How do you stay calm when there’s no time left on the clock and you’ve only got one shot?
I’ve watched that moment for twenty years, standing close enough to see everything and never once having to take the shot myself.
This week, for the first time, I’m the one with no clock to hide behind.
I’ve set myself a challenge: twenty people into The Performance System by the end of the month. Three are already in. Seventeen to go.
I love a challenge! (I think!)
Twenty is a real number, not a marketing trick dressed up as scarcity. I read and respond to every submission myself, every week, for every person who joins. That’s the actual ceiling for what one person can do properly. Past that, feedback gets thin, or late, or both. I’d rather cap it honestly than pretend I can do it for two hundred…although, now that really would be a challenge.
And this is all, bizarrely, rather uncomfortable for me...
Because, I’ve built my whole career on being the person behind the scenes. Comms, PR, media. I launched rugby’s first ever online TV channel (yes, I am that old) and did all the pitchside interviews myself, so I wasn’t always off camera, but even then I was asking the questions, not the person everyone had turned up to watch.
I built The Performance System in much the same way. Two years building it quietly, testing it on real people, refining what didn’t work, reading and replying to people’s work every week and never really shouting about any of it.
(Quietly working in the background is the bit I know how to do.)
What I don’t find quite so natural is standing up and saying, publicly, this is what I’ve built, this is what I think it’s worth, and this is what I want to do with it.
So that’s what I’m doing now.
The Performance System is twenty years of watching what actually creates high performance in elite sport, pulled together into five weeks/phases and made applicable to how you work, decide and perform in your own life.
Because that’s always been the whole point of this for me.
You really don’t have to be an athlete to operate like one.
I already know the System works because I tested it before I really talked about it. Real people have already been through it. I’ve read their work, watched what changed and seen what happens when someone stops relying on how motivated or confident they happen to feel that day and starts operating differently.
So, I’m not putting something into the world and crossing my fingers that it works.
The bit I don’t know is whether I can get seventeen more people to say yes to it before the end of September.
And THAT is where this gets interesting/terrifying/crazy (delete where appropriate).
Because I spend a lot of time talking about performance. About deciding what you want, setting the standard, doing the work, reviewing honestly and not allowing how you happen to feel about something to dictate whether you do it.
It’s relatively easy to talk about those things when it’s somebody else’s performance we’re discussing. Slightly different when it’s your own.
So, for September, I’m going to put myself through it in public.
This is The Season (as I am now calling it), because it's my test for myself. I'm going to put everything I've got into getting this properly off the ground and hopefully win the championship at the end of it. (Did you see what I did there?)
And rather than appearing at the end of the month with a lovely retrospective about everything that worked, I’m going to tell you while it’s happening.
If it stalls at eight, I’ll say so.
If I try something and it doesn’t work, I’ll tell you.
If I realise I’ve got something wrong, I’ll tell you that too.
And if all twenty places go, you’ll hear that from me as well.
I am not going to just go quiet and brush it under the carpet if things don’t go the way I want. That’s the deal.
There are seventeen places left right now. I’d love for you to join me, from anywhere in the world.
This isn’t feedback in the way most programmes mean it. I read every single submission myself, in full, not skimming for keywords to paste a template response against. I tell you what I actually see: the thing you almost said but didn’t quite, the bit you glossed over because it was easier than sitting with it. Sometimes that means telling you something you’d rather not hear. That’s the job.
You’ll get five phases/weeks of that: someone (ME) reading your actual thinking each week and telling you the truth about it. I don’t have a template response. You’ll come out the other side with a way of running your own life you can keep using long after the five weeks end.
And you'll be joining while I'm putting myself through exactly the same process.
3/20.
Let’s see what happens.
I’ll be back here every Sunday this month with the next instalment, whichever way the score is going…wish me luck!
