Why leaders should train like athletes for high pressure moments

Jim had decided to seek external funding for his business for the first time. He wanted to scale fast and, after analysing his options, concluded that outside funding was the best route. He and his team worked tirelessly on their pitch deck and supporting materials and drew up a target list of investors.

The first couple of pitches didn’t go well. Jim was nervous. His team seemed underprepared for the environment and the probing questions. They walked away deflated.

That was when I started coaching Jim. I asked him to walk me through how he and his team had prepared. He spoke at length about the documentation: the slides, the deck, the hours honing every detail.

“And how did you prepare for the actual pitch?” I asked. Jim looked blank. “How did you prepare for the nerves, the pressure, the environment you’d be in?” Another blank look.

“What about your plan for each pitch, your OST?” Still nothing. “Objective, strategy and tactics. Please tell me you agreed on those with your team before walking into the room?”

You may be feeling a bit sorry for Jim at this moment, but this was exactly the opening we needed to help him get the right outcome.

In elite sport, athletes rarely just practise their skills. They practise for the conditions.

Part of Team Europe’s preparation for last year’s Ryder Cup involved wearing VR headsets. Why? To simulate the abuse they knew they would face from a partisan New York crowd at the Bethpage Black course.

Rory McIlroy even set his headset to the “maximum abuse” setting. His explanation? To prepare not just for what he’d face, but for what it would feel like. Those who followed the competition will understand how much this helped him.

This isn’t new. A decade ago, head coach Stuart Lancaster had the England rugby team train indoors with deafening music before facing Wales at the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff. Why? To simulate the chants and hostility – the sheer wall of noise that would make on-field communication difficult.

Olympic gold medal trampolinist Bryony Page took the same approach ahead of Paris 2024. Appearing on Steve Ingham’s Supporting Champions podcast soon after her Olympic win, she explained how two simulated competitions were held in advance of Paris so that she could get a sense of the rhythm and timings (the competition was being run in a slightly different format).

The simulations taught her that it was going to be a long process: she would need to manage her energy levels, do enough to get through each round, but not absolutely go for it too early.

She was also worried about the intensity of a “home crowd feel”. With the Olympics in Paris her team expected family, friends and Team GB supporters would travel easily, creating a more emotionally charged atmosphere. She and her team did a lot of work before a pre-Olympics competition in Birmingham (where there would be a vocal home crowd) to build coping mechanisms – and, crucially, to practise using them under pressure.

The same applies in business. Why assume you can walk into a pitch meeting and perform under those conditions, especially if the reception is tough, without giving yourself practice? Set up mock pitches. Try to replicate the conditions. Ask the audience to challenge you. It will only stand you in good stead for the real thing.

Sports psychologists work hard with athletes to ensure that they don’t view pressure as something to fear, but as something to embrace – even as a privilege.

That shift in mindset was crucial for Page, who in the end genuinely enjoyed the fact she had so much support in the crowd. It can be equally powerful for business leaders walking into a funding pitch. Instead of seeing the room as hostile and intimidating, reframe it as an opportunity: investors are giving you their time because they want to hear your story.

This is your chance to secure funding – and if this meeting doesn’t go well, it’s another step towards the outcome you want, provided you learn from it.

One of the most important elements that can help get you into this space is language. The way we talk to ourselves and others is key. Self-talk is an accepted area of focus in the world of sport and I’ve always wondered why it’s not more widely discussed in the business world.

Recent research from Harvard Business School, conducted by associate professor Alison Wood Brooks, reinforces this point. The experiment centred on people performing various activities that generate pre-performance anxiety: maths, public speaking and even karaoke.

Some of those in the study were encouraged to re-appraise their anxious arousal as excitement, repeating the phrase “I am excited” to themselves over and over again. The results demonstrated clearly that harnessing anxiety and converting it into excitement through language had a positive impact on performance.

Try. Experiment. Find the wording that works for you. And it’s not just about self-talk. The language you use with others about an upcoming pitch meeting is also crucial.

Compare: “I am so worried about this meeting, it’s going to be really tricky, I think I might mess up and we have so much on the line”, with: “We’ve got a big meeting today. It’s a real opportunity for us, one hour with the ideal audience. We’re going to do our best to nail it and at the very least make sure we learn a lot from it.”

Early on in my career, I remember going into a meeting with someone more senior than me, who happened to be an ex-cricketer. Before we entered the room, he asked how I thought we should approach it. After a few seconds of incoherent reply, he stopped me and said: “What’s your OST?”

