You have rehearsed it in the shower. You have written the message and deleted it. And every time the moment arrives, you find a reason it can wait until next quarter.

That conversation is still making decisions for you. It decides who gets the promotion, which project quietly dies, and which good person leaves without ever telling you the real reason.

Tim Duggan spent 3 years inside one question: how do you get better at conflict? He built a media company out of a website he started in his twenties, hired hundreds of people, sold it, and was still terrible at the hard conversation. He thought he was good at it. He was not, and it took him years to work that out.

So he went to the people who are: Adam Grant. Oxford negotiators. Accredited mediators. An executive producer of The Real Housewives, which turned out to be the most useful conversation of the lot.

What he came back with is a map. 4 terrains, and every conflict you are carrying right now sits on one of them. The move that works on one will detonate on another.

Andrew puts it under load. The leaders who can run a profit centre and have never been taught to disagree. Performance Intelligence's own work on psychological safety and constructive challenge. And a live test Tim has not seen coming, where he places a conflict still playing out in public onto his own model, no notes, no preparation.

Listen to this one before your next difficult conversation, not after it.

00:02 — Why are we so bad at conflict?

03:38 — How our families teach us to avoid difficult conversations

07:02 — The moment Tim realised avoiding conflict was costing him

09:01 — What “swallowed words” do to us — and why silence isn’t really silent

11:32 — The counterintuitive question: what happens if you don’t have the conversation?

18:50 — The four terrains of conflict: summit, arena, minefield and swamp

27:27 — What happens when emotion takes over and the “amygdala hijack” kicks in

34:27 — The RISA test: should you actually have the fight?

37:36 — Why psychological safety doesn’t mean avoiding uncomfortable conversations

44:05 — The hidden conflict behind the return-to-office debate

47:26 — The Conflict Simulator: Tim analyses Justin Langer, The Beatles and Kyle & Jackie O

58:52 — How do you actually end a conflict? Resolve, repeat or release

Contact Tim: https://timduggan.com.au/
Order Tim's book: https://timduggan.com.au/book/clear-in-tension/
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High performance is not about pushing harder. It is about building the capacity to perform when it matters and sustain it over time.

Hosted by Andrew May, one of Australia’s leading experts in human performance, leadership and mental skills, the Performance Intelligence Podcast explores how leaders, athletes, coaches and researchers think clearly, manage pressure and consistently perform at their best.

Drawing on more than 20 years working with senior executives, elite sporting teams and the Australian Defence Force, Andrew combines candid conversations with evidence-based performance insights and practical strategies you can apply.

Episodes span leadership capacity, performance psychology, mental skills, energy management, strategic recovery, productivity and wellbeing.

Listen to think more clearly, lead more effectively and perform at your best for longer.

Get in touch through:
Our website
Book Andrew
Follow us on Instagram, Linkedin, Facebook
Watch this episode on Youtube

If you enjoy the podcast, we would really appreciate you leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Google Play. It takes less than 60 seconds and really helps us build our audience and continue to provide high quality guests.

A young player once told Gilbert Enoka that his advice was rubbish. On the field, when a referee makes a call he disagrees with, he wants to throw a punch, and no amount of mindset work was going to change that in the moment.

Enoka, the All Blacks' mental skills coach for 23 years, did not argue the point. He gave the player a simple physical structure instead, and the player's own frustration rating dropped within seconds of trying it. It is the example Enoka now uses to explain why he believes structure, not mindset, is the most underrated lever in high performance.

High performance is not about pushing harder. It is about building the capacity to perform when it matters and sustain it over time.

Hosted by Andrew May, one of Australia’s leading experts in human performance, leadership and mental skills, the Performance Intelligence Podcast explores how leaders, athletes, coaches and researchers think clearly, manage pressure and consistently perform at their best.

Drawing on more than 20 years working with senior executives, elite sporting teams and the Australian Defence Force, Andrew combines candid conversations with evidence-based performance insights and practical strategies you can apply.

Episodes span leadership capacity, performance psychology, mental skills, energy management, strategic recovery, productivity and wellbeing.

Listen to think more clearly, lead more effectively and perform at your best for longer.

Get in touch through:
Our website
Book Andrew
Follow us on Instagram, Linkedin, Facebook
Watch this episode on Youtube

If you enjoy the podcast, we would really appreciate you leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Google Play. It takes less than 60 seconds and really helps us build our audience and continue to provide high quality guests.

