3 Ingredients to High Performance: Curiosity, Humility, and Confidence

Prepare with humility. Perform with confidence. Live with curiosity.

Even when he was the fastest man on earth, Michael Johnson still got nervous.

What allowed him to win four Olympic gold medals and eight World Championship titles was not an absence of fear. It was his ability to keep anxiety from becoming performance-limiting and transform it into performance-enhancing.

This did not come naturally to Johnson. It was cultivated through curiosity. Throughout his entire career he never stopped working to better understand himself.

Whether I am coaching an elite athlete, head coach, or a corporate executive, it’s a mix of curiosity, humility, and confidence that is the foundation of high performance.

1. Curious Humility

Self-awareness begins when you stop judging your emotions and start studying them.

As Johnson shared on the Finding Mastery podcast:

"What I discovered was, fear happened when I felt underprepared... Not physically. There was never a time where I was physically unprepared. But sometimes I was mentally unprepared."

Instead of ignoring his nerves, Johnson treated anxiety as data. Whenever nerves crept in, he got curious. He didn’t tell himself I shouldn’t feel nervous. I am the best in the world, instead he kept learning because he was humble enough to ask why he felt uncomfortable.

2. Confident Curiosity

We often assume elite performers live in a state of absolute certainty, completely free of doubt.

In reality, the greatest performers (whether Tom Brady, Steph Curry, or Michael Johnson) are grounded realists. They are very aware of what they can control and what they can’t.

As Johnson put it:

"I know that I can win. I know I can win. I’m the best. I don't know if I'm going to win, but we're about to find out."

Arrogance assumes the outcome is guaranteed. Confident curiosity accepts that while you have the capacity to win, the results are not all up to you.

3. Humble Confidence

Humble confidence bridges the gap between potential and execution. Johnson understood this integration:

"I can win, but I have lost. And before I was the best, someone else was, and I beat them. They did lose. You could lose on any given day. You could blow it, or someone could just have the race of their life."

When you respect the reality that you can lose on any given day, you stop taking preparation for granted. You prepare with humility so you can execute with extreme confidence.

The Mix

When you combine curiosity, humility, and confidence, you learn to transform your fear into a performance enhancing stress as Dr. Kelly McGonigal writes in The Upside of Stress.

At the peak of his career, Johnson did not just tolerate his nerves. He loved them:

"The only thing I miss about track is that nervousness... I miss that because I was able to control it. I learned how to control the nerves, and because I could control it, I loved it."

High performance is about building the curiosity to understand stress, the humility to prepare for stress, and the confidence to master stress when the competition is on.

— J.P. Nerbun

The Culture Captain

If you want to help your athletes build deep self-awareness and real mental performance, pick up a copy of The Culture Captain: The 4-Level Framework for Athletes Know Yourself, Lead Yourself, Lead Others, and Lead the Team.

*Notes

Gervais, M. (Host). (2020, December 16). Michael Johnson: 4x Olympic gold medalist on mastery, fear, & resilience [Audio podcast episode]. In Finding Mastery. Finding Mastery. https://findingmastery.com/podcast/michael-johnson/

McGonigal, Kelly. The Upside of Stress: Why Stress Is Good for You, and How to Get Good at It. New York: Avery, 2015.