Lessons for sustaining high performance under pressure, learned through six World Championship golds.
For much of my sporting career, success was easy to measure. There was a start line, a finish line, and a result.
But winning one race is never really the challenge if you want a career at the highest level. Finding a way to perform again and again is what it’s all about.
In total, I won six marathon kayak World Championships and competed at two Olympic Games. My story isn’t about reaching the top. It’s about staying there, and what it really takes to maintain focus and performance over years, not weeks or months.
Now, most of the time I work with senior leaders I focus on whether the way they’re performing today still allows them to perform tomorrow. My clients are all capable, ambitious people carrying real responsibility. They already know how to work hard. I support them to keep delivering and that starts with self-leadership.
Performance under pressure starts before the pressure arrives
There’s a tendency to notice high performance at the moment it becomes visible. In my world, as an athlete, it was the race. For you, it might be hitting a sales target, delivering a presentation, or leading through a crisis.
As an athlete, I knew that what happened on race day was largely determined by what had happened in the weeks, months and years beforehand; the start line is not the place to decide to start being focused, composed and adaptable under pressure.
I prepared for that moment long before it arrived: practising how I’d respond, building routines, learning what helped me focus and what distracted me, understanding how I’d react when things didn’t go to plan.
So when pressure arrived, I wasn’t relying on some extraordinary version of myself appearing at exactly the right moment. I was relying on what I’d already built.
The same applies in leadership. Pressure reveals our existing behaviours; when demands increase, we fall back on familiar patterns. That’s why self-leadership can’t begin in the middle of the difficult moment. It has to be practised before we need it.
Grinding harder isn’t the solution to delivering better results
This lesson can be a tough one to learn when we feel like we’ve been giving our all. Hard work matters, but hard work without recovery doesn’t produce better performance.
In elite sport, training and recovery are part of the same system. Training provides the stimulus; recovery lets the body adapt to it. If you continually add more training without allowing sufficient intentional recovery, there comes a point when you’re no longer building performance, you’re eroding it.
I learnt just how important that distinction was at the peak of my career, when I was diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and told I might never race again.
For an athlete whose instinct had always been to work hard and find a way forward, I was forced to think very differently about performance. I wasn’t lacking in determination, but I did need a better understanding of when to push, when to recover, and what I needed to do differently if I wanted not simply to return to competition, but to compete at the highest level again.
I did return, and I went on to win another three consecutive World Championship titles. But the experience changed my understanding of high performance for good. I stopped seeing recovery as something separate from the work and started seeing it as part of the work.
Sustaining excellence requires a smarter strategy
How often do you treat recovery as the reward for effort, rather than part of it? I’ll take an early finish or a night out once the project’s done. I’ll sleep when the deal closes. I’ll disconnect over the holiday. Until then, the relentless grind can become a badge of commitment.
But operate like that, and it’s only a matter of time before the wheels come off.
As pressure rises, recovery is usually the first thing sacrificed. With less recovery, your energy drops. With depleted energy, handling that same pressure becomes significantly harder. Clarity slips, decision-making suffers, and overall performance dips, which only generates even more pressure.
Strategic recovery isn’t about stepping away once you’re exhausted, it’s about protecting your edge so you can stay sharp and perform at your best when the stakes are highest.
Built in deliberately throughout the day, it doesn’t cost you time; it makes you more efficient, allows for strategic thinking, and fewer costly mistakes.
I understand that in fast paced corporate life with tight deadlines and constant demands, it feels impossible to pause. But you’re never going to get more hours in the day. What you can do though, is ramp up energy and focus by building strategic recovery into your day, giving you the mental breathing room that allow for clarity, insight and new ideas to emerge.
Self leadership isn’t a one-off sprint; it’s about staying at the top of your game. Don’t ask, can I get through this? Ask, can I deliver at my absolute best today, and still back it up tomorrow?
Recovery doesn’t pause progress. It’s the strategy that sustains it.
Self-leadership requires you to notice
Managing yourself well depends on recognising what’s happening in the first place, and that isn’t always easy.
Performance rarely implodes overnight. It drifts, as standards slip, we become more reactive than proactive, and difficult conversations get postponed because they feel like too much. Individually, these things are hard to spot from inside the thick of delivery, but collectively, they matter.
That’s one of the reasons in sport we build deliberate review into training. We don’t review only because something’s gone wrong. We review to catch the small changes before they become bigger ones. That’s the mental agility side of self-leadership: staying honest with yourself about what’s actually happening.
Reflection is often the first thing to disappear under sustained pressure, because there’s always something more urgent to do. We tell ourselves we’ll stop and think once the deadline’s passed, once things calm down but they rarely do.
Self-leadership means creating space to notice before circumstances force you to.
Reflection before correction
This doesn’t require a complicated process. It can start with better questions, asked regularly enough for the answers to be useful:
- Where have I let my standards slip lately without realising it?
- What difficult conversation am I avoiding?
- What do I need to keep performing at my best?
These aren’t questions to save for when something’s visibly gone wrong – by then, correction is much harder. The most effective athletes and coaches I worked with reflected when things were going well, not just when they were going badly. It was one of the ways they protected performance.
Sustaining performance changes the question
There’s a massive difference between achieving high performance and sustaining it. Reaching the top demands talent, preparation, discipline and enormous effort. Staying there requires something entirely different: a deliberate mindset shift. It’s about building the daily habits, clarity, and standards that allow you to operate at that level consistently.
That was true on the water and after 15 years working with leaders and teams, I believe it’s equally true in organisations. Self-leadership isn’t about motivating yourself to do more.
It’s about cultivating self-awareness: knowing precisely how you perform at your best, recognising how pressure changes you, and managing your energy with absolute intent.
Because the real test of high performance isn’t whether you can produce one exceptional performance when it matters. It’s whether you’ve built the skills and capacity to sustain it.