Kieran Perkins on Performing Under Pressure

Kieran, I'm just going to reflect and bring us into the room on a moment that I rewatched over the weekend. I was trying to remember where I was, and I think it was very early in the morning when I saw this race unfold, and I remember waking my dad up for this moment. So I'm just going to play a couple of seconds of this and then I'd love you to take us back to this moment in time. “Was down and out yesterday and suddenly he stood up. He wanted to be shouted. One of the great swims of all time, Ben, and this is all about showing you the best of you.”

So we'll play the rest for everyone — what he called out then was the courage, and I don't think that there is a moment that defines more courage than that for Australians at that point in time. Like, the Olympics are the elite of the elite and everybody is looking for the stories, the miracles, those moments — and you created, can I just say, that was a masterpiece. I don't know why you bothered to fail in the semi-final so you could come back and do that.

Look, it's a really fascinating one, because actually that has come up a bit more consistently of late with the passing of the great Dennis Cometti — obviously his voice narrated that moment and became such an integral part of the story of the race and where it landed. There's different parts of me you need to ask that question. As the athlete, of course, I'm hypercritical and ripping it apart and don't ever want to watch it again, because I've got all these things that I know I could have done differently, better. It's parked, I've moved on. We refer to that part of you as the itty bitty shitty committee. Fair enough. Probably not so itty bitty, but it's there.

And then, when you step back on it now with the time and context, I'm much better at narrating for myself with a level of self-awareness that I could never have brought to the moment — about how actually this story started two years beforehand. In '94 at the Rome World Championships and the Commonwealth Games in Canada, on Vancouver Island, I was still in my own mind on the up. I hadn't won a world championship or Commonwealth Games gold medal at that point. So being able to complete the set of the big four meant that what happened after that was I was thinking about '96, defending my Olympic title, having the opportunity to reinforce that I deserved the first one, that it wasn't a fluke. And so I spent two years thinking about this thing that was so far in the future that I wasn't taking care of today properly.

And sport, especially Olympic sport, you're talking fractions here. When I make those statements it makes it sound a little bit like I was skiving off out the back, not training. Of course you don't — you're there and you're doing the work, you're fully engaged. But it's just those little one-percenters, even quarter-of-a-percent things where you're not quite as sharp, not quite as focused, or you're making choices along the way that a couple of years ago you wouldn't have made because you were still so desperately hungry and chasing someone or something, as opposed to defending. That adds up to these moments where you're not quite as ready as you could have or should have been. You talk about injury and illness — that stuff existed, but I'm pretty unforgiving around that, cuz you're only ill or injured when the Olympics come around because you're not prepared, not because of bad luck. There's no such thing.

And so you go through all of that and you work out all of those things added up to this moment where I'd made the final, I knew I had to race to defend my Olympic championship. And there was a moment a couple of hours out from the race where you kind of have this — I don't know, coming-to-Jesus — where I just realised I was in this mindset thinking about the consequences of failure or the benefits of success, and all of it was rubbish. All of it was complete crap, and all of it overwhelmed what mattered most, which was that intrinsic personal satisfaction of: have I done my best? For me as an individual, my whole career, it didn't matter whether I won, lost or drew, cuz I lost a lot more than I ever won. When I went home that night and was laying in bed on my own in my own thoughts, would I be comfortable and happy that I did my best? And if I did my best, life's good — pat on the back, learn, grow, keep moving forward. But if I haven't done my best, then rightfully unhappy and disappointed in yourself.

You go through these things as a junior athlete — you're learning, growing, getting better and better. And then you get to senior level, best in the world, and all of a sudden you think you should know better, or do it differently, and those things that made you sharp and focused the first time around, you take them for granted and set them aside and don't pay attention to them the way you used to — which not surprisingly leads to a less than ideal outcome.

So a lot of it is reliant on process. By the time I got to that level, I'd practiced this thousands and thousands of times, from sort of eight, nine, ten years of age. You build up this capability. I didn't swim great in the heat but made the final, and then that roller-coaster ride of: okay, I've got to go through process, do my warm-down, speak to the media, get back to the village, eat, sleep, get up the next morning and do whatever prep's required. One of the things a lot of us get really good at, and I certainly am extremely good at, is compartmentalising — the thing I'm doing right now consumes my attention and focus in a way that means all the other stuff just goes away.

