, that the answer to most things was why not, not why should I. The one who would write letters to sponsors for free, corner people in gyms, fly home from Italy and email a stranger the same day, and turn up alone to a polo ball just because something inside her said she had to.

I just needed the right moment to hear the voice clearly enough to act on it. And, if I'm honest, she's the person I still have to remind myself I am sometimes.

The Lesson from the Touchline

I have come to believe that some things in life don’t arrive as a logical decision. They arrive as a feeling — persistent, inconvenient, completely irrational to everyone around you — and they simply refuse to go away no matter how sensible you try to be about it.

Sport called to me at Twickenham and I couldn’t unhear it. I had no qualifications for it, no contacts, no clear path and no guarantee that any of it would work. What I had was the absolute certainty that I had to try, and a father who had spent my whole life telling me that why not was always a better question than why should I.

The grit that followed wasn’t glamorous. It was years of free work, unanswered emails, lucky meetings in unlikely places and the stubborn refusal to accept that the answer was no. It looked, from the outside, like someone who didn’t know when to quit. From the inside, it felt like the only option available.

So if something is calling to you right now — a direction, a change, a version of your life that keeps reappearing no matter how many times you push it away — perhaps the question worth sitting with isn’t whether you are qualified for it, or ready for it, or whether the timing is right.

Perhaps the only question worth asking is the one my dad taught me.

Why not?

At the weekend, I was watching my teenage son play cricket and he had one of those afternoons that perfectly capture why, sometimes, sport is simultaneously brilliant and emotionally brutal.

He bowled beautifully. He was calm, focused and disciplined and looked completely in control. Then he went in to bat.

The team only needed another five runs to win and, realistically, all he needed to do was stay patient and bat sensibly. Instead, he tried to slog every ball he faced. He kept swinging too early and even though we had told him just to bat defensively, he clearly felt compelled to try and smash it. He missed every ball.

Afterwards, he was completely deflated.

As we walked back to the car, he kept replaying the innings over and over again, talking about how badly he had batted and how frustrated he was with himself. However, the more we talked about it, the clearer it became that this was not really about batting technique at all. He wanted to be the hero. He wanted the big shots, the applause and the validation that comes with being the person who finishes the game spectacularly in front of teammates and peers.

The irony, of course, was that they were already in a winning position. What the team actually needed from him was composure rather than heroics.

I told him to think about it as data, because that is genuinely how I think about most setbacks myself. We sat and talked it through properly. What had gone wrong? What had pressure done to his decision-making? Why had he abandoned the game plan? What was within his control and what was not? What would he do differently next time?

Gradually, the emotion started to loosen its grip.

Nothing catastrophic had actually happened. He had simply had an innings that exposed something useful about pressure, ego and decision-making. The “failure” only really existed in the story he was telling himself about it.

Kobe Bryant and the Idea of Failure

Just this week, I came across an interview with Kobe Bryant where he said:

“Failure doesn’t exist.”

The more I thought about it afterwards, the more I realised that this is actually how many elite performers seem to operate psychologically.

Obviously, on a literal level, setbacks exist. Athletes lose finals. Teams underperform. Careers stall. Businesses fail. People make mistakes all the time. However, what often does not exist inside elite performance environments is the tendency to attach catastrophic meaning to every difficult moment.

I increasingly think one of the major differences between elite performers and everybody else is that most people experience setbacks emotionally first and analytically second, whereas elite athletes are often trained, either consciously or unconsciously, to reverse that process.

That distinction changes everything.

The Stories We Attach to Setbacks

Most of what we call failure is interpretation layered on top of an event.

A bad meeting is not failure. A rejected proposal is not failure. An awkward conversation is not failure. A poor innings is not failure. They are simply situations where reality did not align with expectation.

The emotional damage usually arrives afterwards, once identity gets involved.

One difficult presentation quietly becomes evidence that you are not confident under pressure. One rejection becomes proof that perhaps you are simply not good enough. One abandoned habit becomes confirmation that you never stick at anything.

This is where people often unintentionally sabotage their own potential, not because they lack ability, but because they start treating temporary experiences as permanent truths.

Professional sport simply does not allow that mindset to survive for very long. Athletes lose form constantly. Selection goes against them. Injuries disrupt momentum. Confidence fluctuates. Public criticism can be relentless. If every poor performance became an existential crisis, very few people would survive elite sport psychologically.

Instead, elite environments normalise something far more useful: review, analysis, adjustment and re-engagement. That process becomes part of everyday life.

Why Elite Athletes Think Differently

The longer I have spent around professional sport, the more I think high performers often do something psychologically unusual with setbacks.

They do not immediately experience them as existential reflections of who they are. More often, they experience them as situations to analyse, understand and improve. That distinction matters enormously because it changes the questions people ask themselves after things go wrong.

Instead of spiralling into questions about what a setback says about them as a person, they are more likely to ask what actually happened, what changed, what was within their control and what needs adjusting next time.

That mindset sounds deceptively simple, but psychologically it is incredibly important.

I think modern life increasingly pushes us in the opposite direction. Everything now feels emotionally loaded and overly personalised. Every setback seems to carry some deeper commentary on our worth, capability or identity.

