I learned my own, considerably less glamorous version of that lesson in my first season in professional rugby, and it started with a page 3 poster stuck to a whiteboard with my name written underneath it.

In this episode I’ll tell you what I did in the split second after I saw it, why I decided to build my own perception rather than wait for anyone to hand me a fair one, and the one honest caveat I’d add now about where that instinct can tip into something less healthy if you let it.

This is the last episode of Season 1, so I’m leaving you with the lesson that’s shaped how I operate more than any other. Say it before you’re sure of it. Then go and make it true.

One lesson from sport. One story from me. One thing you can take away and use today.

Press play. I’ll see you in there.

I’m taking a break on the podcast for the summer, but I will be back with Season 2 in September.

If there’s a story you’d like dragged out of the archive, or a topic I haven’t touched on yet, let me know in the comments.

I read every single one.

I had just got up on a Saturday morning when my phone rang. A senior player was on the line, telling me a tabloid journalist had just called him alleging that several players had been taking drugs. He had given the journalist my number and wanted to know what to do.

I had planned a day out with a friend I hadn’t seen in months. She was already on her way to my house. I sent her away, sat down at my kitchen table, and started working through what I knew to be the protocol. Not because I felt calm. Because I had a framework and I followed it.

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Over the next several hours, the journalist rang me every fifteen minutes. My phone lost battery from the volume of calls. I came out in a stress rash. But the crisis was managed, and it was managed because I knew the steps before the chaos arrived.

Elite sport taught me that you cannot plan the crisis itself. You can only plan your response to it.

Here is the framework.

1. Pause before you react

The first instinct in a crisis is to respond immediately. In professional sport, the first instinct is to pause. Even thirty seconds of deliberate stillness before you act changes the quality of what comes next. Panicked decisions compound crises. Considered ones contain them.

Try this: In any high-pressure situation, build in a deliberate pause before you respond. Tell whoever needs to know that you are looking into it and will come back to them. Then use that time to think rather than react.

2. Get the facts before you say anything

The most common mistake in a crisis is speaking before you know what you are dealing with. In sport, the holding statement exists for this reason. It buys time without creating exposure. You do not need to say much. You need to say something accurate and nothing more.

Try this: Before responding to any crisis, ask yourself: what do I actually know for certain right now? Communicate only that, and nothing beyond it.

3. Control the narrative, do not run from it

Saying nothing is never a neutral act. It leaves every blank to be filled by someone else, and they will not fill it charitably. Elite sport communications operates on one principle: get ahead of the story, or the story gets ahead of you. You do not have to say everything. But you have to say something, and you have to say it first.

Try this: In any crisis situation, decide on your one clear message before anything else. What do you want people to understand? Everything you say should serve that message.

4. Move with integrity, even when the situation does not

The crisis I described did not go the way I wanted. I was overruled on decisions I believed were right. I had to release a statement I was not proud of. What I could control was what I did around the edges: I called the player involved, I checked on the people closest to him, I maintained my own standards even when the institution’s fell short.

In a crisis, you cannot always control the outcome. You can always control your conduct.

Try this: In any difficult situation, identify the one thing you can do that is unambiguously the right thing. Do that, regardless of what else is happening around it.

5. Review it honestly when it is over

Elite sport teams do not move straight from crisis to the next match. They review what happened, what they would do differently, and what the framework needs to account for next time. A crisis you do not review is a crisis you will repeat.

Try this: After any difficult period, write three questions: what happened, what I would do differently, and what I now know that I didn’t before. Keep the answers somewhere you can return to.

You cannot prevent every crisis. But you can be the person in the room who knows what to do when one arrives. That is a skill, and it is built in advance.

If you want to build the complete operating system that holds you steady under pressure, The Performance System is five weeks of structured work with personal written feedback from me on every review you submit. Find out more HERE

Welcome to Training Week

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

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

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

This week installs that structure around the one thing you keep meaning to get to and never quite reaching.

Here is what I am going to walk you through:

Step 1: Pick the one thing you keep postponing

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

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

Step 4: Build the environment that makes starting the default

The steps below are for paying subscribers.

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What I find fascinating about it isn’t really the tactics. It’s the principle underneath. Nobody on that pitch was expected to survive the full eighty minutes alone.

I think about that a lot when I think about the strangest, most disorientating pivot of my own career, when I stepped away from professional sport to help my husband with his family business. It felt like failure at the time. Like I’d lost my identity and let go of everything I’d spent years building.

In this episode I’ll tell you how we relaunched the business website within a couple of months, why I ended up in front of the camera myself after a rocky start with social media, and how our Instagram followers went from two thousand to over twenty one thousand in three months.

I’ll also tell you why none of that pivot happened on my own, and why identifying your own Bomb Squad, properly, today, matters more than you think.

One lesson from sport. One story from me. One thing you can take away and use today.

Press play. I’ll see you in there.

Welcome to Training Week

Most people think being reactive is a personality flaw, something to feel guilty about and fix with more discipline. It is not a character issue. It is a planning gap.

In elite sport, teams do not wait for pressure to test them and hope they cope well in the moment. They build the response in advance. Set plays for when the game gets tight. Protocols for when a session goes wrong. Scripts for the substitution nobody wanted to make. None of it is improvised under load, because nobody performs well while inventing a response with the pressure already on them.

Reactive people are not weaker under pressure. They are simply meeting pressure for the first time in the moment it happens, without a plan already built. Proactive people met that same pressure days earlier, on a calm afternoon, when it was still hypothetical.

The gap between the two is not confidence. It is preparation. This week builds the preparation.

