Thanks very much. It's really good to join and spend some time together now.

It's a really important question to consider from two sides. One is, as a practitioner going into work in these privileged environments. And the other one is for anybody out there thinking, "What would be the benefits of engaging, whether it's a psychologist, a therapist or spiritual coach?" So, to answer your question directly, my experience of Formula 1 drivers has been, they are so driven, pun not intended there. They're so driven to fulfill themselves and obviously their ambitions that when they explore all of the avenues that they can maximize, whether that's a physical exploration of how to get the optimal neck strength so they can tolerate the G-Force, whether it's nutrition and the right time to fuel themselves over a race weekend, there are huge demands on the body. Of course, it's going to leave quite an important area, which is, how do we look at decision making, the ability to maximize your mind, handling pressure, even just for taking information on, and you start to multiply that by other factors, such as you become, I don't think celebrity is the word they would want, but obviously you become a person of profile. Probably your own business in your own right or a small team around you. So the demands on them become really quite significant. Therefore, as I said, when they're keen to explore all these areas of sport science or the mind seems like a no brainer.

That was my experience. They were very receptive, it was often that they came looking for the service. My relationship with Hintsa is that Hintsa is a very trusted and recognized sports science and medicine provider within that industry. And therefore, when they come to Hintsa they might actually be looking for a whole package. They might actually be looking for the coach, some nutrition and some psychology. That way they know that they're going to optimize their potential in their sport.

I think from my experience of this, you've probably got two things to consider. The first thing is, can we look at that person as an individual? That's actually meeting them as an individual. Let's assess their strengths. Let's have a look at some of the areas they can already identify that they would need to improve. Maybe that's from feedback or from their own experiences. And then also there's kind of blind spots that maybe they just haven't had any awareness raised of areas they can explore and optimize. It's very much individual first, I wouldn't say that every single Formula 1 driver approaches something in a set way, and that's how the rest of the world should prepare, I think. I hope you all agree to generalize now. So very individual.

The second layer of it is that when you look at their willingness, as I said, to engage, actually looking at pre-race preparation, what's the optimal way to prepare pre-race? What kind of challenges are we having there? How do we optimize them in race? What's the best way? Formula 1 is unique, it was unique for me coming into it as well, because in many of the other sports, there's a bit more time than splits of a second. Even on a rugby pitch, a football pitch or an American football pitch, or golf, there tends to be a little bit longer to apply these skills. But when you're going 200 miles an hour into a corner battling somebody for position, the radio is in your ear, your steering wheel has 35 buttons, there's a lot more to process than applying mental skills. So you've got the pre-race, in race, but then also a really important area is post-race.

So when people come out of the car, are they able to engage really well with the team? Can they regulate the emotion of a race quick enough to actually remember it? Are they able to communicate that to an engineer and look at how they can change car performance? Are they then able to recover off the back of night one of a Grand Prix? That post race again is really important. And then the final one of the four that I look at is recharge. The ability to finish a Grand Prix in Melbourne, Australia. And then in a week later you're going to be in Japan and you've got to do all that travel and all the preparation, but you still need to recharge.

Now those four areas are where if we can help that person optimize themselves, the opportunities are obviously very vast and are very unique. Everyone's going to have different strengths in different areas.

I mean, we're probably going well back into early stuff. I just love sports. If you gave me a choice to be out on a sports pitch, chasing a football or throwing a javelin, then I would quite happily go and do that. Very sporty parents. So I think, again, it was role modeling but also just a social situation on holiday. If we were away as a family, then we're probably having a tennis competition or something. Certainly, I grew up in a really sporty family and loved sports. Unfortunately I had some pretty awful run of luck in my late teens when I was playing a very good level of rugby. I had multiple reconstructions of my knee. I had 3 reconstructions of my knee, which most people say one's not great, two probably a career ender, three was early retirement.

I had this kind of pivotal moment at a moment where, and I don't mean this as a sob story, it's just kind of matter of fact, it was a very difficult moment of life because obviously my identity, my enjoyment, my ambition was all tied up in sport. And I thought to myself, I'm going to stay in sport. I knew I wanted to stay in sport, but I didn't even know what it was going to be. I went to university to study a general degree in psychology because I was very interested in it. And then I got interested in sports science whilst I was there. And then I just converged on this idea of sports psychology. I just like the idea that I could apply all of the psychology, social psychology, and criminology, all of the good general psychology you learn when you practice psychology. I found this niche that I thought I could apply to, and it related probably to some of my earlier kinds of core.