Elite athletes and Special Forces do not eat like you do....and the reason you fade in the afternoon is usually something you did that morning.

Jessica Spendlove will tell you exactly what. She will also tell you what to eat when you have 4 minutes and no time to think, whether the supplements you bought are doing anything at all, and why she rarely recommends that a woman fast.

Jessica is a performance dietitian with more than 15 years behind her, a decade of it in elite sport across 7 professional teams, Olympic medallists, world champions and premiership-winning sides, plus 7 years with Special Forces Command.

Jessica has heard every version of "I'm already doing everything right" and she has never met anybody whose nutrition she could not improve. And she is happy to be challenged on that!

The reason it lands is that she got it wrong herself. Jessica spent years feeding elite athletes while running on adrenaline, cortisol and caffeine, and it took her own data to stop her arguing with herself.

If you have been telling yourself you will sort your nutrition out when things calm down, start here.

00:00 The day we took nutrition off the table
03:44 Seven professional teams at once, running on adrenaline, cortisol and caffeine
06:12 The reply-all email that got her roasted at the Christmas party
11:46 The keynote she nearly pulled out of, and the data that made the call
17:19 The three hour morning window where it all comes apart
20:14 The domino habit has to survive your worst day
31:41 You can't ice bath your way out of chronic sleep debt
39:25 Why she almost never recommends fasting for women
55:25 Same meal, different order, different result
01:04:00 Walking into a room of commandos and getting it wrong
01:14:42 How to work with Jessica Spendlove

Contact Jessica through her website, Linkedin, or Instagram.
Buy Jessica's new book "For The Long Run" here.

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High performance is not about pushing harder. It is about building the capacity to perform when it matters and sustain it over time.

Hosted by Andrew May, one of Australia’s leading experts in human performance, leadership and mental skills, the Performance Intelligence Podcast explores how leaders, athletes, coaches and researchers think clearly, manage pressure and consistently perform at their best.

Drawing on more than 20 years working with senior executives, elite sporting teams and the Australian Defence Force, Andrew combines candid conversations with evidence-based performance insights and practical strategies you can apply.

Episodes span leadership capacity, performance psychology, mental skills, energy management, strategic recovery, productivity and wellbeing.

Listen to think more clearly, lead more effectively and perform at your best for longer.

Get in touch through:
Our website
Book Andrew
Follow us on Instagram, Linkedin, Facebook
Watch this episode on Youtube

If you enjoy the podcast, we would really appreciate you leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Google Play. It takes less than 60 seconds and really helps us build our audience and continue to provide high quality guests.

There is a gap between what you are capable of and what you are actually doing. Craig Harper has spent 40 years studying it. His view: the gap is not primarily a talent problem or a knowledge problem. It is a psychological one. Fear, the need to be right, poor self-awareness, and an unwillingness to tolerate discomfort are quietly capping the performance of people who are objectively skilled, experienced, and intelligent. And the higher you rise, the easier it becomes to avoid confronting that.

You can find Craig at his website:https://craigharper.net/
Follw him on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/craiganthonyharper/
Listen to The You Project:https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/the-you-project/id1342430567

High performance is not about pushing harder. It is about building the capacity to perform when it matters and sustain it over time.

Hosted by Andrew May, one of Australia’s leading experts in human performance, leadership and mental skills, the Performance Intelligence Podcast explores how leaders, athletes, coaches and researchers think clearly, manage pressure and consistently perform at their best.

Drawing on more than 20 years working with senior executives, elite sporting teams and the Australian Defence Force, Andrew combines candid conversations with evidence-based performance insights and practical strategies you can apply.

Episodes span leadership capacity, performance psychology, mental skills, energy management, strategic recovery, productivity and wellbeing.

Listen to think more clearly, lead more effectively and perform at your best for longer.

Get in touch through:
Our website
Book Andrew
Follow us on Instagram, Linkedin, Facebook
Watch this episode on Youtube

If you enjoy the podcast, we would really appreciate you leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Google Play. It takes less than 60 seconds and really helps us build our audience and continue to provide high quality guests.

Some people get sharper when the pressure lands. The meeting turns hostile, the plan collapses, the number comes in wrong, and they are still thinking clearly while everyone around them has gone quiet or gone hard.

That is Mental Agility.

