4.8 • 4.7K Ratings
🗓️ 5 December 2025
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
We all feel out of our depth, but the real secret is learning to stay calm anyway.
In this episode, Jake and Damian explore a universal human experience, the moments when we feel completely out of our depth, and reveal why calmness, clarity, and growth often begin right there. Drawing on powerful lessons from guests like Tom Aspinall, Petr Čech, Alex Greenwood, Nick Cox, and Alex Honnold, they uncover the mindset shifts that help us stay steady when everything feels uncertain.
They discuss the importance of naming your fears instead of suppressing them, accepting what you can’t control, and breaking big challenges into small, manageable steps. Through stories of athletes and leaders who chose discomfort, built resilience through “micro-dosed” challenge, and repeatedly stepped into the unknown, Jake and Damian show that fear isn’t a sign you’re failing, it’s a sign you’re expanding.
This episode is a reminder that the secret to feeling calm isn’t eliminating fear, but learning to move with it: acknowledge it, act despite it, and trust that confidence grows through action, not certainty.
Listen to the episodes mentioned:
Tom Aspinall: https://pod.fo/e/2d3d2e
Petr Čech: https://pod.fo/e/21c565
Alex Greenwood: https://pod.fo/e/30cbd0
Nick Cox: https://pod.fo/e/138399
Alex Honnold: https://pod.fo/e/25ce8e
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, welcome back to one of our favorite episodes actually here on High Performance, when myself and Damien, hey Damien. Hey, Jay. We get to do something that we very rarely get to do, which is just sit and talk about some of the guests that we've had on the show. And maybe we should start by explaining the way that things tend to work here at High Performance, right? You live in Manchester. Yep. I'm lucky. Obviously joking. I live in Norwich. I'm not going to say anything other than... You were getting ready to. When they go low, you go high. Well done. Well done. So anyway, if you're not in the UK, I live a long way out east. Damien lives a long way north from London, but London is where we record the episodes. |
| 0:38.4 | So so often we find that we get a train early in the morning, we get in, we record two, three, sometimes four guests in a day. |
| 0:46.0 | And then despite, you know, the best will in the world, we need to get away quick to get back on the train and get home to our families. |
| 0:52.9 | So for us to sit and actually reflect |
| 0:54.8 | on the stuff that we've done on this show is a pretty rare thing. But when we do get to do it, |
| 0:59.6 | it's special. And today we've decided to share with people some of the best clips from the last six, |
| 1:04.9 | can you believe six, five years, yeah, of how we deal with feeling out of our depth, whether that's someone listening to this because they've started a new job or there's something on the horizon or often, I think, Damien, people for whom change has been forced upon them rather than they've made the decision to change. I mean, we wrote an entire book, right, about change called How to Change Your Life, because quite frankly, dealing with being out of |
| 1:28.1 | your depth is a key tenant to high performance, right? Well, definitely. I mean, pretty much every |
| 1:32.6 | one of our guests has spoken about the imposter syndrome, those moments where you find yourself |
| 1:38.0 | plunged into a new environment, a new set of challenges and demands, and you're working out, |
| 1:42.9 | can I cope with this? Am I going to be |
| 1:44.4 | able to thrive rather than just survive? So we've also been fortunate enough to be able to unpick |
| 1:50.9 | what they've learned, what they've passed on to us about how they managed to eventually find |
| 1:56.2 | their buoyancy when they fell out of the depth. And it's always worthy of just sharing it for us, |
| 2:02.8 | as well as for anyone that's kind enough to listen to us, |
| 2:06.0 | that they can apply it and pass it on to people in their lives. |
| 2:09.8 | So if you're struggling at the moment, even if you're not, |
| 2:12.2 | you never know what's around the corner. |
| 2:13.6 | So we've got a really interesting episode for you today. |
| 2:16.3 | We're going to hear from Petichick, the former Chelsea and Czech Republic goalkeeper, |
| 2:21.4 | Angix Greenwood, who's a lioness. |
| 2:23.4 | Nick Cox, the former academy coach at Manchester United, and free climber Alex Honnold. |
... |
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