Performance Intelligence

In this Bite Size from episode #156, West End performer Josh Piterman breaks down the exact ritual he uses to stay present through a show he's now performed more than four hundred times. It involves a mirror, a handful of post-it notes, and letting his own finger decide what he focuses on that night. It sounds almost too simple to work. It's one of the reasons audience number four hundred gets the same performance as audience number one. 

Listen to Josh's podcast here:https://shows.acast.com/behind-the-mask
You can find Josh at his website:https://www.j...

Most senior leaders have a year in mind when they will finally stop. House paid off, kids launched, a few rounds of golf a week.

Dr Norman Swan thinks that date deserves a much harder look. The research he’s been reading points to retirement as a likely cause of cognitive decline, with the same drop showing up across country after country. And the plan most of us have for filling the time, more family, a caravan trip, a few series to binge, doesn’t give the brain the load it needs.

Swan, the ABC’s best...

Glenn McGrath never told his teammates what time he’d see them in the morning. Everyone already knew where he’d be: in the pool, 90 minutes before the bus left, every match day of his career.

Former Australian cricketer Michael Bevan explains why McGrath’s real edge was doing simple tasks well, over and over, and why the gap between good and great players is so rarely about talent. Manly’s Jake Trbojevic shares the trademarks he writes down before every game: the few things he knows he does well, and the rest he refuses to chase under pr...

Before you go looking for your next big idea, go back to your last great one.

Marcus Bridge was four months into fronting Northlane when the band recorded Node. It went to #1 and won an ARIA, but a decade on he’d outgrown the singer on that record, so he went back into the studio and sang it again.

A rock star might seem an unlikely teacher for a leader. But Marcus has spent 10 years doing what you do: delivering on demand, under pressure, with an audience judging every move.

Going back is th...

There is a phrase elite performers use to keep people at a distance without ever saying so directly: don't look at me, look at my performance.

Dr Michael Gervais, the sport psychologist behind some of the NFL's most recognised teams and a trusted voice inside Super Bowl-winning locker rooms, built an entire career on that idea before he noticed what it was costing him somewhere much closer to home. It took one blunt question from someone he trusted to show him the difference between being excellent and being known.

What that question was, and what...

Much of what leaders put down to stress, or to a lapse in discipline, is chemistry at work. Andrew chose five of these moments, drew a real scenario from our coaching practice for each, and asked an expert to identify the neurotransmitter behind it, without warning.

Play along. One scenario is the board presentation that keeps replaying long after midnight. Another is the leader whose drive has quietly gone flat, and it gives even our expert pause.

Professor Tom Buckley is a University of Sydney academic and Andrew’s co-author on MatchFit.

See if...

Most leaders have said it. My door’s always open. Far fewer realise their team is watching whether they ever walk through a door themselves.

Former NRL player Keegan Hipgrave was the teammate everyone could talk to, the one pushing mates to open up inside a macho dressing room, and later the host of his own mental health podcast. Yet for 8 years, he kept the loss of one of his best mates locked away, while telling everyone else to talk. 

What finally broke that silence, and what changed once it did, is where the real les...

If culture’s in HR, it’s in foster care.

Karl Treacher has spent 25 years inside boardrooms, including the war room of a big four bank during the Royal Commission, and he has watched leaders hand culture to the one department that was never meant to own it. Engagement scores can look healthy while the culture underneath is quietly turning toxic, and the board is often the last to know.

Karl built a culture diagnostic later featured in Harvard Business Review, and he says measuring culture is far easier than most leaders believe. He and Andr...

Lost jobs. Bankruptcy. Marriages that did not survive. Unmanaged ADHD can leave a trail most of us never see, because the risk-taking that looks like drive on the outside is fed by the same low dopamine that quietly pulls a life apart. Lindy Hadges maps the layers sitting beneath the label, and makes the case that you cannot work with ADHD until you understand what is actually holding it in place.

View the ADHD Cake model: https://performanceintelligence.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/ADHD-Cake-of-Understanding.png
Find out more about the ADHD Foundation: https://adhdfoundation.org.au/about-us
...

You’re exceptional at your job. That isn’t the problem. The skills, the experience, the judgement, you’ve spent years building those and they aren’t going anywhere.

The question is whether you’ve still got the capacity to use them. Enough in the tank for the project that matters. Something left for the people at home afterwards. The momentum to get where you told everyone you were going.

And the wave is coming either way. A bigger year, a harder quarter, a team asking more of you than it did last time. Capability isn’t what...

Ask Lisa Alexander who the best coaches she has known were, and almost none of them were the best players. Alexander spent a decade running the Australian Diamonds netball team to an 81 per cent win rate, one of the most dominant coaching records in Australian sport, and she names the pattern directly: serial winning coaches are rarely elite players themselves.

