Four in ten British men believe that, with two years of training, they could compete at the Olympics. I was asked about it live on LBC. My answer took about a second. The far more interesting question came next.

The question that started it

A survey had been doing the rounds suggesting that four in ten British men believe they could reach Olympic level within two years if they simply put the training in. James O’Brien was discussing it on LBC. I was listening, and I could not help myself. I rang in.

Were they right?

Absolutely no chance.

The popular version of expertise, the ten thousand hours idea, has done a lot of damage here. Anders Ericsson’s original research on deliberate practice was never a promise that anyone can reach the top of anything with enough repetitions. When Macnamara and colleagues pooled the evidence across domains in 2014, deliberate practice accounted for roughly a fifth of the variance in sporting performance. Important, but nowhere near the whole story. Physiology, movement quality, age of first exposure, coaching quality, injury history, financial support, opportunity and psychological capacity all sit alongside it.

So the honest answer to the survey is a short one. But then James asked me something much better, and it is the reason this article exists.

A cricket confession, and what it actually tells us

He described playing cricket as a boy. In the outfield he was hopeless. The ball would go up, he would have all that time to run round the boundary and watch it come down, and somewhere in the waiting the thought would arrive: I am going to drop this.

And he would drop it.

In close, with no time at all, diving one handed at a ball travelling considerably faster? He was excellent.

Then he asked the question every coach, leader and athlete eventually asks. How do you train someone out of that?

This is not a quirk. It is one of the most reliably reproduced findings in performance psychology, and every event audience I speak to recognises it instantly, because they have all lived it.

Why skilled performance breaks down: the evidence

Four separate lines of research converge on the same explanation.

1. Reinvestment

Rich Masters showed that skills learned to the point of automaticity are held largely outside conscious awareness. Under pressure, performers reinvest conscious attention into an action that no longer needs it. The result is a movement that becomes slower, more segmented and less accurate. The skill has not disappeared. It has been taken off autopilot and handed back to a system that is far too clumsy to run it.

2. Explicit monitoring

Sian Beilock and Thomas Carr demonstrated this experimentally. Expert golfers putt worse when instructed to attend to the mechanics of their own stroke. Expert footballers dribble worse when asked to monitor which foot is touching the ball. Novices, interestingly, are not harmed by the same instruction, because their skill is still consciously controlled. Rob Gray found the identical pattern in baseball batting. The better you are, the more damage self monitoring does.

3. Ironic processes

Daniel Wegner’s work explains the specific content of the thought. When we try to suppress an unwanted outcome, a monitoring process runs in the background scanning for exactly the thing we are trying to avoid. Under load, that monitor starts driving behaviour rather than preventing it. In Wegner’s putting studies, golfers told not to overshoot did precisely that. “Do not drop it” is not a neutral instruction. It is a target.

4. Attention under anxiety

Attentional control theory, developed by Michael Eysenck and colleagues, adds the final piece. Anxiety consumes working memory and shifts attention towards threat. Performance can look intact for a while, but efficiency has already collapsed. The performer is working far harder to produce the same output, and there is nothing left when the demand rises.

Time is the enemy, not talent

Put those four together and the pattern is clear. The problem is rarely the skill. The problem is the gap before it.

Give a performer no time and there is no opportunity to reinvest, monitor, suppress or catastrophise. The skill runs as trained. Give them time and every one of those processes has room to operate.

This is why the same person can be brilliant in close and hopeless in the outfield.

You see it everywhere once you know what you are looking for:

• The golfer walking between shots, with four minutes of nothing to fill
• The penalty taker on the long walk from the halfway line
• The tennis player at a change of ends, two points from the match
• The presenter in the ten minutes before they are called up
• The sales team in the silence after the pitch has gone in
• The leadership group waiting on a decision they cannot influence

In elite sport we obsess over what happens during the action. Almost all of the psychological damage is done in the gaps between.

What actually works

You do not train the thought away. Thought suppression makes things worse, which is precisely Wegner’s point. You train the gap. Five approaches have the strongest evidence behind them.

