The Provocateurs:

Stuart Crainer:

Hello and welcome to The Provocateurs Podcast. I’m Stuart Crainer, co-founder of Thinkers50. In Provocateurs, we explore the experiences, insights, and perspectives of inspiring leaders. Our aim is to provoke you to think and act differently through conversations with some fantastic people. This is a collaboration between Thinkers50 and Deloitte. So, joining me is Geoff Tuff. Geoff is a Principal at Deloitte [Consulting LLP], and with Steve Goldbach is the author of two bestselling books, Detonate, which came out in 2018, and Provoke, which inspired this series. Geoff, welcome. Please, could you introduce today’s brilliant guest?

Geoff Tuff:

Absolutely. My pleasure, Stuart. And great to be with you here again, as always. I’m thrilled that we are joined today by Dane Jensen, and I’ll talk a little bit about Dane in a moment. But probably most importantly, Dane and I actually have a shared history. I probably shouldn’t get too deep into the detail here, and I promised Dane I wouldn’t dwell too much on it. But he and I have actually worked together in the past as management consultants. And part of what we’ll talk about today is the journey that Dane has taken from that role as management consultant into the much more focused arena that he plays in today. But Dane is currently the CEO of Third Factor, and he’ll tell us a lot more about Third Factor and some of the work that his organization does as we get into the conversation.

He’s also an affiliate faculty member with UNC’s Kenan-Flagler Business School in Chapel Hill, an instructor at the Smith School of Business in Queen’s University in Canada, and the author of The Power of Pressure, which we’ll end up talking about in much more detail. He’s also done a lot of work with the Olympic and Paralympic sports world and all the various different athletes. And again, that’s another place where Dane and I have crossed paths. Deloitte obviously, as I think as you know, is the worldwide management consulting partner with the Olympics and Paralympics, so we have a shared deep interest in that world. So why don’t we dive into it? And I’ll get us going here Dane. I made some reference to our shared history, and without getting into any of the sordid details, maybe you can just tell us a little bit about the world you originally came from that originally got you interested in working with executives and ultimately the path that you got on to work with Third Factor.

Dane Jensen:

Yeah. Thanks Geoff. Thanks Stuart. Appreciate it. Yeah. It’s been an interesting winding road since we first met, Geoff. And I think the world of management consulting … I came up through a very traditional business background. A very left brain business school, management consulting, strategy consulting. I was very fascinated in understanding how business worked, how companies made money, how companies were valued, all the stuff that I think drives a lot of the insight and interest in management consulting. And as I got into the world of Monitor that we both grew up in, one of the things that I think brought me back to this path was when you do enough strategy work, what you start to realize is that in some organizations you finish your strategy project, you do your strategy work, and you go back six months later and the strategy is alive. You can see it. You can see people talking differently, you can see them making different decisions, resource allocation decisions. In other organizations you go back six months later and you go, “Hey, what happened to that strategy work?” And the boss goes, “Well, yeah, that was great. I got the binder. It’s right up here on the top shelf. Great diagrams. The house looked fantastic, the pillars were really nice.” But nothing has actually changed.
I think initially as a more junior consultant, my bias was to believe that it was about the quality of the work. That if it’s a good strategy, it’s going to be having an impact six months later. If it’s a bad strategy, it’s probably sitting on a shelf somewhere. But as you know, you do enough of these things and that’s not really the case. You do great strategy work that goes nowhere and you do mediocre strategy work that actually has a really significant impact on the organization. At the end of the day, it comes back to the degree to which the strategy survives impact. It survives the journey through all the pressures that bat it around. And there are leaders in the organization that can actually get people to commit to it, that can get people to change their actions in line with what the strategy suggests.

So I think as I got deeper into consulting, I started to think that at the end of the day where the rubber really hits the road is the degree to which people, leaders and individuals, are able to, in the face of pressure, actually execute on this stuff. Actually do what they need to do to make the choices, to provoke the future, to do all the stuff that you talk about. And so I got really interested in the people side of things. How do individuals navigate this? How do leaders lead in a way that inspires commitment? And that brought me to the world that I’m in right now at Third Factor.

Stuart Crainer:

Was there a road to Damascus moment? A particular company or instance when you were working with someone that really opened your eyes?

