Meet our expert: Peter Jensen, Founder

Peter Jensen is an expert in leadership and performance under pressure. A PhD in Sport Psychology, he has attended eleven Olympic Games with Team Canada and helped athletes achieve peak performance, including four consecutive Olympic medal-winning women’s hockey teams. He teaches with Queen’s Smith School of Business, works with Fortune 500 organizations globally, and helps leaders and teams apply the lessons of elite sport to drive sustained performance and growth.

“What Is The Olympic Experience Really Like Behind The Scenes?”

People often ask me what it’s like being at the Olympics, and I usually start with this: No one ever comes back saying, “That wasn’t very good.” The Games always live up to their billing. The Olympics are as big, as intense, and as meaningful as people imagine. Importantly, the experience doesn’t begin when the opening ceremonies start. It begins long before anyone arrives.

The Games begin before the Games

One of the biggest misconceptions is that pressure suddenly appears for athletes at the Olympics. It doesn’t. It accumulates long before. I used to tell athletes that the start of an Olympic year feels like walking around with an empty backpack. As the year progresses, they start putting things into it without realizing it. Expectations. Hopes. Comments from others such as “You’re the favourite” or “Don’t let us down.” None of it is meant to be harmful, but it all adds mental weight to the backpack. If athletes don’t learn how to empty that backpack, they won’t perform well when it matters. That’s why preparation must include simulation. Before major championships, we would recreate the full competition environment – crowds, judges, uniforms, even the order in which athletes compete – and then debrief it together. One of the most powerful moments for me was watching younger athletes realize that even world champions get nervous. Experience doesn’t remove pressure. It changes how you respond to it.

Arrival: awe, structure, and distraction

Arriving at the Olympic Village feels a lot like taking a child to university for the first time. You step off the bus, people help with your bags, you’re shown where you’ll stay, eat, and where everything else is. Then comes the flag-raising ceremony: your anthem, your team, the first moment you fully register that you are at the biggest sporting event on the planet: the Olympics. That moment matters. It grounds you. It also amplifies everything you’re carrying. The village itself is extraordinary. You eat meals with athletes from all over the world. In the Summer Games especially, the scale is overwhelming. It’s inspiring and distracting at the same time. Learning what to engage with, and what to tune out, is part of performing well.

Walking into the opening ceremonies

One of the most formative experiences I’ve had was walking into the opening ceremonies. I did it first in Calgary in 1988, and later again in Vancouver in 2010. Walking into the Games in your own country is unlike anything else. The roar of the crowd isn’t just loud – it’s personal. These are your people. The support is energizing, but it also adds another layer of expectation. My experience at the Olympics has caused me to change how I work with athletes. When I talk about the Games with them, I’m not describing something abstract. I know what it feels like in your body to be there: the adrenaline, the noise, the pride, and the responsibility, all at once. It has reinforced something I’ve believed for a long time: preparation isn’t just about skill. It’s about knowing how to respond when emotions are high and attention is pulled in every direction.

The reality of daily performance

Most days at the Olympics look nothing like television. They’re built around routines: meals, practices, travel, waiting, and adjusting to constant change. Schedules shift. Buses run late. Events are delayed. Ice gets damaged mid-competition and must be resurfaced. Competing at the Olympics is largely about learning how to manage time and how to return to your routine when that time is disrupted. When delays happen, the question I always ask athletes is simple: Where would you normally be in your preparation right now? Then we go back there, mentally and physically, and continue as planned. Consistency creates stability when conditions aren’t stable.

Moments you never forget

Some of the most powerful Olympic moments never make the broadcast. One that has stayed with me happened late at night in Calgary after Elizabeth Manley won her silver medal. Hours earlier, the crowd had been deafening. Now it was just the two of us walking through an underground residence tunnel. Two cleaners looked up, saw her medal, stepped aside, and quietly clapped as she passed. No cameras. No noise. Just recognition. That moment captured the Olympics better than any podium moment ever could.

What leaders can learn from the Games

Behind the scenes, the Olympics are not polished or predictable. They’re demanding, human, and full of disruption. The athletes who thrive aren’t the ones who wait for perfect conditions. They’re the ones who know their routines, understand themselves under pressure, and can return to what matters when things go sideways. That lesson applies far beyond sport. High-stakes moments rarely unfold as planned. Performance, whether on the ice or in an organization, comes down to preparation, adaptability, and the ability to stay grounded when the noise gets loud. That’s the part of the Olympics you won’t see on TV. This article is part of Third Factor’s Story Behind the Story series, in which we unpack the stories behind both iconic and under-the-radar Olympic and Paralympic moments. In this feature, Third Factor Partner Sandra Stark shares the mental performance work she and Peter Jensen did with Canadian figure skaters Brian Orser and Tracy Wilson ahead of the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics to help them manage pressure and perform when the stakes were highest. — The 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary were one of the most pressure-filled environments Canadian athletes had ever faced. Canada had never won an Olympic gold medal on home soil, the expectations were immense, and national attention was relentless. Nowhere was the spotlight brighter than on figure skating. Brian Orser entered the Games as the reigning world champion and the central figure in what the media called the “Battle of the Brians,” a highly publicized rivalry with American Brian Boitano. He was Canada’s flag bearer and one of the country’s best hopes for gold. Everywhere he went, strangers reminded him what the country expected – “don’t let us down.” At the same time, ice dancers Tracy Wilson and Rob McCall were carrying a different kind of pressure. Canada had never won an Olympic medal in ice dance, and breaking the long-standing dominance of the Soviet teams was widely viewed as unlikely. What the public saw was composure under extraordinary pressure. Orser delivered a near-flawless performance to win silver by the narrowest of margins, and Wilson and McCall captured an unexpected bronze, part of a remarkable showing in which figure skaters won three of Canada’s five medals. What most people didn’t see was the internal challenge both athletes were managing. Whenever something important is on the line and the outcome is uncertain, arousal – the body’s activation level – increases. The heart rate rises. Muscles tighten. Attention narrows. Up to a point, this activation improves performance. But when arousal climbs too high, execution suffers. Timing slips. Decision-making tightens. Small errors multiply. This is why elite performers don’t just train physically. They train to manage their activation level so they can perform at their best when the pressure is highest. The goal isn’t to eliminate nerves – that isn’t possible when something really matters – but instead to keep arousal within a functional range. In service of this, two years before the Games, the Canadian Figure Skating Association made mental preparation a priority. They brought in Peter and I to help athletes identify the moments that would elevate their arousal and develop specific plans for managing their arousal when those moments arrive. Here are two of the techniques that we used, as relayed in conversation with Brian and Tracy.

