The Truth About Pressure: What It Builds in You

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1:52Hi there, welcome along to one of our regular conversations here on High Performance with myself. and Damien Hughes. Hi, Damien. Hi, Jake. Sit and talk about one of the topics that comes up time and time again in our conversations with high performers. So this podcast has been running for over five years, almost 400 episodes. And so often when we've spoken to people at the absolute top of the game, they talk about the fact that pressure is a privilege. Now, I want to talk to you about this, Damien, because every time people say that, Damien, a little voice in my brain says, well, I disagree. And I've never voiced this before until now.

2:23Go on. But the reason why I struggle with this idea that pressure is a privilege is because to me it doesn't feel like a privilege to me pressure feels like overwhelm pressure feels like doubt pressure feels like you're hurtling fast towards a big moment of failure in your life and to me it feels like anything other than a privilege can you think of a specific moment when that was the case yeah absolutely i can um in 2009 when i was asked to host formula one for the bbc and to the outside world it was like wow what an amazing opportunity This is a children's BBC, a kids' TV presenter that's been given the chance to host Formula One for the BBC.

2:59It'll be transformational for his life. And it felt like anything but. I mean, I had an agent at the time who told me that financially it would change my life. It actually transpired that the BBC were going to offer me what I was earning on kids' telly, plus a very little bit of extra money as a reward for getting that job. And it wasn't a big salary by any means. I also signed a one-year contract. I was also told by the boss at the time that people would make their minds up about my presenting in the first 10 seconds. And if the decision that they came to wasn't a good one, I wouldn't have any more than one year hosting Formula One.

3:31So not only would it be a failure, it would be a very public failure, would almost certainly be the end of my broadcasting career. I had worked at that point for about 10 years to try and build a career as a TV presenter. And I knew standing in the pit lane in Australia that whatever came out of my mouth and whatever happened in the next few minutes was going to determine probably the rest of my life. and it didn't feel like anything remotely close to being a privilege. It felt absolutely horrible. I've had other moments since. I had other moments before that. And I really would love us to have a conversation, a really honest conversation, about how we can develop a good relationship with pressure, about how we can separate the difference between pressure and stress.

4:12Because I think when people say pressure is a privilege, maybe I'm the one who's confusing pressure with stress. Well, I don't think you are. I think you're describing what is a stressful situation, but in my understanding of it, I think your brain is constantly seeking answers to the future. It's a prediction-making machine, and it's asking itself three questions. And if you go back and explore that example in 2009 in the pit lane, your brain is asking, right, what are the expectations that are being placed on me or the demands? Two, do I have the ability to meet those demands? and three, what are the consequences of not being able to do so?

4:51So if we go back and unpick what you've just said there, somebody's saying to you, this can change your life, right? So the expectation is loading up. Somebody's saying to you that you've got millions of people you've never met and never will meet are going to judge you in 10 seconds. So again, there's a weight of expectation there. The consequences you've just said, this is going to certainly end your broadcasting career. So do you think that not one focus there is on your ability that you've done years of children's TV presenting, you've, you know, you started a rapture, that very first time you went to Paris and stood in front of a camera, this was where you belonged.

5:26So nowhere are you focused on, I have the ability to do this, to stand there. So when both expectations become overwhelming and the fear of consequences become crippling, that's where it stops being a pleasure or a privilege. It starts to become stressful because you're very survival. your brain is interpreting that is now at risk. So really, I suppose what you're saying is that pressure is something that's external and stress is something that's internal. And me internalizing the external pressure was the challenge. Yeah, and often what we've seen so often with a lot of our guests is the ability to articulate it and almost externalize this pressure to be able to talk about it.

6:10You can then get your hands around it. Do you remember when Steve Peters said to us that your chimp brain will always become emotional? He goes, what happens if I fail my GCSEs? What happens if I fail my driving test? What happens if my partner decides to leave me? The emotional brain catastrophizes and goes, I'll never survive. I'll never get another job. My life will be over. Whereas if you then go, well, what's my plan? The human brain then kicks in and goes, right, okay, now we can deal with it. My life won't be over. Maybe I'll feel sad for a few months if my partner left, but I'll hopefully start to get on the dating scene or whatever it is.

6:45Your human brain allows you to do it. So I think one of the things that we've seen so often is that the ability to articulate the demands and the consequences and remind ourselves of our ability is where we get to the place of pressure, being a privilege. So interesting. Thank you. That's actually helped me greatly. I feel like I've just had a little counselling session. I think the other thing that I'm talking in a counselling session that really helped to transform my relationship with stress and pressure was when I had some mental health challenges in my early 20s and I went to see a brilliant psychologist.