Here is what I am going to walk you through:

Step 1: Name your three most likely pressure points this week

Step 2: Write the response before you need it

Step 3: Set the trigger that switches you into the plan

Step 4: Review which pressure points you actually predicted correctly

The steps below are for paying subscribers.

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I never had anyone try to pull a number off my back, but I want to tell you about the quieter, far less photogenic version of that same fight, because it ran through my entire first season in professional rugby.

I’ll tell you about the CEO who asked me, in my job interview, whether I had a boyfriend, and what he meant by it. I’ll tell you about the club captain who stopped me on the stairs on my first away trip and asked why I was even there. And I’ll tell you what I decided to do about both of them.

This one isn’t just for the women listening. If you’ve ever had to answer a question nobody would think to ask someone else, or work twice as hard just to earn a seat everyone else got handed automatically, this episode is for you.

One lesson from sport. One story from me. One thing you can take away and use today.

Press play. I’ll see you in there.

For years, I interviewed players and coaches every week. For YouTube channels, for broadcast, for club content. Before big matches, after defeats, mid-season when things were going wrong. And after a while, you start to notice something.

Nobody talked about self belief as though it were a gift they had been given or a feeling they had worked hard to cultivate. They backed themselves because that was what the job required. Week in, week out, year after year, they had simply done it so many times that it had become unremarkable to them. It was just part of the job.

That is the thing most people misunderstand about self belief. They treat it as something you either have or you don’t. Elite sport treats it as something you build through repetition until it stops feeling like courage and starts feeling like habit.

Here is how high performers actually build it.

1. Stop waiting to feel ready

Every professional athlete I worked with experienced doubt before high-pressure performances. The ones who performed consistently did not perform because they felt ready. They performed because they had decided to act regardless of how they felt.

Try this: Name one thing you have been waiting to feel ready for. Do the first step today, before the feeling arrives. Self belief follows action, not the other way around.

2. Build it on evidence, not affirmation

The most effective self belief is not built on positive thinking. It is built on a concrete record of what you have actually done. Elite sport is obsessive about evidence because athletes need something real to return to when doubt is loudest.

Vague confidence collapses under pressure. Specific evidence holds.

Try this: At the end of each week, write down three things you did well. Specific and factual, no hedging. Do this for a month. You are building the evidence base that self belief needs to survive.

3. Separate your performance from your identity

One of the clearest things elite sport teaches is that a bad performance is not a bad person. Players who conflate the two spiral quickly. Players who can separate them recover quickly. The match is not you. The presentation is not you. The setback is not you. Your response to it is.

Try this: After a difficult week or a poor outcome, write two lists. What happened, and who you are. Keep them separate. The first one is a performance to review. The second one is not up for review.

4. Choose your environment deliberately

Self belief is not built in isolation. It is heavily influenced by the people around you. In professional sport, the people in the changing room matter as much as the training programme. If your current environment is consistently telling you that you are not enough, your self belief will reflect that over time.

Try this: Identify one person in your life who consistently backs you, and one who consistently drains you. This week, weight your time accordingly.

5. Use your past self as evidence

You have backed yourself before. You have done hard things before. You have been in situations where you did not know if you could do it, and you did. Elite performers return to this kind of evidence deliberately when confidence is low. It is not nostalgia. It is ammunition.

Try this: Write down one moment when you backed yourself and it paid off. Read it back. That person was you. That person still is.

Self belief is a practice, not a personality trait. The performers I watched build it over years were not more talented or more certain than the ones who didn’t. They were simply more deliberate about it.

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Welcome to Training Week

Most people treat overwhelm as a signal that they need to do less. It is well meaning advice, cutting the list, saying no more, simplifying the week, and it rarely works, because overwhelm is not really about volume. It is about the absence of a sorting mechanism.

In elite sport, nobody performs with fewer demands. A professional weekly schedule is dense: training, recovery, media, analysis, travel, personal life, all competing for the same hours. What changes the experience of that load is not the size of it. It is whether there is a system deciding what matters most in any given moment.

Without that system, everything shows up at the same priority level, and the brain treats every task as urgent. That is what overwhelm actually is: too many things asking to be first, with nothing telling them where to stand in the queue.

The fix is not doing less. It is building the sorting system that tells you, quickly and without agonising, what goes first, what waits, and what gets dropped entirely. That is what this week installs.

Here is what I am going to walk you through:

Step 1: Building your one page sort

Step 2: Giving every task a lane, not just a list

Step 3: Protecting the top lane like it is non negotiable

Step 4: Closing the day on purpose, not when you run out of energy

The steps below are for paying subscribers.

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And her first reaction wasn’t triumph. It was doubt. Who was she to be leading this? Then she talked herself straight back out of it. She’d won this race twice before. She had more experience than ever. If somebody had to be out front, there was no real reason it couldn’t be her.

I’ve spent twenty years watching that exact moment play out in elite sport, over and over, in people who go on to have long, serious careers. It’s never really about talent. It’s about what they do in the split second before they’ve got the evidence to back themselves.

I had my own version of it, a long way from a desert, on a freezing balcony in Newbury. Bath Rugby’s CEO asked me if I could write match reports. I said yes, immediately, no hesitation. I had never written one in my life.

In this episode: the lunch with the PR agency owner whose lesson changed how I thought about qualifications forever, the months of unpaid, unglamorous graft that got me onto that Bath Rugby balcony in the first place, and what Rachel Entrekin’s win at Cocodona can teach you about the exact moment self belief has to outrun the evidence.

One lesson from sport. One story from me. One thing you can take away and use today.

Press play. I’ll see you in there.

