@Shadowwork6969
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25+ yrs in high performance. Coach, consultant & 3× best-selling author. I challenge bullshit around performance, coaching & leadership.
Japan
Joined June 2025
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25+ years in high performance have taught me a few things.
I've coached Grand Slam champions, professional athletes, and elite performers across multiple sports.
I've worked inside international governing bodies, led teams, coached athletes, and spent 8 years on the Dunlop/Adidas International Advisory Board.
I've also made a ton of mistakes along the way.
Here's what I believe:
Personal responsibility is non-negotiable.
Talent isn't enough.
Motivation isn't reliable.
Mental toughness isn't something you simply have.
And the zone isn't something you chase.
I'll be talking about athletes, coaching, leadership, psychology, and high performance.
Jonny Bakks retweeted
Dark Journalist X-Series 239:
Tall White Aliens UFO File Iran Sky Event
MoonBuster Lunar Wars Revealed!
youtube.com/watch?v=Poq6BrVH…
Special Exclusive Premiere Friday 9PM EST...!
I’ve asked athletes plenty of questions about what they want to achieve.
What ranking do you want? What competition do you want to win? What level do you want to reach?
Those questions are important, but eventually I think there's a better one.
Who are you becoming?
I remember working with a talented young baseball player who trained brilliantly when he was motivated, but on other days he drifted through practice.
One day I asked him, “What would a serious ballplayer do today?”
It wasn't a complicated question, but it changed the way he looked at training.
He started making decisions based on the athlete he wanted to become rather than how motivated he felt that day.
That's something I think applies at every level.
Your identity isn't built by what you say you want to become.
It's built by the choices you make repeatedly when nobody is forcing you to make them.
#AthleteDevelopment #CharacterDevelopment #HighPerformance #SportsPsychology
It’s contempt for the average, Joe.
That’s why the elites call us the “Un begun.”
One of the biggest lessons I've learned from high-performance sport is that athletes don't always feel the way they want to feel before competition.
They're nervous. They're tired. They're frustrated. They're questioning themselves.
I've worked with athletes who believed they needed to feel confident and calm before they could perform properly.
But I remember discussing this with a Grand Slam champion I worked with. When we talked about those days when everything felt effortless, he told me he'd experienced that feeling in only a handful of matches across his career.
He still won the biggest tournaments in the sport.
That stayed with me.
You don't need to eliminate pressure before you perform. You need to learn how to perform while you're feeling it.
Breathing, routines, reset strategies and simple cues can help, but the bigger lesson is learning to stop waiting for the perfect feeling.
Sometimes you just have to compete with the feeling you've got.
#MentalToughness #SportsPsychology #PerformanceUnderPressure #HighPerformance
The psychological profile of every military/police officer EVER.
Without exception. Blanket statement.
1. Order followers
2. Psychopaths
Order followers ALWAYS bear more MORAL responsibility than the order giver. @MarkPassio
youtu.be/19Cq__S8uhI?si…
A District Court judge has cleared a former SA Police security officer of threatening his ex-partner with a gun – while refusing to dismiss the woman’s account as untruthful. 📌READ MORE: bit.ly/4hmZs3Y
I’ve always been interested in what happens before an athlete walks into competition.
People tend to focus on the big moment, but most performances are decided much earlier through the habits an athlete has built.
Sleep. Recovery. Nutrition. Training. Preparation. The little routines they repeat when nobody is watching.
I remember working with a golfer whose swing looked excellent on the range but changed completely once she got into competition.
We eventually realised that the problem wasn't her swing. She had no consistent routine between shots. Sometimes she rushed, sometimes she overthought things and every shot became a new experience.
We built a simple routine she could rely on. It felt boring at first. That was part of the point.
When pressure arrived, she didn't need to find confidence. She had something familiar to return to.
That's what good routines give athletes.
#AthleteDevelopment #SportsPerformance #PerformancePsychology #HighPerformance
Jonny Bakks retweeted
Your Capacity Margin Matters
I’m 63, and I’ve been an orthopedic surgeon for 30 years. The patients who stay independent into their 80s didn't chase bulk or aesthetics the hardest… Instead, they’re the ones who did enough to maintain a margin in many more abilities. Don't be the dude with the biggest biceps... but you can't broad jump just 3+ feet.
I actually call it capacity margin — the gap between what your life demands and what your body can still do on a bad day. Not your best day in the gym. But instead, the day you miss sleep, travel, get sick, or catch yourself mid-fall.
Many things erode that margin... You stop practicing getting off the floor until one day you can’t. This happens earlier than you anticipate. You keep the big lifts and drop the quick, sideways, reactive work… then a curb or a dog’s pull sends you flying. Or perhaps you treat aches and pain with rest instead of smart load, and the tendon pain calms down briefly while you get weaker.
