Why sport psychology fits founders

In short: Founders and athletes have to perform under pressure and then recover. Sport psychology has studied this for decades. Much of it carries over.

Opinion, with a bit of method.

My additional qualification is in sport psychology. I work mainly with founders. Some people ask whether that fits. I think it fits very well. Here's why.

Founders and athletes have the same problem

Take away the context. Then founders and athletes deal with the same four things:

• Performing on the day. The pitch, the board meeting, the hard conversation, the launch. You prepare for months. Then it comes down to forty minutes where you have to be fully there.
• Without certainty. The outcome isn't in your hands. You control your preparation, your attention and how you react.
• With people watching. Team, investors, family, the market. People can see how you're doing. And it spreads to them.
• And again next week. It isn't about one great performance. It's about recovering fast enough. That's how you keep delivering for years without breaking.

Sport psychology has worked on exactly these four problems for decades. Its advantage: in sport, results are measured. So bad ideas often get found out faster than in business.

What carries over

Not the clichés. Nobody needs to "visualise success" before a funding round. The useful parts are more concrete.

Directing your attention. Where does your focus go under stress? And how do you bring it back to what you can influence? Athletes train this on purpose. Founders mostly don't. You can see it in meetings: the important point gets lost, the loudest one wins.

Managing tension. It isn't about "calm down". It's about the right level of tension. Not flat, not wired, but alert and sharp. And you learn what gets you there. Much of this is body first, mind second: sleep, breathing, when you drink coffee, the state you walk in with.

A set routine beforehand. What do you do in the thirty minutes before something important? Many founders wing it. A set routine can help you walk in calmer and more focused. And building one isn't complicated.

Honest reviews afterwards. Sport is good at this. What happened? What was in our control? What do we change? Without beating yourself up and without easy excuses. Many companies barely do this. Many founders do it alone at three in the morning. That's probably the worst version.

Recovery is part of the work. In elite sport, recovery is planned in. Overtraining is a well-known risk there. In startups, rest is often still seen as something you earn later. Your body doesn't care about that culture.

People who work under pressure

People who perform under pressure for a living, in sport or in business, mostly don't want comfort. They want to get better.

They can take direct feedback, because they've had a lot of it. And they've usually tried the obvious things already. So the work starts further in.