Performance Intelligence

Divorce at the start of the year. A great white shark attack, live on television, in the middle of it. The death of his eldest brother at the end. That was 2015 for professional surfer Mick Fanning. Performance coach Nam Baldwin , who has worked with world champions across multiple sports, was in his corner for all of it. Baldwin says the conventional playbook for elite athletes, push through, sta...

Olympic gold medallist, Michael Klim , explains why the mentality that won him 17 years of world records nearly destroyed his life after retirement. Michael took the same win-at-all-costs approach into business: redeye flights, fourteen-hour days, no off switch, and it cost him his relationship, his mental health, and eventually his body. You can find Michael at his TGI Sport Profile: https://tgis...

Creatine has spent decades filed under gym supplements, something for building muscle and nothing else. Dr Tom Buckley says that filing is out of date. A recent meta-analysis found measurable improvements in memory, attention and processing speed among people taking creatine, distinct from any effect on strength or size. Buckley, who has spent his career researching human performance, is careful a...

Most productivity systems quietly punish you for a bad week. Andrew May's Better Week framework budgets for them. The target is 25 to 30 genuinely good weeks a year, a number most high performers find uncomfortably low, which leaves room for the stretches when everything lands at once.  He walks Angela Poon, Performance Intelligence COO, through the maths. What he calls the rest of the year, and w...

Years of touring teach cricketers to be very comfortable in their own company. Coffee when you want it, lunch when you want it, a day built entirely around you. Former Test wicketkeeper Steve Rixon argues the skill cuts both ways: it protects you on the road, then quietly isolates you once the career ends and the kids leave home. Former Test fast bowler Stuart Clark has already had to work it out...

Most people who benefit from the status quo work hard to keep it. Michael Bungay Stanier, Rhodes Scholar and bestselling author of The Coaching Habit, says it was built for him, and decided to spend some of that advantage. First through curiosity and humour, the quieter tools for shifting who holds power in a room. Then through the harder move: stepping down as CEO of Box of Crayons, the company h...

A professor at Harvard and MIT wrecked his knee and stopped running the 7.5 miles he ran every night of his adult life. 5 months later he could not finish his own work. He was losing the thread in conversations, forgetting things he had never forgotten, and getting angry in a way he did not recognise. He was convinced he had developed adult ADD in middle age. He hadn't. He had just stopped running...

Most nutrition advice focuses on what you eat. Dr Amantha Imber, an organisational psychologist and author of The Health Habit, became more interested in what happens after you eat, and started wearing a continuous glucose monitor on herself to find out. The device tracks blood sugar in real time, and what she discovered about a specific ten-minute habit after meals surprised her enough to build i...

You have rehearsed it in the shower. You have written the message and deleted it. And every time the moment arrives, you find a reason it can wait until next quarter. That conversation is still making decisions for you. It decides who gets the promotion, which project quietly dies, and which good person leaves without ever telling you the real reason. Tim Duggan spent 3 years inside one question:...

A young player once told Gilbert Enoka that his advice was rubbish. On the field, when a referee makes a call he disagrees with, he wants to throw a punch, and no amount of mindset work was going to change that in the moment. Enoka, the All Blacks' mental skills coach for 23 years, did not argue the point. He gave the player a simple physical structure instead, and the player's own frustration rat...

Elite athletes and Special Forces do not eat like you do....and the reason you fade in the afternoon is usually something you did that morning. Jessica Spendlove will tell you exactly what. She will also tell you what to eat when you have 4 minutes and no time to think, whether the supplements you bought are doing anything at all, and why she rarely recommends that a woman fast. Jessica is a perfo...

There is a gap between what you are capable of and what you are actually doing. Craig Harper has spent 40 years studying it. His view: the gap is not primarily a talent problem or a knowledge problem. It is a psychological one. Fear, the need to be right, poor self-awareness, and an unwillingness to tolerate discomfort are quietly capping the performance of people who are objectively skilled, expe...

