Playing to Your Strengths When It Matters Most With Paddy Upton

·1 hr 7 min·5 clips

Virat Kohli never sweeps a ball, yet dominated world cricket for 10 years by perfecting his limited strengths.

The episode begins with host Dipanjan Deb introducing Paddy Upton, a performance coach with experience in cricket, hockey, and chess. Upton shares his top five CliftonStrengths: strategic, futuristic, ideation, self-assurance, and achiever. He explains how he uses StrengthsFinder in his coaching, emphasizing self-awareness as a foundation for performance. A key example is Virat Kohli, who avoided learning the sweep shot to focus on his strengths, becoming the world's best batsman. Upton details managing weaknesses, like placing a poor fielder in non-essential positions to reduce pressure. He contrasts instruction-based coaching with a coaching approach that fosters intelligent teams, critiquing traditional sports methods. Upton recounts coaching chess champion Gukesh, realizing universal performance principles apply even without chess knowledge. He discusses pressure management, defining it as attachment to future results and advocating for present-moment focus. The 2011 Indian cricket World Cup win is highlighted, where the team reframed pressure as 1.4 billion Indians holding their hands. Upton distinguishes between belief and knowing, stressing that knowing one's strengths is more powerful. The episode concludes with insights on leadership and culture, noting that effective leaders fine-tune themselves like instruments and avoid ego-driven approaches.

As heard by us

Paddy Upton connects strengths-based coaching to chess, scaling businesses, and pressure that tests people.

Paddy Upton's conversation is most useful when it moves performance coaching out of its usual setting and asks what still holds. His work with an 18-year-old chess player is the strongest example: he admits he knew little about the game, yet argues that mental habits,…

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Why you'd press play

You want performance coaching that can move from top-level sport to chess and into a scaling business without losing the human thread.

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