If I'm really honest, from the heats the day before to getting to the final, there were some really significant ups and downs from that buildup of stress — from “she'll be right, mate, just a bad day yesterday, you got this” through to absolute despair that your life's going to be over because you're going to fail in front of the world. I often say these moments where you go, “if I don't win, mum won't love me anymore and Mr. Crew, my coach, will never talk to me again” — all of these consequences, which are all panic. It's your amygdala hijack, your fight-or-flight instinct gone into flight. Up and down, up and down. But probably the baseline was just distraction through process until I got three or so hours out.

I got to the pool to prepare for my warm-up, was getting a bit of physio treatment, and as I was laying there in this quiet moment, I started the buildup of adrenaline and panic. My heart's pounding in my chest, I'm starting to sweat while I'm just laying there. I wish I could tell you it was some genius of enlightenment from self-awareness, but that's not true, because when you're in the middle of that hardcore adrenaline moment your cognitive capacity is massively diminished. But I had this moment — a process — where I've gone: what the hell are you doing? If you stay this nervous and this worked up, you'll be exhausted before the race even starts. It's competition 101: a little bit of nerves is good, in the corner vomiting is bad.

And look, that in itself is self-awareness. I could have dismissed that moment, had that thought pop into my brain and immediately moved past it. But it hit me like a train: God, what are you doing? As a nine-year-old you never got this nervous, you learned how to control these things. How did you used to do it before? Asking myself that simple question triggered this explosion of awareness — I have to calm down, disassociate, get myself into a better space. What did I used to do? Distract myself, get up, walk around, talk to someone about anything other than the Olympic Games. It's physiology: once you switch off the trigger in your brain producing the adrenaline, you then need time for the adrenaline in your system to metabolise and get out of the way. That gets your heart rate under control, gets you back into full cognitive control.

When you hit these moments of performance, these moments of stress, you can't create more capability or more potential in that moment. The training and the work and the preparation, all those things that add up to who you are right in this moment — that is all of the potential that you have. Your only job in that moment is to know how to get that potential out of yourself and deliver it, and not have less of your potential available to you because of the nerves or the stress or the self-talk that might get you into a spiral.

It's one of the things I find interesting — Lane, you'd know this yourself — when you line up the eight finalists in an Olympic final side by side, the differences between those physical specimens, their capability, their talent, the workload they've put in, the quality of the people around them: there's not a measurable difference in the human beings, the animals, the machines that are there. The measurable difference, what creates the outcome of that race, is absolutely what's going on in your brain, and your brain's ability to deliver your potential then and there when it matters most. By '96 I'd been competing at a dedicated level for 12, 14-plus years. There's no inventing new capability in that moment — it's getting it out of yourself.

To dedicate yourself to an activity like that for years and years, you have to at its core love what you're doing. Nobody can be forced to be excellent in that environment if they don't really want to be there. Don't get me wrong, there are many days you turn up and you'd prefer to be anywhere else — in bed, out with friends. There's always choices you make along the way, some begrudgingly, but on balance you really have to love it. And when you get to the point where the pressure and the stress get you to where you don't want to be there, really at your core — that's not good. That's not the place you should be.

It's one of those ironies of we're all different. I marvel at people who talk about how they were afraid to lose and only did it for the competition, cuz the competition gave them the juice. I only competed because it was a moment to prove that all the stuff I'd been doing was worthwhile. What I actually loved was the training and the time with team and the effort and the progression — every day turning up and knowing you're getting a little bit better. And then you get in the race and it's like, ta-da, this is how good I've got. But it hurts — it's 15 hundred-metre sprints — and knowing how to hurt yourself and love it and be really engaged in that was the juice at the core.

When I look back on my career as a whole, the bits I love and remember most were those times when you'd go home after a big day, get in bed exhausted, can't sleep cuz my shoulders are hurting so much and my neck's bad, and you just have a little smile to yourself and go, I put in today, I deserve it. It's no different to the races: if you got out of the race and you didn't feel like you were absolutely 100% gone, that there was nothing left in you, you'd be angry about the lost opportunity and the wasted time. Two years prior to Atlanta you smashed the world record at the Comm Games and you didn't even look like you had a sweat going. So, yeah, I understand the… You get that. I do.

