In this episode of The Huddle Leadership Podcast, host Kate Russell welcomes Caroline Anderson, Director of Performance Edge Psychology, registered psychologist, and former Olympian (Athens 2004). Caroline brings nearly 20 years of experience working across clinical and performance psychology, including her recent role as Lead Psychologist for the Australian Olympic Committee at the Paris 2024 Olympics.
Caroline's unique perspective combines the lived experience of elite athletic performance with deep psychological expertise. From her early fascination with psychology in high school to becoming an Olympic taekwondo athlete while simultaneously studying and working full-time, Caroline has always straddled two worlds that she now brings together in her private practice and consulting work with organisations including the Victorian Institute of Sport, the AFL Players Association, Cricket Australia, and the Melbourne Mavericks netball team.
This conversation challenges fundamental assumptions about what drives performance. Caroline reveals that the most common struggles facing high performers—whether Olympic athletes, surgeons, corporate leaders, or eight-year-old gymnasts—aren't what most people expect. The issues aren't about working harder or wanting success more. They're about learning to moderate relentless drive, managing the uncomfortable emotions that accompany ambitious goals, and understanding that confidence isn't a prerequisite for excellent performance.
Through candid discussion about pressure, doubt, anxiety, and the misleading messages society sends about mental toughness, Caroline provides a masterclass in performance psychology that applies far beyond the sporting arena. Her insights reveal why telling someone to "just be confident" is unhelpful advice, why anxiety might actually be useful for performance, and how teaching children to be present might be more valuable than teaching them to win.
Key Takeaways
Working hard isn't the hard part: High performers are naturally driven, motivated individuals who set lofty goals and pursue them relentlessly. Working hard comes easily to them. The real challenge is learning how to moderate that drive—to understand when "more" stops being better and starts causing harm.
The success paradox: Society teaches that the recipe for success is to do more and work harder. But Caroline argues there's far more nuance to sustainable high performance. Hard work without balance risks burnout, mental health decline, and physical health issues that ultimately undermine the very success people are chasing.
Doubt is normal, not weakness: One of the most common challenges Caroline sees across all performance domains is people feeling bad about feeling doubt, worry, or fear. These emotions are natural responses to doing difficult things, yet performers often compound their anxiety by judging themselves for having it in the first place.
Confidence is overrated: Caroline challenges the widespread belief that people must feel confident to perform well. Confidence is a feeling, and like all feelings, it fluctuates constantly. Someone can feel supremely confident one moment and lose it entirely the next. Performance depends on what you're doing and focusing on, not how you're feeling.
Anxiety isn't the enemy: The fight-or-flight response that creates anxiety is the body's way of mobilising resources—giving you more energy where you need it and conserving it where you don't. This biological response isn't inherently bad for performance; it just doesn't feel comfortable. The problem isn't the anxiety itself, but how we respond to it.
Get comfortable with discomfort: Athletes excel at tolerating physical discomfort—pushing through difficult training sessions because they know it makes them stronger. The same principle applies to emotional discomfort. Learning to accept and work through uncomfortable feelings in the service of performance goals is a critical skill.
Focus determines outcomes, not feelings: When performers start worrying about how they're feeling—trying to change, fix, or eliminate anxiety—their focus shifts away from the task at hand. That distraction, not the emotion itself, undermines performance. The key is acknowledging feelings without letting them dictate behaviour.
Experiential avoidance shows up as hesitation: Under pressure, teams and individuals naturally want to avoid the threat—not by literally running away, but through hesitant play, passing when they should shoot, or making safe choices instead of committed ones. Understanding this tendency is the first step to responding differently.
Adolescence changes everything: Young athletes often start their sport with fearless ease—doing backflips and competing without worry. Around adolescence, brain development enables them to think about consequences, failure, and judgment for the first time. This normal developmental shift can create performance issues if not properly supported.
Early success creates vulnerability: Children who win everything when young and find sport easy often lack resilience when competition increases and setbacks become inevitable. They haven't developed skills to handle difficulty because they've never needed them.