Lesson #1: Plan for Reality Instead of Avoiding It

After the World Championships in Geneva, where Brian was not happy with how he skated, Peter asked him how he was preparing mentally before skating. Brian explained that he “had all the showers turned on in the dressing room so he wouldn’t hear how the Russian skater [who went ahead of him] had done.” Standing in the noise of the shower, Brian imagined the Russian had skated brilliantly. In reality, the Russian had fallen on both triple axels. In trying to avoid reality, Brian instead magnified his anxiety. “That was the turning point,” Peter explains. From then on, Brian’s training approach shifted: instead of trying to shut out uncertainty, Peter worked with Brian to plan for it. Together they laid out exactly what he would do after warm-up: walk through his program, rehearse key jumps, and – most importantly – rehearse the opening segment he was about to skate. In figure skating competitions, skating order matters – and skaters don’t learn their order to skate until the day before they skate the short program. If you skate late, you may have an agonizing half-hour wait after your warm-up to compete. If you skate early, you may not even leave the ice – which feels incredibly rushed. Brian hated skating first – but instead of hoping it wouldn’t happen, Peter helped him normalize it by creating a plan for each scenario: “We developed a routine that worked for me,” Brian explains. “A skating-first routine, a skating-sixth routine. We were prepared for any scenario.” The plan removed the uncertainty and second guessing that could creep in. Once Brian had clarity on what he was going to pay attention to and practised it; he could maintain control over his arousal level. This wasn’t about calming down, it was about restoring control. In particular, they agreed that if Brian drew his dreaded skating-first slot, he would skate only part of the warm-up, step off the ice, and walk through the opening of his program – physically and mentally – with skate guards on. He would mentally rehearse through to his first major jump, then return to the ice once his warm-up ended. At the Olympics, that exact scenario played out. Brian skated first in the short program – and won it convincingly. Anyone watching would never have known how uncomfortable that situation was for him. Listen to Brian talk about the steps that lead to a great performance:

Lesson #2: Train For High Arousal Instead of Trying to Eliminate It

Tracy Wilson knew exactly when her arousal would spike: the moment she stepped onto the ice and heard her name announced in a packed Calgary arena. “Nothing would get me more jazzed up than hearing ‘Tracy Wilson, Rob McCall, Canada,’” she recalls. Instead of trying to suppress that reaction and stay calm, she trained for it. Tracy used vivid mental imagery, rehearsed repeatedly in everyday moments: driving to the rink or lying in bed at night. “I hear the announcement and I observe how I feel,” she explains. Then she ran a specific attentional cue: “I hear the noise … I’m going to go under the noise. It’s there. It’s going to go over. It’s going to go behind my back and down.” This wasn’t intellectual visualization. It was sensory and physical. Because the body responds to imagery as if it’s real, repetition trained her nervous system to respond automatically. Peter and I saw this pattern repeatedly: performers assume the goal is to eliminate nerves. But when something matters, high arousal is inevitable. The skill is learning to perform with it and keeping it within a functional range by directing attention to where it belongs. Tracy’s imagery did exactly that. It kept her focus on skating to centre ice, waiting for the music, and entering the opening movements, rather than drifting toward outcomes, judgments, or expectations. Listen to Tracy discuss training and preparation for emotional moments:

What This Means for You

The more important something is, and the more uncertainty it contains, the higher your activation will rise. The question isn’t whether you’ll feel pressure but rather how you will respond to it. And how you respond in the moment is a function of how you’ve trained and what you’ve practiced: Orser used structure to manage waiting and uncertainty. Wilson used imagery to regulate the surge that came with public introduction. Different methods, same objective: directing attention toward controllable actions and away from the thoughts and feelings that lead to overwhelm. Whether you’re stepping onto Olympic ice or into a high-stakes meeting, the principle is the same: you don’t rise to the occasion, you default to what you’ve trained. Here are four ways to apply the principles of mental preparation to your reality:

Know your optimal arousal level When you need to perform – where do you want your energy level to be? A 6 out of 10? An 8 out of 10? In order to manage arousal, you need to have a goal.
Identify your triggers What moment will increase your arousal? For Brian it was the wait, for Tracy it was the introduction. Once you identify where you are likely to get thrown off, now you can plan.
Create a strategy You can use routine like Brian, a mental image like Tracy that directs your focus, or a tool that works best for you to anchor your attention where it will serve you.
Practice it repeatedly When the moment arrives, your attention will go where it has been trained to go.

Build Resilience In Your Organization

Bring the skills that elite athletes use to build resilience and perform under pressure to your organization. Contact us to learn more about our resilience programs.

Bring skills that elite athletes use to build resilience to your organization. Contact us to learn more.