7:18And she said, look, the biggest bit of advice I can give you is stop fighting these thoughts. I was having intrusive thoughts. She said, the pressure that you're feeling, the stress you're feeling isn't coming from the thoughts. It's coming from you fighting those thoughts. And I would love to talk about this for a moment for so many people listening to this who feel pressure, feel stress, feel overwhelmed, are having intrusive thoughts, are having daily doubts. maybe they are catastrophizers, maybe they've got a bit of OCD, whatever's going on in their life, this idea of not fighting the feeling gives you freedom.

7:47And I'd love to play a clip from Tom Aspinall, the brilliant UFC fighter who's given us one of our most popular episodes ever on high performance, where he just openly spoke about the dangers of walking into the octagon in UFC and accepting the risks. Should we hear from him? I'd love to. I'm willing to step in the cage with, We're talking about John Jones here, who is the most dangerous guy to ever fight in MMA. So I'm talking about potentially the most dangerous man, unarmed on earth, who I'm potentially going to fight with. Now, if I'm sat backstage getting my hands wrapped, knowing that he's over the opposite side of the arena, getting his hands wrapped, we're both going to walk into the arena in front of 35 ,000 people with millions watching around the world, and one of us is going to get separated from our consciousness, quite literally, and you're not scared of that, then, like I said, you're either a complete idiot or you're just lying.

8:46So fear is extremely present in what I do. So the reason why I thought that was really important, right, Damien, is because that is a great lesson for all of us, that if Tom can live with freedom in his thoughts when facing a life or death situation, actually, when you're fighting in the UFC. This idea that one of us is going to be separated from consciousness, potentially separated from life. You know, those are the stakes that he's playing with. If he can do it in that situation, then we should all be able to separate ourselves from our intrusive thoughts or our fear or our pressure or our stress when it comes to our relationship with our kids or our relationship with our boss or the amount of work that we're having to do.

9:27And this idea that if we can stop fighting the forces that are out there, then the freedom is actually really powerful. Yeah, very much. I mean, if anyone goes back and listens to that episode we had with Tom, we'll know that we referenced in it the work of the amazing boxing coach, Customato. Customato was almost the godfather of boxing coaches. And he had this great line that, you know, fear is like fire. It can either heat your home and provide for you and your family or it can burn it down and consume you. and I think what Tom spoke about speaks to the essence of that. It's the ability to acknowledge its presence, not to deny it, not to fight it and go, I'm not frightened because that's doing what you described in your counselling sessions in your early 20s.

10:14You're trying to suppress or deny the intrusive thought of a fear or frightened, but I don't feel I can acknowledge it or I can talk about it. So the ability of being able to articulate fear and the pressures that come with it, again, allow you to get a handle on it, to be able to then reframe it in a certain way. I heard Bruce Springsteen once talk about, when he said, do you get nerves? And he said, no, it's excitement. He's just reframed the same emotion in a way that he considers it to be more helpful. So I think Tom's given us a great way in there of we have to acknowledge pressure and we have to describe how it makes us feel because only then can we get a handle on it.

10:56and then use it either to heat our houses and allow us to perform, or allow it to consume us. There's some really good research on this that talks about you either perceive something as a threat or a challenged state. There's a study that was done with students where some students were told they had to do an exam to prove that they were worthy of a place at the university, whereas other students were given the same exam, but they were told that they were doing the test to validate exactly why they should be at the university. so the first group were almost threatened with the idea of that you shouldn't be here and you need to justify it the other group was told this is exactly where you should be and this is just to reaffirm you and what they found is the difference in performance was something like 80 percent for those that had been given the challenge state 65 percent for those that performed from a threat state so when we feel under pressure and we don't have the ability to frame it in a healthy way it inhibits our ability to access our rational brains it stops us having perspective it stops us being able to respond to difficult moments and this takes us really nicely actually into a conversation with steve hansen who's one of the greatest ever rugby coaches he led the all blacks to some huge success and he spoke to us about pressure but also about staying in the moment about creating plans about how to create a framework around yourself to help you deal with pressure.

12:19Should we listen to him? Yeah, I love this conversation at Twickenham where it was. But you need to understand it's there. You need to have to admit to yourself it's there. And then you can put some plans around it. So what pressure you feel might be different to the pressure I feel. What Dame feels could be different to both of what we feel. Identify what it is and then what's your plan. When you start feeling that, what are you going to do? because if you don't have a plan and you're feeling it, you're gone. You're not going to pull it out your backside and say, oh, I'm going to do this now because you just can't.