To be really frank, it's not easy. One of the things we often overlook is that every athlete, regardless of how successful your career was or how successful you look post-transition, the transition is epically difficult. Every single one of us struggles — some publicly troll the depths, others do it quietly on their own or with great support. Working in a corporate environment, you're trying to build the sense of validity of the skills you've got and the experience you've had, but working out how to translate it so that people who haven't had that experience can see it.

The thing with sportspeople is, when you get to the elite dedicated level, because you're so focused and you're an adult, it's a lot easier to see the things that matter and grab onto them and develop them in a really conscious, thoughtful way. Whereas when you're a kid you just learn, you get experiences, but it's more intuitive and you don't necessarily attach it to actual skills you can develop. Getting into that corporate environment, it became really clear that while sport's a great analogy and provides fabulous lessons, there are also some really significant differences that, if you don't know how to navigate, can be extremely difficult.

The NAB one — being in sales teams — one of the things that became obvious was the difference between how a corporate world was set up versus how an athlete might approach it. In the corporate world, there's no finish line. Every customer interaction, every day you turn up, it's just this role. There's very rarely a moment where everybody gets to stop and say, hey, we've embarked on this journey, we're done, let's go celebrate and do nothing for the next week. Even at the end of the financial year, all your targets get set back to zero the very next day and you're off again like nothing's ever happened. And what tends to happen, and you see it in a lot of really motivated leaders, is every Monday morning they'd get the sales numbers of the week before, and you almost had this moment where you knew — is the boss happy, angry, absolutely losing their mind? And that mood is going to be 100% driven by the sales outcome from last week. I used to look at this and go, this is just nuts. Nobody can live a roller coaster like that — the amount of energy you destroy within yourself and the teams and the people around you on this up and down, up and down, is crazy.

Taking it back to more of an athletic mindset: we're on a journey here, and in that journey there will be good and bad. Stuff will work, stuff won't. We assess, we pivot where we need to, but we also have faith that if we do all these agreed things we set up at the start of the year — say it's a 12-month cycle, this year we're going to work on these five things, and if we do them exceptionally well, we trust the outcome will occur. As an athlete you just keep working on those five things with your coach and your performance support people. You don't get caught up too much in the sub-competitions or the training moments where it might have gone bad or good in terms of assessing the validity of the strategy in a full-stop way. It's more evolutionary: that's going well, that's not, we could pivot here, adjust there, but we're on the track and we trust it. Sure, the sales numbers on a Monday morning are really important, but you don't have an absolute tantrum and lose your mind if they're bad, because there could be 20 reasons why. If the boss gets up and yells at everyone, they're going to go down even more — crushes everyone.

As an athlete, I would always have preferred to see someone working hard, doing all the things they know they need to do, committing every day, and then failing — but being proud knowing they'd given it a red-hot crack — than winning accidentally and getting it for no good reason other than being in the right place at the right time, which, let's be honest, is 99% of business. The contrasts are really interesting. But don't get me wrong, managing yourself, navigating complexity, navigating interpersonal relationships, understanding what leadership looks like and the difference between a job title and the values and behaviours you exhibit every single day — athletes just do that without even thinking.

There were times in my career where I found myself absolutely losing my mind with someone and couldn't work out why this person was driving me nuts, until much later where I'd go: oh, of course — they were lazy, or really negative all the time, bitching about everything being wrong, it's not going to work, I can't do this. You knew instinctively that their attitude was dragging everybody else down, cuz negative emotions are much, much more contagious than positive ones. Just intuitively losing your sense of, no, I don't accept this, I'm not going to let this be the context of how my life is run — you need to change or get out of here, because that's not what I need from the people around me, and not what I want to display to the people around me. All of those things are so powerful and valuable. It's actually why athletes, given the right opportunity to build the technical skill sets for a new career, do so well — the soft skills of getting the best out of yourself, leadership, are so strong. You just have to know what that thing is you're going to reapply it to and how.

Can I give you a moment to think about that, KP? What I love about high performers is you just call it out as it is. The mentality I've had to learn is that someone calling you out is love. It truly is love and respect to say, hey, what happened, what's going on for you? High performance takes an edge where you have to look in the mirror and say, is this good enough, or how can I change. So I'm acknowledging both of you for being that to each other as well.

