Whenever on our screens, sport captivates audiences across the globe with impressive achievements, demonstrations of perseverance, and inspiring stories.
When looking to elevate our leadership potential, leaning into the lessons we can draw from sport continues to offer interesting points of comparison, especially around how we perform and take care of ourselves in high-pressure roles. Too often, leaders continue to neglect their own wellbeing in the face of stress, challenge, and change.
In this article, three experts – Dr Lisa Turner, Rochelle Trow and Jenny Williams – have shared their thoughts on what lessons sports can offer the workplace, drawing on insights from major sporting events – including the 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Olympics – to reshape how we think about doubt, failure, and recovery at work.
Dr Lisa Turner is a spiritual technologist, systems engineer, and creator of CETfreedom. She pioneers the fusion of advanced AI technologies with profound transformational practices to accelerate human awakening, leadership evolution, and conscious culture-building. Through her work, she empowers visionary leaders to move beyond personal development into a new paradigm of ethical power, energetic mastery, and collective evolution.
Rochelle Trow is an HR executive, coach, and author of Anchored, with more than twenty-five years of international experience. She has shaped people strategy and led transformation in global organisations, including Unilever, GSK, Astellas, Takeda and Onsemi, earning a reputation for bringing clarity to complexity and keeping humanity at the centre of change. Her own experience of burnout and reinvention led her to found The Change Canvas, a leadership ecosystem dedicated to helping professionals thrive in high-pressure systems without losing themselves. Drawing on her lived experience and corporate background, Rochelle works with individuals, teams and organisations through keynotes, facilitation, leadership development and coaching.
Jenny Williams, MCC, is a leading Executive and Systemic Team Coach and author of Brilliant Doubt, who has lectured at Cambridge University on leadership and entrepreneurship. She has spent thousands of hours working with exceptional leaders, helping them harness the power of doubt as a catalyst for clarity, creativity, and confidence. Her work has established her in the top 4% of coaches globally with an International Coaching Federation certification as a Master Coach.
Learning to Work With Doubt
For Jenny Williams, executive coach and author of Brilliant Doubt, Mikaela Shiffrin’s performance at this year’s Winter Olympics shows that elite performance is often accompanied by self-doubt.
A teenage Olympic champion who became the most successful World Cup alpine skier in history, her career has also been shaped by injury, loss, and an eight-year Olympic medal drought. After failing to medal in Beijing and facing years of pressure and setbacks, she returned in Cortina to win slalom gold, drawing on experience, preparation, and emotional resilience rather than chasing confidence, Williams notes.
“In interviews, Shiffrin described a deliberate shift in mindset. Instead of trying to eliminate nerves or prove something, she focused on what she could control. She spoke about showing up without needing certainty, trusting her training and allowing performance to follow. Doubt and intrusive thoughts were still present, but she did not try to suppress them. Instead, she anchored herself in the process and not the medal,” Williams says.
Williams calls this Active Doubt: engaging with uncertainty rather than trying to eliminate it; keeping moving forward or, in Shiffrin’s case, taking the turns that carry her down the mountain.
“Winners don’t wait for the doubt to go, they work with it, knowing it’s part of the process and the stretch to excel. Waiting to feel fully confident before acting is a trap. The leaders who perform best are those who use their doubts to prepare deeply, stay grounded in process, and allow confidence to become the outcome, not the prerequisite,” Williams adds.
Our Relationship With Failure
As Dr. Lisa Turner, Founder of CETFreedom, points out, the Winter Olympics are brutal. “Athletes fall on the biggest stage in the world, in front of billions of viewers, with years of preparation behind them. What separates the great from the good isn’t whether they fall, it’s how fast they recover,” she says.
At Milano Cortina 2026, seventeen-year-old Choi Ga-on crashed heavily in her opening snowboard halfpipe run, lay on the ice receiving medical attention, and looked finished. Two runs later, she delivered a 90.25 score to win gold and make history as the first Korean Olympic snowboard champion.
Turner highlights that in business, we’re conditioned to hide our failures: “The prevailing wisdom says project confidence, never let them see you struggle. But every leader will fall publicly at some point, a failed launch, a lost client, a strategy that didn’t work. What determines your trajectory isn’t the fall. It’s your emotional recovery speed.”
She says the ability to process failure quickly, regulate your emotional state, and return to peak performance isn’t personality, it’s neuroscience. “Athletes train this deliberately. Business leaders rarely do. Those who invest in developing genuine emotional resilience – not the “just be positive” variety, but deep nervous system regulation, with a proven recovery strategy – will always outperform those who simply hope they won’t fall,” Turner argues.
Rebuilding Capacity Takes Time
Adele Nicoll competed at these Olympics only months after a serious knee injury that could have prevented her participation. As Rochelle Trow, author of Anchored, notes: “Anyone who has recovered from a physical injury understands that returning to full strength does not happen immediately. Stability returns first, then strength, and only later does intensity increase. Sport recognises this sequence and plans for it.”
Yet business environments are often less patient, Trow says. “After restructures, sustained pressure, or crisis periods, leaders are expected to resume the normal pace quickly. On the surface, performance may appear to stabilise. Targets are met and routines continue. Yet internally, energy may still be lower than usual and decisions may require more effort. Patience can shorten and reactions can become sharper, not because someone lacks skill, but because recovery is still underway,” she adds.
Misreading this phase as a decline can create unnecessary pressure. Trow suggests that a more constructive response is to temporarily reduce decision volume, shorten planning horizons, and allow space for clarity to return. Capacity rebuilds progressively, and judgement tends to strengthen as steadiness returns.
“In business, we rarely acknowledge recovery as part of performance – yet it is,” Trow concludes.