Dane Jensen:

Oh, gosh. I can tell you there was a real personal moment, Stuart, for me. And specifically to pressure. I had prided, my entire identity I think in many ways was built on my intellectual horsepower. That’s what got me through business school. That’s what got me into consulting. In my mind, that was what underpinned my success with my clients, was my ability to be smart and rational and do all of that stuff. And I do have a very vivid memory of… Before we had children, my wife and I decided we wanted to go and live somewhere else for a bit. I’m based in Toronto, knew we wanted to raise our family in Toronto. It’s where my family is. I got three siblings, I got my parents here. So we always knew we wanted to end up here. But we thought, hey, before we settle in, why don’t we go and see the world a little bit? And so I got transferred over to your neck of the woods and we moved over to London.

And when I landed in London, I was staffed on a project that had a team in New York, a team in London, and a team in Asia. And for the first six weeks that I was living in London, because the team was based in New York, I would commute from London to New York on a Sunday and commute back to London on a Thursday. And at the same time, we were trying to find a place to live. We had temporary housing for 30 days. We didn’t have a permanent place to live. So I would get off, I would take the Heathrow Express in a rumpled suit, pull my bag, and immediately go and look at five or six flats with my wife to try and find a place to live.

So I was managing a team across all hours. There’s emails coming from Singapore in the middle of the night. There’s emails from Europe in the morning. There’s emails from North America in the evenings. Processing two transatlantic time changes a week and trying to find a place to live. And perhaps unsurprisingly with hindsight, but what I started to notice is everything I prided myself on started to slip. I just wasn’t as good a leader to my people. I was more dictatorial. I had less space and time for questions. I was making errors that I wouldn’t normally make. Quality errors, oversights, emails with typos, all this stuff. And that was a real moment for me where I went, you know what? The intellectual stuff is necessary. You need the intellectual horsepower. And there is this additional layer which is like, how do I hold up under pressure? What is that layer of skills that actually allows me to access all of this stuff and what starts to chip away at that or dent that? And that was a real moment for me as an individual where I went, okay, I got to put some boundaries around some things here or this pressure is going to overwhelm my ability to perform and be successful. So that was definitely a pivotal moment for me.

Geoff Tuff:

So knowing you Dane and knowing your work and having read your book, I know we’re going to get into the power of pressure in a lot more detail, but before we get there, maybe you can just tell us a little bit about the genesis of Third Factor, what the original purpose of the organization was, and then we’ll bring that back around to your shift into practicing at Third Factor.

Dane Jensen:

Yeah. That sounds great. So I always talk about Third Factor, we’re like this interdisciplinary leadership and research hub. And what I mean by that is we operate in a whole bunch of different environments where people have to perform under pressure. We started as an organization in the world of elite sport. So we were founded by my parents. Actually it was founded by my father Peter Jensen, my mom’s Sandra Stark. My dad’s a sports psychologist, my mom’s a clinical psychologist, which made for very interesting dinner conversation, especially around high school age. That-

Geoff Tuff:

I just had a lot of light bulbs go off.

Dane Jensen:

Yeah. Yeah. “How was your day?” Was the start of a three-hour conversation. Yeah. Anyway, so there’s a whole other avenue we could explore there. But really their fundamental insight was that the work that they were doing with athletes to prepare them for international competition, the work that they were doing to help them manage the pressure that they were facing, this was a universal human experience that had application well beyond the world of sport. I would love to say that they arrived at this insight themselves. Really what happened is they were doing great work with the Olympic movement in particular in Canada leading into the ’88 Calgary games. And in fact, athletes that they worked with ended up winning 80% of Canada’s medals in Calgary. And sports psychology at the time was like this dark art. My dad’s degree was from the phys ed faculty. The psychology faculty didn’t even have a performance psychology, a sports psychology unit at this point.

But after the Calgary games, there was a ton of media attention around us because of the medal performance. And so there was a lot of dialogue around, okay, well what are you guys doing back there? Is this shock therapy? Are you lying them down on a couch? What’s happening behind the curtain that is leading to this performance under pressure? And as part of that dialogue and that media attention, it was actually the Queen’s School of Business at the time that picked up the phone and called and said, “Hey, the stuff that you guys are doing with elite athletes, we think this is really relevant to people in business. We’re facing different pressure, but at the end of the day, it impacts people in a very human way. Would you be willing to come and talk to execs and business people about some of the stuff you’re working on with these athletes?”