My what?

He explained that one of the key things he had learnt from sport and taken into his professional life was to approach everything through the prism of these three letters. In sport, high-pressure situations demand clarity of purpose.

Athletes and teams must be clear on their objective – what they are trying to achieve, which is not simply “to win”. They need a strategy: the overall approach that will give them the best chance of reaching that objective. Finally, they must think about their tactics – the specific decisions and actions they will make in the moment, under pressure.

Sport provides some brilliant examples of OST planning. Two of my favourites are shared by Alistair Campbell in his book Winners and how they succeed.

When Clive Woodward was England rugby head coach, his objective was simple: to win the World Cup, which he did in 2003. His strategy centred on excellence through attention to detail, while his tactics were expressed through the countless marginal gains he introduced across every aspect of the team’s preparation.

Ben Ainslie took a similar clarity of thinking into Olympic sailing, winning gold at four consecutive Games. His objective was to win the race, but achieving that required a carefully defined strategy built around detailed modelling of how the wind and currents were likely to behave.

Decisions were mapped out in advance: if this happens, we do this. If that happens, we do that. However, once the race began, it became almost entirely tactical, but always within the strategic plan. As Ainslie himself put it: “Strategy is about how we manage the weather and the environment. Once you’re into the race, it is pretty much all tactical, but within your strategic frame.”

Sharing this framework with Jim was a revelation. Until then, he hadn't taken the time to plan each pitch meeting properly with the team, taking into account the audience they were talking to. He also treated every pitch as a single, high-stakes shot at funding. But when he realised his objective for one meeting might simply be “get a second meeting”, his strategy and tactics shifted accordingly.

It was a few weeks before I next saw Jim. He had worked hard in all of these areas: having a clear OST for this fundraising period and for each individual meeting, preparing the team for the conditions they were likely to face (including paying actors to play the investors, with instructions to behave in a difficult way) and shifting mindsets in advance of each meeting through self-talk and team language.

The results were promising. They had delivered some strong pitches and one potential investor asked for a follow-up.

But one thing was troubling Jim. Despite all the preparation, the team had still been caught out in a couple of meetings due to time pressures. They had expected to have an hour to pitch, but ended up with closer to 30 minutes. That meant they couldn’t get through their whole presentations – and they felt they hadn’t made their case.

This gave me the opportunity to share one more critical lesson from sport: communicating under pressure.

When we think of communication in sport, we often think of pre-match speeches – coaches delivering carefully prepared messages to inspire and motivate. But much of the communication in elite sport happens under pressure, in the moment, with little time to spare.

I’ve shared in Business Leader pages before the story of the Great Britain women’s hockey team in the 2016 Olympic final in Rio against the favourites, the Netherlands. Their ability to communicate using just one or two words, in the few seconds they had as their bodies were being pushed to the limit, made all the difference. It helped them stay in the right place mentally, deliver key messages and win gold.

[Hockey pic]

I highlighted two key elements to Jim. The first is to keep messages simple and tangible and the second is to meet the recipients where they are.

Anyone who watches elite sport will see how relentlessly physical it is. And that takes its toll, not just on physical performance, but also mentally. The best coaches and captains know that time-pressured messages (such as a half-time talk) need to be simple, succinct and easy to absorb.

Beware the trap of thinking you need sophisticated or complicated language, or to talk for so long that your central point gets lost in the melee. Keep messages short, sharp and tangible.

It's also important to adapt to what’s in front of you. I stressed to Jim the importance of checking, before you start, how long you have got. Try also to get a sense of where your audience is emotionally and practically. Do they look like they are in listening mode? Or are stressed, distracted, glancing at phones?

If so, why not say: “I know you’ll be in the middle of a really busy day, but we hope we can have your focus for the next 30 minutes so we can share this opportunity with you.” And if it’s clear the timing is just not great for them, why not suggest rearranging?

Jim’s follow-up meeting was postponed at the investors’ request. Previously, that would have caused disappointment and panic. This time, Jim and his team reframed it positively. Better to meet when the investors could give their full attention. The extra time allowed for more preparation.

When the meeting finally took place, it went brilliantly. Jim and his team secured their funding.

In our next session, we reviewed the lessons. But the most powerful moment came when Jim realised these lessons wouldn’t just help with fundraising, but with every single day at work. From a coaching point of view … bingo!