Positive Leadership: Preparing for Big Moments

1. Practice under pressure. Practice makes perfect, but not if you're practicing under circumstances that differ from the ones you'll experience when it matters.

2. Promote self-worth. You don't have to use positive affirmations to reaffirm and promote self-worth. Calling to mind your many interests and experiences can boost your level of confidence and, as a result, your performance when the going gets tough.

3. Change your perception. What can feel like the most important moment of your life, the center of the universe, and focal point of everyone in attendance, is merely a blip in the grand scheme of life. Pressures are perceived; reframing the situation provides context that can greatly improve performance.

4. Divert stress. Fixating on an upcoming performance can invite stress and worry which ultimately distracts you from the task at hand. Combat it by employing a few easy exercises beforehand. Counting backward or singing a song will prevent you from succumbing to stress, freeing up the brainpower needed to nail it.

5. Take a breath. Taking a deep breath and clearing your mind is a productive alternative to stumbling through a presentation or problem you're working on. Pausing not only allows you to absorb the information needed to succeed, it also replenishes your brain's supply of glucose, which aids in performance.

Positive Leadership: Preparing for Big Moments

Positive Leadership: Making Sound Decisions Under Pressure

Here are a solid set of principles for making sound decisions under pressure:

1. Remove the rose-coloured glasses: A good cost-benefit appraisal can be trickier than you think. Why? Because most of us tend to underestimate costs and overestimate benefits – and to be generally optimistic about our ability to make things happen. Our analyses inevitably bend toward the outcomes we’re hoping for. Good decision-makers are wary of wishful thinking. Get a second or third opinion from skeptics you trust — the advisers who'll push back and make you defend your assessments.

2. Wield the red pen ruthlessly: When it comes to picking ideas, separate the elephants from the ants. Cross off everything but the top few priorities, and make sure you haven’t fallen in love with pet projects and ‘hobbies’ whose time may have passed. When it’s clear a pet project is ailing, hurry up and get out the rifle (so to speak). A few, clear, simple goals are more likely to yield results than complex “perfect decisions” that can bog down an organisation.

3. Don’t fall in love with percentages: Everyone likes a tenfold return, but you’re not going to be noticed by the Wall Street Journal for turning $10,000 into $100,000. A mere doubling of $500 million into $1 billion, however, could be worth spilling some ink over. In many business decisions, it’s the long-term return that matters, and the highest absolute benefit wins over the highest percentage benefit.

4. Don’t delay the decision: Time is rarely on your side. We have yet to hear an executive say he made a tough call too soon. The same goes for making personnel decisions: if you’re not looking for ways to promote or keep current team members, it may be time to think about replacing them.

5. Feel the fear and do it anyway: Be careful about letting your feelings warp your perception of the situation. Fear can make you freeze up; but in almost every case, it’s better to make a call and deal with consequences than to leave things in limbo. Look the circumstances squarely in the face. As Sir Winston Churchill said, "courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees all others.”

6. What would Kant do? It should go without saying that you want your decision to be an ethical one. So if your ethical compass needs a bit more calibrating, remember Immanuel Kant. His “categorical imperative” is a useful thought experiment to help you decide if you’re doing the right thing. It’s a bit like “The Golden Rule” on steroids: what if everyone in the world, in your shoes, always made the same choice you’re about to make? If that's a world you’d want to live in, you’re okay in Kant’s book.

7. But can you execute it? Good decisions can become great ones if you execute them well. So for every one of your options, think about whether it’ll be easy to explain to your team and your organisation, or if it’s likely to be lost in translation. Will people be enthusiastic about making it happen? If not, maybe the idea's not as good as it looked on paper.

8. Think forward: Don’t relive past decisions – good or bad. Circumstances change, people change, and you change. Dwelling on past glories or failures is dangerous and unproductive.

9. Borrow wisdom: You’re probably not the first person to face a given predicament, so seek out anyone who might have been there before. Mentors have seen a lot of things – find a good one if you can. And make a habit of reading about how past leaders made momentous choices.