So if you take it all the way back, this is the late ’80s. That’s sort of the genesis of the business, it was really trying to understand: Yes, our world is incredibly different from the world of elite athletes. I think we absolutely recognize this. Most elite athletes are in their early 20s, they’re often living at home. They have a team of people around them whose sole job is to clear distractions from one goal, which is winning an Olympic medal. Most of us dream of a world like that. We don’t have one goal, we have 20 goals. We are surrounded by teams of people. They tend not to clear distractions from our goals in most cases. So it’s a very, very different world.

And there are certain things … My dad, Peter, he always talks about this. Like the laws of physics. Gravity looks very different on Earth than it does on Mars. It’s still gravity, right? It’s still the same fundamental force. And I think there’s a lot of those that exist for pressure. Pressure is a human experience. It’s physiological. It’s about heart rate and respiration and cortisol and adrenaline. Wherever the pressure is coming from, there are some fundamentally human responses that can apply beyond the world of sport. So that’s the genesis. Right now, our world is 80% corporate, 10% academic, 10% sport. So I teach at UNC, I teach at Queen’s. Most of my work is with large organizations. And then we maintain that R&D lab, so to speak, in the world of elite sport, working with athletes and teams.

Stuart Crainer:

I suppose the obvious question is what is the Third Factor, or indeed what are factors number one and two?

Dane Jensen:

Stuart, this is a great, great question that I love answering. The first two factors are nature and nurture. And the term Third Factor comes from a mentor of my father. It was a guy named Kazimierz Dąbrowski. And Dąbrowski was a Polish psychologist. His major theory was the theory of positive disintegration. And the idea of positive disintegration is that it is through the experiences that take us apart, that we re-emerge at a higher level. So that’s the idea of positive disintegration, which has a lot in common with anti-fragility and resilience and that whole domain of thought that has become really popular in the last 10 to 15 years. The way he studied and arrived at the theory of positive disintegration was by studying the lives of people that, in his view, had reached very high levels of moral and emotional growth. So your classic cases would be the Nelson Mandela’s of the world, the Gandhi’s of the world.

What he wanted to understand was what were the experiences that led these people to move to this higher plane of moral and emotional growth? And what he observed is as he looked at the stories of somebody like a Nelson Mandela who was imprisoned on Robben Island for many, many years before emerging at a higher level of growth. He came out of prison free of bitterness, free of the desire for retribution having achieved a higher plane of moral and emotional growth during that 20 plus year period of imprisonment. What he really deeply came to believe was that this wasn’t nature and this wasn’t nurture. The genetic endowments that you are born with are part of the story. The nurture in the Robben Island prison was not nurturing. That wasn’t the environment that had led him. He said, we’re missing something here. And what he called it … He never gave it another name. He just said, there is a third factor and the Third Factor is the role that we play in our own moral and emotional growth. It is, yes, I am born with certain genetic endowments. Yes, I am raised in a certain environment. What is the role that I play in my own growth and development?

And so a big part of why we called the company Third Factor … And this was a rebrand maybe four years ago from Performance Coaching. What really resonated for us in that name was that our job as an organization is to try to tap into that Third Factor in other people. To get people excited about maximizing their potential, about reaching higher levels of moral and emotional growth. And in many ways, I actually see that as a one sentence definition of leadership. Your job as a leader is to get somebody else excited about their potential, excited about their growth and development because that’s the only way that we get to self-efficacy, we get to self-determination, we get to self-responsibility. So maybe a longer answer than you wanted to that question, but that’s where Third Factor comes from.

Geoff Tuff:

I’m glad you asked that Stuart. I have never actually asked Dane that myself. I think it’s a fascinating story and a great concept. Let’s dive in to … And I’m going to talk about your book, The Power of Pressure. I assume it’s probably the best encapsulation of a lot of what you’re practicing and thinking these days. But let’s dive into the book. Can you tell us a little bit about maybe first, where the ideas for the book came from and then maybe two or three of the core concepts within the book that you try to bring your readers through, bring your audiences through, bring the various different leaders through that you work with?