One difficult moment and we immediately start constructing narratives about ourselves. Perhaps I am not capable. Perhaps everyone else is coping better. Perhaps I am simply not cut out for this.

High performers seem to interrupt that spiral much earlier. That is not because they are emotionally detached or robotic, because they absolutely are not. Elite athletes can be incredibly emotional people. However, they often understand that emotion is a very poor analyst.

That is why elite environments become so process-driven. Review, analysis and adjustment are normalised to such an extent that setbacks lose some of their emotional drama. Poor performances are still disappointing, of course they are, but they are not automatically transformed into identity crises.

Analysis, Action and Achievement

One of the frameworks I return to repeatedly in my own work is something I call the Three A’s: Analysis. Action. Achieve.

Not because life unfolds neatly, because it obviously does not, but because people who continue progressing usually have some sort of process that prevents them emotionally collapsing every time something goes wrong.

(This method/framework was used every week in the ‘Nerve Centre’ or the coaches room. My husband was Head Performance Analyst and this, for him, is the pinnacle of elite sport structure)

The first stage is analysis.

Analysis is not endless overthinking disguised as productivity and it is not self-punishment masquerading as accountability either. It is simply the ability to evaluate reality honestly.

What actually happened? What was within my control? What needs adjusting? What should I repeat? What should I stop doing?

Elite athletes do this constantly, even after successful performances. Some of the most successful people I have worked around were also some of the most relentlessly reflective. They were not obsessed with perfection. They were obsessed with refinement.

Then comes action, which is perhaps the stage most people avoid once confidence has taken a knock.

Action requires re-engagement before certainty returns.

People often assume high performers act because they feel confident. I actually think many become confident because they continue acting. Repetition creates familiarity. Familiarity reduces hesitation. Reduced hesitation builds trust. Eventually, what once felt psychologically uncomfortable simply becomes behaviourally normal.

Only then, usually much later than people expect, does achievement arrive. Not as one dramatic breakthrough moment, but as the accumulated result of repeated adjustment over time.

Failure as Interpretation

What struck me most after the cricket match was how quickly my son’s mood changed once he stopped interpreting the innings as evidence about who he was.

Once we removed the emotional narrative from it, he could suddenly see it much more clearly. He had not failed. He had simply made poor decisions because he got caught up in trying to prove himself. That was not really failure at all. It was simply useful information about how pressure, ego and the need for validation had affected his decision-making in that particular moment.

I suspect that is the real lesson hidden inside Kobe Bryant’s quote.

Perhaps failure only truly exists once we decide to convert an event into identity.

Perhaps most of the things we label as failure are simply uncomfortable moments that expose something useful about ourselves. An insecurity. An ego. A lack of preparation. A need for validation. A technical weakness. A moment of panic. A loss of discipline.

Those things are not always pleasant to confront, but they are not failure either. They are feedback.

Perhaps that is why some people keep progressing long after others have quietly withdrawn from the process altogether. It is not because they never doubt themselves or because setbacks do not hurt. It is because they have learned not to mistake temporary events for permanent truths.

They understand that most of what we call failure is not actually the event itself.

It is the meaning we attach to it afterwards.

Welcome to Training Week

Inside professional sport, coaches become highly observant of small behavioural patterns because small patterns rarely stay small for very long.

A player arriving slightly distracted to training does not sound particularly dramatic in isolation. Neither does somebody looking mentally cluttered before a match, reacting emotionally to small frustrations or struggling to settle their attention properly once sessions begin.

But over time, those things usually start appearing elsewhere too.

Decision-making becomes rushed. Focus drifts more easily. Communication changes. Emotional reactions increase. Standards fluctuate depending on mood or pressure. Eventually, the problem stops being talent or ability and starts becoming the inability to consistently position yourself properly before performance is required.

That is one of the biggest misconceptions people have about elite environments. They assume high performers spend all of their time thinking about motivation, intensity or confidence when, in reality, a huge amount of elite performance is built around preparation.

Not just physical preparation.

Mental preparation too.

The strongest performers are rarely the people trying to regain control halfway through chaos. More often, they are the people who have already created enough clarity before pressure arrives. They have thought about what matters, where their focus needs to sit and how they want to operate once demands start increasing around them.

And whilst most people are not stepping into professional sporting environments every morning, the same behavioural patterns quietly shape everyday life too.

A lot of people start the day immediately reacting:

• messages

• emails

• notifications

• deadlines

• other people’s urgency

• unfinished stress from yesterday

Before they have properly decided:

• what deserves their attention

• what actually matters today

• how they want to operate

• or what standard they want to hold once pressure arrives

Over time, that creates a low-level state of constant reactivity. People begin feeling mentally behind before the day has even properly started. Attention becomes fragmented. Focus weakens. Emotional energy gets pulled everywhere. And eventually, even very capable people start operating far below the level they are actually capable of sustaining.

This is rarely because they lack discipline.

More often, it is because they never properly positioned themselves before the noise began.