In a professional rugby club, the Monday after a match is not a day off from the last one. It is the first day of the next one. The team comes in, the analysts have already been through the footage, and the review begins. What worked. What didn’t. What the data says versus what it felt like. What changes need to be made before Saturday.

Nobody waits until the season is over to reflect. Nobody assumes that a win means everything is working, or that a loss means everything needs to change. The review is regular, structured, honest, and short. Then everyone moves.

Most people I have worked with do not review their weeks at all. They move from one thing to the next, carrying the same patterns, repeating the same mistakes, and wondering why consistency is so hard to find. The weekly review is the single habit that changes this more than any other.

1. Review on a fixed day, every week

In elite sport, the review is not done when there is time. It is built into the schedule. The Monday analysis meeting happens whether the team won by thirty points or lost in the final minute. The consistency of the habit is what makes it useful. A review done occasionally produces occasional insight. A review done weekly produces a compounding picture of your own performance over time.

Try this: Choose one day and one time this week as your review slot. Put it in your diary as a recurring event. Treat it as a non-negotiable appointment with yourself.

2. Review honestly, not charitably

The most common failure in self-review is giving yourself the benefit of the doubt on things that do not deserve it. Elite sport does not do this because the footage does not lie. A missed tackle is a missed tackle regardless of whether you felt tired or the opposition surprised you. Honest review is not self-criticism. It is accuracy.

Try this: In your next review, identify one thing you are tempted to explain away. Write down what actually happened, without the explanation. That is the thing to address next week.

3. Review the process, not just the outcome

Elite sport separates process from outcome because a good process can produce a bad result and a bad process can produce a good one. What improves long-term performance is the quality of how you operate, not just whether things worked out this week. Reviewing only the outcome tells you what happened. Reviewing the process tells you why.

Try this: Add one process question to your weekly review: how did I actually operate this week, separate from the results? This is where consistent improvement starts.

4. Identify one thing to change, not everything

After a poor performance, a team does not overhaul the entire game plan. They identify the highest-leverage thing to improve before the next match and they focus on that. A review that produces ten action points produces nothing, because ten things compete with each other for attention. One clear change, made deliberately, compounds over time.

Try this: End every review with one sentence: the one thing I am going to do differently next week is this. Just one. Write it at the top of your notes for the following week.

5. Acknowledge what worked

This is the part most people skip. Elite sport does not skip it, because understanding what is working is as important as understanding what is not. If you only ever review what went wrong, you will optimise for avoiding failure rather than building on strength. Both matter.

Try this: Start your weekly review with one question: what actually went well this week? Write at least two specific answers before you move to anything else.

The review habit will not produce results in week one. It will produce them in month three, when you can see your own patterns clearly enough to change them. That is how elite sport builds consistent performers, and it is how you build one too.

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And every time, I think the same thing.

It’s not because I’m naturally more confident, or more disciplined, or wired differently.

It’s because of what I spent twenty years watching.

I wasn’t the athlete. I was the person in the background — season after season — with a front row seat to what actually makes elite performers different.

And what I saw, over and over, was that the best in the world weren’t exceptional because they felt confident every day.

They had a system.

A way of thinking, preparing and responding that worked regardless of how they felt.

That fascinated me. And for almost two years I have been working out how to translate everything I observed into something genuinely teachable.

Not just for professional athletes.

For anyone who knows they are capable of more and wants the structure to prove it.

What follows are the five things that sit at the heart of all of it.

Each one is something I watched elite performers do consistently. Each one is something I have now built into a tool, a framework or a programme that you can work through yourself.

None of it requires a sporting background.

All of it works because it is about human performance, not sporting performance.

1. Self belief is not a feeling. It is a standard you set for yourself.

Inside professional sport, the performers who sustained belief over a long season were not the ones who felt it most naturally.

They were the ones who had decided, specifically, who they were as a performer.

They had named it. Written it down. Returned to it when pressure arrived and tried to tell them something different.

Most people treat self belief as something that either shows up or it doesn’t.

In reality, it is something you build deliberately — by getting honest about what is currently getting in the way, by defining who you are when you are at your best, and by setting a standard that does not move when things get hard.

I built the Self Belief Reset for exactly this.

It is a free workbook that takes you through that process — not as a motivational exercise, but as a practical one.

If you have ever felt stuck between knowing what you are capable of and actually backing yourself, that is where to start.

Start the Self Belief Reset here

(It is FREE!)

2. You cannot perform well inside chaos. The first job is always to remove the noise.

Before any high performance environment begins a new cycle, the first thing it does is cut.

It removes what is irrelevant, defines what matters most and builds a foundation of focus before any execution begins.

This is not optional. It is the starting point for everything else.

Outside sport, most people skip this entirely.

They move from one week to the next carrying the same noise, the same vague priorities and the same unresolved questions about what they are actually working towards.

Then wonder why progress feels slow.

Getting clear is not a passive process. It means defining who you are performing for and what you are working towards — not in abstract terms, but in specific ones you can return to every single week.

It means being honest about what is currently taking your attention that has no business doing so.

Build the foundation once. Let everything else sit on top of it.

3. Motivation is unreliable. Identity is not.

The shift I saw most consistently in elite performers was this.

At some point, they stopped performing to prove something and started performing because of who they had decided they were.

The behaviour stopped being driven by how they felt on a given day.

It was driven by a standard they had set for themselves that they were no longer willing to drop below.

This is the difference between motivated and disciplined.

Motivated means you act when you feel like it. Disciplined means you act because you have decided that is who you are.

One is dependent on circumstances. The other is not.

Raising your standard is not about pressure or perfectionism.

It is about deciding, clearly and specifically, what you are no longer willing to accept from yourself — and then holding that, especially on the days when it would be easier not to.

