I regularly share practical, evidence-based articles and tools on mindset, decision-making, habits, and personal growth—to help people manage stress, build resilience, and perform at their best.
The power of compounding was my single biggest lesson from 2023. After letting that realisation settle over the break, I’ve thought more about how to execute on it. I’m going to do a few things differently. I’ve decided my formula to experiment with this year is going to be: practices x coaching. With that in mind, I’ve adjusted my approach to planning out 2024 to be: Vision Framework Practices Coaches Goals
If I could choose only one lesson from 2023, it would be the power of compounding. Compounding small actions has helped me resolve 2.5 years of hamstring pain, spend quality, consistent time with family and friends, and get me through an intense business pinch point earlier this year. I dropped the bar for action so low I couldn’t fail and I took a much longer view on the time horizon to results. I’ll keep reinforcing this for myself because I’ve finally realised the pattern. The work on what matters most to me is never done. Whether it’s building and maintaining my relationships, business, health, energy or living in accordance with my purpose, values and priorities - they are all a set of ongoing practices. (Atomic Habits by James Clear helped.) Because of that, I’m going to invert my approach to planning for 2024. Rather than goal setting, I’m going to focus on defining practices first. A question to guide and filter what I choose is: Do I think this is a practice I can see my self continuing for the rest of my life? If yes, then I’ll experiment with setting these up for next year. Then I’ll set goals as milestones along the way to see how I’m tracking. They can move and change and I’ll nearly certainly not hit them all the time. But it’s not about perfection. It’s about deliberate practice. What follows are the notes from my review and the practices I’ll look to continue and evolve into 2024.
I could taste the dust in my mouth. I could feel the intensity of the sun through my shirt. As I stood looking out over the Pyramids of Giza towering out of the desert, it wasn’t simply their size that struck me. I couldn’t remember ever physically feeling this immensity, this depth and weight of history and humanity. I was 19 and I couldn’t remember ever feeling so small.
According to Professor Arthur Brooks, Harvard author and researcher on the science of happiness, a feeling of being small is an important contributor to our sense of wellbeing.
I’ve had many, many great times in Byron Bay - music festivals, holidays, surfing, hanging out with friends, walking the lighthouse path.
I’ve been thinking more about my online workshop tomorrow at 2:30pm (free rego here). I titled it Momentum. But I may have made a mistake. Certainly a sense of momentum is one of the possible outcomes. To either find some momentum if you’re feeling stuck or maintain it and build it if you already have it. But the heart of the workshop is to reinvent what we know about mindset. I used to believe mindset was all about positive thinking, about setting goals and chasing them, about visualising success. But the science of psychological flexibility - of what repeatably works to better manage stress and pressure - flies in the face of that. It’s not about positive thinking. It’s about positive action that moves us towards what truly matters. It’s not about building people into brick walls of stronger, tougher, harder. Brick walls break when hit hard enough. It’s about building trampolines that can absorb the hits and bounce back. And it’s not about reducing stress and pressure, it’s about changing our relationship to it. To know in advance that it will be a part of everything we do and then train and practice for it. I’ve had to completely reinvent how I think about mindset.
Thanks for your comments and questions on my previous articles on adaptability and the myth of tradeoffs. As I said in those articles, there is a huge opportunity to develop psychological flexibility in our leaders, teams, organisations and communities to manage wellbeing, lead and perform better in situations of stress, pressure and discomfort - regardless of the context. I’ve loved learning and teaching about it in all sorts of settings – business, non profit, tech, military, sport. My clients and I have used it to perform at work, rebuild health, to improve parenting and relationships and more. That’s why it’s the starting point for me in every one of my coaching and speaking engagements. So I’m really excited to bring this to life in a public online workshop this coming Thursday.
