By Paddy Upton This article is based on themes explored in two recent reels — a clip from my podcast Lessons from the World’s Best with Gary Kirsten, and a reflection on how ego quietly undermines team performance. First, what do I mean by ego? It’s that often unconscious part
By Paddy Upton When it comes to performance, one word that’s thrown around more than most is confidence. You hear it in every changing room, every pre-match team talk, every boardroom before a big pitch.You need to be confident. Build your confidence. Go in with confidence. But where, exactly, does confidence
By Paddy Upton Why does losing make you stronger than winning? It doesn’t. That’s a lovely idea. But it’s also, in most cases, rubbish. The notion that we learn more from failure than from success has been floating around sport and leadership circles for years. And I’m not convinced it
By Paddy Upton When Sachin Tendulkar walked out to bat in his very first Test match – at just 16 years old – he was clueless. His words, not mine. “I had no idea what was going on. I was getting beaten by the pace. This is the wrong place
By Paddy Upton I’ve been working across all four — and lately, scaleups have taken centre stage Over the past six months, my business focus has pivoted in a way that’s been both interesting and energising. Scaleups have gone from a small slice of my leadership work to the clear
If hard work is not enough, then what is? By now we know that hard work is not enough to achieve success. But it doesn’t mean, like many misinterpret, that you therefore don’t need to work hard. Rather, we need to know when to work hard, how to work smart
By Paddy Upton World number one fast bowler Jasprit Bumrah said something fascinating at a conference where he and I recently spoke in Bangalore. He said his unique action, which is one of his superpowers, is the result of him being “lucky enough to not have a coach when I
By Paddy Upton If you want to win at anything worthwhile, you’ll need to learn how to lose. And not just in a “dust yourself off and try again” kind of way, but in a deeper, more accepting, and ultimately liberating way. Because here’s the reality—whether in sport, business, or
The Winning Mindset Interestingly, my experience is that a so-called ‘winning mindset’ is not so much about knowing how to win—all top athletes do—but rather about how well they manage and bounce back from loss. A practical example comes from my experience working with Gukesh D in preparation for the
By Paddy Upton Why do some people succeed more often than others? We know it’s seldom about sheer talent alone. In my time working with elite performers across sports and business, there are some common factors that keep coming up. These four stand out. Successful people prepare excellently. They don’t skim
A few decades ago, the biggest challenge for most people was lack of access to information. Today, the challenge is almost the opposite—there’s too much information. Just like our shift from a world where food scarcity was a major issue to one where obesity is a dominant health concern, our
Confidence and arrogance often get mistaken for each other. From the outside, they can look remarkably similar—strong-willed, unwavering, even bold. But spend enough time around high performers, and the distinction becomes glaringly obvious. One fuels growth and elite performance; the other stifles it. Confidence is Earned, Arrogance is Assumed When
Over my years coaching elite athletes, I’d confidently say that the three most common mental obstacles to success are i) an inability to move on from past mistakes, ii) pressure to succeed and iii) fear of something going wrong at some point in the future. Fear of failure. Fear of
For 25 years, one experience sat firmly on my bucket list: stepping into an Olympic Village to live among 15,000 of the world’s best athletes, coaches, and sports scientists In 2024, that dream became a reality. I walked into the Paris Olympics alongside the Indian men’s hockey team, knowing that
This ‘kid’ had just suffered a crushing loss in the 12th (of 14) games of the World Chess Championship. With scores now tied and two games to play, his attitude towards the loss—and the upcoming games, arguably the most significant in chess history—convinced me to take that flight. On the