It's hard. I have a gift at upsetting people. But the thing is, because I know you and I trust that you're not making a judgement on who I am as a human being — you're making a judgement on what I'm doing. That's one of the things that significantly underpins it. Footy teams say play the ball, not the man, right? If you're playing the person, it's personal, it's destructive, and it's not given with a level of trust and love and respect that makes it easy for that person to engage. Whereas if you're playing the ball, it's about: okay, what are we doing and how are we doing it? I can give you constructive feedback which is harsh and honest — and that's something I had to learn in the work environment, because you can't do that with people that haven't come from our background; they don't take it well. It's recognising that it's not a dialogue about who you are as a human being or whether I love you or think you're valuable — it's your behaviours and what you're doing. And it's difficult to navigate, cuz we're also human beings. We all have days where someone says something and you've got to stop and go: no, that wasn't a personal attack, they're actually calling me out, and I'm probably mostly angry because I know they're bloody right.

There's an element of the athletic experience that's really unhealthy too: I can tell you exactly how much I weighed at any point from my mid-teens till today. I'd always go on this journey where I'll stop exercising, put on weight really quickly, get grumpy about it, then start exercising again and my weight flatlined. Even as an Olympian I never actually worked out how to lose weight — I was always very good at consolidating and not losing. When I retired, life, kids and work all got in the way of real accountability, and that journey got me to a really poor point. By the time I hit my peak weight, I was about 40 to 45 kilos heavier than I raced. It probably took me 15 years to get there. I got on the bandwagon, took care of things, and over about 18 months I lost about 18 kilos. Then COVID came around, I ate and drank my way through it living in Melbourne locked in the house, put it all back on again, and for about a year after that I tried to do what I'd done before and it didn't work.

I got to that point of real anger with myself. I went: nothing I'm doing is working, so I clearly don't have the skills to take care of this. Maybe I should get help. So I went to my GP and said, hey, I've got a thyroid problem or something, do some tests and tell me what's medically wrong with me so I can take a pill and fix this. When he stopped laughing at me, he said, I'll do the blood tests, but I'm here to tell you there ain't anything wrong with you other than your lifestyle. Did all the tests — surprise, surprise, medically nothing wrong with me. He said, you need to go get some proper help. So I went to a specialist who worked with me on understanding what my triggers were. My reflex when I wanted to lose weight was two things: starve myself and exercise. And that immediately triggered a physical response built off 20 years of being an athlete doing volumes of work you could never consume enough calories to support. So even though I was starving myself, my body held on to what I did eat for grim death, and when I'd exercise I couldn't do enough to shift the balance.

So the first thing the doctor got me to do was stop exercising entirely and get my eating under control — eat properly, the right volumes of food, and do incidental stuff: walk up the stairs, don't use the elevator. Still active, but not go for a run or jump on the rowing machine and trigger that “oh my god, we're an Olympian again, we'd better harvest all our calories” response. Really resolving my diet: no alcohol, more protein, only fresh food, get rid of all the processed stuff, and drink lots and lots of water to help satiate my hunger. It took, conservatively, two years of doing that to get to a point where I could eat a meal and feel full. I'd never experienced that as an athlete — I'd eat so much food I'd never feel full. I worked out what that felt like, which meant I could maintain my diet while introducing more physical activity. I ended up losing over 30 kilos, and I've kept it off. Well done, congratulations, very proud of you, my friend.

It's understanding that it is a lifestyle. That was one of the things this doctor said when I first went to her: if you're looking to go on a diet and then go back to what you were doing before, let's not waste everybody's time and money, just don't bother. You need to approach this from, this is going to be my lifestyle going forward. That's daunting for anybody to contemplate, but I'm well and truly at that point now where not only am I happy and comfortable with it, it's enabled me to see joys in things I would have completely walked past before. Whether that's eating something real — you go to a restaurant and eat something expertly prepared and go, oh my god, the flavours — or, I live in Melbourne not far from the Treasury and Fitzroy Gardens, and to get to the MCG, about a 15-minute walk, years gone by I would have got a tram or a cab or driven. Now I will always walk, and I walk through the park and go, man, this is beautiful. The birds chirping, they've changed the garden beds. It sounds benign and silly, but just being present is damn good. As an athlete you trained yourself to be forcibly present all the time because it mattered so much, and then as an adult in the mire of life you lose that. It's wonderful to kick yourself every now and again and go: just look up, for God's sake, look what's around you.