Thanks for your comments and questions on my previous article on Adaptability. It was great to explore the role of psychological flexibility in wellbeing, leadership and performance. There is a huge opportunity to develop it in our leaders, teams, organisations and communities to work better in situations of stress and pressure and develop our ability to handle discomfort. I’ve loved learning and teaching about it in all sorts of settings - business, non profit, tech, military, sport. It’s the starting point for me in every one of my coaching and speaking engagements. So here are a handful of the questions I’ve received:
I’ve been speaking with a host of business, sport and non profit leaders and their People and Culture teams recently. (A special thanks to those of you who completed my survey a few weeks ago.) One of the key themes that’s emerged has been the adaptability of their people and organisations in the face of today’s rapidly changing environment. What can we do to address this?
To fall from Olympian to limpin’ around feeling like I’d been kicked between my legs took 19 years and 5 months.
Goals We never formally discussed culture or wrote down values, purpose, mission or even a goal for our Olympic campaign. We were utterly focussed on the playing process. Which, of course, is incredibly important. But, in hindsight, to not put anything down on paper, no goal, no result, nothing at all? It seems an extraordinary oversight. Would it have dialled up pressure to explicitly state that we were chasing a gold medal? Perhaps.
Hi there, I hope you’re having a good week. It was great to share some of the lessons learned from my journey in a couple of recent interviews.
The temperature was below zero. The stars were still out. My breath fogged in the predawn Canberra air. It had been 25 years since I’d lived at the Australian Institute of Sport and made this walk from the athlete residences to the pool. There was a beep as the security pass opened the door into the swimming complex. It was completely empty. Everything was still. Even the robot cleaner on the bottom of the pool. The humidity and smell hit me. So many laps done. So much time. So many experiences. It felt like coming home but there was also an edge.
In our fast-paced world, transitions are inevitable. They can be exciting but also daunting. It can feel like stepping off a cliff into an unknown void. In my previous article about Psychological Flexibility, I explored the critical role it plays during exits and transitions. The subsequent discussions have made me realise that there is a pressing need for a solid and immediately actionable framework to navigate these periods.
If you were facing a swinging sledgehammer, would you prefer to be a brick wall or a trampoline? If a sledgehammer hits a brick wall hard enough, or enough times, it breaks. A trampoline, on the other hand, absorbs the energy and bounces back. And we all face events that feel like sledgehammers at times.
When I resigned from my business a year ago, I started writing again. The Mirror Is The Hardest Place To Look was my first article in years. I didn’t know at that point that I’d keep going. It just felt like a story with some tough lessons that was too important not to share. Now, 14 months and 23 articles later, there are days my writing flows and other days it’s excruciating, but it’s still valuable each time. On reflection, a few themes have emerged about my process and what writing means to me.
“Do you have life insurance?” This was the opening question from my neurosurgeon. My mum and dad were sitting on either side of me. 10 minutes earlier, I’d been in the bathroom trying to compose myself while we were waiting for the appointment. A day earlier, I’d been at home waiting for my MRI results after a concussion wakeboarding. As the referring GP, my mum was faxed the radiologist’s report. It said I had a brain tumour.
For someone who thought they knew a fair bit about health and fitness, I’ve had to completely rewire my approach to training in the last few years. My old approach was built on sayings like: More is better. No pain, no gain. Go hard or go home. It was about toughening up with sets of 10 x 200 metres freestyle on 3 mins wearing a t-shirt. I have a clear memory of diving off the blocks in a sprint swim set with the absolute intention of going so hard that I’d make myself vomit. Even at the 2003 Water Polo World Championships in Barcelona, rather than recovering on our rest days, I’d hit the gym because I was telling myself that “it wasn’t the Olympics”. It wasn’t just me though, it was coaches at the time too.
I’m looking for the perfect EA. This person will be my right hand for all things organisation to help me translate my ambitions for 2023 into reality. They’ll be working across my diary, events, client experience, partnerships, finance, product development and content. You would start with a paid one-month trial, probably around 10 hours per week. If all goes well, there could be potential to expand significantly from there. Competitive pay and tons of interesting opportunities. Here’s more on me, if needed. Job Description To help me focus exclusively on content creation and experience delivery, I need someone who’s a ninja at handling quite a bit.
I was trained by, and am now coached by, Ferzeen Anis who is one of only 360 Professional Scrum Trainers globally.
I’ve tried writing letters to people in the past in order to help me process and organise my thoughts. Some I’ve sent, others I haven’t. But each time I’ve found it useful.
