Simon Hartley is a performance coach and sports psychology consultant with nearly 30 years of experience working globally with elite athletes, organizations, and teams, including Olympic gold medalists and Premier League footballers. As the founder of Be Worldclass and co-founder of Success Engineers, Hartley is renowned for simplifying complex ideas about performance into practical steps.
Listen to the exclusive interview with Simon Hartley at – https://LBDLibrary.com
His unique journey started in sports science, where he studied physiology, biomechanics, and psychology. He quickly narrowed his focus to psychology, recognizing a crucial truth: what he practiced wasn’t just sport psychology—it was human psychology. The strategies for achieving optimal mental performance work for everyone, whether you are an Olympic athlete, a salesperson, or a doctor. His mission is to coach people in performance psychology, ensuring that the “stuff that goes on between our ears helps us rather than hinders us,” thereby engineering a stronger mental game.
The Driving Force of World-Class Performance: Curiosity
Hartley’s curiosity led him to set a mission: to see if the world’s best performers outside of sport shared the same mental characteristics as elite athletes. He studied diverse individuals, including a Michelin star chef, a world barista champion, a polar explorer, and the head of a world-leading science and medical research institute.
He discovered that the foundation of world-class performance isn’t just passion, but a powerful version of it: curiosity.
World-class operators are constantly driven by the questions: “How can I be better? What can I do differently? How can I improve?”. For example, a mountaineer friend, Allan, who climbed all 14 8,000-meter peaks, was driven not by climbing a higher mountain (since he climbed Everest early), but a harder mountain, such as K2 or the north face of the Aiger. Similarly, the world barista champion, James, was curious not just about making the best coffee, but about how to create an experience for the drinker.
This process is a “yellow brick road of questions and answers”. These performers are often so busy finding the answer to the next question that they are not focused on a goal; they achieve greatness almost accidentally as a side effect of their tireless curiosity.
Decoding Motivation: The P.A.R. Model
In his book, Motivation is pear-shaped, Hartley breaks down the complexity of motivation into four core drivers, or answers, he found consistently over nearly 30 years:
1. P is for Purpose: This relates to the inherent value of the work—understanding the importance of what we do and the difference we make (e.g., changing lives, saving lives, or making people happy).
2. Enjoyment: This includes enjoying the challenge, the camaraderie of a great team, working with clients, or the autonomy and creativity involved, even if specific tasks aren’t liked. The easy stuff is often the boring stuff; we like the challenge.
3. A is for Ambition and Achievement: This recognizes that people are motivated by feeling competent, growing, developing, and hitting goals. They love the feeling of being good at what they do, both individually and as part of an organization.
4. R is for Recognition and Reward: People need to feel recognized and rewarded. This extends beyond cash bonuses, commissions, or incentives; it often involves simple actions like a “pat on the back,” a “well done,” or a genuine “thank you” for making a difference.
Just like personality types, people have different motivational biases, meaning some of these drivers will be stronger than others. However, leaders can motivate most people most of the time by establishing four strong pillars of motivation within the organization. When all four pillars are strong, a crucial fifth dimension is created: a place people are proud to belong to.
The Authentic Leader and the Power of Laughter
For organizations seeking to move from good to truly great, Hartley emphasizes understanding what truly matters to people. Sometimes, non-cash rewards can hold more meaning than bonuses.
Take, for example, the Fiji Rugby 7s team. After enduring their hardest, most challenging training week, the prize for the winning team was simple: pizzas and beer, costing only about 50 GB pounds. This prospect motivated the squad immensely.
Furthermore, working with the Fiji team highlighted the critical role of enjoyment. In that environment, laughter was one of the biggest performance-related KPIs. If players were having fun and laughing, they were likely to perform well. Hartley asks how many CEOs measure the “decibels of laughter” or have KPIs related to fun and enjoyment, considering its direct impact on performance.
Traditional management often relies on fear to achieve short-term results, but this is often unsustainable, and people can become numb to it. Instead, leaders should focus on “cat herding”: understanding why people would choose to care more, work harder, or go the extra mile, even when nobody is watching. This reveals the organization’s true, authentic culture.
A key to sustainable leadership is authenticity. Leadership based on fear or approval-seeking (like the “David Brent style” character) is often inauthentic, exhausting, and leads to burnout.
Authentic leadership emerges when an individual masters three interwoven strands:
1. Know yourself.
2. Be yourself.
3. Like, love, and accept yourself.
When these strands are in place, individuals are comfortable in their own skin, and the ego takes a back seat. They don’t need external approval or results to validate them, avoiding the need for the ego to fill the “hole where self-worth should be”.
——————————————————————————–
Ready to Start Your Own Journey?
Simon Hartley’s body of work includes several bestselling books:
• Peak Performance Every Time (on foundations like focus, confidence, and motivation).
• How to Shine (based on studies of 12 world-class individual performers).
• Stronger Together (research into world-class teams like Formula 1 crews and the Red Arrows).
• How to Herd Cats (focusing on leading through influence).
• Could I Do That? (exploring how people tackle seemingly impossible challenges).
For those whose words are resonating, Hartley recommends starting with his fictional book, Silence Your Demons, which is particularly useful for adults (40, 50, and 60-year-olds) dealing with the “chaotic stuff that flies around between our ears”. It is available at silenceyoudemons.co.uk.
You can also find free resources, including an “espresso version” of the Podium Mindset program, by visiting worldclassresources.com.
Listen to the exclusive interview with Simon Hartley at – https://LBDLibrary.com