I'm actually wearing one of our shirts which is “be where your feet are.” When you look up you feel the joy of life — that place of being, not the doing. One thing I'd add: it's also being able to apply it in environments which aren't necessarily the space where you're tied up in the depths of your passion. We hear people all the time talking about how important it is to follow your passion. If you can do that in a way that makes you money and supports the people you love, knock yourself out, that's great. But for the vast majority of humans on the planet, we're all going to be engaged in doing something which isn't really our passion — we've got realities to contend with. If you can find ways to be present when you're doing that necessary thing, the thing that enables you to then go do the things you love, life's so much easier and so much better. I've met very few people who work in a job that 24/7 is rainbows and unicorns of joy. All of us have stuff we have to do that's no fun. But if you can still be present and find the moments, life is a lot more successful. You do have a pill for that — wake up.

There's a study around who has the worst job in the world — it came down to hospital cleaners — but the ones that thrived found the purpose in those moments: it's actually cleaning to save a life. And another study put step trackers and heart-rate monitors on hotel cleaners, gave them a target of calories to burn, and reframed their brains to say this is about weight loss and lifestyle — they cleaned better, were happier, more productive, and burnt more calories. It's just reframing the positivity of the things you have to do to put food on the table, but making it about joy.

KP, what a lesson of wisdom, of truth, of identity. You're remembered as the guy in the pool who came back from lane 8, but today you've changed in my mind to the man who, when rubber hit the road, redefined his life. And I was nervous when you asked that question, LB — it triggered me. It did. Because I've been on the comeback journey myself, but being kind is being straight with someone. The way KP said it: I wasn't judging the man, I was judging the behaviours and asking him to do things a little differently because I care about him. I want to be around him a whole lot longer, and the way he was going about living life was not going to offer me that opportunity, so I was being a bit selfish. Hug.

Thank you for your time, Kieran. How do people follow your journey — are you big on LinkedIn? I'm going to disappoint you enormously, Tess. Yes, I am on LinkedIn, but it's a corporate account managed by my wonderful team at the Australian Sports Commission, so you'll get less of unfiltered me and more of appropriate corporate me. I'm happy to engage in these conversations, but I'm not of the social media generation that provides constant content — I'm a consumer when it comes to that. So see me out and about, come and say hello. We will, and we'll follow the Australian Olympic team, because I know we're in a wonderful place with you leading. Well, he's head of the Australian Sports Commission. One final question: what are you most looking forward to when it comes to Brisbane 2032?

For me, it's actually the way the nation as a whole will come together around that moment. I was fortunate enough to compete in Sydney, so I remember what that was like, for the good and the bad. There were two weeks, four weeks with the Paras added on, where Australia was proud of itself and connected to itself and able to set aside all of the petty divisions and the idiotic politicking — things that, at the moment, you would say we're in a bit of a death spiral of fear and loathing and segregation, which is just awful and absolutely not an environment I want to live in. I know when 2032 comes around, for that period of time we will experience the very, very best of ourselves, and we'll be engaged fully and proud of the 800 Australians competing, not only through their incredible performances but the humble and grateful personalities that shine through. Those moments where they've represented their country have been an expression of all of us, and that's pretty awesome to think we have in our future.

And will you get LB back as a liaison officer? Well, they didn't ask me back twice, so don't take it as a slight — some of us have got skills and some of us need to apply those in different areas. You are the mentor to the stars, though — that needs to keep happening. Oh, KP, in and out of the water, my friend, it's so great to have this conversation with you. Thank you for sharing your insights and your wisdom with us. No, appreciate the opportunity. Keep following the Australian Olympic team — they need us to lift them up and believe in them — and especially the Australian Paralympic team. We should be getting behind all athletes great and small. Go Australia. Oi oi. From us to you, this has been A Wake Up Call with Kieran Perkins. We'll see you next week. Toodles.