4. Knowing what to do is not the same as doing it. The gap between the two is where most performance is lost.

In elite sport, execution is treated as a skill in its own right.

Not a given. Not a personality trait. A trained capacity that gets built through specific habits, routines and systems designed to reduce friction between intention and action.

Most people have more than enough knowledge to perform better than they currently are.

What they are missing is the bridge between knowing and doing.

That bridge is built from small structural decisions: what you do first, what you remove, what you make automatic so that it no longer requires a decision at all.

The question to ask is not “why can’t I follow through?”

It is “what is creating friction between the intention and the action?”

Find that. Remove it. The follow through becomes significantly easier.

That is what elite environments do. It is what you can do too.

5. The performers who improve fastest are the ones who review honestly and consistently.

In professional sport, review is not a luxury.

It is a non-negotiable part of every performance cycle.

After every game, every training block, every week, the same questions get asked: what worked, what didn’t, what needs to change. Not emotionally. Practically.

Most people never do this at all.

They move from week to week on instinct, repeating what felt good and avoiding what didn’t, without ever sitting down to look clearly at how they are actually operating.

As a result, the same patterns repeat. The same friction points keep showing up. The same gap between intention and output persists.

The Three A’s is the review framework I use across everything I do.

Analyse, Action, Achieve.

It is the same weekly cycle that professional teams run, applied to your work, your health and your personal performance.

It gives you a structured way to look honestly at what is happening, decide what needs to change and define what a good week actually looks like.

You can access it as a standalone tool right now.

Find The Three A’s here.

The Three As

If you want all five, built into a single system, with me alongside you every week

Everything above — self belief, focus, identity, execution and review — sits inside The Performance System

It is a five week programme that takes each of these principles and installs them properly.

Structured weekly work. Practical tools built specifically around you. Personal written feedback from me on every review you submit.

This is not a course. There are no videos to watch passively and forget.

It is structured work, done by you, reviewed by me, built around your life and what you are actually trying to achieve.

By the end of five weeks you will have a Performance Charter — a personal operating system that is yours permanently.

I have tested these principles with people across the UK, Australia and America who have never set foot on a professional sports pitch.

They work because they are about human performance, not sporting performance.

The Performance System is open now. Everything you need is here.

Unlock Performance System

Have you ever worked hard, shown up consistently and done everything right — only to find that the results still aren’t reflecting the effort you’re putting in?

Perhaps you feel like you’re busy all the time but not actually moving forward. Or you know what you should be doing, but can’t seem to make it stick. Or you’ve had good spells, but consistency is the part that keeps letting you down.

Most people, when they hit that wall, go looking for more motivation. More confidence. A better morning routine. Another strategy.

After twenty years working inside elite professional sport, I can tell you that isn’t what separates people who perform consistently from those who don’t. The difference is almost never about how fired up someone feels. It’s about how they operate when the feeling isn’t there.

High performance isn’t about hype. It’s about having a way of working that still functions when things feel uncertain, pressured or hard. And the important part is that it can be learned. It isn’t reserved for professional athletes. It’s a set of behaviours, and behaviours can be built.

This week’s training gives you the foundations of that operating system.

Here is what I am going to walk you through:

Step 1: Stop waiting for motivation — build structure instead

Step 2: Get clear on what actually matters this week

Step 3: Review your performance, not just your output

Step 4: Reset quickly when things go wrong

The steps below are for paying subscribers.

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In this episode I talk about what he taught me — the hard way — about decisiveness, pace, and why procrastination is really just a failure to back your own judgement.

You’ll also hear about the New Zealand All Blacks and why their extraordinary win rate comes down to something much simpler than talent, and what the pace of professional sport teaches you about making decisions that actually move things forward.

One lesson from sport. One story from me. One thing you can take away and use today.

Press play. I’ll see you in there.

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Tom Foley spent more than a decade officiating professional rugby at the highest level, including a World Cup final, making contested, irreversible decisions in seconds, under intense scrutiny, with every word broadcast live.

He now helps boards and leadership teams make hard decisions, surface the truth they need to hear, and hold their nerve under pressure. He writes The Hard Call, on decision-making, legitimacy and composure when there is no right answer.

Tom and I connected after recognising something in each other’s work. Our careers ran adjacently, his inside the game as an official, mine behind the scenes in the media and communications world of professional sport, but the challenges we faced and the lessons we drew from them turned out to be remarkably similar.

This piece is about composure under pressure, and why it is not a personality you are either born with or not. It is a discipline. I think you will find this piece well worth your time.

Recently I sat in a boardroom of a large multinational organisation that was quietly coming apart. Not financially, not yet, but in the way that tends to come first. The brand was under attack, the numbers were sliding, and the pressure had moved out of the spreadsheets and into the bodies of the people at the top. The meetings ran fast and loud. People talked over each other. Decisions were made twice and reversed three times. There was a great deal of emotion and very little control.

What they could not see from the inside was that their panic was not staying in that room. It was cascading. Every clipped email, every plan changed at the last moment, every visibly rattled appearance in front of their own people was being read, copied and amplified one layer down, and then another, until an entire organisation was behaving like a frightened animal because the dozen people at the top were.

I did not tell them to calm down. You cannot order a human being to feel something, and telling a stressed person to relax is the fastest way to make it worse. What I told them was this. It is completely natural to feel the panic. Everyone in this building feels it, and you are not failing because you feel it too. But when the eyes of the organisation are on you, your job is to be the calmest people in the room. Not the calmest people in the world. The calmest people in that room, on purpose, for the few minutes it matters most.