Many of us have come to rely on our instincts to cut through the jungle of choices we face every day. Be careful, though: good intuition is not the same as good decision-making. In business, intuition works, but only in conjunction with calculation. Like a chess master, you should pick your move after weighing the outcomes. Then make it, implement it, and start thinking about the next one.

Positive Leadership: Making Sound Decisions Under Pressure

Positive Leadership: Congratulations Andy Murray!

Congratulations to Andy Murray - handling the weight of expectations of a whole nation - a true performance under pressure. Murray has shown that with dedication and great teamwork, allied to the resilience and learning which comes from past disappointments, any goal can be achieved. In defeat, Novak Djokovic demonstrated real sportsmanship and he is to be applauded for that. Hopefully, we Scots will not have to wait another 117 years for a Men's Singles champion at Wimbledon! 

Positive Leadership: Congratulations Andy Murray!

Positive Leadership: Turning Pressure into an Asset

Pressure is nothing more than the shadow of great opportunity.’ – Michael Johnson, US Olympic Gold Medallist

Here are six things experienced leaders do that transform pressure from a liability to an asset:

Know Thyself: Leaders must know themselves, their strengths and weaknesses, and where they will and won’t compromise. When a leader is comfortable in their own skin they won’t fear dissenting opinion and diversity of thought, they’ll encourage it. Knowing who you are frees you to become a better thinker and a better leader.

Lead: A leader’s job is to acquire and develop talent. The larger the organisation you lead, the more your performance is dependent upon the talent of your team. The better the talent, and the better you utilise talent, the less pressure you’ll feel. The key to capacity, throughput, and scale is not found by doing – but by developing others to do. Leaders who feel the least amount of pressure are those who spend the most time acquiring and developing talent. Conversely, leaders who feel the most pressure are those who feel they must do everything themselves.

Keep It Simple: Complexity creates pressure. The best leaders look to simplify everything they can. Simplicity rarely equates to a lack of sophistication – it actually demonstrates remarkable elegance. Simplicity drives understanding, which leads to a certainty of execution. One truism you can count on is performance relives pressure.

Get Alignment: Great leaders strive for the following: one vision – one team – one agenda. Organisations that have a shared purpose, common values, and aligned interests are simply more productive than organisations that don’t. Alignment of values and vision take the complexity out of decision-making, and removes the ambiguity from the process of prioritisation. Leaders who have organisational alignment feel less pressure than those who don’t.

Focus: Focused leaders rarely feel external pressure. Unfocused leaders feel as if pressure is coming at them from all directions. Focus affords leaders clarity of thought that a cluttered mind will never realise. It’s not possible to lead an organisation toward a better future when a leaders mind can’t see through the fog. An organisation is never under greater pressure, or at greater risk, than when leaders lose their focus.

Create Whitespace: The best way to maintain focus is to make sure you’ve allowed for some whitespace EVERY day. Any rubber band stretched too tightly will eventually snap – there are no exceptions to this rule. Leaders who don’t create time for quality thought and planning end-up taking unnecessary short cuts and risks. They let pressure force them into making bad decisions that a little whitespace could have prevented.

Positive Leadership: Turning Pressure into an Asset

Positive Leadership: Making Sound Decisions Under Pressure

Here are a solid set of principles for making sound decisions under pressure:

1. Remove the rose-coloured glasses: A good cost-benefit appraisal can be trickier than you think. Why? Because most of us tend to underestimate costs and overestimate benefits – and to be generally optimistic about our ability to make things happen. Our analyses inevitably bend toward the outcomes we’re hoping for. Good decision-makers are wary of wishful thinking. Get a second or third opinion from sceptics you trust — the advisers who'll push back and make you defend your assessments.