This article is part of Third Factor’s Story Behind the Story series, where we look at remarkable Olympic and Paralympic achievements and the athletes who made them happen. This time, we’re featuring Brian and Robin McKeever. Together, they’ve won 16 gold medals in Para Nordic skiing. — Brian McKeever is one of Canada’s most accomplished skiers, winning gold at every single winter Paralympics since Salt Lake 2002 (6 in a row), and is now part of the coaching team heading into Milan Cortina. Brian was 19 when he began losing his vision to Stargardt disease. He competed in Para Nordic skiing’s visually impaired category, where athletes ski at full speed but rely on a guide to navigate the course. That guide was his older brother, Robin. Robin wasn’t a helper on the sidelines – he was an elite skier in his own right. As Brian’s guide, Robin skied directly in front of him during races, setting the pace, choosing lines, calling terrain, and making split-second decisions that affected them both. If Robin made a mistake, Brian paid for it. If Robin wasn’t fast enough, they couldn’t win. To spectators, the McKeevers’ racing looked effortless: two skiers lined up and moving in sync, linked by trust and quiet communication. What wasn’t visible was how much work it took to build that easy relationship – or how important kindness was to sustaining it. Brian raced on the same courses and distances as Olympic cross-country skiers. The physical demands were the same. What differed was how results were calculated. In Para Nordic skiing, athletes are classified by disability type, and finishing times are adjusted using a percentage system, like a golf handicap. For Brian, that system created a unique challenge. Because he was in the least severe vision-loss class, his finishing time was counted at 100 per cent. Athletes with more vision loss had time removed, sometimes significantly. As a result, Brian and Robin often had to win races by minutes to win overall. Guiding made their reliance on each other unavoidable. In Brian’s category, Robin skied directly in front, choosing the line while Brian drafted behind him. The draft helped – but only if the guide was fast enough to lead. If Brian had to hold back because his guide was not skiing fast enough, there was no way he would win, which meant that Robin had to ski at a level that matched one of Canada’s top able-bodied skiers. As Brian puts it, “I’m not winning without a good guide.” This wasn’t an individual event with assistance. It was a shared performance.

Kindness Is the Mechanism That Lets Standards Hold

When choosing who to work with, one thing mattered most to the brothers. “Skills can be learned,” Brian says, “but the right compatibility is [most] important.” For Brian and Robin, compatibility meant being able to handle feedback without eroding trust. It wasn’t about being agreeable, it was about keeping standards high while delivering feedback with kindness. “There could be criticisms, there can be hard conversations,” Brian explains. But when feedback came with “kindness in their hearts and how it’s being presented,” it became “much easier to listen to it and to debrief, and figure out a better way forward.” That difference mattered for learning. With trust in place, someone could say, “Hey, I think if you do something this way, you’ll be faster,” and it would be heard as help. As Brian says, “we all get better together.” Robin noticed the same effect. Strong trust meant “less micromanaging.” Standards didn’t drop; roles were clear, intentions were trusted, and learning could continue under pressure. Here’s Brian sharing about the importance of kindness to their culture:

Kindness Can Raise the Bar

One of the most important moments in Brian’s Paralympic career happened because a competitor took the time to help him. Early in his Para Nordic career, Brian sometimes raced without a guide. In one event, he finished just “30 seconds behind the top guy in the world.” Afterward, the German athlete and his guide told him, “You need to have a guide, because today with a guide, you might have won.” Brian remembers thinking, “Why would another nation be helping me out on this?” The answer was simple: they were “just excited to have competition.” That advice changed Brian’s path. Because of that conversation, he asked Robin to guide him, beginning “10 years of pretty fun work racing together.” Sometimes kindness doesn’t make sport easier. It makes it better. On why others helped them out to raise the bar:

Trust Is Built in the First Failure, Not the First Success

Their first World Cup together took place at the Salt Lake City Olympic course in March 2001. It was unusually warm – about 15 Celsius, Robin recalls – and the snow was wet and unpredictable. On a fast downhill, something went wrong. Robin reached the bottom and realized, “Brian’s not there.” He waited, then started hiking back up the course. He heard Brian yelling. What he saw first wasn’t Brian, but “a ski sitting off the edge of the trail.” Brian had caught an edge in the “sloppy snow,” gone off course, and ended up “hanging off of a tree upside down.” Robin climbed down, removed the skis, and pulled him back up. From Brian’s side, he stepped outside the track to get a push and hit the “mashed potatoes” snow: “My ski stopped and I kept going.” The tree became “the only thing stopping me from sliding headfirst down a steep mud slope.” He held on and waited for Robin. “I figured he’d eventually figure out I wasn’t there,” Brian says. Robin later called it “a very big failure on day one.” What mattered was what followed. “We laughed about it.” No blame. No anger. That moment set the tone. Trust wasn’t automatic – even between brothers. It was built through shared experience and protected by how mistakes were handled. Kindness showed up early, not as softness, but as steadiness. Here’s Robin sharing their early guiding failures:

Autonomy in Preparation. Alignment in Execution.

The McKeevers succeeded because they didn’t pretend they were the same athlete. As Robin explains, “We have overlapping roles that work together … we have the same end goal, but we still need to arrive there in slightly different ways.” That showed up in training. “We have our own training programs,” he says. “It’s not exactly the same, but we still need to arrive at the same point where we can ski together, race together, and communicate in order to achieve a team victory.” Brian puts it plainly: “I can ski by myself. Robin can ski by himself, but he’s there to help me. And we are winning this together. We’re not doing this individually.” Giving each other space reduced friction. Coming together at the right moments kept them aligned. Trust and looking out for each other were the glue that made both possible.

