Performance Intelligence

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/

There's a moment in your 50s when you start planning for decline instead of planning for growth. Craig Harper never had that moment. At 60+, he's more committed to his physical and mental performance than most 35-year-olds. 

This isn't about genetics or obsession. It's about asking a different question: what would I have to do differently to stay in the game? His answer might surprise you.

Craig Harper is a high-performance coach, author, and speaker specialising in sustainable performance and behaviour change. 

You can find Craig at his website:https://craigharper.net/
At...

Have you ever finished a presentation, race, meeting or performance and someone asked, "How did it go?" only to realise you can barely remember it? Not because you failed but because you were completely immersed.

Dr Sue Jackson is one of the world's leading researchers on flow and co-authored the defining book on the subject alongside the man who first named it, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

Sue takes you inside one of the most sought-after and least understood states in human performance.

Why do some moments feel effortless while others feel like a grind...

Most conversations about depression treatment start and end with medication. But what if that starting point is too narrow?

Paul Taylor challenges a widely accepted assumption in mental health care that antidepressants are the primary or most effective solution for depression.

What he argues is not simplistic and not anti-medication. It’s more uncomfortable than that: that for many people, medication alone may not be enough to meaningfully address the deeper drivers of depression.

That raises a harder question most people never get asked: if medication isn’t the full answer, what is?<...

Inside the venom of a desert lizard, scientists found a molecule that does something the diet industry spent 50 years failing to do. It quietly switches off hunger.

That molecule is now the most talked about drug on the planet, and it's sitting in the fridges of millions of people who couldn't explain how it works if you paid them.

Dr Tom Buckley, 30 years in medicine and a professor at Sydney University, has looked at the evidence and called these drugs revolutionary.

But what about "Ozempic face"? What if the wait comes back...

Most teams spend their lives trying to reach the top. Very few have to answer the question of what happens when they get there.

The Penrith Panthers have won 4 consecutive NRL premierships. In an era designed for parity, they've achieved something almost unheard of in modern sport. Which raises a fascinating challenge.

How do you keep people motivated when they've already achieved the goal?

How do you maintain standards when success becomes normal? 
How do you avoid complacency when everyone around you is telling you how good you are?

Dan H...

Talent gets you through the door. It does not keep you in the room, and it has almost nothing to do with what you become.

Kieren Jack is proof. The last pick in the AFL rookie draft, too small and too slow on paper, he outworked every reason he should not have made it. Kieren played 256 games for the Sydney Swans, co-captained the club, won the 2012 premiership and earned a place in its Hall of Fame. Then he did the harder thing. He walked away at the top and started again, building a whole new career in...

Ever lost your composure right when you needed it most? In a high-pressure moment, when everyone's watching and one wrong move costs you, most people freeze. This reporter learned to do the opposite.

Seasoned news reporter, Ali Piotrowski breaks down the one skill that kept her sharp through war zones, Middle East conflict, and the chaos outside Trump's indictments: calm. Not the kind you're born with. The kind you train.

She explains why composure became her edge, and why it can be yours too.

If you work in a fast-moving, high-pressure environment, this...

The kind of person who's been helping others perform better for 40 years doesn't usually admit they're struggling. Craig Harper did.

His dad is in the hospital. The drive is five hours return. The calls from clients still come. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, one of Australia's most recognised performance coaches said something he'd never said publicly before.

That he's lonely.

This conversation is for anyone who gives more than they get. Who holds it together at work and unravels at home. Who knows exactly what to tell others and...

Could eight daily habits, locked in by 40, really add more than two decades to your life? The research says yes. And the habit at the top of the list is the one most senior leaders quietly deprioritise.

If you want a clear, no fluff framework for long-term health and the small daily decisions that compound into decades, start here. You'll walk away knowing exactly where to focus, and what to stop wasting money on.

Watch the longer episode on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaOmJ25Q-GI 
Contact Dr Tom: https://au.linkedin.c...

How do you build a team where people will run through a wall for each other? Not metaphorically. Literally.

James Slipper, the most capped Wallaby of all time. Nic White, the third most capped scrum half in Australian rugby history. Two men who've spent more time with each other than with their families, who've argued hard on the training paddock and sat next to each other every Tuesday team dinner for over a decade.

Their answer isn't team building. It isn't trust falls. It isn't a values poster on the wall.

Slips opens...

You've got more data on your body than any generation before you. Heart rate variability, readiness scores, recovery metrics. But are you actually recovering better?

Dr Shona Halson is one of the world's leading recovery scientists. She's worked with Olympic athletes, elite sport, and high performers at every level. Her verdict on wearables is more nuanced than the marketing suggests, and more useful than most of the scores on your wrist.

This one will change how you look at your morning metrics.

You can find Shona at her LinkedIn: https://au.linkedin.com...

You know what you should be doing. More sleep. Better recovery. Less time running on empty. You have known it for years. So has every burned-out doctor, executive, and elite athlete Andrew May has ever worked with. The problem is not knowledge. It is the gap between knowing and doing. And most people are misdiagnosing the reason for that gap entirely.

Andrew May is a Mental Skills and Leadership Coach who has worked with ASX executives, elite sporting teams (Wallabies), and the Australian Defence Force. 

Andrew gets honest about his own near-burnout at 40, what it t...

Backstage. Heart hammering. Sweat beading. Every mental tool in the toolkit, breathing, self-talk, all of it, failed Dr Michael Gervais in real time.

Michael is one of the world's leading performance psychologists and was moments away from presenting to the international body of sports psychologists. The researcher whose theory he was challenging was sitting in the front row. And he was falling apart.

What pulled him back had nothing to do with technique. It was accidental. Mundane, even. And it became the foundation of a 27-year daily practice that he still runs today.

Most people think they're pretty good at reading people. Maz Farrelly says they're not, including you. 

Maz has sat across from more than 20,000 people across 30 years of television production. Big Brother. X Factor. Celebrity Apprentice. She has watched people try to hide, perform, charm and deceive their way through a room. She knows exactly what they're doing.

Maz shares what three decades of casting, producing and reading talent has taught her about human behaviour, and why most of us are missing signals that are right in front of us. She unpacks her ABCDE framework for r...