Then we got specific, because “be calm” is useless and the specifics are everything.

Calm is not a temperament

The most damaging belief about composure is that it is a personality. That some people are simply built serene, with slow pulses and even voices, and the rest of us are not, and that is the end of it.

Let me offer myself as evidence against it. For more than a decade I officiated professional rugby at the highest level, making irreversible decisions in seconds, in front of tens of thousands of people in the stadium and millions more at home, with every word I said broadcast live. And I can tell you with certainty: I am not a naturally calm person. When the hardest calls landed on me, my heart rate was not the heart rate of a serene man. The composure I showed was not a feeling I was lucky enough to have. It was a performance I had trained, deliberately, for years, precisely because I knew the feeling would not be there when I needed it.

There is a serious research literature behind this, gathered under the slightly unusual word equanimity. Equanimity is the even-minded, non-reactive state that lets a person meet difficulty without being swept away by it, and two findings about it matter enormously to leaders. The first is that it is consequential: people higher in equanimity regulate their emotions better and perform more steadily under stress. The second, and this is the liberating part, is that it is trainable. There is a degree we are born with, but it is mostly a skill, built through emotion regulation and cognitive flexibility, the way a muscle is built. The Stoics knew this long before the psychologists measured it. We are disturbed, they argued, not so much by events as by the view we take of them, and the view can be trained.

The balance between arousal and control

It helps to be precise about what we are training. Composure is not the absence of pressure. It is a balance, the regulated point between raw arousal and conscious control. At one end is the fully flooded stress response, the racing heart and the tunnel vision, the body acting before the mind can intervene. At the other end is cold detachment, which is its own failure. Psychological balance is holding the dial at the point where you are aroused enough to be sharp and controlled enough to choose.

This is not a metaphor. More than a century ago, Yerkes and Dodson described the relationship between arousal and performance, and it has held up ever since. A little arousal sharpens you. But past an optimal point, rising arousal does not just feel worse, it makes you think worse. Attention narrows. Working memory falters. The capacity for complex problem-solving, the exact capacity a hard decision needs, degrades. An over-aroused leader is cognitively impaired at the precise moment the stakes are highest, and is pulling the whole room’s arousal up with them.

You are the thermostat

Which is why the leader’s balance matters more than anyone else’s. Human beings co-regulate. Our nervous systems are not sealed units; we read each other constantly, below conscious thought, and we tune ourselves to the most central person in the room. In a crisis, the group calibrates to the leader. You are not a thermometer, reading the temperature. You are the thermostat, setting it.

The research turns that from a nice idea into a hard claim. Emotional states transfer between people automatically, as we synchronise with one another’s expressions, voices and postures, which Hatfield and colleagues mapped in detail. At group level, Barsade’s work on the “ripple effect” showed this contagion measurably shifts cooperation, conflict and performance. And Sy, Côté and Saavedra demonstrated the specifically downhill flow: a leader’s mood transfers to the group’s emotional tone and, through it, shapes how the group coordinates and what it decides.

That is exactly what was happening to my boardroom. Their panic was not a personal weakness. It was a contagion event, and they were patient zero. The instruction to be the calmest people in the room worked because it put the lever in the only place it actually sits. They could not calm the organisation directly. They could only regulate themselves and let co-regulation carry it downward, the same channel that had been carrying their fear.

There is a connection here to something I have written about before. Amy Edmondson’s work on psychological safety shows that in low-safety rooms people do not disagree out loud; they go quiet, they nod, and they undermine the decision afterwards. And the thing that drives safety down fastest is often a visibly rattled leader. Frightened people give you the false yes. A composed leader does the reverse: they make it safe to bring the bad news into the room, because the bad news is clearly not going to detonate the person receiving it. Your composure is not vanity. It is the precondition for getting the truth out of the people around you while you can still use it.

How you actually build it

So how is it learned? Not by deciding to feel calm, which never works, but by training the state and the behaviours that produce it.

Start with the things you can control in the moment. Language goes first under adrenaline, so override it: slow the rate, drop the pitch, shorten the sentences, and where you can, pre-script the phrasing for the moments you know will be hot, so you are reaching for prepared words rather than inventing them with a brain that has gone offline. The body is next, and the room reads it before it hears you, so when everything speeds up, slow your body down on purpose. Settle the hands first, then the posture. And use time, which is the most powerful lever of all: take the time the decision needs, not the time the noise demands, and hold the pause with steady body language so it reads as command rather than indecision.

Underneath all of that sits the lever that makes the rest possible. Composure is in large part a trained physiological state, built through breathing, tempo and, above all, rehearsal under load. You do not learn calm in calm conditions. You build it by practising in pressure, so that when the real moment comes your body does not treat it as a novel emergency, because it has been somewhere like it before. It is why match officials train decision-making with the heart rate up and the legs burning, rather than fresh and seated. You are not only training the decision; you are training the state the decision has to be made in. A simple pre-pressure routine, run the same way every time, becomes an anchor that summons the state on demand. And the part people forget: recover afterwards. The leaders who burn out are not the ones who feel the pressure, because everyone feels it. They are the ones who never learned to put it down.

None of this asks you to feel something you do not feel. It asks you to perform a state, deliberately, and to transmit it to everyone reading you. That gap between the state you are in and the state you transmit is not dishonesty. It is the most generous thing you can offer a frightened room, because your composure becomes the platform the rest of them can think from.

My boardroom did not become serene. Serenity was never the goal. They became regulated. They learned to hold the dial between arousal and control, to settle their own bodies so they could settle the organisation’s, and to be, for the minutes when every eye was on them, the calmest people in the room.

That is not a personality some of them happened to have. It is a discipline all of them could build. And so can you.