What Leading With Kindness Looks Like in Practice

The McKeevers’ story reveals three practical behaviours that translate directly to leadership and teams:

01.

Reset without blame when something goes wrong.

02.

Deliver feedback as performance support, not personal judgment.

03.

Clarify ownership to reduce micromanagement and create alignment.

01. Reset without blame when something goes wrong

When Brian crashed off the course in Salt Lake City, the response wasn’t panic or finger-pointing. Robin described the day as a failure, but one they laughed about and moved on from. That response preserved trust in a moment where it could have fractured.

02. Deliver feedback as performance support, not personal judgment

Hard conversations were unavoidable, but when framed with respect, people stayed receptive. The feedback that mattered most was specific and performance-focused: if you do this differently, you’ll be faster.

03. Reduce micromanagement by clarifying ownership and alignment

Trust allowed Brian and Robin to prepare in their own way while still arriving at the same execution point. Different paths. Same outcome. This is kindness without lowering the bar: respect that keeps people engaged, paired with precision that drives improvement. In the McKeevers’ case, kindness turned trust into medals, and a partnership into a lasting competitive advantage. —- Brian will be coaching the Canadian para-Nordic team as they go for gold in Milan-Cortina starting on March 10 (see the team schedule here), while Robin will be supporting the Canadian Nordic team as a member of the coaching staff.

Build Resilience In Your Organization

Bring the skills that elite athletes use to build resilience and perform under pressure to your organization. Contact us to learn more about our resilience programs.

Bring skills that elite athletes use to build resilience to your organization. Contact us to learn more.

This article is part of Third Factor’s Story Behind the Story series, in which we look at stories behind iconic and under-the-radar Olympic and Paralympic moments. For this feature, Third Factor founder Peter Jensen takes us onto the ice at the Sochi Olympics women’s hockey final, from his vantage point as Team Canada’s mental performance coach, and explains how the team came from behind to defeat the United States for gold. — For a moment it looked as if Canada’s reign as Olympic women’s hockey champions was about to end. It was the gold-medal game at Sochi 2014 and in the third period the U.S. was up 2-0. Time was running out. Then Canada scored to make it 2-1. With under a minute left, Marie-Philippe Poulin tied the game. In overtime, she scored again and Canada claimed gold. Today, that finish is remembered as one of the greatest comebacks in Olympic hockey history. But it didn’t happen by accident. Team Canada had anticipated this scenario and prepared for it. The weeks leading up to the Sochi Olympics were not easy for the national team. “We hadn’t done really well in our league play during the Olympic year,” recalls Third Factor founder Peter Jensen. The team also underwent a disruptive coaching change just prior to the Games. Momentum favoured the Americans, and confidence alone wasn’t going to be enough for Team Canada to clinch gold. They needed more. So Jensen focused on something tangible: preparing the team for adversity.

That preparation mattered in Sochi. When pressure mounted, the team didn’t fracture emotionally. They had already agreed on how they would behave.

You Perform How You Prepare

A persistent myth about high performance – whether in athletes or business leaders – is that resilience appears when it’s needed most. The reality is simpler: it shows up only to the extent that it has been rehearsed. Months before the Olympics, Jensen met with the team before a game against a strong AAA boys’ team from Brandon, Manitoba. The discussion wasn’t about winning that night. Instead, it focused on a specific scenario they could face: being down 2-0 in the third period. The players began by talking through how they would manage the clock. “You think about it in 10-minute segments,” Jensen explains. “You break it in half … and break it down into achievable things.” He then narrowed the window. What if there were only five minutes left? Now it became two-and-a-half-minute sequences. Smaller problems. Clearer focus. The emphasis was not on emotion or outcome, but on behaviours the team could control under pressure. So when Team Canada found itself down two goals with around seven minutes left in the Sochi gold medal game, the players weren’t overwhelmed. The situation felt familiar. They had been there before and knew how to respond.

Canada takes on the USA in women's gold medal hockey game at the 2014 Sochi Olympics — Canada takes on the USA in women’s gold medal hockey game on February 20, 2014 at the Shayba Arena during the XXII Olympic Winter Games in Sochi, Russia. Photo Credit: High Performance Photography, Dave Holland.

“Stay Positive” Is Not a Strategy

Another subtle but critical shift was Jensen’s refusal to let the team sidestep uncomfortable realities. When asked how they would respond individually late in a close game, players emphasized the importance of staying positive and supporting their teammates. Jensen pushed back. “The coach shortens the bench. And so you’re irritated,” he told them, adding players who weren’t getting ice time would feel frustrated and lose focus. Pretending otherwise wouldn’t make that problem go away. So the team discussed what that “irritation” might feel like and how players could still support their teammates on the ice. By talking about those moments in advance, they normalized them. Falling behind stopped being a psychological threat and became a known condition with a known response. That preparation mattered in Sochi. When pressure mounted, the team didn’t fracture emotionally. They had already agreed on how they would behave.

Normalize Adversity Instead of Hoping It Won’t Appear

After the gold medal game, head coach Kevin Dineen summed up his team in a few words: They never gave up. From Jensen’s perspective, there was more to that explanation. “They didn’t give up because that’s who they were,” he says. “We’d done a lot of work on team vision and culture. But we’d also simulated what they would need to do.” The team didn’t treat adversity as an anomaly. They treated it as an inevitability. By rehearsing the moments most likely to derail them – shortened benches, frustration, time pressure – they removed surprise from the equation. And when surprise disappears, performance improves. The Sochi gold medal didn’t come from belief summoned in the moment. It came from preparation that made the moment feel familiar.

