Steven Bartlett, host of the Diary of a CEO Podcast, recently spoke about how a few glasses of wine impacted his life for three days. He couldn’t sleep properly, which in turn disrupted his diet, gym routine, and his performance on the podcast. The internet was in uproar. It sparked a vocal pushback on “performance optimisation” culture — the movement that espouses that every aspect of your thinking, actions, and daily habits should be tracked and modified to maximise your health and work performance.
Whether you agree with Steven or not, his comment highlighted a feature of modern society:
High performance has become a sanitised commodity.
There is a staggering amount of money to be made from encouraging people to scrutinise their mindset and habits and find themselves lacking. Multi-millionaires have been created by selling the dream that ultimate success is only a wearable gadget or a perfectly constructed morning routine away.
The reality of success in a high-stakes arena is more nuanced and brutal than that. It’s more like fighting in a bloodbath with snot hanging off your nose, as you wipe away tears of desperation with your sleeve for the third time that month.
This is the messy, ugly process that no one is posting about on Instagram. No one is making YouTube videos about how their subconscious belief of having to earn love through achievement derailed their trading execution for the twentieth time. Or how they’re counting down the balance in their bank account, calculating how many weeks of runway they have left before they default on a mortgage payment.
That type of content doesn’t lend itself to viral social media growth.
The reality of the high-performance path
For the people in the trenches working towards an extraordinary goal, there is one common theme that unites them: when you’re backing yourself in an arena where 99% of people will never reach the top, the safety net is you. In trading, investing, entrepreneurship, elite sport, and other high-stakes pursuits, success and failure rest squarely on your shoulders. Feedback is often instant and can be exceptionally cutting. Underperformance comes with expensive consequences. Even for a trader who is working as part of a professional desk, or a soccer player contracted to a team, it’s your career that’s under threat when you fail to deliver on your talents in a critical moment.
When you’re the safety net, underperformance creates a visceral response in your nervous system. There is nothing like the panic that arises when the plan isn’t bearing out in reality and your livelihood is on the line. Outsiders may just perceive this as having responsibility. Or the cost of participating in a high-stakes arena. But that doesn’t do justice to the suffocating and inescapable feeling that there is no other option but to succeed.
This type of do-or-die pressure leads to 24/7 problem-solving. Like a never-ending Rubik’s Cube that you’re working on under the table at family dinners, while walking on the treadmill, or while waiting to pick up your kid at the school gate.
The cost of participation in the arena is the pressure that pervades every aspect of your waking life. When you’re succeeding, it feels like validation mixed with limitless potential and superhuman talents. When you’re failing, it feels like hell.
Why psychology is critical in high-stakes arenas
To win in a high-stakes arena like trading, entrepreneurship, or elite sport, technical skill is non-negotiable. Take trading as an example. Technical skill usually has a clear development pathway: start by becoming acquainted with the markets, the charts, and the style of trading that suits you best; backtest your strategy to prove that it’s statistically profitable over time; and define your trading rules so that you can objectively assess whether a setup is worth taking. But authentic mastery can only come from repeatedly throwing yourself into the market and adjusting each time you hit the deck.
The feedback loop is instantaneous. Which means the adjustment has to happen in real time. You don’t get to go and debrief with your university professor when you take a losing trade and you need to be ready to enter again as soon as your A+ setup appears. You can’t wait for a quarterly performance review with your manager to decide whether underperformance is a result of market conditions changing or your own execution drift.
This is why psychology is critical. The ability to perform at the highest level means nothing unless you can consistently execute your plan under intense pressure. But a lot of the performance psychology and mindset advice that is peddled on the internet focuses more on motivation and surface-level hacks than on providing the mechanism through which to change your behaviour.
In performance psychology, behaviour change is the end goal: to move from a state where you can’t execute your plan under pressure, or you execute it imperfectly or inconsistently, to being able to execute reliably on demand regardless of the context. Sure, it helps to feel motivated and positive and resilient, but if we’re talking about the measurable impact of optimising your psychology, execution is the bottom line.
What it takes to succeed when the pressure is on
Do wearables and pre-performance routines have their place within performance psychology? Absolutely, they do. But to pretend that optimising your habits is sufficient to achieve extraordinary success, while glossing over the less tangible, murky depths of your psyche, reads more like a sales tactic than a solution.
After almost two decades of working with elite performers in professional sport, trading, finance, and business, I’ve witnessed first-hand the challenges that thousands of high-achievers face. And the patterns repeated so often across people and even across performance domains that I was able to create a mental conditioning protocol from the commonalities.
There is a blueprint for mastering the psychology required to succeed in a high-stakes arena like trading, investing, elite sport or entrepreneurship. It encompasses the factors that drive execution under pressure, and the variables that keep the human at the centre sane and healthy enough to keep playing the game.
Helping you to back yourself and win
The purpose of my publication is to share evidence-based insights that materially change how you perform under pressure — to empower you to take the actions that will lead to your success. But I also want to speak to the human journey of carving your own path in an arena where it feels like failure isn’t an option. To provide a resource that challenges your thinking, while simultaneously shining a light on the commonalities faced by every ambitious visionary who walks this path. I offer a collection of insights that you can turn to on the nights when you’re lying in your bed staring up at the ceiling, wondering, “Where the fuck do I go from here?” When you’re exhausted and out of ideas but the burning drive inside you won’t let you consider throwing in the towel.
Mastering your psychology takes a lot of work. But it’s the type of work that is entirely within your own control and therefore has a high likelihood of delivering a return.
Who this is for
This publication is for the traders, finance professionals, entrepreneurs, athletes and other visionaries who are backing themselves to achieve extraordinary goals, against the odds. The people who take the risk of pursuing a vision that most others either can’t see or don’t believe in. And who do it with zero guarantee of results and, often, no backup plan.
With a deeper understanding of how to navigate your internal landscape, you can not only improve your performance, but also change how it feels to walk the path. This often-overlooked aspect of performance psychology is critical — because staying in the game is a necessary prerequisite for success. Winning is simply an outcome of the process.
Hi crede congratulations on publishing on Substack. One of the things that I know has been very helpful for me as a subscriber to other publishers is being able to listen to the content. I didn’t see a button anywhere on the post. I don’t know if that’s something you are aware can be done, but if you’re not opposed, it would be great to be able to have that feature enabled very often when I’m doing other things, but want to take in content, the listening feature is very helpful. Thanks again, Alexa.