So even a fast track, many years later, multiple sports and some really good privileges, I think now I still engage with people with the energy and enthusiasm of that world. I still kind of see it as that. However, I also now recognize that when I go into a corporate world, as long as I can just slightly change my frame of reference, if you're working with a trader, their analysis of what could be a good trade position or the risk and then they get a team and they've got an economist helping them out and then they've got a couple of other quantitatives, and now there's this team and they're going to try and achieve this performance. I can buy into that as well. I can really relate to that as well.

My core is probably something like adventure and curiosity, certainly a competitive drive in there. But then the professional side from psychology over the years, I think also has just taught me to, I've obviously got to try and manage myself and be stable and be able to help people when they're in a high pressure, turbulent environment. I'm not there to be a fan. I'm not there to cheer and say, "Hey, this is Formula 1." And the reason I've come to Formula 1 now was to reverse engineer it, to be honest. It's come the other way. I've just worked in sport and stayed in sport and then it had this opportunity to work with some drivers and it's just exponentially increased, really. It's not like I always said, I'm going to go to Formula 1 as a fan. It's that I've just loved sport, and to be honest, probably my biggest passion is people.

It was a kind of a fortuitous point in my journey. Super early on, I'd kind of volunteered to go and do workshops for an Olympic sport. That had been well-received. Then they offered me a paid position. So I was going back the next year and delivering more. Then once the Olympics came around, I was quite embedded in this team. Once that Olympics finished, because I was in Olympic sport, it kind of feels like you're in it and you've got a bit of credibility, there's an opportunity to move to another Olympic sport.

Now, this second Olympic sport is taekwondo. I knew very little about it. It wasn't a sport that I could practice a lot of. And going back to your point earlier, what can I teach a formula one driver? At the end of the day, I've never even driven a Formula 1 car. But of course, it's the convergence of the right stimulus, whether that's mindset, strategies, support, challenge, that stimulus that exponentially increases something. So I go to taekwondo. And luckily for me, British Taekwondo is on this side of the road in Manchester and British Cycling is on the other side of the road in Manchester, a stone's throw apart from each other. At that time, Sir Dave Brailsford, who led the British Olympic Cycling Program from not the most successful programs to certainly one of the most successful in British history. He'd got a forensic psychiatrist, and he was interested in what support the psychiatrist could offer to some riders. He'd had some riders sent. It was off site, and they'd come back and they seem to be in a really good place. So that was the moment for me to meet this psychiatrist.

We met at a service station, which was like a gas station in the UK, which was the only place we could arrange to meet. We sat down and straight away he grilled me on my knowledge. It was like not very many airs and graces, kind of, "Tell me about what you studied and what do you understand about the brain?" I remember kind of doing my best. And then they got out a napkin. It was the only thing we had to hand, got out a napkin, and we had a pen, and he drew his model of the brain. He said, "You're right with this. And we simplified the brain." Now, when I sat, that was Professor Steve Peters. I said earlier, the creator of the chimp model. When I sat there, two things happened. One is I thought, I can use this. I can use this myself. I can use this model. And the second thing was, I thought, this is going to be really helpful for my work with people.

So since that moment with Steve, I think the journey because of the success of the chimp model and the book, the people who came to the company were so diverse. The sectors that we were able to support were very diverse. That for me was like a fast track of learning, but also of experience, because the military would come or the sports sector would come or high performing businesses would come, the general public would come. That I think exponentially increased me. Solid foundation, good support structure and lots of exposure to different places. I feel like I've probably worked with a good spread of society really, in the performance space.

No, no. Please tell me more.

I agree, and that is absolutely not to say that there's some magic formula. It's not like, I have this cookie cutter, you send me anybody and we'll optimize their performance. Personally, that's not the way I've ever worked. But, it does show you that if we can engage with people, if we can explore truly what they want, what is it they really want, they might not always know that, and we have to explore that a little bit more, and then we can start to look at what it's going to take. And again are they aware of that or do we have to help bring their awareness to a higher level on that. Then of course there's supporting the person to be who they want to be. Sometimes it's more of doing what they want to do. And those two things also interlink. So there's these layers that you start to have in your head that you can explore with people, and it makes it very relevant to where they're at, like the average person who listens to the podcast or is out there in the street today, they have an objective that they're trying to get to, whether it's that day or whether it's half a year or a couple of years, everybody's going about it. Everyone's trying to progress in what's important to them, and to have a relationship with somebody that you can be honest about that, and then you can get some feedback and you can make some plans and you can start to build momentum and again, sometimes have support that would improve anybody. So it's like a no brainer why the elite levels really go after that. Why do they embed psychologists in sports teams? Why F1 drivers have their own psychologists. That's because, as we've just said, it would be helpful to anybody. So therefore they don't leave it to chance at that level.