Inside this week’s training, I’ll walk you through:

• the pre-performance mindset used inside elite environments

• why reactive mornings quietly destabilise focus

• how attention gets pulled away from what actually matters

• the simple positioning habit that changes how the rest of the day feels

• and the practical pre-performance framework to use this week

Read more

One of the biggest differences I noticed in elite sport was the speed of decision-making. Not reckless decisions, but clear ones. In high-performance environments, hesitation costs you, so people are trained to trust their preparation, make a call, and adjust quickly if needed.

What’s interesting is that outside of sport, people often believe better decisions come from having more information. More opinions, more reassurance, more analysing, more time to think. But very often, the opposite happens.

The more information people consume, the harder it becomes to decide, because too much information creates noise. And noise creates hesitation.

In sport, there usually isn’t time to endlessly overthink. You make the decision with the information you have, commit to it, and adapt if necessary. In life, a lot of people stay stuck trying to eliminate uncertainty before they move, but certainty rarely comes first. Usually, clarity comes through action.

A few things that genuinely help:

• Stop collecting endless opinions. Too much input weakens trust in your own judgement and often leaves people feeling even more uncertain than when they started.

• Make decisions with the information you already have. Most people already know far more than they act on, but keep searching for one final piece of reassurance before moving.

• Learn to adjust instead of endlessly delaying. People who move forward quickly are rarely people who get everything perfect first time. They’re usually people who decide, adapt, and keep going.

I think a lot of people are mentally exhausted not because life is particularly hard, but because they’re carrying too many unfinished decisions around with them.

What decision are you currently overthinking?

Before I worked in professional sport, (and I was admittedly pretty young at the time), elite athletes felt almost god-like to me.

Going to watch an international rugby match genuinely felt like stepping into something mythological. The noise. The physicality. The scale of it all. The sense that these people belonged to a completely different category of human being.

And in some ways, statistically speaking, they do.

The percentage of athletes who ever make it to professional level is tiny. The percentage who reach genuine world-class level is smaller still. So when you watch them from the outside, it is easy to see them as something almost intangible to the rest of us. People operating psychologically, physically and emotionally at levels ordinary life rarely demands.

I think that is partly why people become so fascinated by elite performance in the first place.

We want to understand what they have that the rest of us don’t.

And having now spent (almost) more of my life inside professional sport than outside it, I have spent years thinking about exactly that. What I have observed. What I have learned. What truly separates elite performers from everybody else.

Because, whether we like it or not, most of us have been exposed to performance psychology in one form or another by now. You would have to be almost blind to avoid it completely. Mindset books. Podcasts. Motivational clips. Morning routines. Visualisation techniques. Psychological hacks promising confidence, discipline and peak performance in five easy steps.

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Which is probably why a reel I saw this week caught my attention.

It was one of those short videos attempting to condense years of performance work into less than a minute. Pressure. Nerves. Visualisation. Trusting your training. Trusting yourself.

And whilst I understand why that kind of content appeals to people, I am always slightly wary of it too, because I think social media has a habit of turning performance into something far cleaner and more cinematic than it usually is in reality.

That is not because the ideas themselves are necessarily wrong. Much of it is probably true. But big ideas wrapped into bite-sized clips rarely leave room for the messier reality of what elite performance actually feels like from the inside.

And I think there is a difference between studying performance from the outside and spending enough time inside elite environments to understand what pressure actually feels like when it is lived repeatedly and publicly.

You can study sport psychology until you are blue in the face, but I am not sure you fully understand elite performance until you have spent time in the arena itself. And I say that as somebody who was not even an athlete.

Because the longer I have spent around professional sport, the less convinced I am that elite performers are people who feel dramatically different emotions from the rest of us.

More often, I think they are people who have, instead, spent years learning what to do when those emotions arrive.

The bit we usually misunderstand

A little while ago, I watched an interview with Michael Phelps.

What caught my attention was not really the medals or the records, but the preparation behind them and the extent to which so much of his performance had already been mentally rehearsed before he ever entered the pool.

The ability to stay with the next stroke. To stop attention drifting too far ahead. To recover quickly from mistakes. To narrow focus back to the immediate task in front of him rather than the enormity of the moment surrounding it.

From the outside, that can easily look like confidence.

But I suspect much of it is actually familiarity.

Because one of the biggest misconceptions about elite performance is that we tend to romanticise the visible moment whilst ignoring the thousands of invisible repetitions sitting underneath it.

The final.

The race.

The medal.

The comeback.

The pressure moment.

These are the things we see.

But what we usually do not see is the preparation that made the moment survivable in the first place.

The repetition.

The standards.

The routines.

The endless practice.

The ability to keep turning up on days where motivation has completely disappeared and they would genuinely rather stay in bed.

And I think that changes the conversation around elite performance quite significantly, because suddenly it stops looking like magic and starts looking much more like structure.

What pressure actually does

Pressure is often spoken about as though it creates something new inside people.

But I’m not sure it does.

More often, I think pressure simply exposes what has already been built underneath somebody long before the moment itself arrived.

It exposes whether someone has habits solid enough to survive discomfort. Whether standards still exist when confidence disappears. Whether focus can return after distraction. Whether a person has rehearsed functioning under imperfect conditions instead of relying on everything feeling ideal.

Because elite athletes are not calmly floating through their careers without nerves or doubt.

