Performance(50)
As someone who helps lead a team of human performance experts working with some great people and organisations in elite sport and the business world around the globe, I really care about it and I really believe it matters and can make a massive difference to those who are prepared to do what’s necessary to get high performance in their particular role in their particular arena.
In just under a year’s time, our finest sports men and women will be entering the cauldron of the Olympic and Paralympic Games in Rio. For most of them, this will be the biggest challenge of their careers, if not their lives. Many of them will be competing at their first Games. For some, it will be their only Games – their one and only chance to shine.
So, in the third of our Road to Rio series, we’re talking about the importance of using and ignoring goals when you’re in the thick of performance. We write a lot about goals and the way they’re used and abused in different environments. This article though is focused fully on the reality of the role of goals for performance.
As humans, we’ve long been learning from nature. After all, we’re part of it - and in modern times, some of our best inventions have come from learning how things work in nature. Velcro, for example, was inspired from sticky burrs.
Resilience seems to be a hot topic at the moment. When times are challenging and we’re facing many changing demands, the ability to withstand what is thrown at us and bounce back quickly from set backs is all-important. So we asked our athlete ambassador, Sophie Radcliffe, to explain what resilience means to her.
While some Olympic athletes have their places secure others are going through trials. Actually they’ve been on trial for a long time. Just about every day. Imagine having the pressure of being on trial every day just doing your job. Every day. How would that pressure be?
In the final part of our series on resilience, Andrea Furst, one of our Human Performance Experts and Senior Sport Psychologist to GB Women’s Hockey, shares some reflections on resilience from her involvement in the selection process of the past four Olympic Games.
We’re always scanning what’s going on in the world to see how we can connect it to simple, high performance thinking, and when Jim spotted some stuff about a new approach to food labelling, it got us thinking.
Sophie Radcliffe, athlete and adventurer shares her thoughts on dealing with change.
Our world is full of information, communication and distractions so focusing is a constant challenge. In this weeks blog Sophie Radcliffe, talks about the importance to her of Staying on Course.
If you are flirting with the notion of playing in the arena, Performance Fest will be the doorway you need to step through. If you are already in the arena, it is imperative that you give yourself a jolt and continue to raise your game.
Olympic athletes spend most of their time training and very little time competing, so each day they must think about what they need to do to get better. Contrast this with to the world of work where it feels like a competition every day and everyone’s focused on ‘to-do lists’ much more than ‘to improve lists’.