Performance Intelligence

Jim Carrey wrote a cheque to himself for ten million dollars when he was a broke, unknown actor. Sara Blakely visualised a billion-dollar business and an Oprah appearance before either was remotely plausible. Easy to dismiss as coincidence. Harder to dismiss once you understand what an fMRI shows when a person runs a scenario in their mind.  Andrew May breaks down the neuroscience behind why menta...

Since the 1700s we have described this condition in the language of character. Lazy. Undisciplined. Careless. As recently as 2023, an Australian parliamentary inquiry heard the same words still follow people through their lives. Lindy Hadges explains why a condition that sits in the brain attracts shame that an identical shortfall in the pancreas never would, and what happens the moment someone st...

The first thing Jason McCartney asked for wasn't a doctor. It was a whiteboard. Badly injured and facing months in hospital, he didn't ask "why me?!". He set a goal, picked a deadline, and started working backwards, the same way he had for every season of his AFL career. What he learned about handling the moments that flatten everyone else is something most leaders never have to discover until it'...

There's a moment in your 50s when you start planning for decline instead of planning for growth. Craig Harper never had that moment. At 60+, he's more committed to his physical and mental performance than most 35-year-olds.  This isn't about genetics or obsession. It's about asking a different question: what would I have to do differently to stay in the game? His answer might surprise you. Craig H...

Have you ever finished a presentation, race, meeting or performance and someone asked, "How did it go?" only to realise you can barely remember it? Not because you failed but because you were completely immersed. Dr Sue Jackson is one of the world's leading researchers on flow and co-authored the defining book on the subject alongside the man who first named it, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi . Sue takes...

Most conversations about depression treatment start and end with medication. But what if that starting point is too narrow? Paul Taylor challenges a widely accepted assumption in mental health care that antidepressants are the primary or most effective solution for depression. What he argues is not simplistic and not anti-medication. It’s more uncomfortable than that: that for many people, medicat...

Inside the venom of a desert lizard, scientists found a molecule that does something the diet industry spent 50 years failing to do. It quietly switches off hunger. That molecule is now the most talked about drug on the planet, and it's sitting in the fridges of millions of people who couldn't explain how it works if you paid them. Dr Tom Buckley, 30 years in medicine and a professor at Sydney Uni...

Most teams spend their lives trying to reach the top. Very few have to answer the question of what happens when they get there. The Penrith Panthers have won 4 consecutive NRL premierships. In an era designed for parity, they've achieved something almost unheard of in modern sport. Which raises a fascinating challenge. How do you keep people motivated when they've already achieved the goal? How do...

Talent gets you through the door. It does not keep you in the room, and it has almost nothing to do with what you become. Kieren Jack is proof. The last pick in the AFL rookie draft, too small and too slow on paper, he outworked every reason he should not have made it. Kieren played 256 games for the Sydney Swans , co-captained the club, won the 2012 premiership and earned a place in its Hall of F...

Ever lost your composure right when you needed it most? In a high-pressure moment, when everyone's watching and one wrong move costs you, most people freeze. This reporter learned to do the opposite. Seasoned news reporter, Ali Piotrowski breaks down the one skill that kept her sharp through war zones, Middle East conflict, and the chaos outside Trump's indictments: calm. Not the kind you're born...

The kind of person who's been helping others perform better for 40 years doesn't usually admit they're struggling. Craig Harper did. His dad is in the hospital. The drive is five hours return. The calls from clients still come. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, one of Australia's most recognised performance coaches said something he'd never said publicly before. That he's lonely. This conv...

Could eight daily habits, locked in by 40, really add more than two decades to your life? The research says yes. And the habit at the top of the list is the one most senior leaders quietly deprioritise. If you want a clear, no fluff framework for long-term health and the small daily decisions that compound into decades, start here. You'll walk away knowing exactly where to focus, and what to stop...

How do you build a team where people will run through a wall for each other? Not metaphorically. Literally. James Slipper , the most capped Wallaby of all time. Nic White , the third most capped scrum half in Australian rugby history. Two men who've spent more time with each other than with their families, who've argued hard on the training paddock and sat next to each other every Tuesday team din...

