The Next Stroke: Why sustained high performance is built one decision at a time

The Cost of Looking Ahead

I learned this lesson the hard way at the Junior World Cup in Hamburg, Germany.

We were in the final lap of the 5km race, approaching the last turn. It was down to just three of us, and I knew it was going to come down to a sprint finish. In that moment, my mind drifted to the outcome:

Can I actually win this?

That brief moment of doubt and outcome-fixation was costly.

While I was mentally fast-forwarding to the finish line, my rivals were manoeuvring for the inside of the turn. I lost the inside line, got pushed out wide, and had to burn vital energy just to hold position around the bend. Instead of saving gas for the final sprint, I spent it recovering from a focus on an outcome that was still eight minutes away.

I took silver, my first World Cup medal, which was thrilling, but it left me with a powerful question: Did that loss of focus cost me gold?

Maybe I wouldn’t have won the sprint finish anyway. We’ll never know. But what I do know is that by letting my mind leap ahead, I gave away my best chance to find out.

That might sound surprising. If you’re racing for a World Championship, surely you’re thinking about the outcome?

In reality, thinking too far ahead is one of the quickest ways to lose control of the present.

And you can’t control the outcome anyway. You can’t control what your competitors are doing. What actually produces the result you want is staying right here, in this exact moment, executing the only thing you can influence: the next stroke.

Then the next one. And the next.

Thousands of hours of training and years of racing taught me something that’s stayed with me long after I retired:

Sustained high performance isn’t built by constantly chasing the outcome. It’s built by repeatedly returning your attention to what matters most right now.

Leaders carry the same pressure to think ahead

They’re expected to plan for next quarter, next year, sometimes the next decade, while managing uncertainty and making high-stakes decisions with incomplete information.

I remember coaching a senior leader who was completely paralysed over a critical structural change.

Instead of focusing on the immediate next step — a candid 10-minute conversation with a key director, he was mentally spiralling through six different worst-case scenarios six months down the line.

Because he was so fixated on an outcome months away, he stalled. Decisions sat on his desk, uncertainty spread through his team, and morale dipped. Outcome-thinking had completely crowded out the decision right in front of him.

When we spoke, I didn’t ask him to solve the six-month strategy. I asked him a simple question:

“What is the single next stroke you need to take today?”

That shift changed everything. He realised he didn’t need to control the entire company’s long-term reaction; he just needed to have one honest conversation that afternoon.

When everything feels important, attention becomes fragmented. Energy goes into worrying about outcomes still months away, while the decision directly in front of us gets less care than it deserves.

The future matters. But we only ever influence it through what we do next.

In sport, every stroke matters because it shapes the one that follows. One rushed stroke affects efficiency. One lapse in focus costs energy.

The same is true in leadership. High-performing teams are rarely built on one extraordinary decision. They’re built on hundreds of ordinary ones, made consistently well — the next conversation, the next piece of feedback, the next commitment kept.

Individually, they don’t always feel significant. Collectively, they define culture.

When pressure increases, the instinct is to zoom out — to think harder about the destination, to worry about everything that could go wrong. That’s often exactly the moment to narrow focus instead, because the only part of the picture we can actually influence is the decision directly in front of us.

That’s what “the next stroke” has come to mean to me. A reminder to return my attention to what I can execute well today, rather than getting distracted by everything I can’t control tomorrow.

Whenever work starts to feel overwhelming, I find it helpful to pause and ask myself a simple question: what’s my next stroke?

Not the whole strategy. Just the next decision that deserves my full attention.

It’s a small shift. But small shifts have a habit of changing the direction of a performance.

High performance isn’t sustained by trying to do everything at once. It’s sustained by doing the next thing well, over and over again.

That’s how races are won. It’s how organisations sustain the same thing too.

Put it into action…

Identify that one area where outcome-thinking is creating noise. Pause and ask yourself one simple question:

“What is the single next stroke I need to execute today, and how do I make it count?”

This isn’t just a mindset for sport, it’s how high-performing corporate teams win.

Whether it’s a keynote on sustained high performance or a deeper session on building focus under pressure, I work with leadership teams who need to perform consistently, not just occasionally.

If you’re planning an event or an offsite and want to talk through what that could look like, get in touch.