Do you still watch the Olympics? In time off this week, I’m loving watching the Winter Games athletes compete.
Seeing high-performance in action: the stress of that one chance to reach the finals/get on the podium after 4 years of preparation. Now that’s pressure!
The skiing for example:
It can be snowing/sunny/shadowed.
The snow temperature changes during the actual event.
There’s a drone whining over them as they ski.
Fastest qualifiers wait to go last in the final.
And that’s without dealing with their internal chatter, and constant body micro-adjustments!
Yet despite all that, they often make it work beautifully.
A bit like when we see other people communicating, and it’s working. Sometimes it looks effortless.
Perhaps it is. (That flow-state is amazing when it happens.)
OR, maybe we’re just not seeing the constant micro-adjustments going on underneath, dealing with:
In-the-moment self-doubt.
The frowning face in the audience (that’s a threat trigger).
The word we can’t remember under pressure.
The bit we just missed by mistake…
High-performance, whether it’s in sport or speaking – it’s not about perfection: what we see as excellence is often simply controlled chaos.
And working with this chaos – rather than aiming to eliminate it – is something that mental performance coaches are now using with Olympians:
Instead of aiming for a smooth, flawless flow state (which used to be the goal), the research has shifted to have coaches look at how to build their athletes’ capacity to be fully present in the moment.
Present enough to control where they put their focus.
To handle what Sean McCann, a senior sports psychologist for the US Olympic and Paralympic committee, calls
“Moments of disruptive pressure”.
And this ties into my work with clients
They know that skills like mental rehearsal and getting into flow are great, and still important.
But we work on the basis that most usually don’t work when the pressure is high – that:
• Difficult colleague who sucks you in every time.
• Board meeting where you get one chance to make an impact.
• Presentation where you know tricky Q and A is looming at the end.
Because when that environment kicks in, it’s usually not possible to access anything that uses a lot of processes –
Dealing with disruptive:
Thoughts
Sensations
External disturbances…
So, I have 2 questions for you:
How well do you navigate pressure moments?
If the answer is “not always brilliantly”, are you able to dissect clearly enough what gets in your way?
For a lot of my clients, the pressure turns those moments into a messy ‘blob’ – the internal chaos I mentioned at the start. And it’s hard to get past that successfully enough.
If you can tease out and dissect some of these moments, you might be able to separate the components, and see them as data you can work with.
Olympic coach McCann has a good question as you start to look at the data:
“Was it something you didn’t do, you can’t do, or just something you haven’t done before?” **
Then it’s about working out your next chance to test something different.
And if you need help figuring out what that ‘something different’ might look like, you might like to book a chat with me.
I’ve written before about Olympic athletes pre-performance routines which we can learn from.
**There’s a great interview with some of these Olympic performance coaches in Men’s Health, Feb. 2026 here if you’re interested.
