What Sport Taught Me About Pressure At Work

I spent a good part of my younger years in a swimming pool, playing water polo to GB Junior level. It is a sport that is relentless, physical and largely invisible to anyone watching from the side, because most of the effort happens under the water.

I didn't realise at the time how much of it would carry over into professional life. Years of consultancy work, and now coaching, have shown me that many of the lessons hold up remarkably well.

Pressure Is Information

In sport, nobody pretends pressure isn't there. The final quarter of a close match is supposed to feel different. You train for it precisely because you know it's coming.

At work, pressure often gets treated as a sign that something has gone wrong. A tight deadline, a difficult board meeting, a project that matters more than usual. People tell themselves they should feel calmer than they do, and then spend energy fighting the feeling rather than using it.

A more useful starting point is that pressure is information. It tells you the outcome matters to you. The question is not how to make it disappear, but how to perform well while it's present.

Preparation Changes How Pressure Feels

The matches I remember feeling most composed in were not the easiest ones. They were the ones where we had prepared properly. We knew the plays, we had rehearsed the awkward scenarios and we had a shared sense of what we would do when things went wrong.

The workplace equivalent is surprisingly rare. People prepare the content of a presentation, but not the moment the hardest question lands. They plan the project, but not the conversation they'll need to have when it slips.

It is worth asking, before anything high-stakes:

• What is the moment I'm most worried about?
• What would a good response look like in that moment?
• Have I actually said it out loud, or only thought about it?

Rehearsal isn't theatrical. It simply means your first attempt at something difficult isn't the one that counts.

Recovery Is Part of the Programme

No serious athlete trains flat out every day. Recovery is built into the plan, because performance depends on it. Skip it and the decline is slow, then sudden.

Professional life rarely makes the same allowance. High performers in particular tend to treat rest as something they earn once the work is finished, which in most roles means never. The result is a kind of hidden fatigue that doesn't show up until it really shows up.

This is one reason I measure performance and contentment separately. Someone can be delivering brilliantly while quietly running down their reserves. If you only look at output, you miss the warning signs until they become the main story.

Small Margins, Repeated

Water polo is decided by small margins. A slightly better position, a fraction of a second earlier, a pass that lands where a teammate expects it. None of those moments is dramatic on its own. Repeated over a match, they decide the result.

I think about work in the same way. Big changes are rare and often unreliable. What tends to move things is a handful of small, deliberate adjustments, applied consistently and reviewed honestly. A better first hour. A clearer brief. One difficult conversation had a week earlier than it otherwise would have been.

Ownership Under Pressure

The best teammates I played with had something in common. When things went wrong, they didn't look for someone to blame and they didn't freeze. They took ownership of the next action, however small, and got on with it.

That idea sits at the heart of how I coach. OWN IT is about honest awareness of what is influencing you, and clear ownership of what you do next. It isn't about carrying everything alone. It's about recognising which part is genuinely yours and acting on it.

Bringing It Back to Work

You don't need to have played sport for any of this to apply. The principles are simple enough:

• Expect pressure where the stakes are real, and don't treat it as failure.
• Prepare for the difficult moments, not just the content.
• Build recovery into the plan rather than hoping for it.
• Look for small margins and repeat them.
• Take ownership of the next action.

None of these will make a demanding role easy. They can make it more sustainable, and they tend to make good performance more repeatable.

If this resonates, you can read more about how the coaching works, or book a conversation to talk it through.