2. Wield the red pen ruthlessly: When it comes to picking ideas, separate the elephants from the ants. Cross off everything but the top few priorities, and make sure you haven’t fallen in love with pet projects and ‘hobbies’ whose time may have passed. When it’s clear a pet project is ailing, hurry up and get out the rifle (so to speak). A few, clear, simple goals are more likely to yield results than complex “perfect decisions” that can bog down an organisation.

3. Don’t fall in love with percentages: Everyone likes a tenfold return, but you’re not going to be noticed by the Financial Times for turning £10,000 into £100,000. A mere doubling of £500 million into £1 billion, however, could be worth spilling some ink over. In many business decisions, it’s the long-term return that matters, and the highest absolute benefit wins over the highest percentage benefit.

4. Don’t delay the decision: Time is rarely on your side. When did you last hear an executive say he made a tough call too soon. The same goes for making personnel decisions: if you’re not looking for ways to promote or keep current team members, it may be time to think about replacing them.

5. Feel the fear and do it anyway: Be careful about letting your feelings warp your perception of the situation. Fear can make you freeze up; but in almost every case, it’s better to make a call and deal with consequences than to leave things in limbo. Look the circumstances squarely in the face. As Sir Winston Churchill said, "courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees all others.”

6. What would Kant do? It should go without saying that you want your decision to be an ethical one. So if your ethical compass needs a bit more calibrating, remember Emmanuel Kant. His “categorical imperative” is a useful thought experiment to help you decide if you’re doing the right thing. It’s a bit like “The Golden Rule” on steroids: what if everyone in the world, in your shoes, always made the same choice you’re about to make? If that's a world you’d want to live in, you’re okay in Kant’s book.

7. But can you execute it? Good decisions can become great ones if you execute them well. So for every one of your options, think about whether it’ll be easy to explain to your team and your organisation, or if it’s likely to be lost in translation. Will people be enthusiastic about making it happen? If not, maybe the idea's not as good as it looked on paper.

8. Think forward: Don’t relive past decisions – good or bad. Circumstances change, people change, and you change. Dwelling on past glories or failures is dangerous and unproductive.

9. Borrow wisdom: You’re probably not the first person to face a given predicament, so seek out anyone who might have been there before. Mentors have seen a lot of things – find a good one if you can. And make a habit of reading about how past leaders made momentous choices. Many of us have come to rely on our instincts to cut through the jungle of choices we face every day. Be careful, though: good intuition is not the same as good decision-making. In business, intuition works, but only in conjunction with calculation. Like a chess master, you should pick your move after weighing the outcomes. Then make it, implement it, and start thinking about the next one.

Positive Leadership: Making Sound Decisions Under Pressure

Positive Leadership: How Priming Impacts Your Performance

Malcolm Gladwell discusses how what you experience in advance of a situation can profoundly affect the choices you make and the results you get.

This effect is called "priming" and it profoundly effects your expectations and behaviour.

Positive Leadership: How Priming Impacts Your Performance

Positive Leadership: What Winning Means!

BBC commentators Steve Cram and Brendan Foster stand to salute Mo Farah's second gold medal in a thrilling 5,000m race.

In the studio, pundits Denise Lewis and Colin Jackson literally jump for joy as the 29-year-old won Great Britain's 27th gold medal of London 2012.

Positive Leadership: What Winning Means!

Positive Leadership: London 2012: The Importance of Sport Psychology

BBC Sport journalist Matthew Syed, author of Bounce, explains how important psychology among athletes is in the battle between success and failure.

Each and every competitor has their own routine, superstition and ritual before their sport, which can make a massive difference in their attempt to win gold.

This is what performing under pressure is all about!

Positive Leadership: London 2012: The Importance of Sport Psychology

Positive Leadership: Support Networks and Success

Procter & Gamble launched its "Thank You, Mom" campaign at the Vancouver Games in 2010. A critical and commercial success, the campaign returned for London 2012. In one execution, a re-working of its 2010 Winter Olympics 'Thank you, mom’ spot, P&G pushes raw emotion to the tear-jerking nth degree with its depiction of mothers worldwide raising children to become champions and sharing their triumph. 'Being a mom is the hardest job in the world,' the ad says, 'but it’s also the best.'