12:57What sort of plans would you put in place then? Because obviously some players would thrive under pressure and we've all seen players. They thrive under pressure because they're prepared for it. Right. It's not the pressure that's making them thrive. It's the preparation that's making them thrive. and they've planned for, okay, when this gets hot and it's a tug of war sort of time in the heat of the game, they're not worried about the scoreboard. Their plan is forget the scoreboard. Their plan is to stay right here where my feet are. Stay in there now. What's the job I've got to do? Let's do that job as really good as I can and hope like hell the guy across me, he's worried about the scoreboard or he's worried about the mistake he's just made.

13:40and I think that's the difference. So having those mental skills, like for a long time, the All Blacks didn't want to admit to ourselves that we were chokers at World Cup and the reason we didn't is because the people at the top didn't have to own it because you got the sack. So the next guy coming in, well, not my fault, I didn't choke, so I'm not a choker. But in 07, we got the opportunity to do it again and we had to sit there and say, well, shit, what are we going to learn from this? What can we take out of this pain and put it into a wee parcel that's going to make us good? We won two World Cups because of the fact that they allowed us to have another go.

14:24And we took the learnings and, you know, Bob's your uncle, SpongeBob got there and got the job done. So what were those learnings? All about pressure. We have to admit to ourselves that there is a lot of pressure. So how are we going to deal with the fact that we haven't been in a final before? What is that pressure doing to each of us individually that we haven't been there before? So walk towards that things are going to go wrong. So what are we going to do if they do go wrong? There's a really important piece of work that was done in the early 20th century by a psychologist called Lev Vygotsky.

15:03The actual site of his work is the zone of proximal development but it's better known as the Goldilocks zone. And what the research says is that in any situation, you can either be in your comfort zone where everything is really easy or at the other extreme of it, you're in your panic zone where you feel that level of stress and anxiety and performance inhibiting responses. But the perfect zone that we need to be in is the learning zone where we feel that we're being stretched. The edge of our ability is being stretched but we're capable of getting there. and we know that we can do it. And when we get to a place like that, that's what I see Steve talking about, that training for them was getting you in the Goldilocks zone all the time, not making it too easy, not making it too hard, but just stretching you so that when you had to perform, you knew that your brain had the evidence that gave you the confidence to go and execute.

15:58It reminds me of Nick Cox, the man who leads the academy at Manchester United, telling us that they used to take young players and they do stretch and reward. So they'd have training sessions where they specifically have bad refereeing decisions or they play them against much better players. So the young man you players are being stretched all the time. And then other games where they give them a huge reward by putting them against a bad team or rewarding them and making their life easy. And all of this reminds me of the conversation we had with James Clear, the brilliant author of Atomic Habits.

16:23And if you remember, he came up with five pillars, really, for dealing with stress and pressure. I think it would be worth sharing with people. Well, the first one is decision fatigue, where he sort of shared that numerous decisions can drain the mental energy, right, leading to stress and therefore planning ahead, having routines, can reduce the number of decisions that you need to make. And you talk about this brilliantly really often. Therefore, you conserve your mental energy. It lowers your stress levels. He talked about clarity and focus with us, if you remember. He said that having a clear plan allows you to focus on your tasks without being overwhelmed by constant uncertainty.

16:58And that's a big thing for me. I'm a catastrophizer, so if I'm uncertain about something, I really struggle. Therefore, if I just start making a list or start planning to do something about the problem, it immediately alleviates my stress and my worry. And what he's really famous for is habit formation, obviously. In Atomic Habits, he talks about how this planning and creating good habits and structured plans for our goals and where we want to live is really valuable and again, can reduce stress and overwhelm. But also I loved when he spoke to us about preparation and anticipation. Do you remember he sort of highlighted that planning actually allows us to anticipate those challenges.

17:33You talk about them often, Damien, as premortems. Instead of a post-mortem or what's killed someone, have a premortem. What can kill? What can be the problem here? And the final one, which I thought was really powerful, is realistic goals. You know, James Clear says, instead of setting goals that are so hard to reach and that are so out of your comfort zone that it's going to cause you huge stress and anxiety, set goals that are realistic. And when you reach them, go a bit further, go a bit further, so smaller goal setting. I'd love people after this conversation actually to listen to the full episode with James Clear.