Perhaps you accept “I’m just getting older” for losses mostly from disuse. You optimize labs and supplements boosted by longevity podcasts while your power, balance, and bone density fade.
Looking fit is great… But big biceps and having no margin is fragile.
If you want a simple audit today, pick one thing you did easily five years ago- the floor, hills, a suitcase, a quick change of direction- and notice whether it’s still easy. Then train that for the person who still wants options a decade or two from now.
I’ve worked with a lot of athletes who became obsessed with trying to find “the zone.”
They’d have a great training session or competition and then spend the next few weeks trying to recreate exactly how they felt that day.
The problem is that the more you start thinking, “Am I in the zone yet?”, the less attention you’re giving to what you actually need to do.
I saw this with an athlete who was constantly checking performance data during competition. She was trying to work out whether she was having a good day, but the numbers were pulling her further away from the race.
We stripped things back and focused on the things she could actually control: feel, positioning, decisions and execution.
Nothing magical happened. She simply started paying attention to the sport again.
The zone isn't something I think athletes should chase. Build the conditions and let it find you.
#TheZoneIsEarned #FlowState #SportsPsychology #AthleteDevelopment
Silver Week finished today but managed to squeeze 87km in with my daughter along the lake.
Stole a lamington out of our display case when I got back.
The criminal elites will ALWAYS USE physical currency.
Why?
Do you really think Mr Don Corlione trusts the bankers with numbers on a screen? & do you think the bankers trust Mr Corlione?
Only the pleps will use digital currency.
One of the mistakes I see parents and coaches make when assessing young athletes is focusing too much on individual incidents.
A child loses their temper once, gives up on a difficult drill or blames a teammate after a bad result, and suddenly we're worried about their character. I think it's much more useful to look for patterns.
In the work I've done with young athletes, I've always been interested in what happens repeatedly.
- Does the athlete usually get back up after mistakes?
- Do they help teammates?
- Do they take responsibility?
- Are they willing to try different solutions when something isn't working?
Those behaviours tell you much more than one bad afternoon. That's why we developed green and red flags around the different character strengths in our system.
The goal isn't to label a child as “good” or “bad.”It's to notice the patterns early enough that you can actually coach them.
Disagree.
Why would you want to “hurt” yourself during a workout?
You don’t need to learn to hurt again; rather you need to learn INTENSITY DISCIPLINE.
Keep your HR low & your RPE no higher 3 daily & no higher than 5; EVER.
(If you want to be a professional athlete obviously these rules change)
One of the things I've become increasingly interested in is how often we tell athletes to “focus” without actually teaching them what that means.
You see it all the time. An athlete loses concentration, starts looking around, gets distracted or becomes caught up in what's just happened, and the instruction is simply: “Focus.”
That's not really a strategy.
In my book, I developed a simple focus protocol built around breathing, visual and auditory awareness, physical sensations and then bringing that awareness back into sport-specific movement.
The idea isn't to create some magical state of concentration. It's to give the athlete something they can actually practice.
Focus is a skill. Like any other skill, it gets better when you train it deliberately rather than waiting until competition and hoping it turns up.
I've coached athletes who went on to do very different things after sport.
Some became coaches. Some went into business. Some went into academics or professional careers that had nothing to do with their sport.
But I've noticed that many of the habits they developed through sport stayed with them.
- Preparing properly.
- Managing pressure.
- Turning up when they didn't feel like it.
- Dealing with failure.
- Taking responsibility.
- Learning how to keep going when something doesn't go according to plan.
That's one of the reasons I think we sometimes measure sport too narrowly.
Of course winning matters. Performance matters. Results matter.
But if an athlete spends ten or fifteen years in sport and leaves with nothing except a collection of results, we've probably missed something.
The real value of sport is what the athlete carries with them when the competition eventually stops.
The athlete might finish competing.
The person doesn't.
#AthleteDevelopment #CharacterDevelopment #SportsLeadership #LifeSkills
Here's a question I think every governing body should ask before appointing someone to develop coaches:
Who have you actually developed?
I've always found it strange that someone can spend years teaching coaches how to develop athletes without having a meaningful track record of developing athletes themselves.
I'm not talking about qualifications. I'm talking about experience.
If your job is to teach coaches how to develop players, shouldn't you understand what player development actually looks like when you're responsible for the outcome?
I've sat in meetings where people could talk brilliantly about pathways, frameworks, and long-term development.
Then I'd ask: “Which athletes have you actually taken through that process?”
(I've been kicked out of more meetings and asked not to come back then youve had chicken dinners)
The best Coach Developers should bring knowledge and theory, but they should also bring scars. They should know what it feels like when an athlete doesn't progress, when a decision goes wrong, or when a talented player loses confidence.
I asked ChatGPT to summarize my training philosophy in one sentence, and this is what it came up with:
"Maximum useful capacity for the minimum physiological cost."
@Alan_Couzens @inaki_delaparra @hjluks