Of course they feel pressure. Of course they feel uncertainty. Of course there are days where they feel mentally flat, frustrated or exhausted.

But the best performers are often able to stop those emotions becoming the thing that dictates their behaviour entirely.

And I think that is a very different skill from simply “feeling confident”.

It is a trained response.

Why confidence is probably overrated

This is where I think some conversations around mindset become slightly too simplistic, because people are constantly told to trust themselves, believe in themselves and back themselves, as though confidence is something we can simply summon through enough motivational repetition.

And whilst there is truth in those ideas, trust rarely appears because we repeat the right phrase often enough.

Usually, trust is built through evidence.

Through repeated preparation. Repeated action. Repeated proof that you can return to the task when emotions become unreliable.

Take Jonny Wilkinson.

One of the things that made him extraordinary was not simply talent, but repetition. It is well documented that he spent hours and hours practising kicks, repeating the same movement over and over again until, under pressure, his body had something deeply familiar to return to.

That is the part people often miss when they talk about confidence in elite sport, because very often what looks like composure is actually familiarity. Muscle memory. A nervous system returning to something it has already rehearsed countless times before.

And this is also why I think visualisation is often misunderstood.

Most people imagine visualisation as mentally rehearsing success. Winning the race. Delivering the perfect presentation. Getting the result. Hearing the applause.

But I suspect the more useful part is often rehearsing the uncomfortable reality instead.

What happens if things start badly?

What happens if confidence disappears halfway through?

What happens if your attention starts drifting?

What happens if pressure becomes overwhelming?

What happens if you simply do not feel like doing the thing you once claimed mattered to you?

Because that is usually where performance is actually built, not in fantasy versions where everything goes perfectly, but in familiarity with discomfort, imperfection and error.

What professional sport teaches you very quickly

Whether you have worked in professional sport or not, I think most of us can probably agree that talent alone is rarely enough.

Of course talent matters enormously, but by the time somebody reaches an elite environment, talent is usually the starting point rather than the full explanation.

What starts separating people is often everything surrounding the talent itself: the standards, the routines, the recovery, the response to feedback, the ability to tolerate repetition, the willingness to continue without immediate reward and the discipline to keep showing up after disappointment.

And perhaps most importantly, it is the ability to continue functioning when emotions are inconsistent.

Because I think we often assume elite performers must feel ready more often than everybody else, but I’m not convinced that is true at all.

They still have days where they feel tired, days where pressure becomes loud, days where confidence fluctuates and days where motivation disappears entirely.

The difference is usually that there is already something stable enough in place to return to anyway: a structure, a process, a standard or a routine capable of carrying them even when their emotions are trying to pull them elsewhere.

How this applies beyond sport

Let’s face it, most of us are not preparing for Olympic finals.

But we are all preparing for moments where our emotions may not be particularly reliable guides. Difficult conversations. Important meetings. Creative risks. Decisions that require courage. Commitments we made when motivation was high but now have to honour when it is not.

And perhaps that is why elite sport becomes so interesting beyond sport itself, because it exposes something much broader about human performance.

Namely, that we probably overestimate the importance of motivation and underestimate the importance of structure.

We assume high performers succeed because they feel more ready, more confident or more certain than everybody else, when in reality I suspect many of them have simply rehearsed what to do when those feelings disappear.

The real code

So can we really break the code of elite performance?

Maybe.

But I suspect the answer is both more encouraging and less dramatic than people want it to be, because when you spend enough time around elite environments, you eventually realise there probably is no single secret code at all. And, if there is, it’s probably quite simple.

There is no magical mindset. No perfect morning routine. No single visualisation technique that suddenly transforms somebody into a high performer.

More often, what separates elite performers is their ability to return to the basics consistently, long after the excitement has disappeared.

The preparation.

The repetition.

The standards.

The structure.

The ability to function when emotions become unreliable.

And perhaps that is actually encouraging, because it means elite performance may not be quite as mystical or unreachable as we sometimes make it seem.

So can we break the code?

I think we probably can.

Because the real code was never perfection in the first place.

It was practice.

If you want to build stronger focus, consistency and self-leadership using the same performance principles discussed here, you can explore The Performance System — my deeper programme designed to help you apply elite performance strategies to everyday life and work.

The Performance System

I also am delighted to offer free meditations to help with your focus and self belief:

Morning Focus Meditation
A short guided reset to help you start the day with more clarity, intention and composure.

Gratitude for Pressure
A guided reflection designed to help you reframe pressure, nerves and discomfort more constructively.

Download Meditations

Welcome to Training Week

Inside professional sport it’s crucial that everyone in the team is aligned in their mission and purpose. Not only do people tend to perform far better when they are genuinely connected to ‘why’ they are doing something, but it also gives them a clearer strategy - every decision goes back to the why.

And when I say the goal or purpose, I do not just mean “win the next match” or “get selected”. I am referring to something far deeper than that.

Because the reality is that professional sport is repetitive, demanding and mentally draining at times. There are periods where confidence tanks, performances dip, criticism increases and progress feels slower than expected.

The people (and teams) who tend to hold themselves together best through those tough periods are usually the people who are clear on:

• what they are building

• what matters to them

• who they are trying to become

• and what the bigger aim actually is underneath the day-to-day pressure

A vague purpose wont work.
A mission from another team wont work.
A general feeling about what others want, wont work.