The reason has nothing to do with talent and everything to do with what coaching actually requires. What that is, and who she credits with teaching her the difference, is where this goes.

You can...

Divorce at the start of the year. A great white shark attack, live on television, in the middle of it. The death of his eldest brother at the end. That was 2015 for professional surfer Mick Fanning. Performance coach Nam Baldwin, who has worked with world champions across multiple sports, was in his corner for all of it.

Baldwin says the conventional playbook for elite athletes, push through, stay hard, don’t let it show, would have made things worse. What he coached instead, and why it had to come before any return to competition, is what this on...

Olympic gold medallist, Michael Klim, explains why the mentality that won him 17 years of world records nearly destroyed his life after retirement. Michael took the same win-at-all-costs approach into business: redeye flights, fourteen-hour days, no off switch, and it cost him his relationship, his mental health, and eventually his body.

You can find Michael at his TGI Sport Profile: https://tgisport.com.au/talent/michael-klim/
At his Website: https://www.michaelklim.com/
Or on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/michaelklim1/?hl=en

High performance is not about pushing harder. It is about building...

Creatine has spent decades filed under gym supplements, something for building muscle and nothing else. Dr Tom Buckley says that filing is out of date. A recent meta-analysis found measurable improvements in memory, attention and processing speed among people taking creatine, distinct from any effect on strength or size. Buckley, who has spent his career researching human performance, is careful about what the research does and does not show. What it does show, for a desk-bound brain rather than a gym-bound body, is the part worth hearing.

Find Dr Tom here
View the UNSW Study
...

Most productivity systems quietly punish you for a bad week. Andrew May's Better Week framework budgets for them. The target is 25 to 30 genuinely good weeks a year, a number most high performers find uncomfortably low, which leaves room for the stretches when everything lands at once. 

He walks Angela Poon, Performance Intelligence COO, through the maths. What he calls the rest of the year, and what changes when you say it out loud to your team on a Monday. High performance is not about pushing harder. It is about building the capacity to perform when it matters a...

Years of touring teach cricketers to be very comfortable in their own company. Coffee when you want it, lunch when you want it, a day built entirely around you. Former Test wicketkeeper Steve Rixon argues the skill cuts both ways: it protects you on the road, then quietly isolates you once the career ends and the kids leave home. Former Test fast bowler Stuart Clark has already had to work it out for himself. What each of them realised was missing, and why it had nothing to do with cricket.

You can find Stuart at his LinkedIn...

Most people who benefit from the status quo work hard to keep it. Michael Bungay Stanier, Rhodes Scholar and bestselling author of The Coaching Habit, says it was built for him, and decided to spend some of that advantage.

First through curiosity and humour, the quieter tools for shifting who holds power in a room. Then through the harder move: stepping down as CEO of Box of Crayons, the company he founded. What that handover asked of him, and the temptation he had to resist to make it stick.

Find Michael at his LinkedIn: https...

A professor at Harvard and MIT wrecked his knee and stopped running the 7.5 miles he ran every night of his adult life. 5 months later he could not finish his own work. He was losing the thread in conversations, forgetting things he had never forgotten, and getting angry in a way he did not recognise. He was convinced he had developed adult ADD in middle age.

He hadn't. He had just stopped running...

The psychiatrist who worked that out went looking for evidence that barely existed at the time. 2 decades later it became Spark, the book...

Most nutrition advice focuses on what you eat. Dr Amantha Imber, an organisational psychologist and author of The Health Habit, became more interested in what happens after you eat, and started wearing a continuous glucose monitor on herself to find out. The device tracks blood sugar in real time, and what she discovered about a specific ten-minute habit after meals surprised her enough to build it into how she coaches high performers now. What that habit is, and why flat blood sugar matters more than most people realise, is what this one gets into.

 You can find D...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

What do you do when the version of yourself that's winning is also the version that's breaking?

You know the feeling, hitting every number, saying yes to everything, and still walking away from the day feeling like you performed it rather than lived it. Now imagine finding the exact moment that stopped working, and the one small shift that got you back.

Most high performers don't burn out overnight. It happens one performance at a time, right up until the body forces the stop, mid show, mid meeting, mid life.

Christian O'Connell has...

Rose Herceg, President of WPP Australia and New Zealand, has a specific image she uses to stop a hard day turning into something bigger, something she thinks most people have lost the ability to do.  

Running a business of 2,500 people through a genuinely volatile industry, she has no shortage of bad days. What she refuses to do is let one bad day become a bad week, a bad month, or a story about who she is.  

The image itself is deceptively simple. What's harder, and more useful, is the discipline she has built around ac...