18:03I thought it was really valuable. Yeah, it was. But again, I think it's really practical too that each of those five pillars there are all in their own way, just allowing people to reduce the sense of expectation, minimize the consequences, and instead focus on your ability. What can I do in any moment just to be able to give the best that I can? There's another clip that almost challenges some of this stuff. You know, this is somebody that was set in high demands and expectations of the people in their world. Let's listen to the brilliant, the belligerent and the bombastic Barry Hearn. Lesson number four is pressure is only felt by those that fail.

18:47What that really means is that people make excuses for their own weaknesses. We've all got weaknesses. but it's very tiresome for me to hear people say oh yeah i couldn't handle it or yeah i'd rather keep my mouth shut firstly i would never tell anyone if that was the case with me because that's something inside me to sort out and secondly it's probably lacking appreciation that we've all got an opportunity in life to do something and it won't always go right so don't start crying around me go out and do something about it and if you do fail make it one time you fail and use that as a springboard to succeed it's about character isn't it it's about what's inside you didn't we breed character enough into people these days no we don't and sometimes it's frightening I had this thing with my children about I love them so much but when it comes down to it are they going to be good enough in this world when dad's not there You know, my kids was, you know, sometimes they were taken to school in limos.

19:55They went to private schools. All the things that I hated when I was younger because I had an inferiority complex about people who had things I didn't have. And you think, do you spoil them? And then you realise, maybe not. You see, I mean, Eddie's a great example. I can't believe how he's turned out. He's a credit to me and what he does. And he's got a tremendous work ethic and he doesn't need to have. you know he wasn't ever going to starve or go without and yet there's something inside and that's what everyone's got to find they've got to find that inner strength that takes some past ordinary people if they want to be special so i struggle with some of the stuff that barry says there because actually i think that um it's not the healthiest way to live it's not the healthiest way to operate but there's no denying that it's his truth right that's the mindset he has and it's taken him to an incredibly successful place i suppose really what what we need to talk about around this is this idea that building character is what allows you to deal with stressful or challenging or difficult times the way to build character is to fail so i believe very strongly that if we want to live a life where we are able to deal with big challenges in front of us if we want to live a life where stress and pressure are bedfellows that we can cope with and by the way damien i actually think that a life lived without pressure and without stress is maybe a life where we're going to be unfulfilled at the end of it.

21:18Like I do think it's okay to have things in our lives that are overwhelming now and then, not all the time, but now and then. How do you deal with those things? I think you have to have failed. I think you have to be comfortable with the fact that things are not always going to go right. Because actually I look at, you know, some of the things that happened in my early life, you know, like challenges, moments where I thought, man, this is really bad for me because things have gone wrong. I now realise that those things were hard for me they weren't bad for me like you know I've still got a folder at home with maybe 30 rejection letters from children's BBC where I ended up working in the end so why have you kept them?

21:58I've kept them really for the kids because I know that Flo and Seb are living in a lovely bubble at the moment where like everything is set up to make them successful but that can't be the case forever they're 12 and 9 so that's generally the life of a 12 and a 9 year old if they're lucky but by the time they're 16, 17, 18 they will have to be applying for jobs, applying for uni doing exams, failing them, falling out with friends, having relationship breakdowns so I want at some point to say just come and have a look at this, you know like you know your dad was on kids TV here are the raft of rejections before I finally made it and so I think that the reason why I think that's relevant here is if we can get comfortable with the fact that failure is a necessary part of life, what did Greg Hoffman the former chief marketing officer of Nike tell us so failure is the price of ambition failure is the price of ambition then I think it allows us to be ambitious so if someone's listening to this and they are struggling and they do feel under pressure and they do have fear that they're going to not be able to cope with the things that are in their lives then I would remind them to do a premortem I would remind them to look at all the times in their life that they failed previously I would like to remind them that they have a 100 % success rate of getting through tough times yeah I love that because they're here and they're listening to this conversation I love that.

23:10It reminds me of Southwest Airlines. They're like America's equivalent of Ryanair or EasyJet, like Budget Airline, but only operate in America. And in their headquarters, I remember being told this, that they've got like an eat crow wall, which apparently is an American term for like what happens when you make a mistake, like the humility that comes from it. And they've got a wall dedicated to mistakes that were made from the staff. And when they were asked about it, they said, why do you have a wall dedicated to that? They went, well, one of our non-negotiable behaviours, they call them freedoms, is innovation.