Dane Jensen:

Yeah. So the book started because I stumbled on a really good question. And the question that I stumbled on was what’s the most pressure you’ve ever been under? I was teaching at the time. I think it was a course on resilience. I was having lunch with a bunch of participants. What would you say, what is the most pressure you’ve ever been under? And the story that I heard back in response to that question was so good that I started asking every interesting person I could find about the most pressure they’d ever been under. And over time I thought, you know what? There’s a lot of power to this question because on the other side of it, no matter who you ask, there is a really good story. And typically that story contains some really interesting insights into what creates pressure, the impact of pressure, and how people manage it.

So the book was really my attempt to get a little bit more disciplined at asking that question. So I built around that question a follow up question. So what made it so high pressure? How did that impact you? What did you do that helped? What did you do that didn’t help? What did other people do that helped? How did the experience change you? And then I just sought out as many interesting people as I could to ask them that question and started to do some pattern analysis in terms of what I heard back. And this is where our interdisciplinary business model really helped. Because I was able to talk to 21 people that have won Olympic medals, 13 of them gold medals. I was able to talk to people that lead Navy SEAL teams. I was able to talk to academics about the research they’re doing on pressure. But actually more than that, I probably asked about … Well, at this point I’ve asked more than 10,000 normal business folks about the most pressure they’ve ever been under. And so a lot of the insights for the book came from just synthesizing, okay, what did I hear in response?
And I think to your second question, what are some of the core concepts? I think that the first thing that you realize when you ask enough people this question is that pressure doesn’t fit in a box. There is no tidy, oh, this is pressure and this is not pressure. Pressure spans the total human experience. I have people describe really short moments like a critical job interview or an entrance exam or something like that. I had people describe long periods of pressure, like caring for a parent at the end of life while dealing with a corporate downsizing.

I had people talk about personal stuff, work stuff. I had people talk about life and death experiences like having to deal with an active shooter situation in a school. I had people talk about much more interpersonal pressures. So again, I think, total range of human experience you get when you ask people about pressure. And at the same time, as different as these experiences are, when you step back and ask it enough times, the helpful thing is you start to see some patterns emerge. There are undoubtedly patterns in what causes pressure and the things that we do to try to manage it that can either help or hurt.

Geoff Tuff:

And let me ask Dane, before you get into some of the core concepts, do you actually have a definition of pressure? I think we all have … We can relate to it, we can imagine our own pressure points and what it feels like but is there actually a definition that you use for pressure or is there one that exists in the world?

Dane Jensen:

So there’s one that I use. I think that it’s one of those words that depending on the research you consult, different people have different definitions for pressure. I can give you mine. And in particular I like to differentiate between pressure and stress. One of the things that repeatedly came up was, okay, is that a pressure situation or is that a fear situation? Is that a pressure situation or is that a stress situation? The way I came to think about the difference between pressure and stress is I use the metaphor of a basketball game. My wife is a huge Toronto Raptors fan. She’s deeply invested in the Toronto Raptors basketball organization. Invested to the point where if we’re in the playoffs and it’s a close game, she has to leave the room for the fourth quarter and get updates on the game by text message because it is so stressful for her to watch the game that she has to exit the situation. That to me is stress.

Pressure on the other hand is reserved for the people playing in the game. Pressure is for the athletes that are on the court that are participating in the game. So in my mind, part of the definition of pressure is that there is something I have to do here. I need to act. And so my one sentence definition for pressure is pressure is the need to act in important uncertain situations. And that gets to the patterns of what creates pressure because really pressure, what I’ve come to see, is pressure is a function of three things. It’s a function of importance, uncertainty, and volume. If you have importance and uncertainty, you have pressure assuming you need to do something. So I can take those one by one. So importance … I think this is pretty straightforward. The amount of pressure I feel is directly proportional to how important I have coded the outcome of the situation to be. If I don’t think the situation matters, I’m not going to feel pressure. And importance alone is not enough. You need uncertainty because no matter how important a situation is, if the outcome is certain, I’m not going to feel any pressure. So I need this combination of two things. This matters to me and I’m not sure how it’s going to turn out. There’s a certain measure of uncertainty. And pressure for me is really the product of those two things. Use a very simple example. If I buy a $5 lottery ticket, there’s a huge amount of uncertainty. 99.9999999%. It’s not going to create that much pressure because the importance is relatively low. If on the other hand, I’m getting wheeled down a hospital corridor to a life-saving surgery with a 90% success rate, the 10% uncertainty there is going to get magnified by that importance to create a fair amount of pressure. So it is that interplay of importance and uncertainty. And if I have to act in that situation, that’s where pressure comes from. And then the final piece is volume. And this is the force multiplier for pressure. So you have Importance times Uncertainty that creates pressure. Volume is just how much of it am I dealing with at once? How many priorities, how many important uncertain situations?

