Lee Povey

For years as a cycling coach, I thought my value came from knowing everything. Every gear, every tactic, every decision.

I was wrong. I was suffocating the people around me and calling it leadership.

The moment I stepped back and focused on the three things only I could do, everything changed for my athletes and for me.

If you looked at your task list today, how much of it is your job, and how much of it is you refusing to let go?

Some of my best thinking as a sprint cyclist happened nowhere near a velodrome.

I would wrestle with a problem until my brain felt like a wrung-out sponge, and then go do something completely unrelated. Somewhere between the second coat of paint on a fence and absolutely nothing in particular, the answer would stroll in, unhurried.

Turns out there is a name for this. And it has everything to do with how the best leaders I know approach their hardest problems.

You can read my newsletter for this week: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/percolator-lee-povey-d9xuc

Most of us were taught that there are right choices and wrong choices.

Get it right, and you move forward. Get it wrong, and you fall behind.

That binary underlies many of the decisions I watch founders and executives struggle with, because the cost of being wrong feels unbearable both for their egos and what they believe it will do to their organization.

Here is what I have come to understand after years of coaching elite athletes and leaders: when you approach everything as a learning opportunity, wrong choices no longer exist. Every outcome becomes data. Every setback becomes a reference point for what you would do differently next time.

The fear of failure is not really about the outcome. It is a fear of what the outcome says about you. And as long as your identity is attached to always getting it right, you will play smaller than your potential.

The athletes I coached who improved fastest were rarely the most talented. They were the ones who could take a loss, extract what was useful from it, and come back to training the next day without the weight of the result hanging over them. They treated every race as information rather than a personal verdict.

Leadership works the same way. The founders and executives who grow fastest are not the ones who make the best decisions. They are the ones who learn the quickest from those that did not go as planned.

If you want to explore what that looks like in practice, I would love to have a conversation. A free initial call is a good place to start.

https://calendly.com/lee-povey/free-initial-consultation

It’s my job to meet the people I lead where they are at.

Often you will hear people say, “This is my natural leadership style”. In my opinion, this approach is stunted because they think they can only work with people that fit their specific leadership style.

In my experience, the best and most effective leaders are the most adaptable and tailor themselves to best meet and understand what their staff and colleagues need to be their most successful versions of themselves.

Today is International Youth Day, which is one of those observances that usually passes me by entirely. And this time I caught it.

Because I've spent a decent chunk of my adult life in the company of young people who needed something from an older person, and I've come away convinced that we've got the arithmetic of mentoring completely backward.

My latest newsletter is about what mentoring actually gave me. And I'm still not sure who came out ahead.

You can read the full article here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/who-mentors-mentor-lee-povey-3k9uc

Who Mentors the Mentor? Today is International Youth Day, which is one of those UN observances that usually passes me by entirely, wedged as it is somewhere between World Chess Day and whatever day celebrates cheese. But this time I caught it, because I've spent a decent chunk of my adult life in the company of young peopl

I left school at 17 without a degree and just my bicycle. And frankly, feeling like a failure.

That sounds more dramatic than it was. I was dyslexic in an era when nobody called it that. The feedback I kept getting from teachers was that I was smart but lazy. I reluctantly accepted that story because I didn't have another one to replace it with.

What I did have was a track bike and a talent I couldn't yet fully explain. For a teenager who felt like he was failing at everything the world said mattered, that was enough to hold on to.

Cycling gave me something school never did: immediate, honest feedback and opportunity for success. You either crossed the line first or you didn't. The track was the first place in my life where I felt like the rules made sense, and I love rules!

It took me years to understand what those early years had actually taught me. How to perform under pressure. How to lose without letting the loss define you. How to show up on the days when nothing in you wants to, because those are often the days that matter most.

Leadership is more complicated than cycling. The feedback is slower, the variables are messier, and the finish line keeps moving. Yet the fundamentals are the same. You perform at the level you prepare for. You lead at the level you understand yourself.

36 years later, my clients don't care about my school results. What matters is the impact I have on their ability to lead and on how I help their organizations thrive.

If you are a founder or executive who wants to explore what high-performance coaching looks like for you and your team, I would love to talk. A free initial call is a good place to start.

👉🏻 https://calendly.com/lee-povey/free-initial-consultation

Somewhere along the way, we decided kindness only counts if it costs you. That enjoying generosity makes it "selfish."

The behavioral research says otherwise: kindness and reward are the exact same event.

Decency was never supposed to be a sacrifice. Full article in the link in the comments. 👇



–----

And hey, I just created a Medium account to share all my thoughts on leadership, human behavior, and performance. Give me a follow on Medium at ! 🙌🏻

I spent years believing that pushing harder was the answer.

In elite sports, that belief gets rewarded. You train through pain, you show up when you're exhausted, and you perform anyway. It works, until it doesn't.

When I moved into high-performance leadership coaching, I carried that same operating system with me. And I watched founders and executives do the same thing. Running on fumes, wearing exhaustion like a badge of honor, and wondering why their performance was plateauing.

Sustainable leadership is about how well you know yourself under pressure, where your limits are, what you need to perform at your best, and who you can lean on when the weight gets heavy.

The leaders who last are not the ones who push hardest. They are the ones who know when to ask for help and are not ashamed to do it.