Pre-Plan for Adversity

You don’t need an Olympic stage to apply these lessons. The same approach Team Canada used to win gold works in business, leadership and life. Here’s how to get started:

Identify two to three scenarios that are most likely to derail your team.
Break each scenario into smaller, controllable steps to solve, rather than treating it as one overwhelming problem.
Decide in advance what you will think, say, and do when those moments show up.
Choose simple imagery or verbal cues that help ground focus and regulate emotion under pressure.

Preparing for adversity doesn’t invite negativity. It builds confidence, so when things don’t go to plan, as they inevitably will, you’ll know exactly how to respond. Watch the full conversation with Peter on the story behind gold in Sochi.

Key Insights:

Resilience is not a personality trait; it is a trained response to pressure.
Breaking high-stakes situations into smaller, controllable segments reduces cognitive overload and sharpens execution.
Avoiding negative scenarios creates fragility; rehearsing them creates confidence.
Teams perform better under pressure when they normalize adversity instead of treating it as failure.
Preparation replaces hope with clarity.

Build Resilience In Your Organization

Bring the skills that elite athletes use to build resilience and perform under pressure to your organization. Contact us to learn more about our resilience programs.

Bring skills that elite athletes use to build resilience to your organization. Contact us to learn more.

This article launches Third Factor’s Story Behind the Story series, in which we unpack the stories behind both iconic and under-the-radar Olympic and Paralympic moments. For our first feature, Third Factor CEO Dane Jensen sat down with Tessa Virtue – two-time Olympic champion and, with her partner Scott Moir, the most decorated Olympic figure skaters of all time. — From the outside, the story of Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir’s career is simple: show up every four years and win. Gold in Vancouver, silver in Sochi, then, after retiring and un-retiring in spectacular fashion, gold in PyeongChang via one of the Winter Olympics’ all-time iconic performances. But the story behind gold in 2018 is strikingly different than gold in 2010. The lead-up to 2010 in Vancouver was marked by overcoming both injury and conflict: “I had surgery to combat an overuse injury in my legs, and throughout the recovery process Scott and I stopped speaking. We just lost trust.” At the Olympics, Tessa was “counting the number of steps it would take to get to the cafeteria because I knew if I walked those 300 paces, I wouldn’t be able to practise or compete. And so, it felt like the ultimate Hail Mary just worrying about making it to the end of a program.” In the end, talent and hard work – on both recovery and the relationship – aligned to produce one shining moment. Tessa and Scott were crowned the youngest ice dance champions in Olympic history. It was an incredible performance – and one that felt like it would be hard to repeat. “Stepping off the podium in 2010 … I’m not sure I really felt like a winner, if I’m honest,” she says. “There were a lot of factors that had to come together for us to win, and I’m not really sure if I knew stepping off the podium in 2010 that I could replicate that.”

“We can BE the best, even when we’re not AT our best.”

At PyeongChang in 2018, on the other hand, “before our music even started, I felt different. I felt like a high performer, and I didn’t feel like I needed the judges’ results to prove that for me.” And contrary to the feeling after the 2010 Games, after 2018, “there was real joy and satisfaction that came from the hard work, from the pressure, from all of the things that I would’ve found totally depleting two, four, eight or 12 years earlier.” So what changed? In our conversation with Tessa, three evolutions stood out: embracing discomfort rather than focusing on the number of hours spent in training; a deliberate shift in mindset from chasing perfection to pursuing excellence; and – above all else – a reclamation of personal power.

01. Creating discomfort vs. over-training

After the over-use injuries and surgeries that characterized 2010, the comeback in 2018 was built on less training time – three hours a day instead of 12 – more recovery time, and using the limited training hours to deliberately create imperfect conditions to sharpen their resilience. Whether it was leaving the ice unflooded and chipped, pumping in crowd noise, or falling on command to practise recovery, each practice built confidence that, as Tessa says, “we can BE the best, even when we’re not AT our best.” Here’s Tessa discussing that process:

02. Pursuing excellence vs. chasing perfection

In Tessa’s words, “We needed to stop chasing perfection and instead pursue excellence … and once we took perfect off the table, we thought excellence was possible.” Their daily goal became showing up at an “8 out of 10”; not in effort, but in execution. Reframing their approach unhooked them from the impossible standard of perfection and freed them to connect with the joy and challenge of consistent excellence. Listen to Tessa talk about this shift:

03. Becoming drivers vs. passengers

At the heart of Tessa and Scott’s story behind the story is reclaiming a sense of agency and self-efficacy. After years of being “good little soldiers,” for their 2018 comeback, they stepped into the driver’s seat: assembling their own team, setting their own standards, and “operating as if we were the CEOs of our own business,” she says. “We had agency and autonomy, we really were steering the ship.” That changed their experience leading up to the Games and, she believes, made the ultimate win more fulfilling. Listen to Tessa talk about this shift:

Of course, the effectiveness of these shifts is not limited to sports. We can all benefit from:

Increasing short-burst intensity and building time for recovery instead of focusing on hours worked or busyness as a proxy for effectiveness.
‘Roughing up the ice’ to build resilience into our projections, targets, pilots, and project plans instead of making plans that rely on perfect conditions.
Embracing ‘8 out of 10’ efforts that will produce more from consistency over the long haul instead of aiming for the impossibility of perfection.
Seeing ourselves as the author of our stories instead of allowing ourselves to fall into the mindset of being characters.

When Tessa and Scott made these shifts, the impact was transformative. In Tessa’s words, “I felt like I had the recipe for what it meant to be excellent.” Given the results, it’s a recipe that’s worth testing out for yourself. Want to go deeper? Watch Tessa’s full conversation with Dane here:

Build Resilience In Your Organization

Bring the skills that elite athletes use to build resilience and perform under pressure to your organization. Contact us to learn more about our resilience programs.