High performers span all domains: Performance psychology isn't just for athletes. Caroline's second-biggest client group is doctors facing the immense pressure of exams, consultancy qualifications, and literally life-or-death surgical decisions. The psychological demands of high-stakes performance are universal.
Outcomes must sit within context: While wanting to win Olympic gold or deliver a flawless presentation is natural, these achievements aren't survival needs. When performers start thinking "I need this outcome," their brain treats it as life-or-death, creating disproportionate pressure. Perspective matters.
Values transform performance: Caroline points to Ash Barty's career transformation when she began focusing on humility as a core value—not just off the court, but during competition. Being herself and acting with humility on the court became a performance advantage, not a limitation.
Present-moment awareness is foundational: One of the most important skills Caroline teaches young athletes sounds simple but is profoundly difficult: coming back to the present moment. This ability to redirect focus from past mistakes or future fears to current tasks is fundamental to performance.
Parents need support too: Well-meaning parents, coaches, and clubs often give advice like "just calm down" or "be confident" that, while kindly intended, isn't psychologically helpful. Parents need accessible tools to support their children's mental approach to high-stakes situations.
Featured Discussion
The conversation begins with Caroline's remarkable journey from a psychology-fascinated teenager who convinced her school to offer VCE psychology (they declined) to a registered psychologist who simultaneously became an Olympic athlete. She describes walking into a taekwondo studio at 16 or 17 and immediately loving everything about it—the novelty of the sport, the relationship with her coach, and especially the competitive sparring aspect.
Her first competition was a disaster, she admits with a laugh, but she couldn't describe the feeling of competing—the most challenging thing she'd done, yet also the most rewarding and fun. What started as a recreational sport accelerated rapidly: competing nationally, making the national team, becoming a reserve for the Sydney 2000 Olympics (where she watched her friend Lauren Burns win gold), and ultimately competing at Athens 2004.
Throughout this athletic journey, Caroline was studying psychology full-time, then working full-time, doing both simultaneously with her training. She viewed them as separate worlds at the time. After retiring from competition, she intentionally moved away from sport, working in clinical mental health settings, hospitals, and early intervention programs in the UK. That grounding in complex clinical environments, she reflects, gave her essential experience before returning to the performance domain 10 to 12 years ago.
Kate notes the impressive scope of Caroline's current work: a private practice with four psychologists seeing everyone from eight-year-old athletes to surgeons, corporate professionals, actors, musicians, reality TV contestants, politicians, and specialist military and police operations personnel. Caroline has held roles at the Australian Institute of Sport, spent eight or nine years with the Victorian Institute of Sport working with diving, cycling, and gymnastics, served as Lead Psychologist for the AOC at Paris 2024, and currently works with the Melbourne Mavericks netball team.
When Kate asks about common challenges across this diverse high-performance landscape, Caroline immediately identifies two primary patterns. The first is that high performers are inherently hardworking and determined people. Working hard isn't difficult for them—they're naturally driven, set ambitious goals, and pursue them relentlessly. The challenge isn't motivating them to work harder. The challenge is teaching them to moderate.
These individuals, Caroline explains, have a propensity to overwork, overtrain, overthink, and overdo. They default to quantity over quality, believing the recipe for success is simply to do more and work harder. But that's not always the path to success, she argues. There's nuance. She's not suggesting high performers shouldn't work hard, but there's more to sustainable performance than sheer effort. Without moderation, they risk serious negative impacts on mental health, wellbeing, and overall health—reaching absolute burnout or developing complex health issues while losing motivation and enjoyment for what they're doing.
The second major pattern is how high performers deal with doubt, worry, and fear—the normal, natural emotions that accompany doing difficult things. Anytime someone signs up for something challenging, there's fear of failure, uncertainty, and potential loss. The problem isn't having these feelings; it's how people try to manage them. Often, their natural or socially-taught responses are unhelpful and exacerbate the issue, making them feel bad or worse about having doubt or experiencing performance anxiety.
Caroline emphasises that doubt, worry, and nerves are far more common in high performance than people recognise or realise. It's actually unusual when she encounters someone who's genuinely calm, cool, and collected. That's not really human nature, she notes. But people don't expect to feel this way and don't have tools to manage it effectively.