A great Olympic advert!

Positive Leadership: Support Networks and Success

Positive Leadership: 'If...' The Story of Team GB and the London 2012 Olympics - Pure Magic!

Positive Leadership: 'If...' The Story of Team GB and the London 2012 Olympics - Pure Magic!

Positive Leadership: How to Win in Business

Some interesting observations from the British Olympic Association’s Director of Sport, Sir Clive Woodward:

'Successful businesses, like successful sport teams, need to remain open to new ideas and to learn how to perform under pressure, according to Sir Clive Woodward, the 2003 Rugby World Cup-winning coach.

Outlining his theory, the British Olympic Association’s Director of Sport said that “great teams are made up of great individuals” and that successful team players shared four characteristics: talent, a willingness to learn, an ability to perform under pressure and the mindset of wanting to be a champion.

Sir Clive argued that “talent is not enough” because there are “bucketloads” of talented competitors. He said top players, like top businessmen and women, needed to be willing to be taught — to be “sponges” instead of “rocks”.

“I’d fly anywhere in the world if I thought it had the smallest chance of [helping] me becoming a better coach or a better manager,” he said.

“Once you lose that ability, that kind of focus, the chances are you’ve become a rock and you’re not going to be competing with that person in the next room.”

He said one of his first actions on becoming head coach of the England rugby team in 1997 was to give each player a laptop and teach them IT skills. “The media had a field day [but] I was trying to find out who the sponges were, who the rocks were. Who the guys in the squad saying ‘this guy isn’t going to be here for long, we don’t need to do this’ were.”

Sir Clive said that the next key component of a successful team member was an ability to perform under pressure, something that he did not believe was inherited.

“Are you born with this gene to play and perform under pressure? I would say absolutely not ... I think this is coachable,” he said. “What you can do is role-play situations you’re going to get into. If you come across something you’ve never seen before, the chances are you would freeze.”

Finally, according to Sir Clive, to become a champion players must have the right attitude, including an “obsession with detail about what you do to beat the person in the next room”.'

For more, see: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/public/ceo-summit/article3443993.ece

Positive Leadership: How to Win in Business

Positive Leadership: Our Offer to You

What do the recent Barclays LIBOR scandal and the ‘humiliating shambles’ of the G4S Olympics security operation have in common?

One thing is certain – leadership which has failed to deliver optimum performance and results when put under pressure.

Leadership cannot exist in a vacuum in any organisation – it impacts business strategy in a multitude of ways. Oftentimes, leaders fail to appreciate this connection or at the very least, are unprepared for the effects of pressure on strategy and behaviour.

Executing business strategy successfully in situations of high pressure and delivering optimum results requires proven leadership which appreciates the underpinning importance of a values based leadership culture throughout the organisation.

At Positive Leadership, we have developed a proprietary values based approach to optimising business results. For us, it is the interaction and close synergy between leadership values and business strategy that delivers such an outcome on a consistent basis. Our Values of Positive Leadership™ are based on extensive research and many years of business experience.

We work with our clients advising them on how to excel under pressure. Our involvement is client/transaction specific and typically involves a combination of transaction based advice, leadership coaching and management mentoring.

We are confident that our approach will help you deliver improved bottom line performance and equip you and your fellow leaders with the understanding, skills and awareness to ensure that optimum performance and results are delivered, even under pressure, unlike the leaders of Barclays and G4S.

If you would like to speak with us to learn more about our ideas and to benefit from a no-cost initial consultation, please contact graham.watson@positiveleadership.co.uk

Positive Leadership: Our Offer to You

Positive Leadership: The Path to Peak Performance

Harvard's Dr. Edward M. "Ned" Hallowell (author of Shine) outlines the five steps necessary to excel at work: select, connect, play, grapple and shine.

Everyone can 'shine'!

