When success stops helping

Failure gives you a reason to change. Success gives you a reason to keep doing what you’re doing. And sometimes that’s the problem.

When something isn’t working, there’s an incentive to find out why. When something works, the logical response is to keep doing it the same way. The more it works, the more confident we become that we’ve found a formula we can rely on.

But with competitors constantly biting at your heels, one lesson sport taught me was that sustaining performance means questioning what works, not just what doesn’t.

The strength that got me there wasn’t going to keep me there

For a long time, one of my greatest strengths as a marathon kayaker was the portage.

For those of you who don’t know, (most I assume, because who does other than marathon kayakers?!) marathon kayaking isn’t spent entirely on the water. A portage means getting out of your boat, running with the 9kg kayak for about 100m and then returning to the water again and doing it multiple times a race. I was a fast runner with the biceps to power through water and then carry the kayak and run with it. I spent hours perfecting my entries and exits so that I was slick and not a single second was wasted. It worked and it won me my first two world titles.

But I also knew it wouldn’t carry me through the next stage of my career on its own. Nothing had broken, the strategy wasn’t failing. I just knew that what got me there wasn’t going to keep me there. So, while it was still working for me, I started developing another part of my racing: my sprint finish (previously I had lost 3 world titles on a sprint finish). That meant taking an unconventional approach and shifting my focus away from pure endurance and pouring my energy into building speed and power.

Adopting a new approach when I was already winning was scary, but I realised the bigger risk was staying comfortable and being left behind.

It wasn’t just the physical training that we kept questioning, either. I worked with a nutritionist who concocted a disgusting thick green drink that would boost my iron levels (that were low) and included the exact vitamins I needed, down to the dose, to keep my immune system strong enough to avoid the infections that could wipe out weeks of training. Nobody was making me drink it everyday. I just kept looking for the next marginal gain, in places most competitors weren’t bothering to look at all.

Experience tells you what has worked. Adaptability asks whether it still does.

That distinction matters more the more successful you’ve been. Failure practically forces you to ask questions. Success rarely does; it just gives you more reasons to carry on.

A process that’s worked for years, a way of making decisions, a particular strength you’re known for: why would you question any of it if it’s working? Because conditions and performance levels don’t stand still. Markets shift, teams grow, competitors learn, and what was once an advantage often ends up becoming the norm.

Adaptability doesn’t mean changing everything

Constantly changing what you do isn’t high performance either. There were standards, routines and behaviours that stayed important throughout my career, and I didn’t throw them out every time someone developed a new training method.

The skill is telling the difference between what still serves you and what you’re doing mainly because it’s served you before. That’s a genuinely hard judgement, and it takes real confidence: when something’s failed, circumstances decide for you. When you’re still succeeding, nobody’s forcing your hand. You have to be willing to question your own formula before the results demand it of you.

That’s what curiosity actually looks like in practice: not a slogan, but constantly asking what else might help, in places nobody else is thinking to look.

If you want to put this into practice, here are three questions worth asking yourself or your team this week:

• What’s working well enough that nobody’s thought to question it?
• Which of your strengths are you asking to carry too much of the load?
• If you weren’t so busy trying to protect what made you successful, what would you do differently or change?

That last one is the hardest, and usually the most useful.

Success isn’t something to preserve

My portage remained a strength. Developing my sprint finish didn’t make it less valuable, it gave me more ways to win. That’s the real point.

Sustaining high performance was never about finding one formula and protecting it. It was about continuing to develop what the next performance required.

Failure gives you an obvious reason to adapt. Sustaining success asks something harder: to keep questioning what needs to change while things are still going well.

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.