Yeah, sure. I think Steve's work is out there in his book. So he's got "The Chimp Paradox," which is his book, and would be a good starting place for anybody who wants a deeper dive than my quick overview now. But essentially, the chimp model is an access model into our mind. Steve's a consultant psychiatrist, a medical doctor and studied medicine and how the brain operates. He was looking at many years of research from when the ability to functionally scan our brains was progressing more than our ability to really understand, I'm going to put a big caveat in there that we're still learning a lot. We absolutely don't understand the brain, by far the most complex system we've got. And we're learning a lot about it. But it was improving. We could see there was localization of certain behaviors. If you damage certain parts of the brain, then it starts to show up. For example, memory can be damaged in certain parts of the brain, and we can't remember certain episodic memories or language can be affected.

When Steve was looking at that, he started to think, okay, I can see these different systems. And he simplified it down in his working model to three systems. So many people will be familiar with the idea of having a strong emotional center from an evolutionary perspective, very instinctual, very impulsive, fight flight freeze. We've really got this instinctual survival system, and Steve looked at the neuroscience and he realized that was actually quite similar as a system to what the actual chimpanzee possesses. And when we look at some of the behaviors of humans, let's say under stress or our primary drives, our territory, whether that's physical or psychological, our food, if we are very hungry for periods of time, when we start to see people in that light and we can all reflect when we're probably in chimp mode. We can probably recognize when our chimp is out, we can recognize how our thinking shifts, how our behavior shifts. If we take over somebody on the motorway and you do it very respectfully, but then there's a traffic jam and you can kind of look around and you'll see quite a lot of what we might call the more chimp driven behavior, there'll be some banging of the steering wheel and some kind of expletives going on.

Without oversimplifying, it's to recognize that within our brains are independent circuits that we don't control. We do not have direct control over the orbitofrontal cortex. It tends to go before our more rational logical thinking. So it's almost a pre-conscious thought. We're looking at body language. We're making assessments. We're hungry before we even know it. And then we just think, "Oh I'm hungry." So the body and the brain are massively connected to keep us alive and keep our species alive.

Secondary to that, we've developed fantastic higher level functioning as a human being, our ability to reflect, our ability to plan, our ability to regulate. Often we'd ask people to get a piece of paper and just write down, who are you at your best? And people would write down who they are at their best. That would be truly reflective coming from the higher circuits. So that would be as Steve called, the human circuits. That's you. That's the real you. The biggest thing he would teach people is that you and the chimp, realistically, are best friends. Many people would see that as a rival, but you're not. The chimp has got an agenda, which is to keep you alive and to fulfill its drives, and it will keep offering you emotions and thoughts along that line. But it's your job to take care of it and at times to say, "Yeah, we're worried about giving this speech to a large audience. And that's understandable from the perspective of the jungle, because there's high risk. We don't know who's out there which could be attacked. But actually in this situation, I want to give this talk. It's more aligned with what I believe is important. It's a values based talk to a school group." So all of a sudden our chimp settles down because I've reassured it. So that was a great metaphor of Steve's model. Very simple, scientifically quite well grounded.

But he had this third system, which was what really hit it for me in sport. His third system, he again, metaphorically called a computer. And the idea that we can store programs, experiences, memories, behaviors, patterns over our lifetime. So when I looked at sport, I started to think, "Oh, what mode are people in to perform at their best? Which system do we really want to be in?" And obviously, for an athlete who might want to be very automatic, 100m sprint, for example, would probably want to be very computer, very automatic, not actually much analysis going on, not unnecessary distracting emotions. So a lot of that work would be to get them into computer mode, getting them into flow state as is more commonly known. But actually in other scenarios, I'd want to be in human mode. I'd want to reflect on why my season isn't going well, and is this the right coach for me? Let's do an analysis, let's interview some people. So you can start to shift between the three. And that was where I thought this would be powerful in sport.

Yeah, I think so. Two things actually. One is, first and foremost, neuroscience. When we look at the neuroscience of the brain and how it's operating at certain points, it's very complex. But we can also see that too much emotion in key moments tends to increase error rate. When people are maybe over intense or over forcing something, we see high activation, but at the same time we do see an increase of the error rate.