Want to go further?

This is the heart of a keynote I give to boards and leadership teams, “The Calmest Person in the Room”, on composure as a trainable discipline and on why a team reads its leader’s nervous system before it reads the strategy. I also work directly with executive teams on decision-making and composure under pressure, the same conditions I spent a career in, just without the whistle.

If you think it would help you or your organisation, I would be glad to talk. You can reply directly to this post, subscribe or get in touch at www.the-hard-call.com. And if you found this useful, do share it with someone who is about to walk into a room that needs them to be the calmest person in it.

This is part of a larger argument I keep returning to, that leadership is the work of changing what people do, and that you cannot do it well from a place of panic.

Welcome to Training Week

Most people think focus is a personality trait. Either you have it or you don’t.

Either you’re the kind of person who can sit down and get things done, or you’re the kind of person who picks up your phone seventeen times before lunch and wonders where the morning went.

But inside elite sport, focus is not treated as a personality trait at all.

It is treated as an environment problem.

And that distinction changes everything.

Because when a professional team walks into a training session, nobody stands at the front and says “right, everyone focus today.” Nobody relies on willpower or good intentions or the hope that players happen to be in the right headspace.

Instead, the environment is built to produce focus automatically.

The structure is in place before anyone arrives. The distractions are removed before they become a problem. The attention is directed before it has a chance to drift.

That is why elite performers are not more focused than everyone else in some innate, genetic sense. They are operating inside environments specifically designed to protect concentration, narrow attention and eliminate the decisions that drain it.

Outside sport, most people do the opposite.

They sit down to do important work inside an environment that is actively competing against them. Notifications on. Inbox open. Fifteen tabs running. Phone face-up on the desk. And then wonder why they cannot seem to concentrate for more than a few minutes at a time.

The problem is not willpower.

The problem is the environment.

There are broadly three types of people when it comes to focus:

The Reactor — moves from task to task based on whatever feels most urgent. Busy all day, productive for very little of it. Ends most days wondering where the time went.

The Intender — knows what needs to get done, sits down with good intentions, but loses the battle to distraction within minutes. Finishes the day having done some of it, none of it as well as they wanted, and feeling vaguely behind.

The Operator — has a structure that protects attention before it is needed. Does not rely on motivation or mood to stay focused. Produces consistent output because the environment does the heavy lifting.

Most people spend years as a Reactor or an Intender, assuming that focus will come when things calm down, when they feel more organised, when life gets a little less busy.

It doesn’t work like that.

Inside elite sport, I watched this play out repeatedly. The performers who concentrated most effectively under pressure were not the ones trying hardest to focus. They were the ones who had built a system that made distraction harder than attention.

This week’s training gives you exactly that system.

Here is what I am going to walk you through:

• Step 1: The environment audit — what elite sport removes before a session begins, and how to apply the same logic to your day

• Step 2: The attention anchor — the single question elite performers use to direct focus before pressure arrives

• Step 3: The distraction protocol — how to handle interruption without losing your thread

• Step 4: The recovery reset — what to do when focus has already broken down

• Step 5: Your focus standard — the one rule to hold this week

The steps below are for paying subscribers.

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I had been in the job fourteen days. I had no idea what the protocol was. I had no idea if it was even true. And I absolutely could not let him hear any of that in my voice.

In this episode I talk about what that moment taught me about backing yourself before you have any evidence that you should. Why fake it till you make it is one of the most misunderstood phrases in the performance world. And what twenty years behind the scenes in elite sport actually looks like when the pressure is on.

You’ll also hear about Michael Jordan being cut from his school basketball team at fifteen years old, a horse called Callboy who won a very significant standoff, and forty professional rugby players who behaved exactly like feral five year olds on a Tuesday morning.

One lesson from sport. One story from me. One thing you can take away and use today.

Press play. I’ll see you in there.

By now, you’ve probably heard about Ben Stokes.

England’s Test captain — one of cricket’s most celebrated figures, a man who has spent years rebuilding his own reputation and transforming the culture of the England team — was out past a team curfew in a Chelsea nightclub in the early hours of Monday morning. He and fast bowler Gus Atkinson were the only two players there after midnight, following England’s first Test win over New Zealand at Lord’s. A fracas ensued involving Totoa Auvaa, a 21-year-old Saracens academy rugby player who had been out with his club celebrating the end of their season. England’s team security officer ended up needing stitches.

As I write this, Stokes's Test future hangs in the balance. He and Atkinson have already been left out of England's squad for the second Test against New Zealand, which starts at The Oval on Wednesday - with Joe Root stepping in as interim captain. The ECB and the Cricket Regulator are still investigating, and what happens next is genuinely unresolved. Auvaa, who has captained Samoa U20 and Samoa A, now has his name attached to a story that has nothing to do with what he can do on a rugby pitch.

Two sports. Two clubs. One incident. And a question that I keep coming back to, because I’ve seen this play out before, from the inside.

At what point do elite athletes forget that they are never just themselves?

I spent twenty years working in professional sport. Not as an athlete — behind the scenes, in the press office, on the road, on the planes, in the hotels. I was one of the people who picked up the phone when things went wrong. And things went wrong more than the public ever knew.

In my time at Bath Rugby, I dealt with a cocaine positive test that became front-page news, drug allegations that consumed an entire off-season, a player door-stepped by journalists outside his home, a tabloid journalist who rang me every fifteen minutes for three hours trying to goad me into saying something I’d regret. I sat in a stadium clubhouse watching a Sky Sports interview/announcement from a player happen in real time that the club hadn’t been told about, with my phone battery dying from the volume of incoming calls.