Kate raises the issue of insecurity among leaders, observing that the more insecure someone appears, the more they try to mask it with bravado—constantly insisting they've "got this" in a way that suggests the opposite. Caroline confirms she sees this absolutely, noting people can try to fake confidence, externalise it, put others down, or get aggressive. But the most common response she observes is people simply internalising doubt and feeling bad about feeling that way—worrying that their anxiety will negatively impact performance.
This leads to a fascinating discussion about confidence itself. Caroline challenges the widespread assumption that people must feel confident to perform well. Confidence is a feeling, she argues, and like most feelings, it comes and goes, fluctuates, and changes. Someone can feel very confident one minute, then something happens and they lose all confidence the next moment. That's normal.
The problem is that not feeling confident before a big moment—standing up to give a speech, doing a podcast, running an important race—doesn't feel comfortable. People automatically associate that discomfort with poor outcomes. But Caroline argues that how you're feeling doesn't necessarily dictate the outcome. What matters is what you're doing and what you're focusing on.
If you're worried about how you're feeling, trying to change it, battle it, or fight it, that becomes a distraction. Your mind is now focused on trying to fix or solve your feelings instead of on what you actually need to do right now. That's where the real problem lies.
Kate asks whether this means "feel the fear and do it anyway"—just accepting that discomfort is okay. Caroline enthusiastically agrees, introducing the concept of "getting comfortable with discomfort." Athletes are excellent at this with physical discomfort, she notes. They're willing to push hard in training sessions or gym work, experiencing physical discomfort because they know it's in service of getting stronger and better.
But people are far less willing to experience emotional discomfort in service of performance. There are common myths that anxiety is bad for performance. Caroline argues the opposite—particularly in sports, the fight-or-flight response (which is essentially what anxiety is) mobilises the body's resources, giving you more energy where you need it and conserving it where you don't. That's not actually bad for performance settings; it just doesn't feel comfortable.
When performers learn to change their interpretation of the discomfort they're feeling, accept that it's happening, and know what to shift their focus toward instead, they get the best out of themselves.
Kate, a devoted sports fan (supporting Port Adelaide in the AFL and following the Adelaide Thunderbirds in netball), shares her observation that you can watch psychology play out in real time during elite team sports. She recalls Port Adelaide losing to the Bulldogs in a preliminary final when they were the top team—she could tell in the first minute that they would lose because the team that ran onto the field wasn't psychologically equipped to handle that pressure. They got demolished.
What fascinates Kate is watching teams gain the upper hand—suddenly the confidence lifts, the ball bounces their way, everything looks magical, but it's not magic. It's clearly a mindset and psychology shifting in the moment. You can see the other team losing confidence, and it cascades.
Caroline agrees, emphasising that it's about how teams choose to respond to the moment. The successful team doesn't have some magical ability to not feel pressure. They're able to feel the pressure but choose how they respond. When faced with a threat (and pressure is perceived as a threat by the brain), humans have natural response patterns. In psychology, this is called experiential avoidance—just like we'd run from a tiger, we want to run from threats.
In sports, this doesn't mean literally running away, Caroline explains, but it becomes hesitation, passing the ball rather than running with it, playing avoidantly. If teams or individuals don't understand that this tendency can show up, they don't know how to respond to it. Again, it's not an absence of fear or pressure—it's acknowledging and understanding it, having a plan for how to deal with it and respond in the moment.
Kate presses on this fascinating dynamic: when a whole team suddenly crumples, where does that start? Is there someone on the field who's emotionally powerful enough to trigger the cascade?
Caroline acknowledges this is complex team dynamics that could fill hours of conversation, but suggests it's often a cascading effect. One mistake leads to being six points down, and suddenly, people can't come back to the present moment and focus on what's within their control. Brains naturally want to dwell on what happened or fear what will happen in the future. People get distracted by their own internal processes—and this can happen to a team collectively or to individuals—causing them to deviate from the task they set out to do at the start.
The conversation shifts to Caroline's children's book, Jett's Secret Strength: How Nerves Became Your Superpower. Kate notes that leadership starts in childhood, and the experiences children have profoundly impact how they show up as leaders and in workplaces later. She mentions her own child in high performance and her niece, who's an extraordinary golfer who played before a live golf event. It's exciting but daunting for parents trying to protect children in that space.