Stuart Crainer:

I suppose the stereotype is that the great champions in sports at least thrive on pressure. And that’s why the Olympic Games, World Championships records are often broken because the great performers turn up.

Dane Jensen:

So this is the paradox of pressure, Stuart. The subtitle of the book is ‘Why pressure isn’t the problem, it’s the solution.’ And that is a bit deliberately provocative, especially because it came out during the pandemic, and I think a lot of people looked at it and were like, “Okay, has this guy been in a coma for three years because pressure seems to be pretty bad?” So it’s a little deliberately provocative. And I think you’re right. One of the things that’s fascinating about pressure: Pressure is really energy. If you think about the experience of pressure, pressure is emotional energy, it’s physical energy, it’s cognitive energy. And that energy can be hugely helpful. You think about where do more world records get set than anywhere else in the world of sport? At the Olympic Games. Why? Because there’s pressure. Pressure can be hugely elevating. And at the same time, that energy can be hugely destructive. It can lead to anxiety, it can lead to overwhelm, it can lead down the garden path to burnout, mental health injury. So I think that the whole pressure dialogue is how do we get at the good growth producing stuff in that energy under pressure and mitigate our exposure to the dark side of pressure that can lead to anxiety and overwhelm.

And I think one of the biggest surprises in writing the book – this is not one of my hypotheses going in – is that, I think, being “good at pressure” is not one thing, it’s two things. Because the responses that are required to excel in peak pressure moments, like a job interview, or a test, or an Olympic final, are almost opposite to the skills required to thrive through the long haul of pressure. The grind of the days, the weeks and the months. It’s two totally different skill sets. And I think there are few people that are pressure ambidextrous. I talked to people that were really good at the peak pressure moments and their lives were in complete disorder over the long haul. Tiger Woods is a famous example of this. Amazing at peak pressure. The long haul, a little rough. And we see vice versa. We see people that are just rocks over the long haul. They don’t want to give a presentation in front of 2,000 people. They don’t want to be sitting down for a panel interview. So there are just different skill sets for the haul than there are in peak pressure, which was a little fascinating to me.

Geoff Tuff:

That is very interesting. And I wonder then, are there different archetypes of people who deal with pressure in different ways and can we actually typify ourselves as we think about what we do well with and what we don’t do well with?

Dane Jensen:

I think there are, and I think people can get better at this stuff. So for sure, there are people that just naturally have ice in their veins. You look at the Mikaël Kingsbury’s, the Serena Williams’ of the world. There are people that are just born with a certain aptitude for handling peak pressure moments in the same way that I’m sure there are much less celebrated people that are carrying … single moms carrying four kids for 18 years that are doing an incredible job of the long haul of pressure. Yes. So absolutely, I think there are archetypes in both. And one of the things that in my mind is cause for great optimism is we know that you can get better at both of these. These are trainable skills. Most of us are not going to be Serena Williams or Michael Phelps, and we can improve upon our baseline. We can get better at this stuff.

Stuart Crainer:

Has much work been done on pressure? Because it’s one of those things, we all know what you’re talking about. But I can’t think of much research in that area really.

Dane Jensen:

So I think, Stuart, a lot of it does come out of the realm of performance psychology and sports. Martin Seligman out of Pennsylvania has done a fair amount of work on pressure and performance under pressure, under the domain of resilience. A subset of EQ. There’s a little bit of research that’s been done there. To my knowledge anyways, I don’t think … This is part of the reason why I wrote the book. I don’t think there was a model of, okay, these three variables are what come together to create pressure and if we can manage these in a certain way, we can toggle back and forth. What I think is fascinating about this is just like pressure is a double agent … It can be great and it can create anxiety. Every one of importance, uncertainty, and volume is also a double agent. And this is where the peak pressure versus the long haul comes.

