There are leaders who seem to come alive when the stakes are highest. The pressure mounts, the consequences become real and somehow they get sharper. Others – equally talented, experienced and prepared – find themselves doing the opposite.
For more than 22 years, that contradiction has fascinated author and leading pressure performance expert Matt Brady.
“There are so many talented people who are brilliant at what they do, but when the stakes go up, they lose access to their skills,” he tells The CEO Magazine.
“I wanted to understand why that happens. But more than that, could we actually change it?”
In conversation with The CEO Magazine, Brady explores the ideas behind his new book, The Back 9, revealing what pressure does to performance, why even highly capable people can struggle when the stakes rise and how leaders can learn to harness pressure and perform at their best when it matters most.
What first led you to ask the question at the heart of The Back 9: Why do some people rise under pressure while others crumble?
I noticed that I could perform like two different people. Same person, same skills and yet one version of me would show up when it really mattered, and the other one just disappeared, depending on the situation I was in.
“Pressure doesn’t reveal who you are. It reveals what you can access at that moment.”
Once I saw that in myself, I started seeing it everywhere. That’s what got me and I’ve been chasing the ‘why’ of it ever since.
Many believe pressure reveals who we really are. Why do you disagree?
This is something that I hear all the time and I just don’t buy it. Pressure doesn’t reveal who you are. It reveals what you can access at that moment. That distinction matters, because if you believe pressure exposes some fixed version of you, then performance starts to feel like destiny – like you either have it or you don’t.
But that’s just not true. What shows up under pressure is shaped by what you trained, what you rehearsed and what you built beforehand. This is good news because if you can shape it, you can change it.
Why can pressure make us lose access to abilities we already possess?
Because having the skill and being able to reach it are two completely different things. That gap between the two is what I refer to as the ‘Access Gap’.
Under pressure, your biology changes. Your attention shifts, your thinking changes and so does the way you make decisions. The skill itself hasn’t disappeared, even if it feels that way; what has changed is your ability to access it.
“There is a huge difference between rising for a moment that matters and living as if every single moment is an emergency.”
The ‘Access Gap’ isn’t a coaching problem or a mindset problem. It’s a neurobiological problem – and it’s costing your organization every time pressure rises.
What is pressure telling us, and how can leaders learn to recognize and respond to it before it starts affecting their decisions?
Pressure is just telling you that something really matters. That’s it. You might feel your heart rate start to lift or your attention narrow. You could also get a surge of energy or have a sick feeling in the pit of your stomach.
We feel those responses and tend to interpret them as a sign that something must be wrong. But pressure isn’t the enemy. Your body is not trying to stop you. Most of the time, it’s just getting you ready.
So the first step for any leader is to recognize the signal early, understand how it affects you and, rather than fighting the feeling, learn to work with it – turning it into something that lifts you rather than something that sinks you.
What is one widely accepted belief about pressure and performance that you now believe is completely wrong?
That you should calm down under pressure. Trying to do this actually makes it worse. The goal is not to get rid of the energy, it is to use and channel it into effective performance.
“You can’t force flow; you have to build the conditions for it.”
The best performers don’t feel less pressure, they have just got better at working with it.
The Back 9 introduces the ‘Championship Cycle’. How does the framework work, and how can leaders apply it when the consequences are real and the pressure is high?
The ‘Championship Cycle’ is a flywheel with four stages: clarity, certainty, flow and momentum. It gives you a way to work through pressure rather than simply hoping for the best.
Clarity is knowing what matters right now, rather than getting pulled into the outcome, consequences or what could go wrong. Certainty is reconnecting with what you know, what you’ve prepared for and what you can control.
From there, you create the conditions for flow – being fully present, engaged and able to access your capabilities more naturally. Momentum is about recognizing and reinforcing what worked, turning progress into belief and feeding the cycle again.
The mistake people make is trying to jump straight to peak performance. You can’t force flow; you have to build the conditions for it.
Why did you choose to write The Back 9 as a novel rather than another business book?
Because people don’t really change from a bullet point, do they? We change from stories and from seeing ourselves in someone else.
A business book tells you what to think, but a story lets you feel the pressure right there with the character, helping you discover the lesson for yourself. And when you’ve lived it on the page first, it sticks. That’s what I was after.
Burnout is often treated as the inevitable price of ambition. What should leaders be doing differently?
Ambition isn’t the problem. Pressure itself isn’t automatically the problem. The danger is when pressure becomes constant and you never actually come out of it. There is a huge difference between rising for a moment that matters and living as if every single moment is an emergency.
“The next opportunity in human performance lies in helping people access more of what they already have.”
Leaders need to get better at spotting when pressure is useful and when the system just needs to come back down. That means building in recovery and becoming clear on what genuinely matters. It also means giving people some sense of control and helping them see the progress they’re making.
You can’t keep asking the system to run at full intensity without letting it rest. Genuine high performance isn’t about staying switched on all the time. It’s about being able to switch on when it counts and off when it doesn’t.
If every leader learned just one lesson from your work, what would it be?
Pressure doesn’t remove skill, it changes access to it. And that completely changes the conversation. Because the answer isn’t always more skill or another training program. Some of the most capable and talented people in your organization already have exactly what they need. The real question is whether they can reach it when the consequences get real.
So the next opportunity in human performance lies in helping people access more of what they already have, right at the moment it matters most.
My hope is that leaders stop treating pressure as a sign that something’s wrong and start seeing it as proof they’re built for exactly what’s in front of them.
The Back 9 is available from 30 October 2026, with an introductory price of A$19.95 plus shipping for the first month (regular price A$24.95). Find out more at mattbrady.com.au/book/
