Pressure(18)
Welcome to our Road to Rio series! You’ll hopefully have seen by now that the Great Britain Women’s Hockey qualified for Rio with a superb series of performances throughout the World Hockey League in Valencia. They won the whole tournament, winning every match they played, and happily booking the team’s place for Rio next year as a result.
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.
We’re 186 days out from the Rio 2016 Olympics (as of 1st February!). It’s a critical time for athletes around the world preparing for the Games - what they do this winter will dictate their level of readiness to deliver medal winning performances at the Games.
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.
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.
Dom Boon is People Director for Virgin Media. As a customer we’ve worked with him on high performance principles and he’s done an extraordinary job in applying them to another area of his life – swimming. This blog tells the story of his serious accomplishment in May this year.
If you’re a tennis fan you’ll have been suffering post-Wimbledon blues last week. It was another classic Wimbledon – imperfect weather conditions, some surprising upsets and a few memorable on-court battles. As ever, there was plenty of high performance learning to be taken from the fortnight – and this week, we’re sharing our picks of the best.
With a few days left before I fly to Rio to support the GB Rowing Team in their build up to the Rio Olympic Games, there are lots of significant Milestones ahead which will be used by the coaches and athletes as more than just the basis for a check list.
So, the Rio Olympic Games are underway! After 4 years of preparation – for both athletes and their support teams, and for the host city – the Games got started with a spectacular Opening Ceremony on Friday night.
So that was the Rio Olympics. A fantastic fortnight of sport and a compelling spectacle for those of us glued to our screens. The backdrop was spectacular, and as ever, the controversy and noise around the Games organisation and environment faded into the background once competition got going.
We've been working with Adidas Western Europe on a year long Talent programme. It's been fascinating to see how the folk on it are grasping the opportunity to learn as much as they can. It's prompted some thoughts from us about learning - so our blog this week highlights some of the very impressive and effective learning behaviours we've seen from them over the past 6 months.