What is imperative, is a purpose, or focus, that gives direction to what they are doing and keeps their behaviour and decision-making anchored to that shared vision and goal.

This is often where people begin drifting, aimlessly, in everyday life too. It’s not because they are incapable, or can’t be bothered, but because they have never properly stopped to look at what they are actually working towards and why it genuinely matters to them.

So instead:

• they will react to whatever feels most urgent

• they will move towards goals that do not really fit them (and they don’t care enough about)

• they will struggle to stay consistent

• they will lose drive and momentum quickly

• they will keep changing direction halfway through…and then do it again

Eventually, even very capable people can start feeling flat, distracted or disconnected from their own life because they are constantly operating without enough clarity underneath what it is they are doing.

Why this matters in high-performance environments

Inside professional sport, there is, of course, always pressure in the background.

Pressure to perform.
Pressure to improve.
Pressure to recover quickly after setbacks.
Pressure to maintain standards consistently over long periods of time.

The people who tend to hold themselves together the best are the ones who stay connected to:

• what matters most to them

• what they are trying to build

• who they are trying to become

• why the difficult parts are worth tolerating

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That level of clarity tends to stabilise behaviour over time.

Because when the reason behind something feels meaningful enough, people stop needing constant motivation in order to act.

Of course…

They still have difficult days.
They still lose confidence occasionally.

But they are far less likely to drift away completely because there is something underneath their behaviour holding it together.

And whilst most people are not operating inside elite sport environments, the same pattern show up in everyday life too.

This is where it can go wrong.

People often assume they need:

• more discipline

• more confidence

• more productivity

• better habits

• stronger motivation

But often, what they really need is clearer direction.

Because it is difficult to stay consistent when:

• the goal itself feels unclear

• the reason behind it is weak

• or the thing you are chasing does not genuinely matter to you

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That is why people often:

• start strongly then lose motivation or pace

• procrastinate on the important things

• constantly switch goals, without ever achieving much

• struggle to follow through properly

• feel busy without feeling purposeful

A lot of inconsistency is actually a clarity problem rather than a motivation problem.

This week’s training is designed to help you identify where that lack of clarity is actually coming from and how to start correcting it properly.

Inside, I’ll walk you through the full WHY exercise used to uncover:

• what you genuinely want

• what is really driving it underneath

• where your current behaviour is drifting away from it

• and the one standard to focus on this week to bring things back into alignment

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Read more

Just this week, I was asked why on earth I would leave working for a professional sports team - surely I really missed it?

It was a good question and one I get asked often. Yes, I do miss match days. The atmosphere was always amazing, even if they were long and exhausting and I was, usually, without exception, the last to finish work.

But actually, working in professional sport is not as glamorous as I think most people imagine it to be. It certainly wasn’t for me anyway. You never really get downtime, you rarely get proper holidays and even when the athletes take time off, the reality is very often that the people behind the scenes can’t. It is relentless and unrelenting and, if I’m honest, there were moments where I probably didn’t realise quite how much I had normalised running on adrenaline and pressure all the time.

But equally, there was a buzz to it that is hard to explain unless you’ve experienced it. And do I feel lucky for having done it? Yes, I absolutely do.

The atmosphere, the build-up towards a match day, the pressure, the shared purpose of everyone working towards one moment, one outcome, one event. There is something incredibly addictive about that environment and I genuinely loved being part of it.

So, why did I leave?

Aside from having children which made it much harder (I ended up working on my laptop on a cricket job five hours after giving birth to my first child), the pressures of always showing up, kidding myself I could do it all and still functioning like a human being took their toll.

And, as Covid hit, I lost a big contract almost overnight. At the time, I was working on the Six Nations, introducing players and press, coordinating networks and helping bring some incredible sporting moments together and honestly, that part was super fun.

But then Covid arrived and suddenly those contracts disappeared overnight.

And I think for the first time in a very long time, I really started questioning where I fitted and who I actually was outside of that world.

I had read so much over the years about athletes tying their identity to sport and I completely understood it, because I realised I had done exactly the same thing myself.

I had also experienced that crisis of identity when my dad died.

He was the person who introduced me to rugby in the first place. We spoke after every single game. Win, lose, good game, terrible game, we talked about all of it. Sport became such a huge part of how we connected that, when he died, sport never really felt the same afterwards. I was not sure how I was going to navigate it without him there with me.

And again, I found myself asking the same question: Who am I without this?

Around that time, I started meditating and, forgive me for sounding slightly woo woo here, but I genuinely had what felt like a complete epiphany. I had this overwhelming feeling that I needed to start writing everything down.

All the lessons.
All the experiences.
Everything I had learnt after two decades in and around professional sport about pressure, consistency, mindset, performance, self-belief and what actually helps people sustain high standards over time.

Slowly, from there, I started creating content. Then downloads. Then courses. Then talks. But underneath all of it was one very strong belief that never really left me: That the lessons used in elite sport could genuinely help people navigate everyday life better.

Not just for athletes, but leaders, founders, professionals, parents and anyone trying to juggle pressure, responsibility, ambition and real life all at once.