At the same time, when we see people to be quite relaxed and get themselves again, kind of topically called flow state, they are there, they're very present, they're very task focused, we'll see lots of brain activity. It's not like the brain's turned off, but now we see a higher success rate. So what I'm always interested in is how do we help people recognize what that state is like for them and get them into that state more often than not. And neuroscience would seem to suggest that that's to do with which systems we're in and how we get good at shifting between them.

For me, it's to remind everybody that this ability to manage your mind is not a trait. The myth is that high performers are just wired differently or that they were born with the ability to do these things really well. That's the myth. What I see is people investing time into learning right mind models. They understand the mind and how it might react. They explore their own mind and they say, "Okay, what does my mind do under pressure situations? What are my triggers? What are my typical coping behaviors?" And then they say, "Okay, what could I try new? Do I need to rethink that situation? Do I need to look at how I regulate emotion in the moment? Do I look at new habits that help me do that?"

So, a Formula 1 driver is managing their emotions, their decision making, their relationships in this pressure cooker. But they're working on it. They're proactively working on that with a feedback loop. So I completely agree with you. It is about getting in the right state, but I often think that's a skill that people can work on.

I really do. I think like I said, it's a simple framework, and also it's one that's realistically been around for a long time. If we think about, plan, do, review, that's it. I don't know who owns that. I'd probably be struggling now to find if that was one author that had that idea. I'd go back and have a look.

I think the simple premise is preparation. Then obviously the level of preparation that people do for events can have a big indicator on success. If you're a corporate professional and you've got a big project coming up, your ability to be really clear of what the goal is, if you break down each one, if you're preparing for it, what is the goal here? What are our focus points here? What are we trying to really achieve with this project or with this delivery or this interaction? Then we might do some scenario planning, how could it play out? What are our options? If it's the board meeting, who's in the room? What typically do I need to do? How do I engage with those people differently? What's the message in that? Is my deck ready? Are my key messages ready? What resources do or don't we need? So, I think that the idea of pre is often about preparation and planning, but also what we see in sport, and I think we do see it certainly in other domains, but to a higher level of popularity in sport we see more simulation.

In Formula 1, they have simulator cars, full spec seats, which is basically a kind of interactive virtual reality. We're familiar with virtual reality nowadays. You're sitting in the car, the track is being fed into your brain, and you're maybe doing that track 50, 60, 70, 80 times with slightly different conditions, like a wet condition put on, or a different wind condition. So what you're doing is, you're training your brain, you're simulating the experience.

Now, visualization has been popular in sport for a long time as well, where we think about different situations on the pitch and how I'm going to respond to that, and therefore I'm priming my brain, I'm priming the circuits, which are more automated to kick in at the moment. When you think about right from the goal into the scenarios, into the simulation and imagery, and then the last part for me pre phase is probably around energy management. So, you've done your preparation and it might be two days now before the delivery and the work is done. I think in the Olympic world, if you're really trying to add any more preparation two days before you compete, that would suggest to me that really we should accept now, you've got more chance of injuring yourself than you have of finding the kind of miracle in two days. So now we need to manage our energy.

In Formula 1, because the turnarounds are so tight, there comes a window where actually the best thing you can do now is down regulate. The Formula 1 car is not sitting on the track on a Wednesday with somebody revving its engine, burning its fuel and rubber. We can't do that with the driver. Some athletes, 100% will believe that they prefer a hyped approach to perform better. Don't talk to me from Wednesday to Saturday because I'm in game mode. And I am not here to say whether that's right or wrong. I'm saying some people like to do that. Somebody else will say, well, I just burn out doing that. I need to tune in at the moment and tune out. And that is all still pre-phase. What do you think? Does that seem relevant to the corporate world as well?

100% important because of course, sport is another example whereby situations can emerge that would make the person feel a little bit limited. For example, you might be in a car and the performance of the car hasn't been as effective as you may desire. And therefore, if you're not careful, the brain starts to fulfill that kind of narrative that, we're in a limited car and, if you're not careful, the most extreme would be like, what's the point? There's no driver or athlete that I've ever met that says, what's the point before they play? I think they're too highly driven for that because they're too competitive. But it does show you their ability to say, come on, what is this race weekend about them? If we're not racing for the podium, what is it about? They might say, right, it's about championship points. It's about finishing, sixth or fifth. Maybe it's about, "I'm really going to push the car this weekend because we need to know its limits. The engineers need to find out how you explore that." So you're reengaging them in that idea that the motivation becomes intrinsic again, it's their drive to learn, to push, to compete. And as long as they can reframe that, you're totally right.