You've got more data on your body than any generation before you. Heart rate variability, readiness scores, recovery metrics. But are you actually recovering better? Dr Shona Halson is one of the world's leading recovery scientists. She's worked with Olympic athletes, elite sport, and high performers at every level. Her verdict on wearables is more nuanced than the marketing suggests, and more use...

You know what you should be doing. More sleep. Better recovery. Less time running on empty. You have known it for years. So has every burned-out doctor, executive, and elite athlete Andrew May has ever worked with. The problem is not knowledge. It is the gap between knowing and doing. And most people are misdiagnosing the reason for that gap entirely. Andrew May is a Mental Skills and Leadership C...

Backstage. Heart hammering. Sweat beading. Every mental tool in the toolkit, breathing, self-talk, all of it, failed Dr Michael Gervais in real time. Michael is one of the world's leading performance psychologists and was moments away from presenting to the international body of sports psychologists. The researcher whose theory he was challenging was sitting in the front row. And he was falling ap...

Most people think they're pretty good at reading people. Maz Farrelly says they're not, including you.  Maz has sat across from more than 20,000 people across 30 years of television production. Big Brother. X Factor. Celebrity Apprentice. She has watched people try to hide, perform, charm and deceive their way through a room. She knows exactly what they're doing. Maz shares what three decades of c...

8 blokes showed up to help a mate with prostate cancer. They cleaned his house, mowed his lawn, scrubbed his kitchen. 3 hours of work. No gym. No program. No heart rate monitor. Dr Paul Batman ran the numbers afterwards and told them what they'd actually done. The equivalent of three five-hour marathons. Most of us have been thinking about movement the wrong way. We wait for the perfect workout, t...

Most conversations about ADHD stop at the diagnosis. This one goes further. ADHD expert, Lindy Hadges, gets specific across the three groups where ADHD is most misunderstood and most consequential: high performers in business and sport; women, who are being diagnosed in their mid-50s after decades of masking; and children, whose ADHD behaviours look very different at home than at school. Lindy is...

A leader from one of Australia's biggest banks called Andrea Clarke with a problem. 5000 employees. 1 AI tool. 0 opens. Not one person had clicked the app. Andrea's response wasn't to talk about technology. It was to talk about fear. Because what that leader was really dealing with wasn't a training gap or a communication failure. It was something older and more fundamental: we are not wired for c...

You've probably heard the word ADHD more times than you can count. You might even use it yourself. But if someone asked you to explain what is actually happening in the brain of a person living with it, could you? Most people can't. And that gap, between the label and the reality, is where a lot of pain lives. Lindy Hadges is a Psychotherapist, ADHD expert, and board member of the ADHD Foundation...

What does Deep Purple have to do with the All Blacks scrummaging better? More than you'd think. Mike Cron is one of the most successful rugby coaches in history. In this Bite Size, he tells the story of one of his strangest coaching ideas, where it came from, why it should not have worked, and why it did. Learn more about Mike here: https://www.mikecroncoaching.co.nz/   Use Code "PQPODCAST10" to g...

October 12, 2002. AFL star Jason McCartney was on holiday in Bali. By the end of that night, 202 people were dead, and he had burns to 50% of his body. Most people with his injuries spend 3-4 months just getting out of hospital. Jason was back on the football field in 5 months. What got him there was not superhuman toughness. It was a specific set of skills, built through years of setbacks, that c...

Nobody feels ready. Not elite athletes before competition. Not doctors before a high-stakes exam. Not leaders before the moment that defines them. Psychologist Lisa Martin has spent her career working with people at the edge of their performance. Her finding: readiness isn't a feeling you arrive at. It's a practice you build. The people who perform when it counts aren't calm because they're confid...

Some leaders grip everything. Others let it all slide. Earl Evans has spent decades building businesses that do neither. Earl is one of the most influential figures in Australian wealth management (CEO of Shaw and Partners) and one of the sharpest operational minds working in Australian business today. He thinks about leadership differently... and in this Bite Size, you'll hear exactly why. What h...