Performance Intelligence

Founders love to talk about building a company. They rarely talk honestly about giving it up. Michael Bungay Stanier, best known for his book The Coaching Habit, did exactly that at Box of Crayons, the company he founded, stepping down as CEO in a transition he says most founders manage badly. What made his different, and the specific temptation he had to resist to actually let go, is the part of this conversation worth sitting with.
Find Michael at his LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelbungaystanier/
                           Or Website: https://www.mbs.works/
Buy a copy of Michael's books: https://www.booktopia.com.au/michael-bungay-stanier/author1256.html
High performance is not about pushing harder. It is about building the capacity to perform when it matters and sustain it over time.
Hosted by Andrew May, one of Australia’s leading experts in human performance, leadership and mental skills, the Performance Intelligence Podcast explores how leaders, athletes, coaches and researchers think clearly, manage pressure and consistently perform at their best.
Drawing on more than 20 years working with senior executives, elite sporting teams and the Australian Defence Force, Andrew combines candid conversations with evidence-based performance insights and practical strategies you can apply.

Episodes span leadership capacity, performance psychology, mental skills, energy management, strategic recovery, productivity and wellbeing.
Listen to think more clearly, lead more effectively and perform at your best for longer.
Get in touch through:
Our website: https://performanceintelligence.com/
Book Andrew: https://performanceintelligence.com/keynotes/
Follow us:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/performanceintelligencepq/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/performanceintelligence-byandrewmay
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/performanceintelligencebyam/
Watch this episode on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@performanceintelligencepodcast
If you enjoy the podcast, we would really appreciate you leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Google Play. It takes less than 60 seconds and really helps us build our audience and continue to provide high quality guests.

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 that put exercise and the brain in the same sentence for most of us for the first time.
You already know you should move more. That is not the problem. The problem is the distance between knowing it and doing it, and what that distance costs you if you are paid to think for a living. Attention? Mood? Whether you can still hold a hard problem in your head at four in the afternoon?
Dr John Ratey is now 78 years old. He has been at Harvard since his residency, he has written 12 books, and his own protocol is far simpler than anything you would expect from a Harvard laboratory. He explains what BDNF does to a brain, why he now describes muscle as an endocrine organ rather than scaffolding, what the last 10 years of research has added to the case he made in Spark, and the one thing he could not write at the time because the evidence was not there yet.
You can keep treating exercise as the thing you do for your body when there is time left over. Or you can treat it as maintenance for the organ you are actually being paid for.
00:00 The Harvard genius who lost his mind when he stopped running
 06:05 The cocktail party patient who started it all
 11:01 The 1970s discovery behind the runner's high
 14:05 Turn ADHD into a superpower: the Ferrari brain with bicycle brakes
 20:06 The real prescription for a distracted mind
 24:54 The school that got smarter by moving more
 29:08 Meet BDNF: the brain's own Miracle-Gro
 32:45 Dr Ratey is 78, and he's nowhere near done
 37:11 Inside Spark 2.0: what's changed since the first book
 43:26 Why a fit brain matters more in the age of AI
 53:16 John's own weekly training plan
 1:04:16 The question John didn't expect: why he took up Zumba at 75
Learn more about Dr John Ratey here: https://www.johnratey.com/ 
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High performance is not about pushing harder. It is about building the capacity to perform when it matters and sustain it over time.
Hosted by Andrew May, one of Australia’s leading experts in human performance, leadership and mental skills, the Performance Intelligence Podcast explores how leaders, athletes, coaches and researchers think clearly, manage pressure and consistently perform at their best.
Drawing on more than 20 years working with senior executives, elite sporting teams and the Australian Defence Force, Andrew combines candid conversations with evidence-based performance insights and practical strategies you can apply.

Episodes span leadership capacity, performance psychology, mental skills, energy management, strategic recovery, productivity and wellbeing.
Listen to think more clearly, lead more effectively and perform at your best for longer.
Get in touch through:
Our website: https://performanceintelligence.com/
Book Andrew: https://performanceintelligence.com/keynotes/
Follow us:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/performanceintelligencepq/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/performanceintelligence-byandrewmay
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/performanceintelligencebyam/
Watch this episode on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@performanceintelligencepodcast
If you enjoy the podcast, we would really appreciate you leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Google Play. It takes less than 60 seconds and really helps us build our audience and continue to provide high quality guests.