23:42And they went, and with innovation, that demands that you fail. And so we want to celebrate the failure because we only need one of the innovations to come off for it to be worth millions for us. So things that we take for granted now, like in the early days of those flights, not having seating plans where you find your own seat or you print your own boarding passes off, they all came from innovations of Southwest Airlines staff, but they were built on the scaffolding of hundreds of failures and what they were doing was celebrating the failures rather than just the big moments. I love that, Damien.

24:16I love the way that you suddenly come up with some brilliant story from all the things that you've experienced in your life. Can I play one final clip before we wrap this up and go to a few viewer questions? Okay, if I say someone that you didn't think that you wanted to have on High Performance and at the end of the conversation you thought it was one of the most empowering conversations you'd ever had. Alistair Campbell. Alistair Campbell. Well, you had an opinion of him. The opinion was wrong, which is another whole other episode of High Performance, actually. You know what? I bumped into him recently.

24:43What did you say? Well, I was running late for a flight and I legged it down for a flight to Belfast. And I thought it had already been cold, so I sort of just barged my way to the front like an ignoramus. And then I looked round and realised... Like an ignoramus. A mixture of arrogance and ignorance. Yeah. And as I turned round, the person I'd barged in front of was Alistair Campbell. Now, previously, before meeting him, I would have anticipated he'd have given me his equivalent of the air dryer. Yeah. You know, like, who do you think you are? Things like that. But I turned around and apologised and then realised it was him.

25:16And again, it was a textbook reminder for me of how we judge a book by its cover. Because he was kind, he had a laugh. And we ended up sort of chatting on the flight over and just really generous with his insights and his decency. Well, let's hear from him. when he spoke to us about the impact of pressure, overwhelm, fear, doubt, when he was on a TV show and he had a moment where he almost had to escape the classic flight or fight. The thing about pressure leading to... Was it Dave Brelsford or there's another guy in the book, Andy McCann, who's a sports psychologist in Wales, yeah. He said, pressure good, stress bad.

26:00Pressure, good. Pressure, this matters. That makes you do it better. Stress, you're worrying about things you shouldn't. Your mind's going to a place you can't control. You lose the plot. And I once had a situation where I was doing interviews and I was having like out-of-body experiences, one of which you can Google it. Google me and Andrew Marr and it will come up top. I guarantee it. And it was an interview where he asked me a question and I'm just, I'm not there. I'm kind of, I'm over there. At one point I'm thinking I'm going to hit him. And I didn't speak for quite, listen, you do telly, right?

26:39Yeah. It's only a few seconds, but honestly. It was like a long time. Quite a long few seconds. And I didn't say anything because I didn't know what was, I didn't know where I was. So I went to see this guy, Andy McCann, because I knew him through a friend of ours who was a golfer, who was helping him because he had the yips and he couldn't putt properly. And Andy told me this thing. He said, well, all that's happening there is, I can't remember the medical term, but he gave me the medical term. And it's a sort of fight or flight thing. And he said, the thing you've got to do is find your own thing that works for you.

27:11I said, well, like what? He said, well, you know, the All Blacks, if ever you see the All Blacks playing and you see them do that, look at the sky. It's a centering. That's their centering thing. They're losing concentration. Just go like that. and it just gets them back. Other people, they might do that. So nobody notices if you do that, you're just doing that, but that's their thing. So I develop this thing. So my thing is that, I do that. I just rub my thumbs. So if I feel, and this is like, if I get, it doesn't happen as often, is it? I don't want to make this sound dramatic. If somebody attacks me in the street, which occasionally does happen, right?

27:47You know, just shouts at you or has a go, whatever. I just do that. And I don't know why, But two things happen. One, I feel centred. And secondly, I smile. It makes me smile. And I do it on the telly. If I'm feeling under pressure at an interview or something, I'll just do that. So what Alistair's talking about there, Damien, and obviously it works better in video than audio, but he's rubbing his fingers together and he's kind of explaining that he has this physical movement that he does, which is used to centre himself, ground himself and sort of bring him back to the present moment probably not too dissimilar to you know if you go to cbt therapy and they advise you to sort of tap or you know tap your arms or tap your hand it's a way of kind of bringing yourself back into the present moment and i think it's an important place for us to finish this conversation because what we're not saying to people is by listening to this 30 odd minutes of chat on high performance you're never going to feel pressure and overwhelm again you probably will particularly if you're chasing your own version of high performance but actually you can still be okay in those moments yeah definitely well it does bring us back full circle so when we spoke earlier about the idea of demands being overwhelming or consequences feeling frightening the bit that we didn't talk about in the middle was reminding yourself of your abilities so when things go wrong and they will that's what we've discussed through the greg hoffman quote of failure is the price of ambition your ability to remind yourself to be in the moment is key so your brain think of it like it can travel in three directions your brain can either you make a mistake it goes into the future and goes oh this is not my day this is going to be dreadful today i've made one mistake i'm going to make another or it can go into the past and it can keep replaying the mistake you've made you idiot how could you do that or you can center it and that's what alistair's talking about there so whether it's dan carter telling us about kicking the toe of his boot into the ground so he could feel the earth beneath him.