Pre-performance routines

A consistent, rehearsed sequence occupies the gap so that attention has somewhere to go. Stewart Cotterill’s review of the routine literature shows the mechanism is not superstition or ritual. It is attentional control. The routine fills the vacuum before the mind fills it for you.

An external focus of attention

Gabriele Wulf’s research across three decades is unusually consistent. Directing attention to the intended effect of a movement, the target, the ball flight, the line, produces better outcomes than directing it to the body producing the movement. Aim at the gap in the field, not at your own hands.

Implementation intentions

Peter Gollwitzer’s if then plans convert intention into an automatic response. If the ball goes up and I feel my hands tighten, then I fix my eyes on the seam and move my feet. Deciding in advance removes the decision from the moment when decision making is least reliable.

Reappraisal rather than suppression

Alison Brooks found that relabelling pre performance nerves as excitement improved singing, public speaking and maths performance, while attempts to calm down did not. The physiology of anxiety and excitement is close to identical. The interpretation is what differs, and the interpretation is trainable. This sits within the wider challenge and threat literature developed by Marc Jones and colleagues.

Quiet eye training

Joan Vickers demonstrated that experts hold a longer, more stable final fixation on the target before executing. It can be trained directly, and it works, because a fixed gaze anchors attention externally at exactly the moment it is most likely to drift inwards.

None of this is motivational. It is mechanical. That is why it transfers so cleanly out of sport.

Why this matters in organisations

The Football Association’s performance model has four pillars: technical, tactical, physical and psychological. My argument, and the one I make in every keynote, is that psychological does not belong alongside the other three as a fourth equal component. It sits underneath them as the foundation. Technical skill, tactical understanding and physical capacity all depend on it being available under pressure.

The same holds in business. Your people are almost never underperforming because they lack the skill. They are underperforming in the gaps: the week before the board meeting, the silence after the redundancy announcement, the last fortnight of a quarter that is not going to land. The capability is intact. Access to it is what has failed.

That is a solvable problem, and it is a far more useful conversation than resilience as a slogan.

Bringing this to your event

Content like this works on a conference stage for one reason. Every single person in the room has dropped the ball in the outfield. They do not need to be persuaded that the phenomenon is real, only shown why it happens and what to do about it.

I have spent four decades inside elite sport, including work with eight Premier League clubs, the Lawn Tennis Association as National Psychology Manager, British Olympic programmes through the English Institute of Sport, and authoring the Football Association’s guide to psychology in football. I created the original Team Murray support structure while working with Andy Murray between 2007 and 2009. I have contributed to the BBC, Sky and Al Jazeera since 2000.

The themes in this article sit at the centre of The Winning Mind, my evidence based keynote on performance psychology. Teams and cultures under pressure are the subject of Inside Winning Teams, and the psychology of ritual, routine and superstition is explored in The Lucky Shirt.

Sessions are delivered as conference keynotes and adapted for leadership away days, sales kick offs and senior team offsites.

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Frequently asked questions

What is choking under pressure?

Choking is performing below your established level specifically because of the pressure of the situation, rather than through fatigue, injury or lack of skill. The dominant explanation is that pressure causes performers to consciously monitor movements that are normally automatic, which disrupts execution.

Can choking be trained out?

It can be substantially reduced. The evidence supports pre performance routines, an external focus of attention, if then implementation intentions, reappraising nerves as excitement, and quiet eye training. Trying to suppress the unwanted thought directly tends to make it more likely, not less.

Does sport psychology genuinely transfer to business?

The mechanisms do. Working memory, attentional focus, anxiety and automaticity operate the same way in a boardroom as on a pitch. What changes is the task, not the psychology. The value for an audience lies in recognising the mechanism in their own working life.

Why is waiting harder than acting?

Because waiting provides the time required for conscious interference. With no time available, a well trained skill simply runs. With time available, attention turns inward, threat monitoring begins and working memory is consumed. The gap, not the action, is where most performance is lost.

Could an untrained adult reach the Olympics in two years?

In almost every case, no. Deliberate practice explains only a portion of the variance in elite sporting performance. Physiology, movement quality, age of first exposure, coaching, injury history and psychological capacity all contribute, and elite competition selects on all of them simultaneously.