Every single one of those situations started the same way. Someone made a decision — in a bar, at a party, in a moment of feeling invincible — without accounting for the fact that their individual decision was never really individual at all.

That is what nobody ever seems to say out loud. And it’s what I want to say now.

When you sign for a professional sports team, you stop being just you.

You become part of something that other people have staked their livelihoods on. The coaches, the analysts, the medical staff, the press officers, the commercial team, the community programmes. The other players who train alongside you every day. The fans who have bought season tickets. The young players coming through the academy who are watching your every move because you are what they are trying to become.

None of that disappears when the match finishes and you walk out of the ground.

In my experience — and I say this having watched it happen repeatedly — the athletes who genuinely understood this were the ones who had the longest, most respected careers. Not necessarily the most talented. Not the most decorated. The ones who understood what the badge on their shirt meant at 2am on a Monday morning just as much as it did at 3pm on a Saturday afternoon.

The ones who didn’t understand it? I watched them cause enormous damage. Not just to themselves — to the people around them, to the clubs they played for, to team-mates whose careers were tangled up in stories they had nothing to do with. And to young players like Totoa Auvaa, whose name is now in every cricket and rugby headline in the country through what appears to be nothing more than being in the same building.

There’s something specific about this Stokes story that deserves to be said carefully.

This is not his first nightclub incident. In 2017, there was Bristol. He was arrested, charged with affray, eventually acquitted — but the fallout was enormous, the story was everywhere for months, and he missed the Ashes tour that year. The version of Ben Stokes who has led England since — the Bazball Stokes, the World Cup Stokes, the man who seemed to have genuinely rebuilt himself and his relationship with the game — appeared to understand all of that. Which is why this week feels so jarring to so many people who had invested in that story.

I’m not here to judge what happened at Rex Rooms. I wasn’t there. The investigation will run its course. But I am interested in the pattern. And the pattern tells us something important about the culture we build — or fail to build — around elite athletes.

Because the question isn’t just what Stokes did. The question is: what environment creates the conditions where this keeps happening?

In sport, the standard you walk past is the standard you accept.

That phrase got used a lot during my time in the game — usually by coaches talking about on-field performance. But it applies just as much, if not more, to the culture that exists around the pitch. Who’s enforcing it? Who’s noticing when a player is making decisions that suggest they’ve stopped thinking about the consequences? Who’s having the honest conversation early enough that it doesn’t end up in a courtroom, or on the front page of a tabloid, or in an ECB investigation?

The answer, in my experience, is almost never the person at the top of the food chain.

I remember presenting a crisis management system to a group of club press officers after we’d navigated a particularly brutal off-season. One of the things I said then, and believe now, is that reputation management in sport can never just be reactive. By the time you’re issuing a holding statement and fielding calls every fifteen minutes, you’ve already lost control of the narrative. The work has to happen before the crisis. It has to be baked into the culture of the club from the top down.

What does that look like? It looks like the captains and senior players taking genuine ownership of what the badge means — not just in pre-season media training, but in the actual daily decisions they make and the ones they influence in others. It looks like the structures around athletes giving them honest counsel, not just access management. It looks like building an environment where someone can pull a player aside before the curfew gets broken, not after.

That kind of culture is rare. And when it’s missing, the incidents happen. They always happen.

I want to come back to the academy player in all of this.

Totoa Auvaa is 21 years old. He’s an academy player at Saracens — he hasn’t yet played for their senior team. He captained Samoa’s youth sides. By all accounts he was out with his club on a normal end-of-season night. His name is now attached to an international incident that has put England’s Test captain’s future in jeopardy.

I’ve seen this too. I’ve watched junior players and support staff get swept up in stories that weren’t theirs, because they happened to be in proximity to someone whose decision-making had consequences that rippled outward. They didn’t choose the headline. They just happened to be in the room.

Sport doesn’t protect those people. It very rarely even acknowledges them. The story is always about the star, the captain, the player with the column inches. The collateral damage happens quietly, and it matters.

I believe in Ben Stokes. I believe in the version of him that walked his team through the Headingley miracle and changed the temperature of Test cricket. But believing in someone doesn’t mean suspending accountability — for him, or for the culture that has allowed this pattern to repeat.

Elite sport is built on standards. On the idea that what you do when no one is watching is just as important as what you do when 30,000 people are in the stands. That’s not a slogan. It’s the actual mechanism by which high-performing teams work. When it breaks down, it doesn’t just break down for the individual — it breaks down for everyone who shares the badge.

This week, a lot of people will write about what Ben Stokes should or shouldn’t have done. I’m less interested in the verdict than the lesson. Because in my experience, these stories are never really about one person and one night. They’re about what a culture has decided to allow, to ignore, to normalise — for years before the headline appears.

The scoreboard is the last thing that changes. The culture was always going first.

If this struck a chord, I'd love to know. Hit reply or leave a comment.

Welcome to Training Week

If you have ever watched Cristiano Ronaldo closely before a penalty, you will probably have noticed that he is almost constantly talking to himself.

Sometimes it is barely visible. A few words under his breath. Sometimes it is more obvious: gestures, instructions, visible self-encouragement, almost as though he is actively trying to pull himself into the emotional state he needs before the moment arrives.

From the outside, it can look theatrical or perhaps even egotistical, but it’s a practice that is worth taking note of.

Athletes quickly learn that pressure changes the tone of the internal conversation happening inside somebody’s head. And once that internal dialogue shifts, behaviour often follows very quickly afterwards.

A missed chance becomes hesitation. Hesitation becomes overthinking. Overthinking changes decision-making. By the time confidence visibly drops, the real change has often already happened internally several moments earlier.