Before every season, Dallas Eakins sits down to think about what kind of “infection” he wants to spread among his players. It’s not the image you expect from a pro hockey coach. But that’s how he puts it. Dallas has coached in some of hockey’s highest-pressure environments. He’s the former coach of the Anaheim Ducks and Edmonton Oilers. Today, he’s GM and Head Coach of Adler Mannheim in Germany. He knows that in locker rooms it’s easy for the germs of fear, panic and “don’t screw up” to get airborne. Early in his career, that sometimes happened.

“They will never care how much you know, until they know how much you care.”

He’d come in armed with systems, standards and structures. His expectations, he thought, were crystal clear. But when the team hit a rough patch, he could feel it: Players were complying with the plan, not owning it. They were doing what was asked, but they weren’t bringing the honesty, grit or collaboration that was needed. Looking back, Dallas is blunt: He was leading from systems and standards first. Care came second. Over time, he switched the order. “They will never care how much you know,” he says now, “until they know how much you care.” He still runs a tight ship. The standards are high. But now he starts with care, gets disciplined about consistency, and lets trust show up as a byproduct. And when that happens, something important shifts: Accountability stops being something he does to the team and becomes something the team does with and for each other. That’s the journey this article is about. And it’s one that’s seen over and over, from NHL locker rooms to university parking lots to a sweaty beep test in a Swedish sports hall.

Coaches West: Jeff Daniels & Dallas Eakins (right), American Hockey League (AHL), 2013 All-Star Skills Competition. American Hockey League (AHL), CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

A Consistent Pattern

In every case, the pattern is the same:

01.

Start with Care. Really know your people and their experience.

02.

Be Disciplined to Stay Consistent. Show up the same way in the highs and lows, while holding high standards.

03.

Let the Team Hold the Line. They naturally hold each other accountable because they feel the care and see it, consistently.

01. Start with Care

Really know your people and their experience. Care is not a motivational speech at the start of the season. It’s not saying, “My door is always open,” and then being permanently unavailable. Care is deeply unglamorous and wonderfully specific. When Dallas talks about caring, he means:

Know players as humans: their families, their histories, the stuff that keeps them up at night.
Notice when someone walks in a little off. Take the time to check in.
Understand that the same message lands differently with a 19-year-old rookie than it does with a veteran on his fourth team.

That’s not “being nice.” It’s gathering data. Because the minute you understand someone’s reality, you can design the way you lead them. I felt this viscerally on a very different stage: move-in day at my daughter’s university. We arrived on campus with our car full of bins and feelings. My inner soundtrack was looping: I hope she’s going to be okay. Is her room okay? Are the people okay? Is she okay? It was chaos – traffic, honking, parents doing the slow drive of mild panic. And then we met the red-shirt crew. A team of student volunteers swarmed our car – waving, smiling, introducing themselves, asking my daughter about her program and residence, unloading everything into carts. Within minutes, our car was empty and her stuff upstairs. More importantly, she was smiling. The energy in her body had changed. So had mine. In 10 minutes, nothing fundamental about her life was different. Same dorm, same unknowns. What changed was this: a group of people had clearly thought about her experience and built around it. That’s care as a verb. Leaders who start with care:

Plan for how people feel on day one, week one, month one.
Name realities in the room (“you’re new”, “this is a lot”, “this stretch is brutal”) so people don’t have to pretend.
Ask questions that make it about the person, not just the task.

It doesn’t mean lowering the bar. It means people don’t have to waste energy hiding where they really are. And that’s what sets you up for the second move.

02. Be Disciplined to Stay Consistent

Show up the same way in the highs and lows, while holding high standards. Care gets people to lean in. Consistency is what convinces them you mean it. This is where Dallas’s “infection” metaphor comes in. Before walking into the room, he’ll ask himself: “What do I want people to breathe in from me today?” If the team has lost five straight, it is easy for a leader to walk in tight, reactive, and unintentionally spread panic. If he lets media chatter or his own inner critic become his story, the team will inhale that anxiety. So Dallas works on his internal hygiene:

Is this thought helping, or just scaring me?
Is this my story, or someone else’s?
What is actually true about how we’re playing?

The goal isn’t to be robotic. It’s to be predictable in the right ways: Players may not know what the next drill is, but they know he’s not going to humiliate them, disappear emotionally, or swing wildly from praise to blame based on one result. That kind of consistency is a form of care. And it unlocks something important: People start to take more risks, tell more truth, and tolerate higher standards because they’re not bracing for who’s going to walk through the door today. I saw a similar pattern with the women’s floorball team I worked with at Pixbo in Sweden. Every season, we ran the dreaded beep test. At first, it was all the usual things: tight shoulders, nervous jokes, the temptation to disappear. Everyone knew it mattered, but it felt like a test to survive. So we focused on being boringly consistent in between:

Clear expectations about effort.
The same type of debrief after good days and bad.
The same message: You matter on your best day and your worst day.

By year two, beep-test day felt different. Players were still nervous, but they walked in ready. No mysterious “sick days.” Less avoiding eye contact. A quiet pride in even showing up for it. Consistency didn’t make it easy. It made it safe enough to go hard.

03. Let the Team Hold the Line

They naturally hold each other accountable because they feel the care and see it, consistently. When care and consistency have been there long enough, something lovely happens: Accountability stops being a solo act. Back to that beep test. As players started to drop out, they didn’t head for the showers or go look at their phones. They started cheering for whoever was still running. I remember one player who carried a lot of anxiety. When she finally hit her limit and stepped out, you could see the disappointment in her whole body – hands on knees, head dropped. Within seconds, two teammates were at her side. One put a hand on her back. The other said something like: “You were further than last time. You’ll get past it next time. We’re right here.” That’s not, “Oh well, who cares about the test?” It’s, We care about you too much to pretend this doesn’t matter. And we care about you too much to let this moment define you. That’s what it looks like when a group starts to hold the line together:

They protect each other’s dignity and the standard.
They challenge each other from a place of belief, not frustration.
They don’t let someone quietly slide below what they’re capable of.