When did you last actually let yourself feel hungry? Not the "due for a snack" kind. Properly, deliberately hungry, on purpose. If you can't remember, you're not alone. Now imagine using that discomfort as a lever instead of avoiding it.

Every reflexive snack, every meeting that runs straight into the next, every bite you take before your body even asks for it keeps you running on one setting. You never give your body the signal to switch fuel sources, sharpen your focus, or clean house at a cellular level. The fog, the afternoon slump, the stubborn weight...

Most leaders try to restore a struggling performer's confidence with a pep talk. It almost never works. When Jason McCartney had written himself off, a coach did something far more deliberate, and it pulled him back from the edge of walking away. The approach is simple, repeatable, and the opposite of what most people reach for.

 You can find Jason at his LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-mccartney-oam-b10a39217/

What goes through your mind when you're trapped underwater by a 50-foot wave? For Matt Formston, it's not fear. It's making an omelette.

After losing 97% of his vision at just 5 years old, Matt has become a Paralympian, world champion, world record holder, and the first blind athlete to conquer the legendary waves of Nazaré. But today isn't about the achievements...it's about the process behind them.

Matt shares the 8 hard standards that have shaped every part of his life, from elite sport and leadership to parenting and business. Matt believes standards matter more than goals, e...

"I know this." Andrew May hears it from some of the smartest people in the country, right before they admit they are doing none of it.

The gap between what we know and what we do is not a willpower problem or a time problem, and treating it like one is exactly why nothing changes.

He breaks down the difference between self-awareness and self-regulation, and the small, almost embarrassing first step that actually closes it.

This episode was originally published on the Healthed podcast with Dr David Lim. You can find the original...

What do people say about you when you're not in the room?

How are they introducing you, summing up your work, your professionalism, your brand? Now imagine you had control over that.

Because here's the reality: you already have a brand. You're building it whether you like it or not, and right now it's either working for you or quietly costing you.

Maz Farrelly has spent 30 years creating and articulating some of the biggest names and biggest shows on television. The producer behind Big Brother, The X Factor, Celebrity Apprentice, Q&A: Maz...

Women achieve the same cardiovascular health benefits as men at roughly half the exercise volume. Yet the standard exercise guidelines prescribe identical amounts for both.

Dr Paul Batman argues this is one example of a deeper problem: a fitness model built on incomplete data, applied to populations it was never designed to reach. Only 16 percent of people follow the conventional guidelines. The question is not how to motivate the other 84 percent to do more. It is whether we are asking them to do the right thing at all.

You can find Dr Paul at his...

The best performers in the world have found a competitive edge that's completely free. You can use it too, and it starts tonight.

When Dr Jemma King put wearables on Australia's Special Forces in 2017, the culture was "sleep when I'm dead". Within months, those same soldiers were showing off their recovery scores and competing over who slept the most. Not because they went soft. Because the data showed sleep was making them faster, sharper and safer, and elite performers chase anything that does that.

Jemma has spent a decade measuring what great sleep unlocks in...

Nic White played 77 test matches for the Wallabies. For most of that career, he felt like he was one bad game away from being dropped, one coach away from being told he was not in the plans. He was told exactly that in 2015. So he left.

What he did next, and why he came back, says a great deal about what actually drives elite performance over the long haul.

This is a conversation about the difference between proving people wrong and knowing your own worth, and why both matter more than most leaders admit.

Jim Carrey wrote a cheque to himself for ten million dollars when he was a broke, unknown actor. Sara Blakely visualised a billion-dollar business and an Oprah appearance before either was remotely plausible. Easy to dismiss as coincidence. Harder to dismiss once you understand what an fMRI shows when a person runs a scenario in their mind. 

Andrew May breaks down the neuroscience behind why mental rehearsal works, and why leaders who ignore it are leaving a genuine performance edge on the table.

Since the 1700s we have described this condition in the language of character. Lazy. Undisciplined. Careless. As recently as 2023, an Australian parliamentary inquiry heard the same words still follow people through their lives.

Lindy Hadges explains why a condition that sits in the brain attracts shame that an identical shortfall in the pancreas never would, and what happens the moment someone stops believing the story they were told about themselves.

View the ADHD Cake model: https://performanceintelligence.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/ADHD-Cake-of-Understanding.png
Find out more about the ADHD Foundation: https://adhdfoundation.org.au/about-us<...

The first thing Jason McCartney asked for wasn't a doctor. It was a whiteboard.

Badly injured and facing months in hospital, he didn't ask "why me?!". He set a goal, picked a deadline, and started working backwards, the same way he had for every season of his AFL career.

What he learned about handling the moments that flatten everyone else is something most leaders never have to discover until it's forced on them.

You can find Jason at his LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-mccartney-oam-b10a39217/