What Actually Creates a Leadership Breakthrough (It’s Rarely a New Idea) 

In the late 90s, I had teenagers sitting in circles with their eyes closed, and more than a few parents raised an eyebrow.

At the time, alongside my day job in strategic planning for sports development, I ran my own gymnastics club. I trained teens for national competitions with my crew of coaches, and through a focus on mindset, nutrition and training, they invariably excelled.

Was it because they were more physically capable, or had better genes than other gymnasts around the country? Unlikely. Plenty of clubs had athletes with more raw talent than ours. Some had better facilities, bigger budgets, longer histories. On paper, we should have been middle of the pack. We were not.

The circles the parents wondered about

Those circles? Visualisation. The gymnasts would mentally rehearse winning competitions over and over, working through every tiny, seemingly insignificant head turn, toe point, pause and jump in each routine. Every second, every millisecond of the full routine. Hearing the music. Sensing the beat and the required movement. Only then would they step onto the mat to perform whatever combination of flips and somersaults they had visualised and we had cemented together.

This was unorthodox coaching for the era. Sports psychology had not yet reached every rural town in England, and what we were doing looked, to the untrained eye, like teenagers napping upright. Yet the results kept coming. They trusted their thoughts, their feelings and their actions, and that trust delivered consistent performance under pressure, which is the only kind of performance that counts in competition.

The harder work was always with the new gymnasts coming into the competitive squad. They invariably dreaded the first routines, feared the falls, and saw failure before they saw anything else. When I swore “I will catch you,” they were not outright distrustful, but they were tentative. That tentativeness showed in their bodies before it showed anywhere else. Hence the crash mats, as they were in the olden days.

Here is what I learned, and it took me years to fully appreciate it: the gap between a tentative gymnast and a star athlete was almost never physical. Work on the mindset, shift whatever was causing the self-limiting belief and the negative emotion, and what you had was a competitor. In our case, a lot of them. In a group, their collective focus and connection was at times electrifying.

The same pattern, thirty years on

These days my coaching clients are not performing somersaults, though that could be an interesting aside. They are founders and CEOs of mid-market businesses, typically with 10 to 150 staff, carrying more than any one person should. The context could not look more different from a gymnasium. The pattern underneath is identical.

Harvard Business Review made this connection explicit years ago. In their influential piece The Making of a Corporate Athlete, performance psychologist Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz argued that executives who want to perform at high levels over the long haul must train the way world-class athletes do, addressing not just the mind but also the emotions and beliefs beneath the surface. Their observation was blunt: most approaches to executive performance deal with people “only from the neck up.” The gymnasts taught me that lesson decades before I read it in print.

So, what does a breakthrough look like for a business leader? When I see it, it is an ‘aha’. A look of relief and amazement. A transformed self-belief, a new meaning given to whatever held them back in the past.

Notice what is missing from that description: a new idea. Breakthroughs are rarely about information. My clients are intelligent, experienced operators. They have read the books, attended the courses, heard the advice. What they could not do before the breakthrough was act on what they already knew because a self-limiting belief stood between knowing and doing.

It is rarely because I have magically enabled my clients to achieve the impossible. In reality, it is quite the opposite. What they now believe is possible was in them all along. They accept the positive identity of who they want to be. They are that person.

What breakthroughs actually look like in practice

The breakthroughs I see every day are not abstract. They look like this: accepting the CEO role rather than hovering at the edge of it. Putting yourself forward for the challenging promotion. Dealing with the conflicts causing disharmony in the leadership team rather than managing around them. Exiting someone who is damaging the culture, which, in truth, frees them for a future in a company where they can thrive as an A Player. No longer tolerating poor performance or bad behaviour because confronting it feels harder than absorbing it.

Every one of these was available to the leader before the breakthrough. The option was sitting there the whole time, the way the routine was sitting inside my gymnasts before they trusted themselves to perform it. What changed was not the situation. What changed was the belief.

There is solid science behind why the mental rehearsal piece works. Writing in Harvard Business Review, Harvard Medical School’s Srini Pillay explains in To Reach Your Goals, Make a Mental Movie “imagining a goal in vivid detail activates the same brain regions that map your actual path to achieving it”. The brain begins building the road before the feet ever touch it. My gymnasts were not daydreaming in those circles. They were laying down neural track.

The same holds for the CEO rehearsing the hard conversation, the founder mentally walking through the board presentation, the leader picturing themselves genuinely stepping back from operations. This is one reason mindset work sits alongside strategy and systems in my approach to business growth with clients. Strategy tells you what to do. Psychology determines whether you will actually do it.

A leadership breakthrough is rarely a new idea. It is the moment a leader stops being constrained by a self-limiting belief and acts on what they already knew. Effective leadership coaching addresses the fear underneath the hesitation, because once the fear is addressed, the capability was there all along.

Once the fear is addressed, freedom exists

I have watched this sequence play out for thirty years, first on gymnastics mats and now in boardrooms across New Zealand: fear identified, belief shifted, action taken, results compounding. The leader who could not delegate builds a team that owns outcomes. The founder who could not step back designs a business that runs without them. That is the heart of what I call Freedom by Design. Growth should create space, not consume it, and the first space it has to create is inside the leader’s own head.

My job, whether with gymnasts or CEOs, is and was never to install something new, it was to remove what was in the way.

So here is the question I will leave you with, the same one I ask in the first session with every leader I work with: what is the thing you already know you need to do, and what belief is stopping you from doing it?