In Dallas’s language, they’ve “caught” the culture. Players are now the ones asking, “Is this who we are?” after a bad period. Veteran guys are the ones pulling a rookie aside to say, “We don’t do it that way here, and here’s why.” The leader hasn’t stepped back from standards. If anything, the bar is higher. But the weight of holding it no longer sits on one pair of shoulders.

Bringing It Back to Your Team

So if you’re a coach, manager, captain or the unofficial “glue” on your team, here are three simple questions to sit with:

Where, specifically, do people first experience your care? If someone new walked in tomorrow, what would show them, “You matter here. You’re not just another body on the roster”?
If we followed you around for a month, what patterns would we see? Not just on your good days, but on the tired, stressed, messy ones too. Would people say, “I may not love every decision, but I always know which version of them is going to show up”?
Where have you already seen the team hold the line together? Think of one moment where teammates raised the standard with each other, so no leader was required. What groundwork did you already lay to make that possible?

At the end of the day, if we want people to tell the truth, hold high standards, and stay in it when it’s hard, they must feel we’re in it with them, not just watching from the bench. Care is what signals that. Consistency is what proves it. And trust – the kind that leads to real, shared accountability – is what grows from there.

Meet our expert: Karyn Garossino, Associate Trainer

Karyn Garossino is an expert in performance under pressure and leadership development. A former Olympic figure skater and five-time World Championship competitor, Karyn holds a Master’s Degree in Psychology and Adult Education and has spent 40+ years being coached and coaching others. She works with leaders across business and government, teaches with Queen’s Smith School of Business, and helps individuals and teams transform pressure into growth.

“How do you collaborate with someone who is different from you in personality, style, or approach?”

When someone thinks, communicates, or behaves differently than you do, collaboration can feel difficult, frustrating, or even impossible. If handled correctly, however, you can flip these differences into opportunities that benefit both parties. Doing this effectively starts with understanding what collaboration is and is not. Collaboration is not compromise. Collaboration is the act of working with someone to produce or create something. Compromise often means splitting differences and giving up something you value so that each side “meets in the middle.” That’s give-and-take, but it’s often at the cost of optimal outcomes. Collaboration is something quite different. It’s a win-win mindset that grows the pie instead of dividing it. In genuine collaboration, both individuals bring their strengths, expertise, and perspectives to the table in a way that creates a better solution than either person could have produced alone. Collaboration requires:

Assertiveness: the ability to contribute and communicate your own perspective with conviction.
Co-operation: an equal willingness to understand and integrate the other person’s view.

That willingness is essential. Research tells us that the most important factor in leveraging differences is Psychological Safety – meaning people need to believe they can share ideas, ask questions, raise concerns or admit mistakes. So an openness on your part to practice genuine inquiry, rather than defend or persuade, will pay huge dividends. When collaboration works, both parties feel heard, and the result is broader, more innovative and more effective than a simple compromise.

Diversity: The Advantage and the Risk

Differences in personality, style, and perspective are not obstacles; they are assets. Research shows that diverse teams often outperform homogeneous ones because they bring varied perspectives, unique knowledge, and deeper problem-solving capacity. However, diversity only leads to better performance when it’s managed properly. Without effective interactions, differences can amplify conflict, miscommunication, and breakdowns in cohesion. That’s the risk McKinsey and others have highlighted: diverse teams can either perform brilliantly or fail spectacularly depending on how they engage with one another. So the first step in collaborating with someone different is not to wish away those differences; it’s to welcome them, and reframe them as advantages. See differences not as barriers, but as opportunities to expand what’s possible. When someone’s style or perspective differs from yours, that’s not a threat; it’s new data. It’s an invitation to learn something new and explore another approach. To do this, you must be intentional about:

Setting aside your default approach long enough to understand how their thinking works.
Asking questions to truly explore the other person’s priorities, assumptions, and logic.
Active listening, where your goal is to nurture a trusting environment.
Holding both stories as true – yours, theirs – and then creating a shared story together.

One way to think about this is that it is about sitting on the same side of the table as the other person – instead of across the table. This can be either literal (in the case of in-person collaboration), or metaphorical when we are on the phone or virtual. When we try to collaborate while facing off against each other by defending our turf, comparing our solutions, or debating who’s right, we create an us-versus-them dynamic. That’s not collaboration, it’s negotiation. Instead:

Position yourself with the other person, not opposite them.
Focus together on the problem, not on each other.
Use a shared surface (whiteboard, document, screen) where both contributions and perspectives are captured and visible.

Sitting side by side helps shift your brain out of opposition and into shared exploration. It also signals a partnership orientation: “We’re in this together.” Pair this with curiosity-based questions like:

“How do you see this unfolding?”
“What matters most to you here?”
“What’s your biggest concern?”
“Where might we be missing something?”

These shifts – mindset first, then practical behaviour – are how collaboration becomes real. And yes, this takes time and self-management on your part. However, productive results and improved relationships will be your reward.