I think in sport, just like in business, where you think to yourself, "Right, I've had a rotten run of form, things haven't gone my way in the last three projects, proposals have been turned back. If you're not careful, the narrative comes, well, this is going to be the fourth." And that can bleed into your demeanor and your delivery and therefore perhaps right to success. But if you can get that chance to stop. Maybe go back to really what you're about, and you can reconnect with what you're about, and often most people will find some direction in their core. Who am I really? What is success really about for me in life? And in those questions, people tend to want to grow. They want to have a go or they want to provide for their family. And they reconnect with that. And they say, "Right, actually, do you know what? It's about me putting my hat in the ring and going again." It's dusting off and let's go again. It's my fourth time being lucky with the board. I think the parallels are there.

Honestly, that sounds so interesting. I would love to see that. When we used to do Olympic preparation clothes, you had your four years, you had European Championships, World Championships and all these qualifiers and eventually you're getting into the clothes, you always pick an optimal window where we'd have an Olympic simulation day. I say the optimal window because you want to do it near enough that it has a relevancy and obviously you're at peak form, but obviously you also don't want to get everybody injured. So, the greatest challenge of simulation is making it realistic enough that your brain gives you the same possible stress responses that you have on the day.

Now, those scenarios were always very good because we'd get people fighting against other people who maybe weren't selected. So there's that good bit of rivalry. That was a great way in taekwondo. But in the trading world, in the hedge fund world, you could also run simulation days. Now we did enough programming around, maybe you'd get a senior or vice president or whatever in there just to observe. That was enough now that the traders in this scenario that we would put onto them, certain positions tanking and do you or don't you hold and how quickly can we get that information from London, are the phones down? You can't get that information. You can just layer it on. And whilst preparing that one scenario, it doesn't mean that you're bulletproof for everything. It does give you a chance to practice awareness, regulation, communication, a bit of ownership in following it up. And I feel that there is just that opportunity to raise the bar a bit.

Yeah, I would love to be in thinking groups, working groups on the front of that. Quite a number of years ago, there were questions around this, how can we take things digital? How can we make it accessible? How can we gamify? The idea of gamifying things and making it sticky. I think it was a big movement. And now with the introduction of AI, I wouldn't want to limit it by suggesting right now where I think it's going to go. I think with my experience of AI, as you work with it and you explore the challenges together, some things that do jump out to me for sure is, the ability to, as you've said, interact with it to give it challenges and for it to offer you some solutions is already something that's going to be accessible to a lot of people. So perhaps not everybody can get access to a very exclusive or limited number of performance psychologists. But then there is information out there, and you can start to almost interact with AI a little bit and get some ideas on how I would do that? And how can I do that in two minutes? And, give me another example.

So I think the opportunity to interact is there. I love your idea of stimulus response training. That tennis ball machine and the machine giving even us, the facilitators, we wouldn't necessarily be able to create what an AI can. So I quite like that. But, at the same time, what I would tend for that with is if we look at the ability to stop at times and actually ground ourselves and to remember what's really important and to make sure we've done enough base level work, back to that core, like, who am I? What's important to me? Do I feel in control of that? The person is massively important in Formula 1 and every other performance sphere. The key people around them are massively important in those relationships, and how we're getting the best out of that. And then often the team, the wider team, the culture, the organism. I'm sure AI and other resources can help us on all those three levels. But I sometimes feel that we always don't need to run before we're walking as well. Have we really pushed those three tiers: the person, the key relationships, the team before we also go left field? I don't think it's one form, I think we can do them both. There's so much opportunity in the basics.

There was a question that you asked previously about one of your previous guests. I was really wanting to listen in and just get a real good flavor. Just to stick to the question, it was about wisdom, kind of exploring wisdom and how it can be developed. I started thinking about that myself. And I thought, certainly for me, there's a bit about experiences there, taking past experiences. Then there's the reviewing part of actually extracting meaning from it. We all have loads of experiences, but maybe we don't stop to reflect on them. So actually stopping, reflecting, unpacking, learning. And then the third one of course is, applying that. You've had the experience, you've learned, but actually have you applied it in a way that means you actually improve future decisions. That's the kind of wisdom way.