The capacity to move between demands, tasks, roles and relationships while staying grounded and effective when conditions change. It is trainable, and it is the capability every organisation is now asking for without ever having taught it.

PQ founder, Andrew May, PQ COO, Angela Poon, and Sports Psychologist, Jacqui Louder, spent 6 months building mental agility into six layers.

1. What your brain does to you under pressure.
2. Why your body sets the ceiling on your thinking.
3. How your identity decides what an event means before conscious thought gets a say.
4. The six seconds that stop you saying the thing you regret.
5. How to actually retain what you learn.
6. The hardiness that has you growing through pressure instead of surviving it.

Now, they are walking you through all six layers here, with one strategy from each you can use this week. Andrew brings you into his real life test of mental agility with a gripping story of being upside down, underwater, strapped inside a helicopter fuselage in the dark, with an instructor offering him a way out.

But what he does next is where mental agility shows up...

00:00 The word everyone uses and nobody can define
04:12 Your brain under pressure is not a character flaw
07:21 What AI can't give you
11:10 Elite sport, clinical psych, actual clowns
14:24 Why an insurer is training this
17:51 Leaving KPMG for a startup
23:43 The three zones
28:18 The brain runs on the body
35:03 Why the same words land differently on different people
39:14 Hanging up the bad day jacket
46:55 Upside down, underwater, offered a way out
52:25 How to work with us

Learn more about a Mental Agility program for your team here or email us at support@performanceintelligence.com
Contact Jacqui Louder here

A suicide bomber walked into a crowded local event in rural Afghanistan, and Harry Moffitt's small medical team spent the day treating the dead and dying. By the afternoon his unit sat in near silence, exhausted and numb.

Moffitt, who spent close to three decades in Australia's Special Air Service, reached for the one thing he carried on every deployment for exactly this reason.

What happened next, in the middle of one of the worst days of his career, became one of the most effective group resets his unit ever experienced, and he says he has never seen anything else do the same job.

You can find Harry at his website: https://harrymoffitt.com.au/
Order a copy of Harry's book: https://www.panmacmillan.com.au/9781761563133/
Connect with Harry at his LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harrymoffitt/
Follow Harry on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/harrymoffitt353/?hl=en

You're probably treating recovery as the reward for hard work, when elite sport treats it as part of the work.

Andrew May has spent more than two decades coaching in sport and business, and Andrew thinks we have misdiagnosed a generation of exhausted leaders. Call it burnout and you go looking for rest. Andrew says the shortfall is usually capacity, and the first move is measuring it rather than resting on it.

Pod O'Sullivan had Andrew on Don't Let The Old Man In podcast and asked him the things he does not get asked on his own show. It was too good to leave over there, so we are bringing it to you here.

00:00 The plan you don't have
01:11 Burnout is not what you think it is
04:25 Vitamin FLPJ: fun, laughter, play, joy
06:52 The CEO who has never burnt out
09:45 Train hard, push hard, recover hard
12:25 What executive blood profiles show
16:17 Your father, your son, and you
18:45 The waterfront house and the crash
23:47 The five metrics worth tracking
30:17 You'd spend a year planning a renovation
38:55 Wearables: who they help, who they wreck
44:38 Why sauna beats cold
50:21 The toast that explains burnout
54:05 Three things to start this week
01:00:25 What your 75 year old self would ask
01:01:24 I've burnt out almost twice

Listen to the original episode: https://pod.fo/e/5543c9
Watch the original episode: https://www.youtube.com/@DontLetTheOldManInPodcast/videos
Follow Pod on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/padraigbosullivan/

Follow DLTOMN: https://www.instagram.com/dltomipodcast/

Most goal-setting advice starts with your why, the deep, soul-searching question everyone knows they're meant to answer but rarely do. Keith Abraham, one of the world's leading authorities on goal achievement, thinks that's exactly backwards, and too hard for anyone with a job and a diary.

He starts somewhere else entirely, with a short list of feelings almost nobody names out loud before setting a goal. Once that shifts, the goal itself, the reasons behind it, and the people who can help all fall into a completely different order.

What that starting question actually is, and why it beats a purpose statement, is the part worth hearing.

You can find Keith at his website: https://keithabraham.com/
Or at his LinkedIn: https://au.linkedin.com/in/keithabraham
Order a copy of Keith's new book: https://www.amazon.com.au/Unstoppable-Velocity-Goals-Reality-Faster/dp/1394389302