Caroline explains her motivation for writing the book: she sees clubs, parents, and coaches with the best intentions, sometimes giving unhelpful messages. Common advice like "just calm down," "just relax," "be confident," or "believe in yourself" sounds reasonable but isn't always helpful, especially if a child is naturally experiencing doubt or worry.
Young athletes often start their sport very early—gymnasts at five years old, for example—when their brains aren't fully developed and things are easy. They can do backflips and triple jumps without concern. But as children get older, particularly around adolescence with significant brain and hormonal changes, they suddenly start thinking about consequences, the future, the unknown, and potential threats like failure and judgment that younger brains don't perceive. Caroline often sees this stage—when normal brain development enables more complex thinking—create performance issues or diminished enjoyment.
The other contributing factor is early success. When children win everything and find everything easy when young, sport inevitably becomes more competitive as they age. They can't win everything all the time. When they experience setbacks for the first time, they often lack the skills or resources to handle them.
Jett's Secret Strength highlights basic strategies parents and young people can use. These include acknowledging feelings as normal human responses to pressure or caring deeply about something, and applying foundational skills like coming back to the present moment. It sounds simple, Caroline notes, but it's probably one of the most foundational things to teach young children in performance contexts. The book focuses on enjoyment, learning, and opportunities rather than the outcome focus that's so easy to get caught in.
Kate observes that outcomes feel good and are measurable, which makes them seductive. Caroline agrees that society is very outcome-driven. We watch the Olympics and celebrate gold medals, and obviously, Olympic athletes want to win gold. But it can't be the sole focus because ultimately it becomes a distraction. People need to think about the how, the why, and the what—not just the outcome.
This prompts Kate to mention that almost every AFL team has a vision statement about winning grand finals. Port Adelaide once included "make the community proud" in their vision statement, which she appreciated because it raises the question: What's the point of winning a grand final if you don't make the community proud? What's the cost?
Caroline immediately connects this to her work with high performers around values, purpose, and especially perspective. It's okay to want and desire outcomes—everyone wants those things. But we don't actually need them for survival. What humans need for survival is connection, love, food, shelter, and safety. When people start thinking "I need to win" or "I need this outcome," it inevitably feels like life or death, like survival, rather than working toward an opportunity.
Kate brings up Ash Barty's Wimbledon win, her gracious and humble speech thanking her team, and how remarkable her presence was in that moment. Caroline reveals that Barty's transformation as a player came from working on values and purpose, with humility as one of her key words. She wanted to be humble, not just off the court but literally on the court—to be herself and act with humility. That became a transformative performance measure.
Kate adds that Barty's decision to retire when all of Australia desperately wanted her to win more Grand Slams—when we wanted to own her success—demonstrates her extraordinary character. She's a great role model for young people.
The episode concludes with Caroline directing listeners to purchase Jett's Secret Strength either through her website at www.performanceedgepsychology.com or through Amazon, providing parents with tools to support their high-performing children.
Innovation Spotlight: Reframing Anxiety as Performance Fuel
Caroline's most counterintuitive insight challenges decades of conventional wisdom about performance psychology: anxiety isn't the enemy of performance—it might actually be useful.
The traditional narrative suggests that performers must eliminate or overcome anxiety to succeed. Entire industries exist around "managing performance anxiety" or "building confidence" as if these uncomfortable feelings are obstacles to be removed before someone can perform at their best.
Caroline flips this framework. The fight-or-flight response that creates anxiety is the body's sophisticated system for mobilising resources in threatening situations. Blood flow increases to major muscle groups. Heart rate elevates. Breathing quickens. Senses sharpen. The body is literally preparing to perform at a higher level.
The physiological state we label "anxiety" isn't inherently problematic for performance—particularly in physical domains like sport, where that extra energy and alertness can be advantageous. The problem is the interpretation and response to those sensations.
When a performer feels their heart racing before a big moment and thinks, "This anxiety is going to ruin my performance," they create a secondary problem. Now they're not just managing the task at hand; they're also trying to fight, eliminate, or change an internal state. That battle for internal control becomes the real distraction.