When I look at the drivers and many other high performing athletes, obviously, drivers are just one cohort that's of interest here. But when you look at them during, it's their ability to do that assessment and to think, "Right, where am I succeeding and why is that and what's working for me? But also where am I not. What is it? Is it my belief system? Do I have expectations that are triggering me in the car, and I need to do that more belief based work before I get in." I know we're talking about during, but at the end of the day, this is the work to better perform during.

Have I done that assessment of what I need to be thinking, feeling, doing in the car so that I can be at my best. That then informs your routines, your refocusing strategies, how you communicate with your engineer, what communication do you need from them? How, again, do you regulate your emotion at certain key moments? What self-talk is in your head? If we've got a long race, it's probably easier to go outside of F1 here. Let's go to the Tour de France, one of the most grueling cycling races in the world. You're going to ride your bike for nearly 21 days well into the altitude. You're going to hit levels of exhaustion, which really are commonly understood to be dangerous for the body. So your brain is going to be telling you to stop, right? It has to. The self-talk has to be, "Oh my God, we're going to blow. If we don't stop now, we're going to blow." And what we see is that if you can train cyclists, even just amateur cyclists, helpful things to think and they change that pre-planned thinking, "Okay, when I get tired, this is what I'm going to think. I'm going to focus on the next 200m. I'm going to focus on just the rhythm of my feet, or I'm going to remind myself why I do this or I'm going to distract myself." They've preprogrammed that thinking, that self-talk, then their success is higher.

So all of these in-car techniques, routines, refocusing, communication, self-talk, I feel that they all come from the driver identifying where they need to change, where's the opportunity for me to be better.

Perfect. And obviously for anyone kind of in the area or familiar, it sounds like cognitive behavioral. It sounds like let's look at my beliefs, let's look at my behaviors. Let's program them in and optimize all this performance. And there tends to be a big relatability for that in sport because it is quite clear. And it's kind of like okay, that makes sense. But obviously when we look at the neuroscience of it as well, we test people, when they have a plan and they know what they're going to do, of course those circuits tend to run faster because they're rehearsed. They're stronger, they're myelinated than they're not having that. So we're almost now looking at how we move away from default survival to more optimal. So it is cognitive. It is behavioral. But the actual strategies, regulation acceptance and refocusing, come from ancient practices. They're things we've done for millennia in different cultures. And in some ways they show up now in a very elite sport.

I think for me, the way the brain is working is it's constantly scanning and taking multiple bits of information and it's very efficient at cheating. It's very efficient at saying we won't focus on that part. That's not important. It chunks it all down and it makes it so that basically we can deal with the amount of stimulus that's coming into our brain. It's actually super good. But it's cheating. When somebody says to you, "Oh, hey, did you not see John? He just waved to you there." "No, I didn't see him." If you could rewind every system, maybe I did see him, but he just wasn't in my frame of reference. So often when we look at focusing, when people say, "How do you focus for two hours in a race car with all this stimulation?" Really a key part of it is just learning to refocus. It's not that you're going to focus for two hours, right? It's that you're going to have to refocus multiple times.

Now that could be the same in a competitive football match. You might have an intention of how you're going to go out and be, but you might just say, "Hey, let's just do that for ten minutes. Let's just focus on that for the first ten minutes. And then after ten minutes, I'm going to refocus. I'm almost going to go again and reset my brain." So the brain starts working in these more intentional, deliberate chunked up ways. There's the idea that to increase our focus, it can be helpful at times to almost intentionally break that cycle and refocus. But I also think from the New York Times perspective, I also meant the intentional break is around being deliberate with making sure you get your recovery. So it's actually more into that fourth area for me as well, because at the end of the day, there's a myth that high performers just grind it out, they're nonstop. It's a relentless season. The season is relentless, but the truth is that recovery fuels performance.

So, at the end of the day, pushing harder isn't always the answer. Strategic recovery, actual deliberate breaks are what sustains elite performance. So that now works in the car. Let's break that kind of pattern and image. Let's refocus. But also let's break this cycle of like plan, do review for life and let's just take some time out. Let's recharge. Let's go to the woods with my kids and just walk and turn my phone off. Let's just breathe and if necessary, let's get a bit of perspective on what's really important. I think that is also an intentional break for me. Very deliberate for people.