Because I honestly believe that so many people are capable of far more than they realise, but they are overwhelmed, mentally overloaded, inconsistent, exhausted or simply trying to carry too much all at once without the right structure or support around them.

And I truly believe people can make their lives more streamlined, more productive, less stressful and build real self-belief simply by implementing the right principles consistently.

And that is really where Lessons from the Touchline was born.

I have developed digital courses, downloadable resources and talks already, but what I feel very strongly about now is creating something deeper. A space or programme that people can join from anywhere in the world, at any stage of life and learn these lessons alongside me in a way that feels practical, honest, supportive and genuinely transformative.

But it is incredibly important to me that I make it as useful, meaningful and transformative as it can possibly be and not just another “online course” that sounds good in theory but doesn’t really create change in real life.

So, if you have got this far reading, thank you. I genuinely appreciate it.

And if you wouldn’t mind answering the polls below, it would honestly help me enormously because I’m very close to launching something I care deeply about and I would love this Substack community to help shape it into something that really nails what people need most.

If there is something missing from these polls that you think people are really struggling with right now when it comes to performance, pressure, mindset or simply trying to hold everything together, I would genuinely love to hear it in the comments.

Some of the best conversations and ideas I’ve had over the last few years have come from people simply being honest about what they are finding difficult.

Thank you again for reading and for being part of this journey with me. It genuinely means more than you probably realise.

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What I’ve seen work far better inside professional sport is having a clear way to reset before one difficult day starts affecting everything that comes after it.

In high-performance environments, there isn’t the luxury of carrying frustration endlessly into the next session, the next game, or the next decision. Things are reviewed honestly, lessons are taken from them, and then people move forward.

That doesn’t mean pretending things are fine or forcing yourself to “stay positive”. It means regaining a sense of control quickly so that one bad day does not become three or four.

In this episode, I break down four simple ways to reset after a difficult day, including:

• how to close the day deliberately

• why choosing one clear next action matters

• how to change your state properly instead of just distracting yourself

• and why high performers review, decide, and move on rather than replaying things repeatedly

A short, bitesize episode with practical ways to steady yourself and reset your thinking quickly.

A simple reset to try tonight

1. Write down:

• what actually went wrong

• what was in your control

• one thing you would handle differently next time

2. Decide one clear action for tomorrow morning.

3. Give yourself proper space to process the day:

• no phone

• no distractions

• let your thinking settle

4. Draw a line under it.

In professional sport, once something has been reviewed properly, people move on from it. That ability to reset quickly is often what keeps performance stable over time.

One of the more striking things I observed during my years working in professional sport was how much attention was given to performance away from the pitch.

People often imagine elite sport is purely about talent, fitness or technical ability, but behind every successful team there are layers of support focused on helping players and staff perform consistently under pressure. Sports Psychologists, Performance Coaches and analysts all play a role in helping create environments where people can operate at their best mentally as well as physically.

What struck me over time was how applicable many of those ideas are to ordinary life.

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Most of us are performing under pressure in one way or another. Work deadlines, financial stress, family responsibilities, uncertainty about the future and constant mental overload all take their toll. Yet many people approach their mindset reactively rather than proactively. We wait until we feel exhausted before we rest, until we lose confidence before we rebuild it and until things begin to unravel before we analyse what is not working.

In professional sport, performance is rarely left entirely to chance.

I remember one Performance Coach introducing a principle to the coaching staff built around a simple phrase: “no bullshit.” The idea was that everybody involved needed to communicate honestly, trust each other and work towards the same goal without ego or politics getting in the way. In theory, it was an excellent approach. In reality, it only worked if everyone genuinely committed to it. The moment ego entered the room, the whole thing became unstable.

That lesson has always stayed with me because it applies far beyond sport.

So much of our personal performance comes down to honesty with ourselves. Not the polished version we present publicly, but the private standards we hold ourselves to consistently. Our habits, routines, preparation, recovery and self-talk all shape the way we perform under pressure.

One thing athletes and high performers tend to do very well is analyse performance without turning every setback into a personal catastrophe. If something does not work, they review it, adjust and go again. Analysis is used to improve performance, not destroy confidence.

I think many of us would benefit from adopting the same approach in our own lives.

One thing I started doing after leaving professional sport was borrowing a simple exercise from the performance environment. Teams are usually very clear on two things: what they are working towards and how they want to operate while getting there.

Most ordinary people never stop to define either.

We set goals, but we rarely think seriously about our own performance identity. How do we actually want to show up in life? What standards, values and behaviours do we want to become known for? What are the non-negotiables?

One Performance Coach I worked with encouraged staff to create a shared identity and philosophy around the way they worked together. The details are less important than the principle behind it: clarity creates consistency.

I think there is real value in doing that exercise personally too.

Not for your business or social media presence, but for yourself.

Sometimes the most useful thing you can do is analyse your own life the way a coach would analyse performance:

• Where are you performing well consistently?

• What situations tend to throw you off course?

• Which habits are helping you feel stronger and more resilient?

• Which behaviours are quietly draining your confidence, energy or focus?

• Where do you need better preparation, boundaries or recovery?