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 Dr Amantha at her Website: https://www.amantha.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/amanthai/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amanthaimber/?originalSubdomain=au
Buy The Health Habit: https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-health-habit-9781761342363 

High performance is not about pushing harder. It is about building the capacity to perform when it matters and sustain it over time.
Hosted by Andrew May, one of Australia’s leading experts in human performance, leadership and mental skills, the Performance Intelligence Podcast explores how leaders, athletes, coaches and researchers think clearly, manage pressure and consistently perform at their best.
Drawing on more than 20 years working with senior executives, elite sporting teams and the Australian Defence Force, Andrew combines candid conversations with evidence-based performance insights and practical strategies you can apply.

Episodes span leadership capacity, performance psychology, mental skills, energy management, strategic recovery, productivity and wellbeing.
Listen to think more clearly, lead more effectively and perform at your best for longer.
Get in touch through:
Our website: https://performanceintelligence.com/
Book Andrew: https://performanceintelligence.com/keynotes/
Follow us:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/performanceintelligencepq/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/performanceintelligence-byandrewmay
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/performanceintelligencebyam/
Watch this episode on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@performanceintelligencepodcast
If you enjoy the podcast, we would really appreciate you leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Google Play. It takes less than 60 seconds and really helps us build our audience and continue to provide high quality guests.

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, and was still terrible at the hard conversation. He thought he was good at it. He was not, and it took him years to work that out. 
So he went to the people who are: Adam Grant. Oxford negotiators. Accredited mediators. An executive producer of The Real Housewives, which turned out to be the most useful conversation of the lot.
What he came back with is a map. 4 terrains, and every conflict you are carrying right now sits on one of them. The move that works on one will detonate on another.
Andrew puts it under load. The leaders who can run a profit centre and have never been taught to disagree. Performance Intelligence's own work on psychological safety and constructive challenge. And a live test Tim has not seen coming, where he places a conflict still playing out in public onto his own model, no notes, no preparation.
Listen to this one before your next difficult conversation, not after it.
00:02 — Why are we so bad at conflict?
03:38 — How our families teach us to avoid difficult conversations
07:02 — The moment Tim realised avoiding conflict was costing him
09:01 — What “swallowed words” do to us — and why silence isn’t really silent
11:32 — The counterintuitive question: what happens if you don’t have the conversation?
18:50 — The four terrains of conflict: summit, arena, minefield and swamp
27:27 — What happens when emotion takes over and the “amygdala hijack” kicks in
34:27 — The RISA test: should you actually have the fight?
37:36 — Why psychological safety doesn’t mean avoiding uncomfortable conversations
44:05 — The hidden conflict behind the return-to-office debate
47:26 — The Conflict Simulator: Tim analyses Justin Langer, The Beatles and Kyle & Jackie O
58:52 — How do you actually end a conflict? Resolve, repeat or release

Contact Tim: https://timduggan.com.au/
Order Tim's book: https://timduggan.com.au/book/clear-in-tension/
View the conflict model: https://performanceintelligence.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Model.jpg
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High performance is not about pushing harder. It is about building the capacity to perform when it matters and sustain it over time.
Hosted by Andrew May, one of Australia’s leading experts in human performance, leadership and mental skills, the Performance Intelligence Podcast explores how leaders, athletes, coaches and researchers think clearly, manage pressure and consistently perform at their best.
Drawing on more than 20 years working with senior executives, elite sporting teams and the Australian Defence Force, Andrew combines candid conversations with evidence-based performance insights and practical strategies you can apply.

Episodes span leadership capacity, performance psychology, mental skills, energy management, strategic recovery, productivity and wellbeing.
Listen to think more clearly, lead more effectively and perform at your best for longer.
Get in touch through:
Our website
Book Andrew
Follow us on Instagram, Linkedin, Facebook
Watch this episode on Youtube
If you enjoy the podcast, we would really appreciate you leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Google Play. It takes less than 60 seconds and really helps us build our audience and continue to provide high quality guests.

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 underrated lever in high performance. 

High performance is not about pushing harder. It is about building the capacity to perform when it matters and sustain it over time.
Hosted by Andrew May, one of Australia’s leading experts in human performance, leadership and mental skills, the Performance Intelligence Podcast explores how leaders, athletes, coaches and researchers think clearly, manage pressure and consistently perform at their best.
Drawing on more than 20 years working with senior executives, elite sporting teams and the Australian Defence Force, Andrew combines candid conversations with evidence-based performance insights and practical strategies you can apply.

Episodes span leadership capacity, performance psychology, mental skills, energy management, strategic recovery, productivity and wellbeing.
Listen to think more clearly, lead more effectively and perform at your best for longer.
Get in touch through:
Our website
Book Andrew
Follow us on Instagram, Linkedin, Facebook
Watch this episode on Youtube
If you enjoy the podcast, we would really appreciate you leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Google Play. It takes less than 60 seconds and really helps us build our audience and continue to provide high quality guests.