Yeah, if I were having the four areas and I was doing an assessment with the driver, I mean obviously there's this proper psychological assessment first where I'm doing history and presenting factors, again, combining my training fundamentally as a psychologist then with performance elements. But I think once that's done, then we're now looking at performance and we're in this four phase performance cycle, every single phase has to be a needs assessment for that person. And you're right, therefore the tailoring is different. What I won't do is say, "Hey, look in the car, the strategy you need to apply is self-talk and you need to use positive affirmations." Now, one person might just say to me, "You're absolutely kidding me, Robbie, I don't relate to that psychology. I find that it distracts me from the task." And actually what we're recognizing is this person's far more about instructional self-talk. They need to be reminded to, "Hey, you're overdriving at the minute. Settle back." Overdriving means, you're almost trying to push it too much, you're trying to find too much time, and you're not actually getting the best out of the car.

So one person's self-talk that works for them might actually really not be relevant to the other person. And recharge is the exact same. And you're right. If I said to somebody, the prescription is you have to go into the woods and be on your own. But they say, "Well, actually, no, I recharge from being with people, ideally my inner circle who don't ask me a million questions about Formula 1, but I like to be in the family unit. And, I like to be around a fire." You know, you get me by fire. And I feel that warmth. I just absorb the warmth. Somebody else might say, "I want to go diving and I want to get under the water because it just reminds me how small I am." That recharge phase is very individual.

I think a lot of people out there are still asking the same question of themselves. They're probably still trying to work out that themselves. I think there's a level that I try to explore with people whereby, recharge is also a similar process as happiness, whereby if you wanted to recharge you kind of look at when am I going to do that? So you might say, "Okay, me and my family, we're going to have a vacation." There was some research I read recently, which is that eight days is the optimal amount of time to be away, based on the time you get there and adjust versus the time that then you're kind of a bit familiar with that environment and you kind of also want your home comforts to go back. So there's loads of stuff out there that will tell you where to go, when to go, and all the rest of it.

But, having that one time a year and thrashing me until then, I don't know if that's going to be enough for most people. People might say yes, but other people might say, "No, I'm a double vacation person." Someone else might say, "No, I'm about working four days a week and I have a three-day weekend." So it gets individual for what it looks like. The constraints happen when obviously you work in a sport where you don't have that freedom, right? Where there's very set windows when you can take time off, and there's a very high demand when you're in between it.

I think for Formula 1 drivers we look at how you recover even within a race weekend. So from like stint one free practice to when you're going into qualification, how can you reset there. Is it that you get in your private room? Is it meditation? Do you go and get that chance to escape and just down regulate the system? How do we then look between races? We haven't done it yet. But post-race number three is so important, because if you don't do it well, you'll probably never get to recharge. If you're always stuck in frustration or disappointment or questioning your performance, then that can carry on the whole week. And before you know it, you're racing again. So getting number three really good, where you debrief and you accept and you learn, enables you to now go to your room and sleep and recharge.

I think there is micro recharging. There is more kind of, "Hey, at this moment in time, I can't wait to go and recharge." And I think this is same with happiness, just to complete that point whereby, sure, I'll be happy if I can achieve some of these goals in a year, but also just to have 2 or 3 things that I know make me happy, whether it's watching some comedy or speaking to an old friend, I need to be able to access that now because otherwise holiday in June is a long way away.

Again, I think when you look at some of the most popular spoken about, maybe it's because they are quite tangible, you can read a book and obviously we'll talk about it now. I think sports psychology for a long time was recognized or was believed to be just the training of psychological skills. And there were probably like five of them, goal setting, self-talk, visualizing, it was like classic kind of nuts and bolts sports psychology. And then they realized there was a lot more going on in terms of psychology.

I think self-talk is a classic. For me, it's not just about being positive. I think it's quite important. It is about being constructive. It is about making sure that the inner narrative is constructive. Now, if we think about effective uses of that, as I said, it could be that you're quite instructional. So you're giving yourself something tactical. If I'm a defender in rugby and I'm a bit worried about making these tackles because these guys are pretty big, I'm sure it's the same in American football. It might be that for a little while I just work on some visual cues. But in my head I'm like stay low, stay strong. And that narrative is just overriding any interference from I'm not going to make the tackle. And what if I get rolled over. So I'm just deliberately saying, "Stay low, stay strong" is very instructional and helpful for me.