So importance is a great example. There is lots of research on the importance of importance on why we need purpose. Obviously Simon Sinek and all of the great stuff that he’s done around Start With Why. And in peak pressure moments importance is the enemy. Because in your peak pressure moments, most of us fixate entirely on how important this is and why this matters to me and how deeply connected to my purpose this is. And that’s actually what leads to choking and overwhelm. And so in our peak pressure moments, one of the things that we’re really working on is, “Can I get some perspective on importance?” Can I step back and go, “You know what, yes, this is a critical moment for me and I still have my health, my family.” That ability to in the moment distance from importance and purpose. The long haul is the exact opposite. The long haul is when you’ve got to search for it because life feels relentless. So every single part of the equation, it’s funny, they’re all double agents and how you relate to them really changes and what you’re trying to optimize for.

Geoff Tuff:

So Dane, I know you’ve covered some of the concepts in the book, but tell us … And maybe the best way to answer this question is the top things that you hope your readers take away from the book, either in terms of frameworks or mental notes or things that they can do in their daily lives or over the long haul that will help them thrive under pressure.

Dane Jensen:

Yeah. So I think there’s three … This actually isn’t even in the book. I only came to this after … It’s funny. The woman who helped me write and market the book, Carolyn Monaco, she told me right from the start of the project, there’s the book you intend to write, there’s the book you write, and then there’s the book you wish you wrote. Every book is three books. And I have found that to be quite true as you start talking about the book and doing interviews like this.

So these three things actually aren’t in the book, but as I give speeches on the book, this tends to be what I anchor on. Is that this ability to get at the good stuff from pressure while avoiding the anxiety and overwhelm, it ends up coming down to basically three things. There are three things that you have to hold in tension. So the importance tension is, “I have to be able to see what I’m doing as important while at the same time seeing what’s not at stake.” And I think there are two disciplines embedded in there. There is the discipline of being really good at looking for growth, contribution and connection. That to me is where we find importance. How is this making me stronger? Yes, this is uncomfortable. How is it making me better? Yes, this is uncomfortable. How am I contributing? Yes, this is uncomfortable. How is it bringing me close to people? That’s the discipline of looking for importance.

Then there is my ability in the highest pressure moments to actually step back and go, “You know what? This is important to me and here’s what’s not at stake.” To notice our anchors, to notice the things that aren’t going to change.

One of my favorite stories in the book that I tell almost every time I present the book is about a guy named Johann Kass, and Johann’s one of the most decorated winter Olympians of all time. He’s a four-time gold medalist in long track speed skating. And he talked about the period leading up to the Lillehammer games. He’s Norwegian. And leading up to the Lillehammer games … This is a guy who was facing what, for my mind, is the most press you can face in sport, which is he was a gold medal favorite. So he was expected, actually, to win three gold medals in Lillehammer. At an Olympics in his home country. He was the flag bearer, he was the face of the games in Norway. In an individual sport. So anything less than gold is a failure. All five million people in Norway know who you are, and it’s just you out there on the ice. There’s no coach, there’s no team, there’s nobody. That to me is as heavy as it gets. And he talks about 10 days before the games, he couldn’t handle it. He broke down. He ended up crying under a staircase in his hotel. And the way he described that moment to me is he said, “At that moment, the fear of failure was so strong that I felt like failure at the Olympic Games would create failure for the rest of my life.” When we talk about how does importance start to work against us, this is where we fall into that trap of, of course the Olympics is important and he has layered all of this additional importance on top of it to build it up into this thing that then becomes a block to performance. It becomes a creator of anxiety and overwhelm. And so his sports psych sat down with him and she had a conversation with him. So she said, okay, you want to be a doctor after you retire from sport? Will failing make you a worse doctor? Not really. Okay. One brick off the scale. And she goes, okay, do you think the Norwegian people care whether you win a gold medal or another Norwegian wins a gold medal? And this is a tough one, right? This is the ego question. You don’t become world champion without a healthy ego. But eventually he goes, they probably don’t care as long as somebody from Norway wins, we’re good. She said, okay, well do you think somebody from Norway is going to win? He is like, yeah, we got the deepest team in the world. Okay. I’m not responsible for the happiness of four and a half million people. That comes off the scale.