Often, the issue is not capability. It is preparation, recovery or the systems surrounding you.

Over the years, I have become far more aware of the importance of creating systems that support me mentally and physically. Exercise, sleep, boundaries, recovery and even the way I speak to myself all affect how well I cope under pressure. That is not indulgent; it is recognising that performance and wellbeing are closely linked.

One question I often come back to is this: would the person I want to become be proud of the choices I am making today?

Not perfect choices. Just aligned ones.

Because in both sport and life, success is rarely built in one dramatic moment. More often, it is built quietly through consistency, preparation, resilience and the willingness to keep showing up even when motivation fluctuates.

Perhaps that is what being your own Performance Coach really means. Not demanding perfection from yourself, but learning how to support yourself well enough to keep moving forward.

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Welcome to Training Week

Have you ever found yourself frustrated that people seem to have formed an opinion of you that no longer feels accurate (or was never accurate in the first place)?

Perception has a huge influence over life, work and performance, whether we acknowledge it or not. It shapes trust, credibility, leadership and opportunity and, over time, it can even begin shaping how we see ourselves.

Professional sport tends to magnify this because the margins are so small. A player can be hugely talented, but if their focus starts drifting away from the pitch, eventually people stop talking purely about ability. Questions begin forming around reliability, discipline and professionalism instead. Equally, there are people who earn trust long before they speak because their behaviour consistently reinforces something calm, dependable and steady under pressure.

That is usually how perception is built. Not through one dramatic moment, but through repeated signals over time. How somebody behaves. How they respond under pressure. Whether people trust them to follow through. Whether their actions consistently reinforce the standards they claim to value.

The same thing happens far outside professional sport too.

At work, people form opinions quickly about who feels organised, emotionally steady, reliable or difficult to manage. In relationships, people notice consistency far more than intention. Even confidence becomes affected by perception because many people gradually start reacting emotionally to how they think they are being viewed.

That is often where things begin drifting.

That clarity changes how they operate.

Because there is a difference between understanding perception and becoming controlled by it.

Perception matters. Reputation matters. How you carry yourself matters. But constantly reacting emotionally to every opinion around you is exhausting and, eventually, destabilising.

The strongest performers tend to understand something much more useful instead. If perception needs to change, behaviour has to reinforce that change consistently enough for trust to rebuild around it. Most people do not fundamentally change their perception of someone because they explained themselves well. Usually, perception changes when behaviour becomes consistent enough over time to challenge the original narrative.

That is also where stronger self-belief tends to come from.

Not from finally being understood perfectly by everybody around you, but from becoming more anchored in your own standards, values and behaviour. From knowing who you are, what matters to you and how you want to operate when pressure arrives.

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Why capability and outcomes are not the same thing

One of the most interesting things about talking about discipline, consistency and performance is how quickly people tend to point towards outcomes.

If these traits are truly available to everyone, surely more people would be sustaining them?

And on the surface, that sounds like a reasonable challenge.

But I am not convinced that outcomes alone tell us very much about what people are actually capable of.

Because from what I have seen through years working in professional sport, the people who operate consistently at a high level are rarely people relying purely on motivation, confidence or extraordinary levels of willpower every single day.

Very often, they are people operating inside systems and environments that make certain behaviours easier to repeat, easier to return to and far harder to avoid.

That is a very different thing.

What professional sport teaches you very quickly

Professional sport strips away the fantasy that high performers simply “feel like it” more than everybody else.

They do not.

What they often have, however, is structure.

There are standards.
There are routines.
There are expectations.
There are behaviours repeated consistently enough that they eventually stop feeling exceptional and simply become part of how somebody operates.

And I think this is where consistency is often misunderstood.

People tend to look at disciplined individuals and assume the discipline came first, when very often the environment, the framework and the repeated behaviours arrived long before the identity did.

Over time, those behaviours compound.

Not dramatically at first.
Not instantly.
But steadily enough that eventually they begin to shape confidence, self belief and performance itself.

How this applies beyond professional sport

One of the strongest beliefs I have developed through my years working in professional sport is that many of the structures, behaviours and strategies that support high performance are not exclusive to elite environments or elite people.

They are far more transferable than we often think.

And I genuinely believe that more people are capable of discipline, consistency, self belief and sustained progress than they currently realise, particularly when they are given the right frameworks, structures and ways of operating to support them.

Because yes, of course, willpower matters to a point.

But I think we often overestimate the importance of huge acts of motivation and underestimate the impact of smaller habit changes repeated consistently over time.

Very often, meaningful change does not begin with one dramatic overhaul or some life changing moment of clarity. It begins with one small step, repeated often enough that it slowly starts to alter how somebody operates, how they make decisions and what starts to feel normal to them.

The problem is that most people give up long before those smaller changes have had time to compound into something bigger.

The problem with modern life

And I think modern life plays a huge part in that.

We now live in a world where almost everything sits at our fingertips all of the time. We can have answers within seconds, shopping delivered the next day, entertainment instantly and even recovery from illness is often discussed through the lens of speed, optimisation and quick results.

Everything around us quietly reinforces the idea that if something is working, we should see evidence of it immediately.

But meaningful change rarely works like that.