Positive Leadership: The Path to Peak Performance

Positive Leadership: Dealing With Uncertainty

Positive Leadership: Dealing With Uncertainty

Positive Leadership: Controlling Your Mind Through Positive Intelligence

Daniel Goleman made a compelling and accurate case nearly two decades ago that Emotional Intelligence (EQ) was more important to leadership effectiveness and performance than IQ. But most attempts at increasing EQ have resulted only in temporary improvements. The reason is that a more foundational and core intelligence has been ignored, which is a pre-cursor to high EQ, namely Positive Intelligence (PQ). Without a solid PQ foundation, many of our attempts at improvements fail due to self-sabotage.

Your mind is your best friend, but it is also your worst enemy, involved in self-sabotage. To illustrate, when your mind tells you that you should prepare for tomorrow’s important meeting, it is acting as your friend, causing positive action. When it wakes you up at 3:00 a.m. anxious about the meeting and warning you for the hundredth time about the many consequences of failing, it is acting as your enemy; it is simply exhausting your mental resources without any redeeming value. No friend would do that.

Your PQ is the percentage of time your mind is serving you as opposed to sabotaging you. For example, a PQ of 75 means that your mind is serving you 75% of the time and sabotaging you about 25% of the time. Compelling evidence from a synthesis of research in psychology, neuroscience, and organisational science shows that with higher PQ teams and professionals ranging from leaders to salespeople perform 30-35% better on average. What’s more, they report being far happier and less stressed.

In this video, author and Stanford lecturer Shirzad Chamine introduces Positive Intelligence. He shows how your Positive Intelligence score or PQ dramatically affects both your performance and personal fulfilment. He reveals the 10 Saboteurs that are our hidden internal enemies and how to combat them.

Positive Leadership: Controlling Your Mind Through Positive Intelligence

Positive Leadership: Excellence Under Pressure

Two people who had survived intense pressure and tasted success last year were Graham Henry and Richie McCaw. As respective coach and captain of the All Blacks they were tasked with bringing home the Rugby World Cup silverware and a nation of five million supporters weren’t going to accept anything less.

Success in sport can often hinge on how much a team wants to win and in high stakes situations mental toughness can play a crucial role.

Henry believes that his eight years coaching the All Blacks proved mentally tougher for his family than for him. "They go through more difficult times than you, because they have no control over it, and you have. You're at the coalface, doing the job, and it dissipates the pressure; you are so involved in the process you don't worry too much about the result.”

Henry is now passing on his knowledge to other sporting teams as a “mentor”. He’s involved with Super 15 rugby team the Blues, Argentina’s national rugby team the Pumas, and Sport New Zealand’s emerging coaches from disciplines such as yachting and cycling.

In a recent interview, Richie McCaw opened up about the sort of pressure he is under as All Blacks captain. “There is always pressure going into any match, I have accepted that. Everyone expects the All Blacks to win every time they go on the field. If you try and say there is no pressure you are kidding yourself. I try to put it aside and just be excited by the opportunity.”

He goes on to say that being the best player he can be is key to supporting his team. Walking the talk and leading by example are traits of role model Todd Blackadder (former All Black), which Richie hopes to emulate.

Psyching yourself up is a particularly effective mental toughness tool and we all do it before a big occasion because it helps to give us courage or the “edge”. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the world’s most successful rugby team, the All Blacks, also have the most elaborate mental warm up – the Haka!

Positive Leadership: Excellence Under Pressure

Positive Leadership: Success for the Successful: The Kobe System

If you haven't experienced the Kobe System for yourself, you must not know what it feels like to be over the top!

This is because the Kobe System isn't just about getting to the top; it's about going over the top! Success for the Successful is Kobe Bryant's winning, results-oriented philosophy on how to adapt to succeed.

In this motivational speech, Kobe makes clear that just because you're the GOAT doesn't mean you're done dominating. The KobeSystem helps ex NFL star, Jerry Rice come to that hard conclusion.