Key Takeaways:

Collaboration ≠ Compromise. It’s Expansion. If you’re “meeting in the middle,” you’re probably shrinking the outcome. Real collaboration grows the pie by combining strengths, not trading them off. The goal isn’t to protect your idea, it’s to create a better one together.
Differences Are Data, Not Disruptions. When someone’s style or thinking throws you off, that’s not friction, it’s information. High-performing teams treat difference as an input to improve the solution, not a hurdle to overcome.
Psychological Safety Is the Multiplier. Diversity only pays off when people feel safe to speak, question, and challenge. If you’re defending or persuading, you’re shutting down performance. If you’re curious and inquiring, you’re unlocking it.
Get on the Same Side of the Table, Literally and Mentally. Opposite sides create opposition. Side-by-side creates partnership. Shift your posture, share the surface (whiteboard, doc, screen), and aim your energy at the problem, not the person. It’s a simple move that changes the whole dynamic.

When people picture elite sport, they usually imagine the glory: the medals, the anthem, the moment everything comes together. What they don’t often see is the psychological turbulence underneath those performances – the doubt, fear, shame, and self-recrimination that show up when things don’t go according to plan.

Years ago, Third Factor founder Peter Jensen was working with a Canadian national team that was, by all measures, one of the best in the world. They were perennial contenders, a program with history and swagger. And yet, in the first days of a world championship, everything came undone. They lost to their arch-rivals badly, and the shock was devastating.

We’re always navigating the gap between what is and what ought to be. That gap hurts. But the hurt is meaningful. And if we can help people explore that meaning, we unlock the very thing that allows them to grow.

By the next morning, the athletes stood in the hotel lobby looking hollowed-out. Angry. Embarrassed. Anxious. They knew the tournament was short. They knew another loss could knock them out. And they knew they were at risk of spiraling.

This is the territory we work in every day – not just in sport, but in business, education, and leadership. People experiencing disappointment, failure, or the deep discomfort of not living up to their own expectations. As psychologist Kazimierz Dabrowski wrote, we’re always navigating the gap between what is and what ought to be. That gap hurts. But the hurt is meaningful. And if we can help people explore that meaning, we unlock the very thing that allows them to grow.

What follows is how Peter helped that team turn a moment of psychological crisis into the fuel that carried them to a gold medal, not despite their negative emotions, but because of them.

01.

Acknowledge the pain and help people observe it

02.

Move toward compassion, not criticism

03.

Help them find the meaning inside the pain

1. Acknowledge the pain and help people observe it

When Peter asked the players how they were feeling that morning, they didn’t hold back: awful, embarrassed, sad, angry. A typical response might have been reassurance: You’ll be fine, shake it off, don’t worry about it. But reassurance rarely helps; it often makes people feel more alone in their emotions. Instead, Peter simply said: “Yeah. You look awful.”

It may sound blunt, but it wasn’t judgmental. It was observational. It told the players: I see you. What you’re feeling makes sense. Let’s look at it together.

When the strength coach announced they’d be doing lunges at practice, Peter asked: “How are you going to look doing lunges? How will your teammates know you’re back?” These were reflective questions not about the loss, but about how they were showing up in response to it. They invited the players to step outside themselves and observe what was happening internally. This is the first job of a coach in hard moments: Help people dis-identify from the emotion without dismissing it and let them see the feeling rather than become the feeling.

2. Move toward compassion, not criticism

Negative emotions become destructive not because they exist, but because we weaponize them against ourselves. We interpret them as proof: I’m not good enough. I’ll never perform. I don’t belong here. A coach must interrupt that spiral. Peter did this in an unexpected way. That morning, a staff member had told a long, mundane story about buying a T-shirt on sale. The players had zero patience for it. Peter asked the staff member to tell the story again to the entire team. Afterwards, he asked: “Why did he buy that T-shirt?”. Eventually someone answered: “Because he got a good deal.” Peter replied: “Right. He wasn’t going to overpay. He knows what shirts are worth. You guys are overpaying right now.” No judgment. Just compassion and perspective. The point was simple: Don’t pay more than the moment is worth. You lost a game. It hurts. But don’t add interest by beating yourselves up. A coach helps people see the whole truth, not the narrow, distorted version they’re stuck inside.

3. Help them find the meaning inside the pain

That afternoon, the team played a weaker opponent and won only 2–0. Instead of relief, they felt further proof that they were failing. So Peter gathered them and asked each player to share what it meant to represent their country. What surfaced were stories of parents driving endless hours to practices, communities fundraising to support them, comebacks from injury, and dreams that had taken years to build. It was emotional. And it was clarifying. The problem wasn’t that they had lost a game. The problem was that they weren’t living up to what the opportunity meant to them. And when people reconnect with meaning, they reconnect with agency. They can choose how to move forward. From that point on, Peter reinforced that meaning daily: At practice: “An American player woke up today preparing to face you in the gold medal game. How are you preparing?” In the weight room: “Can you improve 1% today? What will you do to show you’re getting better?” By naming their pain and understanding its purpose the team turned the emotional energy inward, toward growth instead of self-attack. They never lost another game. They won the gold medal.

When negative feelings become a weapon

Negative emotions are not the problem. What hurts performance is when people interpret those emotions as evidence of inadequacy: “I failed, therefore I’m a failure.” This is the voice of the critic – a destructive internal narrator that convinces us we’re incapable of growth or unworthy of success. A coach’s role is to challenge that voice by asking better questions:

What is this feeling signaling?
What is the conflict between what is and what ought to be?
And what does this moment make possible?

That’s how people reclaim their will – what we call the third factor: the inner capacity to direct your own development.

The takeaway for leaders and coaches

Whether you’re leading a national team or a project team, the principles are the same:

Acknowledge negative feelings without trying to eliminate them.
Help people step back and observe their internal state.
Guide them toward understanding what the discomfort is pointing to.

When we do this, people stop treating hard moments as evidence of failure and start treating them as invitations to rise. Crisis becomes a catalyst. Pain becomes fuel. And performance becomes possible.