Some people get sharper when the pressure lands. The meeting turns hostile, the plan collapses, the number comes in wrong, and they are still thinking clearly while everyone around them has gone quiet or gone hard. That is Mental Agility. The capacity to move between demands, tasks, roles and relationships while staying grounded and effective when conditions change. It is trainable, and it is the...

A suicide bomber walked into a crowded local event in rural Afghanistan, and Harry Moffitt's small medical team spent the day treating the dead and dying. By the afternoon his unit sat in near silence, exhausted and numb. Moffitt, who spent close to three decades in Australia's Special Air Service, reached for the one thing he carried on every deployment for exactly this reason. What happened next...

You're probably treating recovery as the reward for hard work, when elite sport treats it as part of the work. Andrew May has spent more than two decades coaching in sport and business, and Andrew thinks we have misdiagnosed a generation of exhausted leaders. Call it burnout and you go looking for rest. Andrew says the shortfall is usually capacity, and the first move is measuring it rather than r...

Most goal-setting advice starts with your why, the deep, soul-searching question everyone knows they're meant to answer but rarely do. Keith Abraham, one of the world's leading authorities on goal achievement, thinks that's exactly backwards, and too hard for anyone with a job and a diary. He starts somewhere else entirely, with a short list of feelings almost nobody names out loud before setting...

What do you do when the version of yourself that's winning is also the version that's breaking? You know the feeling, hitting every number, saying yes to everything, and still walking away from the day feeling like you performed it rather than lived it. Now imagine finding the exact moment that stopped working, and the one small shift that got you back. Most high performers don't burn out overnigh...

Rose Herceg, President of WPP Australia and New Zealand, has a specific image she uses to stop a hard day turning into something bigger, something she thinks most people have lost the ability to do.   Running a business of 2,500 people through a genuinely volatile industry, she has no shortage of bad days. What she refuses to do is let one bad day become a bad week, a bad month, or a story about w...

When did you last actually let yourself feel hungry? Not the "due for a snack" kind. Properly, deliberately hungry, on purpose. If you can't remember, you're not alone. Now imagine using that discomfort as a lever instead of avoiding it. Every reflexive snack, every meeting that runs straight into the next, every bite you take before your body even asks for it keeps you running on one setting. You...

Most leaders try to restore a struggling performer's confidence with a pep talk. It almost never works. When Jason McCartney had written himself off, a coach did something far more deliberate, and it pulled him back from the edge of walking away. The approach is simple, repeatable, and the opposite of what most people reach for.  You can find Jason at his LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaso...

What goes through your mind when you're trapped underwater by a 50-foot wave? For Matt Formston , it's not fear. It's making an omelette. After losing 97% of his vision at just 5 years old, Matt has become a Paralympian, world champion, world record holder, and the first blind athlete to conquer the legendary waves of Nazaré. But today isn't about the achievements...it's about the process behind t...

"I know this." Andrew May hears it from some of the smartest people in the country, right before they admit they are doing none of it. The gap between what we know and what we do is not a willpower problem or a time problem, and treating it like one is exactly why nothing changes. He breaks down the difference between self-awareness and self-regulation, and the small, almost embarrassing first ste...

What do people say about you when you're not in the room? How are they introducing you, summing up your work, your professionalism, your brand ? Now imagine you had control over that. Because here's the reality: you already have a brand. You're building it whether you like it or not, and right now it's either working for you or quietly costing you. Maz Farrelly has spent 30 years creating and arti...

Women achieve the same cardiovascular health benefits as men at roughly half the exercise volume. Yet the standard exercise guidelines prescribe identical amounts for both. Dr Paul Batman argues this is one example of a deeper problem: a fitness model built on incomplete data, applied to populations it was never designed to reach. Only 16 percent of people follow the conventional guidelines. The q...

The best performers in the world have found a competitive edge that's completely free. You can use it too, and it starts tonight. When Dr Jemma King put wearables on Australia's Special Forces in 2017, the culture was "sleep when I'm dead". Within months, those same soldiers were showing off their recovery scores and competing over who slept the most. Not because they went soft. Because the data s...