For more motivational videos from Kobe, see: http://globalgrind.com/style/5-levels-kobe-system-featuring-kanye-serena-p-rod-more-video#ixzz1tcdhDX6G

Positive Leadership: Success for the Successful: The Kobe System

Positive Leadership: Preparing to Excel Under Pressure

How well do you prepare to excel under pressure?

The London Summer Olympics are nearly three months from now with the opening ceremony on July 27. However, the training several U.S. Olympians have done with the US Navy SEALs — 10 U.S. teams in Olympic sports have been through at least one session in recent years — is an arduous, indelible part of their preparation.

“I guess what I took away from that was the human body can always achieve more than we believe. And that's controlled purely by our minds." US Olympic gold medallist Garrett Weber-Gale 

The fatigue is so consuming the SEALs advise them at certain points to focus only on their next step — to ignore the discomfort of the elements, the aches shooting through their muscles, the doubts plaguing their minds, and to simply put one foot in front of the other.

"You can't buy what they're going to teach them in four hours," says Wendy Borlabi, a sport psychologist with the U.S. Olympic Committee, who adds the training is especially beneficial to athletes who compete in individual sports. "They're learning what they're doing is bigger than themselves," Borlabi says. "It's different than when they're training for the Olympics, which is all centred on them. "The growth, I think, is astronomical." 

For more, see: : http://www.usatoday.com/sports/olympics/story/2012-04-16/navy-seals-olympics/54506732/1

Positive Leadership: Preparing to Excel Under Pressure

Positive Leadership: Dealing with Pressure

In today's VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) world, we're surrounded constantly by stress and pressure.

Some people always enjoy pressure. Pressure situations to them are the very essence of life. They are a privilege to enjoy. When you are feeling the pressure it means you are in the game and you must be close to achieving something very important.

This advice about pressure is relevant to life, sport and business. 

1. Work, work, work and focus on the fundamentals

You should always believed in controlling what you can control and not worrying about what your competitors might do. In a new business pitch you should never bother with who else is pitching. All you should focus on is doing what you do best and ensuring you deliver your best on the day. To do this usually means you have to work harder than those you are competing against.

2. Keep it simple

Ignore the politics, the possibilities, the past, and what might happen. Don't over rehearse, don't get into too much detail, just push yourself to be great and deliver the winning outcome.

3. Every game is the same. 

The only thing that changes in the final pitch is the importance of winning or losing. If it's a huge new business opportunity, then the stakes are high. But the game is no different than the game we play every day. The rules are the same. So focus on the game plan, not on the consequences.

4. Play in the now

Our brains crave control and certainty. Therefore, focus on the controllables. It is what we can do that counts, not what the other people might be doing.

5. Don't fear losing

You should have no fear of failure. Winning never comes easy, is rarely predictable, and never follows a straight line. Setbacks always happen. Accept it and you will reduce the stress when they occur. Your energy should then be refocused on the task at hand and handling the problem, not on increasing the stress levels. Setbacks should be converted into passionate feel and belief.

Sean Fitzpatrick, the former All Blacks rugby captian once said that when his team lost a test match, they gathered together and absorbed the pain together. Sean told them to hold that feeling so they knew how badly it felt and they would do anything to avoid it in the future.

Pressure. Bring it on.

Positive Leadership: Dealing with Pressure

Positive Leadership: The Source of Pressure

‘Pressure is a heavy feeling that weighs upon your shoulders and it’s brought upon yourself. A lot of other people think it’s brought upon you. Pressure is something you bring on yourself because of your insecurities, your own lack of form, and your concern about the opposition. It can be very different for different people. One person won’t feel it under in any given circumstance and another will feel it greatly. It’s hard to define but when we are feeling it we all know it’s there.’  Andrew Strauss, England Cricket Captain

Events do not create pressure it is only our internal thoughts that do that.  We are responsible for our mind and how it behaves. Therefore the more we train our mind, the better we are able to deal with pressure.

Positive Leadership: The Source of Pressure