Skating on Thin Ice

One minute you’re competent and confident. The next, you’re inside your own head.

Most of my clients relate to this. The need to win not only the outer game - performance, results, reputation - but the inner game of thoughts and beliefs. The message hit home last night. BIG TIME!

I sat down to watch the Olympic free skate final, which was obviously going to be a foregone conclusion that Ilya Malinin would inevitably take the gold medal. For those of you who are not into skating, he is the self-proclaimed “quad god.” What I was most looking forward to was not watching him win gold it was more to do with watching him ace the performance. That felt inevitable. His number one rival had gone just before him and had basically struggled with his routine. It was a shoo-in.

What we witnessed instead was an unraveling. A falling apart. Disbelief. What should have been a masterclass in perfection, or at least what we were expecting, was an uncharacteristically sloppy and basic routine, complete with two falls. The audience gasped. And I was reminded that that’s the absolute brilliance of sport: you really don’t know what’s going to happen.

Anyway, my interest is not so much in figure skating. It’s not my big thing. But I couldn’t help thinking that this is actually what going up looks like. One minute, you’re at the top of your game. Competent. Confident. Certain. Then you start to second-guess yourself. You start to not quite believe anymore.

In interviews afterwards, he said he felt tight. Rushed. As if he’d lost the thread of what he was doing out there. Not physically incapable. Not underprepared. Just off.

And that struck me.

Because we love the mythology of ascent. The narrative arc where talent meets destiny, preparation meets opportunity, and the inevitable champion delivers on cue. We assume that once you’ve reached a certain level, once you are 'the guy' or 'gal' - it’s a straight line from there. Mastery locks in. Confidence compounds. Outcomes become predictable.

But they don’t.

Having climbed both Mount Kilimanjaro and Elbrus i know first hand that the higher you go, the thinner the air. I also know that in the corporate world its the same - at the top, expectation becomes its own opponent. There’s less room to hide. Less room for error. Less room to be human. And sometimes the very awareness of inevitability, this is mine to lose, is what destabilizes you.

In sport we see it often enough. Simone Biles, widely regarded as the greatest gymnast of all time, stepping back from Olympic competition because her mind and body were no longer in sync. Naomi Osaka, multiple Grand Slam champion, withdrawing from tournaments to protect her mental health under the crushing weight of expectation and scrutiny.

These weren’t stories of incompetence. They were stories of altitude.

When you are that good, the world doesn’t just want you to win. It expects you to. Every performance becomes a referendum on your identity. Every wobble becomes a headline.

That’s the paradox.

The moment you start protecting the win instead of skating the programme. The moment you start thinking about how this should go instead of being in what is. The moment you become aware of the narrative rather than immersed in the movement. You tighten. You rush. You overthink. And sport, in all its brutal honesty, exposes it.

But this isn’t just about sport.

It’s about boardrooms. It’s about leadership. It’s about that presentation you’ve delivered flawlessly a hundred times. It’s about the CEO role you’ve finally landed. It’s about the relationship you’ve worked so hard to build. So there you have it - one minute you’re competent and confident. The next, you’re inside your own head.

I’ve seen it with senior leaders. The promotion comes. The visibility increases. The margin for error shrinks. Suddenly the same skills that got them there feel uncertain. They overthink. They micromanage. They play safe. Or they push too hard. The unraveling doesn’t look dramatic. It looks subtle. A hesitation. A slight misread. A decision made from fear rather than clarity.

Going up isn’t just about performance. It’s about psychological altitude. And altitude changes you.

What struck me most last night wasn’t the falls. It was the gasp. That collective reminder that certainty is an illusion. Nothing is a foregone conclusion. Not gold medals. Not careers. Not reputations. Not even the self-image you’ve built.

After the programme I found myself thinking:

Where was the grounding? Where was the last-minute recalibration? The breath. The centering. The quiet reminder to skate the routine, not the narrative? Hours earlier, the commentary had already declared it inevitable. Gold was assumed. The script had been written before he even stepped onto the ice.

And that’s the danger.

When inevitability replaces preparation. When hype replaces grounding. When external certainty drowns out internal presence. Maybe the real mastery at the top isn’t perfection. Maybe it’s staying loose in the inevitability. Staying present when the world has already written the ending. Skating the programme, not the prophecy.

We don’t know what was said backstage. But we do know this: no one is immune from the inner game, so never forget to do the work. The work is what prevents you from burning out. The work is what stops you believing your own press. The work is what keeps you grounded in presence rather than caught up in performance.

Because once you start performing the expectation instead of executing the routine, you’re already skating on thin ice.