A New Way of Being

Alberto Salazar was once the most revered running coach in the world, leading athletes including Mo Farah to the very top of their game. But, in 2019, Salazar was banned from athletics for violating anti doping rules. This week’s guest, Steve Magness, had worked alongside him at the Nike Oregon Project – and he was the whistleblower whose claims were followed up by a BBC Panorama and Pro Publica i...

Brad Smeele was a world champion wakeboarder – until he broke his neck performing a trick in 2014 which left him quadriplegic. Until that point, Brad had been pretty much living the dream, chasing summers around the world while earning money on the side as a model. His identity before the accident was closely bound up with his physicality, and coming to terms with the fact that that was no longer...

Why relationships are the key to success in sport and life, with former England captain Will Carling. Will was appointed captain aged just 22 and led England to their first ever rugby World Cup final in 1991. As well as reaching that World Cup final- England won three Grand Slams in the 90s under Will, and were undoubtedly the northern hemisphere’s best team during that period. The theme of this c...

There’s a lot to be said for truly empathetic leadership, where caring for and taking an interest in the individual comes first. Not only does this create an environment in which people can flourish, it makes winning and success more likely. And my guest this week, Ama Agbeze, undoubtedly proved that to be the case, when she led England to their greatest netball triumph – a historic Commonwealth G...

Would you like to know some tips for succeeding under pressure from someone who was one of the best in the business? Sir Nick Faldo is Britain’s greatest ever golfer – a six times major winner who spent 97 weeks as world number one in his pomp. During our full length conversation – I asked him about one of his strategies for success, which came down to being able to... slow down. ** MyTwitter: htt...

We tend to believe happiness is found when we accumulate money, success and status – but that’s actually wide of the mark. According to one of the pre-eminent happiness scientists in the world, real joy is found by tapping into the transformative power of Awe. Dacher Keltner is a bestselling author and psychology professor at the University of California. Twenty years into teaching people about ha...

Dame Heather Rabbatts trained as a barrister – but that barely gets her CV started. She’s also been a BBC Governor, the youngest-ever Chief Executive of Merton and Lambeth Councils, Head of Education at Channel 4, a Director of the Bank of England, a Board Member of the UK Film Council, and deputy chair of Millwall FC – and that’s just to name a few. I wanted to ask her about getting ahead in big...

"Flow is an optimal state of consciousness where we feel and perform our best". As many of you know, the topic of flow and its deeper implications are subjects I have spoken about on many occasions in this podcast – and in today’s episode we dive into what is a fascinating area. Steven Kotler is a New York Times best-selling author and executive director of the Flow Research Collective. Steven has...

What the experience of flow - particularly in sport - may reveal about the nature of reality. One theme that has arisen time and again while recording this podcast is the experience of flow, and numerous athletes in particular have spoken about the experience of "me" not being there in such moments. But what is that "me" that seems to disappear? That’s a big question and here to help address it is...

Understanding the cost of fear and how to face and replace it - with the former England football psychologist, who was credited with helping transform the team at the 2018 World Cup. Pippa explains the difference between 'in the moment fear', and 'not good enough fear', and it's the latter that is the focus of this conversation and which is lurking behind many of our self-defeating behaviours. MyT...

The ability to hack our health could be right inside us. That’s the view of Wim Hof - aka the iceman. Among other things, he has run marathons barefoot beyond the polar circle as well as climbing through the "death zone" of Mt. Everest in only his shorts. He puts his achievements down to the Wim Hof Method – which has three components, cold exposure, breathing techniques and meditation. Wim speaks...

Would you like a proven pattern to tackle your most ambitious and challenging plans? Whatever it is you would like to do – whether it is starting a business, running a marathon or transforming a school – this episode is for you. My guest in Sir Michael Barber, whose career has straddled the world of elite sport and government. Since joining the government in 1997, he has advised 7 of the last 8 Pr...