I have a very personal, vested interest in this article. I grew up with incredibly strong female role models in my great- and grandmothers, mum, aunts and my three sisters. Now days, my wife and three sisters work, parent and wear many other hats as do so many other women I count as friends and colleagues. My mum grandparents 15 kids. And while my three daughters are all below ten and my six nieces are awesome, they’re all growing up and will need to understand this topic too. So when I met Dr Kellie Pritchard-Peschek, I wanted to understand how she’d become so purposeful about the science of women’s health and how it applies in the workplace and beyond.
Three years ago, at the Brisbane Powerhouse, 30 minutes before my event Changing The Game of Influence was due to start, my speaking coach said to me: “You have to do the Acknowledgement of Country, Toby. Google the right words, then say them.” He was right of course. It was my event. But it had been a long time since I’d run my own event and I’d never started with an Acknowledgement of Country before. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it in my preparation. And I was afraid of making a mess of it. Afraid of missing an important piece of protocol or that I might offend someone.
“I’m just heading off for a swim.” It was lunch time on a beautiful, sunny, winter’s day. This was from one of the most experienced, senior executives I know. For a long time, I’ve admired them in both their accomplishments and conduct. The decisions they’ve made, the organisation they’ve built and the impact they’d had on tens of thousands of lives (including mine) and organisations over decades of work. But at the heart of the reason why I’ve sought their counsel over the years, is that they speak about their proudest achievement as being the relationship they have with their children. And all of this through accomplishments, curveballs and crucibles. It struck me in this brief exchange that here was someone who’d created a habit of maintaining energy, health and wellbeing through it all. But this conversation seemed in stark contrast to others I’ve had recently.
“…and have a great life.” Breath work was over. We’d followed Wim Hof’s breathing pattern on YouTube. His dutch-accented, closing words were already fading. It was cold bath time. Full body, cold water immersion (9 degrees) up to the neck for 10 mins. The tension in the room was rising. “When you get in a cold bath for the first time, you’ll feel awful. Your mind will scream at you that you’re dying, that you can’t breathe, that you have to get out of there.” “That’s completely normal.”
Mindfulness is not sitting in lotus position on a mountain top. Below is the often-cited definition of mindfulness from Jon Kabat-Zinn (author and founder of the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts). “Mindfulness is paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally.” Why is it important? I wrote recently about mindfulness being a critical practice in performance settings. In situations of stress and pressure, mindfulness is the scalpel that sits between my reaction (which I can’t control) and my response (which I can choose).
The ball lands in front of me. I look up. It’s just me against the Greek goal keeper. What do you think goes through an Olympian’s mind in this moment? Let me add a little more context.
Have you ever organised a meeting, event or social occasion? Great. Then, like me, whether it’s conscious or not, you’re already a facilitator too. Because wherever there is a group of people, there is facilitation. I’ve never been formally trained in “facilitation”. I didn’t even really know what it meant until a few years ago. But it turns out I’ve been practising and participating in it for years - in meetings, presentations, conferences, classrooms, off-sites, parties, functions, events, even in my weekly ice baths.
Toby, what was driving you back then? I just knew I wanted to go to the Olympic Games. In reflection, I would say that I was trying to prove something to myself. I think that ultimately, I was trying to prove that I was enough. It was great to be a guest on Jeff Bullas’ podcast recently. Jeff is an online entrepreneur, influencer, author and speaker on all things digital. He has been featured on Forbes as a “Top 20 Influencer of Chief Marketing Officers” and ranked #1 Global “Digital Marketing Influencer”. His work has been featured in the New York Times, Entrepreneur, Inc., and Huffington Post. Having built a social media tribe of over 700k followers, he now advises startups on marketing and influencer strategy.
![[Podcast] How To Thrive As A Leader And Be Your Best Self - Olympics, 3 Questions, 4 Ideas, Crucibles, Buddhism](https://cloudcdn.nz/_tobyjenkins_/assets/uploads/arun-prakash-ylQe9KHHGaA-unsplash-1_1000x668_acf_cropped.jpg)