Somebody else might feel that actually they want it to be slightly more motivational. They might feel that actually, I saw some footage of Ronaldo, the footballer, standing there before he does his free kick and the lip readers have translated what he says, and he's saying, "I've got this, I will score, I've got this, I will score." I cannot go and tell people I work with that that's the affirmation that they should use, because some people will tell me it doesn't help me Robbie. It distracts me. It puts pressure on me. I don't want to try and predict the future. But I do think you can have a neutral one., where I could stand over the ball or before the board meeting. Actually, I don't mind sharing this for the audience from my own experience, but I still get a really high adrenaline response when I'm going to talk to big audiences. And that adrenaline response for me would show up like, the classic heart rate and maybe the hands are a bit sticky. Now, I've learned that I believe that that is a healthy offer from my brain. Just saying, "Hey, be careful. Are we sure about this?" And now my self-talk would very much be around. "Okay. My heart's increasing. That means my body's ready."

Yeah. But I guess the key point and one of the messages there for people would be to stop and first and foremost, become aware of some of your self-talk. I would definitely ask some athletes to keep a journal. It is so hard to keep a journal when you're in a game and certainly in a car, but they'll come out and they can tell you critical moments and some of their thoughts. I think number one for the population is to become aware of it and realize you've got a choice to change it. And then the second thing is to train it so that your inner voice is like a coach, not a critic.

Oh, no. Honestly, I'm just another person trying to do my best as well. I love it when you get with somebody who's curious and they're interested and they want to explore it and they bring you their thoughts once you get that relationship. And like I said, I can't read their minds. I don't know what they're thinking. But once you work with somebody who's open to the idea of exploring what they can try and do, now we can really have a go. I feel that sometimes I don't have those answers 100%. I'll say to them, "Okay, let me have a think about this. Do you mind if I come back tomorrow?" 100% don't feel like I've got it. Somebody asked me today if I want to write a book, and I said, "God, no, not yet." I said, maybe in a while. I said, I'm having too much fun cracking on for now.

That's a beautiful way of putting it. That's a really beautiful way. I'd hope most people in the coaching and the psychology space, once they do enough of it, I think they start to realize that that's the only way to do it. Let me be fair, for obvious reasons, early on, maybe in your career, it helps to have a framework and to have structure, maybe to have a program. It helps because it gives you security that I've got something I can go through. And then, of course, you just realize that it becomes so big that you think, God, I can't even have a framework. And then you feel more comfortable to move. But having things like a good assessment and a four phase performance model or those three levels, the individual, key relationships, team, all these things that you can give so that the other person can see some direction. That's the balance, isn't it? You want to give them some ideas without telling them which way they're going.

Yeah.

Thanks for that. I don't know how other people feel about public speaking or podcasts or otherwise. But, one of the reasons I, 100%, was happy to come on is I just knew we'd have a good conversation. I was keen to interact and learn. So already there's another thing you've given me right there. What made me go off straight away in my head was that point about wisdom earlier? I think everyone has the capacity to develop some more wisdom, but obviously not everyone actually does it. For me, I think when I reflect on why that might be, one of the biggest barriers to that is rigidity. It's people who stick to their beliefs despite new evidence, who aren't willing to take some feedback. Or in this particular example, a suggestion. Whereas, we know, on the other hand, people who embrace that kind of openness, who seek out different perspectives, who say, "Actually, how is this model not complete? And what else might we be missing? Let's go and explore that and let's see how we can improve." I think that's where we accelerate our opportunity for growth, I really welcome it. Genuinely. I'd be curious to look more into it. I think we don't just go through our experiences, right? The good performers, the top performers, don't just go through it, they are kind of actively extracting, adjusting, improving. So, I really welcome that.

Yeah, it's a lovely question. I think it goes straight the way back to my core. Who I am and I currently, I'm very clear that's important to me. I boil myself at the moment down to three values again, leaving that space to grow and adapt. But I think care is a big one of my priorities. I put my family at the top of that list. So I'm very fortunate enough to have a young, just under two-year-old boy. So I see the next few years growing that and just following him on his journey and being a huge part of that with my wife. Already there's that very caring part. Then I think about that in the sports world and the people I'm working with and trying to help them actualize themselves and their dreams. So that's a big part, ties hugely into my second core value, which is adventure. Adventure for me is an umbrella term for growth and trying new things. It's a big world or it's a small world, whichever way we look at it. So I think there's a lot of that in the next few years. Opportunities to meet new people, take on new challenges, experience new things. And then the third one for me would be, again, it's probably a simple one, but it's just to be happy, and in the simplest way. Just to be grateful for what I've got. Stay grounded, be open minded.

I think for me that isn't a grand plan. There isn't a destination that I feel if I get there, then I'm done. I don't work in that way. I think it's just to be really here, enjoy it, have a bit of guidance from those values and make the most of it.

Thanks very much for having me. I really enjoyed it.