Are you someone who has a tracker to keep tabs on things like your sleep and calorie count? We are increasingly obsessed with data and tracking – and we are also increasingly out of touch with the signals of our body. Christie Aschwanden is an award winning journalist, Nordic skier and the author of the fascinating book - Good To Go: What the athlete in us can learn from the strange science of rec...

Psychological flexibility is often described as the ‘super skill’ of resilience, wellbeing and mental health. It is your ability to ‘make contact with experience in the present moment fully and without defence’. Research has found that it is associated with higher quality of life and wellbeing. As regular listeners will often hear me say, we are not our thoughts – we are aware of our thoughts. Thi...

Olympic 2020 Tokyo 1500 metres silver medalist Laura Muir is one of the finest middle-distance runners Britain has ever seen. But there’s more – she is a trained vet too. Muir graduated from the University of Glasgow’s prestigious vet school in 2018 all while competing at the top level – winning her first senior outdoor gold medal at the European Championships that summer. How did she juggle both...

As research into the potential healing powers of psychedelics gains pace, I am thrilled to be joined by Michael Pollan, the author and journalist described as one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine. In his book How to change your mind , Michael researches how psychedelics including psylocibin mushrooms are being used to help people suffering from various mental health...

A good night’s sleep can make you feel strong enough to take on the world. A bad nights sleep – well, let’s not go there. This clip is all about how to avoid falling down the insomnia gap. You see, one bad night’s sleep can quickly snowball – so it’s good to know how to stop that from happening and to recognise the signs. This is from my conversation with Dr Guy Meadows – the founder and clinical...

Lawrence Dallaglio is an English sporting icon who understands the power of being driven by a higher purpose. He won 85 international rugby caps and was a crucial player in England's World Cup triumph of 2003. But Dallaglio is not cut from typical rugby playing cloth. It was the tragedy of losing his older sister in the Marchioness boating disaster of 1989 that ended up propelling him to pursue a...

Who doesn’t want to know how to stop unpleasant and even intrusive thoughts from bothering them? While lots of people talk about positive thinking, and training yourself to turn a negative into something upbeat – the truth is – that takes a lot of effort and doesn’t always work. Dr Russ Harris is one of the world’s leading psychologists. He shares a portable mindfulness technique that can sap the...

There’s a saying that I’m confident you will have heard of – but which we can all too quickly forget when the mind starts taking off. And it is – what you resist, persists. One of my guests who has really internalised the wisdom behind that saying is Jonny Wilkinson. We all know his story – he was the darling of English rugby who kicked the World Cup winning drop goal in 2003, and whose mental hea...

Gary Lineker has been in the news recently – more than usual – after a social media fracas that led him to miss a week of presenting match of the Day and which briefly dominated the news headlines. As we now know that situation was soon sorted – and Gary was quickly back alongside his chums on the MOTD sofa, looking as unruffled as ever. Being centre of the media glare as he was didn’t seem to kno...

We all come into this world with unconditional worth – and then we lose sight of that and spend so much time running around trying to prove that we are enough. It’s part of the human condition – and has been something of a key theme running through this podcast. One of my guests I talked about this with was the 1996 formula one world champion Damon Hill, whose father Graham had also been a world c...

How can you have as many good days as possible? It’s so easy to continually be looking to the future – and pay too high a price in the present as a result. Frances Houghton is a five time Olympian, who won three silver medals, 4 world championship golds and held two world records in rowing. Early on – she set two goals, to compete in as many Olympic games as possible, and to win Olympic Gold. Even...

This episode is about how much our parental influences shape our outlook on life. While we all come into this world with some innate traits, we are also largely a blank slate to start with, but are hugely conditioned by our upbringing. But I think the really interesting thing is that we invariably pick up a framework of what is right, and how to behave in those early years – and that can then shap...

What are you like at sitting with emotions? It can be so easy to distract ourselves, or numb ourselves – by reaching for a drink or a device, or even by going up into our heads and getting lost in rumination. One of my guests who told me he had to embrace sitting with emotions was the former UK Special Forces soldier and Royal Marine Commando turned explorer, adventurer, investigative journalist a...