Caroline's approach teaches performers to reinterpret physical arousal: these sensations mean your body is preparing you to perform. Your system is doing exactly what it should do when something important is about to happen. The discomfort isn't a warning sign—it's a readiness signal.
This reframing has profound implications beyond sport. Leaders giving important presentations, surgeons performing complex procedures, students taking critical exams—anyone in a high-stakes situation can benefit from understanding that their nervous system's response isn't sabotaging them. It's supporting them.
The skill isn't eliminating the discomfort. The skill is accepting it, interpreting it accurately, and maintaining focus on the task despite the uncomfortable sensations. Athletes who can tolerate physical discomfort during brutal training sessions need to develop the same tolerance for emotional discomfort during competition.
This insight reveals why well-meaning advice like "just calm down" or "don't be nervous" often backfires. It reinforces the idea that the feeling itself is the problem. It suggests that something is wrong that needs fixing. In reality, nothing needs fixing—the nervous system is working exactly as designed.
The innovation in Caroline's approach is teaching performers to get comfortable with discomfort rather than being comfortable with confidence. Confidence is a fluctuating feeling that can disappear instantly. Discomfort tolerance is a skill that becomes more reliable with practice.
This represents a fundamental shift in performance psychology—from trying to manufacture the "right" internal state to accepting whatever state arises and performing anyway. It's the psychological equivalent of playing through physical fatigue rather than waiting until you feel fresh to compete.
Quotable Moments
"Working hard is not hard for them. They're driven by their highly motivated individuals that set themselves lofty goals and can work towards those things. The hard bit is learning sometimes how to moderate that."
"The recipe for success is to do more and to work harder. And yet I would say that's not always about success. There's a nuance."
"They're at risk then of it negatively impacting on their mental health and their wellbeing and their health overall."
"Doubt, worry, nerves are actually much more common than what anyone would recognise or realise within high performance. It's almost the opposite—it's unusual when I come across someone who's just calm, cool, and collected."
"Confidence is a feeling, and like most feelings, feelings come and go and they go up and down and they change. Someone can one minute feel very confident in something and literally something happens, and they lose all that confidence in the next moment."
"How you're feeling doesn't necessarily have to dictate the outcome. It's what you're doing and what you're focusing on."
"If you're worried about how you're feeling, if you're trying to change it or battle it or fight it, ultimately that's going to be a distraction."
"Getting comfortable with discomfort—athletes are great at this in terms of physical discomfort. What we're probably less willing to experience is emotional discomfort in the service of what we're actually trying to do."
"When we're in fight or flight, which is essentially what anxiety is, our body is trying to mobilise resources to give you more energy where you need it and save energy where you don't need it. That's not a bad thing for performance settings, it just doesn't feel very comfortable."
"It's not an absence of fear or pressure. It's acknowledging, understanding it and having a plan for how we deal with it and how we respond in the moment."
"Very young athletes can do a backflip, triple jump, without too much concern. And then usually as they get older, around adolescence, when there's a lot of brain changes, they suddenly start to be able to think about consequences and future and unknown and potential threats."
"When they start to experience setbacks for the first time, they don't necessarily have the skills or the resources to deal with it."
"Coming back into the present moment—it sounds easy and yet is probably one of the most foundational things we can teach a young child to do in a performance context."
"When we start talking about I need to win or I need this outcome, that's what I think is inevitably going to come up for us as humans. It's going to feel like life or death. It's going to feel like survival rather than working towards something that's an opportunity."
"One of the pivotal changes in Ash Barty's playing career was when she started to work on values and purpose and one of her key words was humility—to be on the court. This became not just about who she wants to be off the court, but who she wants to be literally on the court."
Connect with Caroline Anderson
Purchase Jett's Secret Strength Available at Performance Edge Psychology website or Amazon
If you're experiencing performance anxiety, burnout, or mental health challenges related to high performance, consider reaching out to a registered psychologist who specialises in performance psychology. Caroline's practice works with individuals across sport, corporate, medical, and creative performance domains.
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