29:43Alistair sort of rubbing his fingers or whether it was Daniel Dubois even talking about regarding walking to the ring in Wembley Stadium as going through the park to work. These are all ways of just centering yourself and being in the moment. And I think when we do that, we remind ourselves of our abilities that just allow us to live our very definition of high performance, which is doing the best you can in that moment with the resources that you have. Thanks, Damien. And look, we've got a High Performance broadcast channel on Instagram. And we actually told our followers there, you can follow it on our Instagram handle, at High Performance, if you want to be part of our broadcast channel.

30:20There's a few thousand people there that enjoy these exclusive behind-the-scenes conversations, photos and things. And we asked the people on our broadcast channel today just to send us their thoughts when it comes to this kind of conversation. Oh, cool. And I'll share a few. Rich Cadden said, pressure is only a privilege if you have the evidence you've done the work. If you've trained hard enough, the fear is reframed into excitement and it's an upward spiral of energy. If you haven't done the work, that's when the fear is framed as anxiety and it's a downward spiral of energy. As a two-time world champion in Mai Tai boxing, I felt this on both sides of the equation and I've talked about this in my book, Cadence Code.

30:55He says, brackets, shameless plug. He says, I'm a huge fan of the show and I'm sure I'll be loving this episode as normal. I shall be reading your book, Rachel. Thank you for sharing that. It's a great show, actually. and actually we hear so often, don't we, that in fact we spoke with Ryan Yates, the Nottingham Forest captain, and he said that he has anxiety. He said he's learned to reframe the anxiety as excitement. It's the same feeling. The feeling of being anxious is the same as being excited and so often it's about reframing. Lynn Maidley says, I'm a chief operating officer in South Africa for a leading global advertising group.

31:29I'm an ex-professional athlete and event rider. I spent a huge amount of my time creating systems and processes to help reach desired high-performance outcomes. But people trump process every time. Attitude over aptitude. And that's exactly what we said. You know, you can create these systems, can't you? Yeah, that's good. And Epic Sarah, 2001 SW says, I love this podcast. I've recommended it to loads of people. Thank you, Sarah. They will love it as well. And we also had a few quotes about hard truths, which we asked people to tell us which one resonates with you. The quotes were, fear means you're ready, you're not weak.

32:03Pressure is good. Stress is what breaks you. Pressure is a privilege. Only winners feel it. And if you don't have a plan for pressure, then you'll crack. And the one that resonated most with the high-performance audience on the broadcast channel is that fear means you're ready. Fear doesn't mean you're weak. What do you think? Well, I like that. I mean, I'm not a big fan of quotes like that when you see them. And let me explain, because you often hear stuff that sounds great on the surface, you know, like, winners never quit and quitters never win. And you go, yes, you do. on both sides. But I think what we're talking about here is that fear, if you reframe it in the right way, you think about the messages that we've spoken about and you're going to explore the topic like John does, like Barry Hearn, Alistair Campbell and Steve Hansen that we've listened from.

32:49You can make it something that becomes your friend rather than something to be feared. And we'll finish with a message from a high-performance audience member, JMSRWD on our broadcast channel. A lack of direction is far more dangerous than pressure. Pressure with direction is manageable and can even be used as a fuel to build great results. Pressure without direction is deadly and will create a black hole of stress and negativity, which is a great reminder that Simon Sinek has been on High Performance and if you listen to his episode about finding your why, then maybe that will be one of the things that alleviates pressure in your life.

33:24Well, they had that great chat with you, didn't they, about your why? Helping you do it. Thanks, mate. Thank you, mate. Thanks for listening and we'll see you again soon for another episode of High Performance Oh, and by the way, if you love these little conversations where myself and Damien just sit and talk about some of the themes that have cropped up on this show over the last few years, ping us a message. You can find Damien. He's at Liquid Thinker on Instagram. You can find me at Jake Humphrey at High Performance on Instagram as well. We're all over LinkedIn as well. Get in touch with us and tell us what you'd love us to talk about on one of these episodes.

33:52Thanks for listening. Hit follow and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

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