So I think this ability to have the mental discipline of in our highest pressure moments, to not deny that it’s important, but be able to disassemble the stakes, that’s a really important skill set that I see in high performers. So that’s number one. That’s the importance tension and I think it’s huge.

Stuart Crainer:

So as we watch pressure play out at the Paris Olympics, how can we be watching the Olympics with perception around this? What should we be looking for?

Dane Jensen:

I think the number one thing that you’re looking for when you look at an athlete is, are they in the right zone between amped up and relaxed? There’s three ways that that gets demonstrated. One is the emotional tenor that they’re bringing. One is the physiology and their physical state, and the third, which is harder to see, is cognitive. How are their thought patterns? I think the thing that most people underestimate about the Olympic Games is how much the fight or flight response is kicking in for people. When I talk to athletes about the five minutes before they jump in the pool, the five minutes they take the track, the number one thing they’re thinking about? Why do I do this to myself? How can I get out of here? It’s so profoundly uncomfortable the five minutes before taking the stage. The athletes that are really successful are those that are able to, literally, you can see this when you watch sport, watch for the people that have their breathing under control. So literally watch the rise and fall of the chest. You see somebody who has it under control and is doing the … This is somebody who is conscious enough of their energy level that they’re taking action to modulate it.

Because when performance starts to go off the rails, it’s when we become our racing heart, when we become our racing breathing. If you see somebody that’s conscious enough that they’re stepping back and managing it, they’re doing visualizing, they’re dropping their shoulders when they breathe, that to me is always a good sign because it means that they’re conscious about how the pressure’s impacting them.

Stuart Crainer:

I suppose if they choose flight, no one’s going to catch them. One consolation, isn’t it?

Geoff Tuff:

Probably true. So Dane, I’m sitting here and I’m sure a lot of our listeners are sitting here thinking, okay, so this is great. Very interesting for Olympic athletes. Most of us are not going to be Olympic athletes anytime soon. But we do want to try to take a lot of these lessons. And for those that aren’t looking at this on the video and are just listening to it, what Dane did there for a moment is he picked up his shoulders and took in a deep breath to demonstrate what strong athletes do in moments of pressure. But what about business folks? What about people who are trying to apply some of these lessons to their day-to-day lives in business, whether it’s preparing for a big presentation, the job interview you referenced before, the run to become the next CEO, whatever it may be. What are the top three, four, five different things that we can take from your learnings in sport and apply to business?

Dane Jensen:

Okay. So here’s my greatest hits list. First, to build on what I said earlier, you’ve got a big presentation coming up? In the lead-up to the preparation, think about how much it matters to you and how important it’s to you. That’s going to give you the energy you need to prepare. Mike Keenan has said, the best teams get scared early. Think about how important this presentation is for you. What’s at stake? That’s going to give you the energy to prep. When you’re standing at the door about to go in and deliver the presentation, shift your attention entirely to why this doesn’t matter to you. You still have your family, you still have your job. That’s what you need to be thinking. So the preparation is about importance, performance is about letting go. So that’s the importance tension.

Then when we come to uncertainty … Listen, this is not me. This is 3,000 years of wisdom. You got to be able to really focus on what are the things that I can control? I talk to a beach volleyball player. Only thing they can control is the serve. When I’m behind the serve line. So what’s my serve in the situation? I will often use that as a focusing question. Okay. A lot of stuff out of my control, what’s my serve in the moment? And then once the ball’s in the rally, you got to just let it play out. You got to be able to accept that you cannot control the future and have faith that things are going to work out as they should. And we don’t have faith that things will work out as they should because we are naive. We do it because it puts us in the physiological state that actually makes it likely that we’re going to behave in ways that are helpful.