That is why self-talk is taken surprisingly seriously inside elite environments. Not because positive thinking magically creates success, but because the brain responds powerfully to repetition. The language somebody repeatedly hears under pressure gradually starts shaping how they perform under pressure too.

And whilst most people are not stepping up to take penalties in front of 80,000 people, the same psychological pattern quietly shapes everyday life all the time.

People speak to themselves constantly:

• before presentations

• after mistakes

• during difficult conversations

• when confidence dips

• when pressure rises

• when something feels uncertain

Sometimes subtly:

“I’m probably overthinking this.”

Sometimes harshly:

“You’re an idiot.”

The problem is that repeated internal language eventually stops sounding like opinion and starts sounding like fact.

Over time, people begin behaving in line with the emotional tone of the voice they hear most often.

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

• how self-talk shapes behaviour under pressure

• why negative internal dialogue becomes believable so quickly

• the difference between grounded confidence and blind positivity

• how elite performers steady themselves internally under pressure

• and the practical self-talk framework to use this week

Read more

It’s a question I was genuinely asked when I first started working in professional sport. And it wasn’t meant kindly.

I spent twenty years inside elite professional sport. Not as an athlete, but as a behind the scener. One of those people you walk past in the street with absolutely no idea who they are or what they’ve been doing that day. The ones keeping everything going, moving and performing, but always in the background.

I had the unique and privileged position of watching it all play out, literally, without ever putting my body on the line. And what I saw, day after day, season after season, is that so much of what makes elite performance work is simple. It’s applicable. And it’s available to everyone.

There is a lot of noise out there about how to do this stuff. Optimise this. Hack that. Follow this system. Actually? It’s really quite simple.

These principles are not reserved for the top 1%. Well, actually it’s more like 0.1% if you truly work out the stats for professional athletes, but that’s a conversation for another day. Everyone can have access to these tools. And that’s what I’m here for.

Every episode delivers one lesson from sport, one story from me, and one thing you can take away and use today.

Most people have never properly worked out who they actually are.

They have a vague sense of their personality. A few values they’d mention in a job interview. But pressed on what is genuinely non-negotiable — what they will and won’t compromise on, what they stand for when nobody is watching — most people go quiet.

That gap is expensive.

It shows up as indecision. As saying yes when you mean no. As working hard in a direction that doesn’t feel like yours. As a persistent, low-level sense that something is off, even when nothing is obviously wrong.

Here’s what twenty years inside professional sport taught me: the people who perform consistently — when conditions are perfect and when they aren’t — are the ones who are clear about this. They’ve done the work. They know what they stand for. And that clarity makes everything else simpler.

You need to do the same.

I learnt why this matters the hard way. When I started working at a professional rugby club, I thought doing a good job would be enough. What I didn’t understand was that without clarity about my own values, I was handing other people the pen to write my story. And they did. It took a full season of deliberate, conscious choices to rewrite it.

Perception is reality. What people believe about you becomes the lens through which everything you do gets filtered. The only way to manage that is to know exactly who you are first.

So. Let’s do that.

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The exercise

Core values are inherent and sacrosanct. They can never be compromised, either for convenience or short-term gain. They are a central part of who you are and who you want to be.

When you identify them, all of your decisions about life, work and family get easier. They align. The noise quiets down.

This takes about twenty minutes. Do it properly — don’t just read it.

Step one: Go back to the good moments.

Think of a time you were most happy. What were you doing? Who were you with?

Think of a time you were most proud. Not because someone praised you — because you knew you’d done something well.

Think of a time you were most satisfied. That quiet, solid feeling at the end of something that mattered.

And finally — what really excites you? What lights you up without you having to think about it?

Write all of it down.

Step two: Pull out the words.

Look at what you’ve written and pull out the values hiding inside those moments.

Words like: diligence, accountability, fairness, honesty, focus, commitment, resilience, courage, kindness, integrity, loyalty, generosity.

Don’t edit yourself. Write down everything that feels true. Aim for around ten words.

Step three: Find the non-negotiables.

Which of these are truly non-negotiable? Which ones, if you acted against them, would make you feel like you’d betrayed something important?

Circle those. For most people it’s three to five. Those are your core values.

List them somewhere you can see them.

Step four: Give them a shape.

Take those values and distil them into a single sentence. A motto. Something short and sharp that you can come back to when you need to make a decision or work out how you’re going to behave.

Work Conquers All — this encompasses the fact that you will always work hard, to the best of your ability, in every situation.

Good is the enemy of great — it demonstrates that you are always going to give it your best shot and never take half measures.

It doesn’t need to be clever. It just needs to be true.

Write it somewhere you’ll actually see it.

What happens when you know

When you are clear about your values, decisions get easier.

The endless second-guessing quiets down, because you have a reference point. When something feels wrong, you can trace it back to a conflict with one of your non-negotiables. When something feels right, the same is true.

And when you know who you are, you stop performing for other people’s benefit and start living from your own. That’s when the perception piece sorts itself out — because you’re consistent. What people see on the outside matches what’s actually happening on the inside.

That consistency is rare. And it’s magnetic.

I think back to those early months at the club. What I was learning — slowly and painfully — was exactly this. The most powerful thing I could do was to be so clear about who I was and why I was there that eventually the noise had nothing to stick to.

It worked. By the end of that first season, things had shifted. The environment hadn’t changed. I had.

Start with your values. Everything else follows from there.

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The core values exercise is one of the tools I use in Week 2 of The Performance System — my five-week digital coaching programme built on the principles of elite sport. If you want to take this further, you can find out more at kateoram.co.uk.