The challenge.

As one of my climbers said, climbing is often described as equal parts technique, strength and mind. The first two are straightforward to train. The third is not.

Traditional training often misses out the mind, and this is precisely where these paraclimbers were getting stuck.

With the Paraclimbing World Championships a year out, several of the team were about to step onto the international stage for the first time.

Three challenges ran across the team:

1. Debilitating nerves before and during competition

2. Constant negative self-talk and self-doubt

3. Focus drifting to the wrong things.

What we did:

• Individualised coaching grounded in sport psychology for each athlete, bi-weekly over eight months.

• I also attended the World Championships to support them there.

• The work covered self-talk, focus and concentration, staying calm before and during a climb, building confidence, setting the right goals, and deconstructing pressure. For one athlete, it also covered communication with her sight guide.

Techniques were built to be usable where the athlete actually needed them. For example, one anchored a calm state to the colour blue, so she could find it on the wall and trigger the feeling on demand.

The results:

• Brittany Davis went from 10th to 6th in the world in under 10 months.

• Whitney Pesek took silver at the 2018 Paraclimbing World Championships in her first year competing internationally.

• Steve Hinson finished top 10 at the 2019 Paraclimbing World Championships, in one of the toughest categories, in his first year on the international stage.

The challenge:

• Projects were running slow or going unfinished. The team was playing catch-up and putting out fires rather than working ahead.

• There was no shared vision pointing the work in one direction, ongoing projects weren't tracked, and members weren't clear on what the common goals actually were.

• All of this against a target of doubling revenue to 24M NOK.

What we did:

• We began with a team audit and the CEO's observations to find where performance was actually being lost, rather than where it was assumed and guessed to be.

• The work itself took a single day, cycling through an Oslo park and stopping for three workshops.

The result:

• The team defined their vision, purpose, core values and common goals, named the barriers standing in the way of each, and left with their first steps decided.

• They walked away holding a performance road map, their own and the team's, for the 24M NOK revenue goal.

What the road map defined:

1. A vision and purpose in the team's own words: outdoor adventures to remember for a lifetime.

2. Three core values defined: genuine, adventurous, professional. With behaviours under each to create shared understanding of how they show up in the workplace.

3. Common goals set across team culture, sales, marketing, systems and trip quality.

4. Agreed working principles: finish before starting, focus on making the best better, cut what doesn't work.

The challenge:

• Negative mindset

• Self-doubt

• Worry and anxiety

• Overwhelming workload and stress that was starting to impair performance.

What we did:

Bespoke team performance coaching across 4.5 hours, targeted at the specific blockers the team named themselves in the audit.

What changed:

• Agreement that their inner voice supported them rose 53%.

• Staying positive and solution-focused under pressure rose 36%.

• Stress and anxiety no longer impacting positivity, 30%.

• Confidence to excel, 18%.

Measured as percentage-point changes in team agreement scores, before and after.

The challenge:

• Employee mindset had turned negative, pessimistic and failure-focused.

• Stressed-out staff meant inconsistent performance, lower profits, and rising absenteeism and burnout.

• Employee wellbeing and the commercial agenda were being treated as opposing forces, when they aren't.

What we did:

Coached the team to stop the high-pressure situations of a financial environment triggering negative responses.

Gave them practical tools so that when stress hits they respond calmly, stay focused and move straight to solutions.

We also worked on a healthier, more joyful work-life balance, in a way that fitted their culture.

What changed:

• Negative, pessimistic thinking gave way to simple techniques for interrupting those thoughts and rebuilding confidence and positivity.

• High-pressure situations were handled with more ease, calm and focus.

• The team stopped treating their wellbeing as separate from performance, and started being understood as a driver of cognitive function, job satisfaction and resilience.

• Strained working relationships improved, and the team was better able to build a culture of enthusiasm and productivity.

The challenge:

A small, high-performing team that came out of the pandemic with lower positivity, lower productivity and a weaker sense of being a team.

The goal:

To reinvigorate the team and build a culture that matched what the company already said it valued: self-development, wellbeing and happiness.

What we did:

We designed the coaching with the whole team, so everyone had a stake in it and was motivated to complete it. They chose four modules:

1. Self-talk for performance and joy

2. Habits that hold under stress and pressure

3. Accessing motivation and focus when they don't come naturally

4. Coming together as a team to create a high-performance wellbeing environment.

What changed:

• Strategies for building confidence, calmness, joy and resilience lifted energy and positivity.

• Stress and self-doubt that had been impairing productivity gave way to goals approached in more motivated, relaxed ways. And, importantly for this team, work was left at work.

• Challenging clients and fast-shifting priorities were handled more calmly, with focus sustained across projects.

• The team became self-aware, and now intentionally builds an energised, positive, high-performance culture.

The challenge:

• Negativity and stress were rising, and friction between team members with it.

• Employees were visibly disengaging, for example cameras staying off in meetings.

• Turnover and sick leave were both running higher than usual.

What we did.

A team audit, combined with the team leader's observations, let us pinpoint where change would matter most and build a targeted coaching plan. We covered four key areas:

1. Positive mindset and self-talk

2. Resilience and mental toughness

3. Positive habits that hold under pressure

4. Communicating better under stress.

What changed:

• Negative self-talk reduced, alongside a clearer sense of how each person's communication lands with colleagues.

• Disengagement gave way to a lighter office culture, with daily team-building the team set up themselves.

• Shared routines increased employee satisfaction and productivity e.g. start- and end-of-day check-ins.

• CEO commented that team health and performance noticeably improved.

Ready to transform your team?

Go back to Team Performance Coaching

Go To Top