Negatively stressed? What’s your chosen response?

"It's subtle this performance coaching stuff, but it works. This time last year if circumstances had been the same I'd have been sh*!ing myself and unhealthily pessimistic. This year I'm still pessimistic, but understand that this pessimism is actually useful. If I use it appropriately, it helps me to perform…
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Confidence is priceless – and expensive

Reading The Times this week, Ben Mcintyre reminded me of something that Miss McIntosh taught me in 1971. 2+2 = 4. The maths is true and is the same this year as it was last, but something has changed - what we have lost is not the ability to add…
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Be Careful What You Wish For

My performance has, more than ever before, been at the forefront of my mind recently. I have just started a new role...same company...new role though. When first approached about the job, I thought "Wow, what a great opportunity; a new challenge without the usual upheaval and culture refamiliarisation required with…
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Keeping your head…

...while all others around you are doing a good impression of something without a head, requires a lot of mental toughness. Like anything that's difficult, the more you prepare for the challenge, the more of a fighting chance of success you have when the key moments actually arrive. So, given…
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Confidence is everything…

We like Simon Barnes in the Times quite a lot. Bloody clever bloke and he's welcome on PlanetK2 any time he likes! His latest musings on the role of confidence in the current financial climate take a break from his usual expert stuff on sport and nature notes, but he's…
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Paralysed by goals…

Under pressure, we know that people's focus tends to narrow down onto just a few things and very often, this actually means missing out on some really important information that's in the world around you. We think we've noticed quite a lot of attentional narrowing onto those wonderful things called…
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Planet earth is blue…

... but we don't think it's terminal! Wow, there's some interesting stuff going at the moment and it's inspired us to put fingers to keyboards in a bid to pass on our views of high performance, at a time when eeking out every ounce of performance potential has become even…
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