In this episode, Steve chats to Professor Gina Rippon and Dr Carl Senior about how top athletes handle the ‘fear of failure’ and how losing can actually help on the road to winning.

Professor Gina Rippon showcases various psychological theories that can be applied to sport, including how our “brains wired are to make us want to belong to the group”, which accentuates “social emotions of shame and embarrassment” if we get things wrong. She also cites the 'ironic process', 'stereotype threat', 'error evaluate systems', 'cognitive emotional burden' and 'inhibitory systems'. If you’d like to find out more about Professor Rippon’s work, you can find her book The Gendered Brain: The new neuroscience that shatters the myth here.

Dr Carl Senior looks at this episode's topics from a different perspective. He highlights our need for 'certificates of achievement', 'media performance metrics', the 'imposter syndrome' and 'obsessive presenteeism'. Dr Senior also looks at how those metrics can be applied to other sports like rugby, boxing and gymnastics.