Most of the time, it is slow, repetitive, underwhelming and, at least initially, almost completely invisible.

There is no dramatic breakthrough moment at the beginning. No sudden transformation that confirms everything is “working”. There is simply the decision to continue, often without immediate reward, long enough for those behaviours to start compounding beneath the surface.

And honestly, I think that is probably the point where most things fall apart.

Not because people are incapable of discipline, consistency or self belief, but because they mistake the absence of immediate results for the absence of progress.

The lesson I keep returning to

The longer I spend around performance, the more I believe that consistency is less about constantly finding motivation and far more about building ways of operating that can survive the days where motivation disappears entirely.

And perhaps that is the more useful conversation.

Not whether people are capable of change.

But whether they have been shown how to stay with something long enough for change to occur.

In reality, it moves. It drops. And when it does, most people try to think their way back into confidence.

In this episode, Kate Oram explains why that doesn’t work — and what actually does.

Drawing on over twenty years working inside professional sport, this episode looks at how self-belief is built through action, not overthinking, and why high-performance environments remove the question of confidence altogether.

You’ll learn:

• Why self-belief drops — and why that’s normal

• How athletes operate without constantly questioning themselves

• Why action, not thinking, is what rebuilds belief

• How to simplify your approach when things feel off

• A practical way to reset and take your next step

This is a short, bitesize episode designed to give you something clear and usable straight away.

Practical reset (from this episode)

If your self-belief has taken a hit, don’t overcomplicate it. Start here:

1. Name what’s actually going on

Instead of saying “I’m stuck”, ask:

• What’s actually making this feel difficult right now?

• What would help me feel more supported this week?

• What do I need to let go of to move forward?

(You’re not stuck — there’s usually something underneath it.)

2. Shift from thinking to action

Ask yourself:

👉 “If I trusted myself today, what would I do?”

Then do one version of that.

Not perfectly. Just once.

3. Reframe the thought that’s keeping you stuck

Take one thought you’ve had recently, for example:

• “I’m behind”

• “I can’t stick to anything”

Then replace it with something more useful:

• “I can start small — right here, right now”

• “I can create systems that support me”

Say it out loud. Repeat it. Use it.

4. Choose one belief anchor

Pick a line you can come back to when things feel off:

• “I don’t need motivation — I need direction.”

• “My belief builds every time I take one small action.”

Keep it visible. Use it.

5. Do one thing this week

Not everything. Just one.

👉 One action that supports your belief
👉 One system or boundary that supports your energy

That’s enough to start.

You don’t need to feel ready. You just need to begin again, with clarity.

What I learnt inside professional sport

Most people think you need to be an athlete to live like one. You don’t. But you do need something most people don’t have.

When you strip it all back, what I saw over more than twenty years inside professional sport wasn’t just talent, or fitness, or even mindset. It was a way of operating. A way of approaching the day, the week, and the small decisions that most people don’t think twice about.

That is the part that makes the difference. Not just in sport, but in everything else. It is what allows ability to show up consistently, rather than occasionally. It is what stops things drifting. It is what turns intention into something that actually gets followed through.

And most people, understandably, don’t have that. Not because they aren’t capable, but because no one has ever really shown them what that way of operating looks like, or how to build it into their own life.

Why most people get stuck

I spent over two decades working behind the scenes in professional sport, in environments where performance mattered and where things were looked at properly, not guessed at or brushed over. What becomes obvious very quickly is that ability shows up fast. What separates people is how they operate once it does. How they approach their work, how they respond when things don’t go to plan, and how they structure their time when no one is watching.

Outside of that environment, most people are left to figure this out for themselves. They know, broadly, what they want to improve or change, but they haven’t quite stopped to look at it clearly enough to do anything with it. So they carry on as they are, repeating the same patterns, hoping something will shift.

The step most people skip

In sport, that first step is never missed. Before anything changes, there is always a moment where things are looked at properly.

• What is actually working

• What is not

• Where things are drifting

• What needs to improve

It sounds simple, but it is the part most people miss. And without it, everything that follows is built on guesswork.

Before we go further

Before I go any further, I just want to say thank you.

To everyone who has subscribed, read, replied or shared anything so far. I know there are a lot of things you could be spending your time on, and I don’t take that lightly.

What I want this to become is something that is genuinely useful. Not just something you read and agree with, but something that helps you look at your own situation more clearly and actually do something with it. Something you can come back to and use, rather than just consume and move on from.

So I’ve introduced The Training Week. This is where I take what I’ve seen inside professional sport and turn it into something practical you can apply directly in your own life, each week.

I’m going to start with the first thing that always happens in the coaches’ room…

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In it, I explain why I created Lessons from the Touchline and what you can expect going forward.

After more than twenty years working inside professional sport, I’ve seen what actually holds up under pressure. Not just in terms of performance, but in how people think, make decisions, and follow through when things aren’t straightforward.

This podcast is about taking those lessons and applying them in a way that works in everyday life.

Some episodes will be slightly longer, exploring ideas in more depth. Others will be shorter, bitesize episodes that give you something clear and practical to take away and use straight away.

If you’re looking to think more clearly, build self-belief, and create structure around what you’re doing, you’re in the right place.