And then the third is volume. And I think the tension with volume is build the physical platform for volume. I’m not telling people anything they don’t know. Sleep, movement, nutrition. It’s impossible to maintain pressure over the long haul if you’re not taking care of those things. The thing that I want to really impress upon people is don’t trust time management when it comes to volume. Time management is a trap. What happens to people who get really good at time management? Do they get more volume or less volume? They get more volume. The better you get at time management, the more volume that you attract. So time management is a great productivity strategy. It’s not a pressure strategy. With pressure, you’ve got to be able to eliminate volume and that means replacing decisions with principles, and it means making sure that you are being really ruthless at what you choose to take on and the commitments that you make.

Geoff Tuff:

That’s great. So maybe a few closing words then, Dane, on your observations on pressure in the modern day and how pressure is either increasing, decreasing, what’s the impact? As you know, Steve and I have done a lot of thinking and writing about the nature of uncertainty and the belief that we are living in an ever more uncertain world. What do you think is happening with pressure these days and what should we be on the lookout for?

Dane Jensen:

This is probably longer than this chat. I think there’s a real debate on are we dealing with more importance or more uncertainty than before? I’m not sure we are. Is the world more important and more uncertain than it was at the dawn of World War II? I don’t know. I think there are debates to be had around are there more important, more uncertain events happening now than there were a hundred years ago? I think what is unequivocally true is that we are more aware of the importance and uncertainty, and there is an economy that has been built on inflating the importance of every minor twinge in the global markets, the geopolitics. And we have had a collapse in timescale. Nassim Taleb talks about this in The Black Swan where it’s like if you check your stocks once a year, 19 out of 20 years, you’re going to have a great year. You’re going to feel good about it. If you check your stocks every five minutes, 49.96% of the time, you’re going to feel bad.

So we’ve had just timescales collapse in terms of uncertainty. So I think even a similar level of uncertainty, but doled out minute by minute, has a completely different impact on our physiology. So I do think that that has changed fundamentally along with the volume of information. To prepare for this podcast, I had to close six different ways that people can hail and communicate with me at any given moment so I could focus on this conversation. I think that is a fundamentally different reality than 10 years ago, 15 years ago. So volume has gone through the roof in my mind.

Stuart Crainer:

So Dane, a final question. What’s the most pressure you’ve ever been under?

Dane Jensen:

The most pressure I’ve ever been under is when I lost my one-year-old son at the shore of the lake by our cottage for nine minutes when he was not old enough to walk. My wife had gone out for a run. I was down by the lakeside with our three kids. Two of them got in a big fight and I was trying to separate them and the youngest in the meantime crawled off. And by the time I separated the oldest two, I couldn’t find him. He wasn’t wearing a life vest, which was obviously our mistake, because he’d been playing pretty far back from the water when I had last seen him. But that nine minutes … Again, you talk about importance. Literally in my mind, this had the potential to be the dividing line in my life. There was like before this moment and after this. So importance, 100%.

I had to act. I had to immediately go into, okay, what’s the worst thing that could have happened here? He could be in the water. And I got in and started searching the shoreline. There’s three docks on the shoreline. Every time I went to look under a dock, I had to do the full, like, okay … I would get the image spontaneously of him floating in the water under the dock, and I would have to get over that and get my head under the water and look for it. It went long enough that people from across the lake came over because they could hear us shouting and came over to help. So that was the most pressure I’ve ever been under. Luckily, he’s fine. It resolved itself. We found him. He had managed to crawl 400 yards up a steep wooded hill into a clearing in the woods and stay perfectly silent for nine minutes. But that was absolutely the most pressure I’ve ever been under and a very real reminder of the physiological impacts that intense pressure can have on you.

Stuart Crainer:

And he’s now an Olympic athlete.

Geoff Tuff:

If you can crawl that far that quickly, I would imagine.

Dane Jensen:

That’s exactly right.

Stuart Crainer:

Introduce it in the Olympics.
It is a fantastic question, and I hope everyone listening will contemplate moments in their own life where they were under the most pressure. Dane, thanks very much for joining us. Dane’s book is The Power of Pressure, and it’s one of those irresistible topics that is universal. We’ve all had experiences of it, and we can all learn a great deal, I think, from Dane’s insights on it. Dane, thank you very much.

Dane Jensen:

Thanks so much.

Geoff Tuff:

Thanks. Great chatting with you.

Dane Jensen:

Likewise.