5 Ways to Be Your Best

Performance expert Peter Jensen offers tips to help you succeed

You may never stand on an Olympic podium, says Peter Jensen, but you can still put in a gold-medal performance in any arena of your life. A psychology coach, Jensen has worked with Canadian athletes at every Olympic Games since 1984. He believes that what sets elite competitors apart—and what anyone can emulate—is their approach.

“If physical fitness is power, strength, endurance and flexibility, then mental fitness is perspective, energy management, imagery and focus,” says Jensen, author of Igniting the Third Factor, a book on helping people reach their potential. He reminds his students that athletes’ physical gifts only partly account for their triumphs. “Getting mentally fit sets the table for success.”

Jensen says that his involvement in sports, growing up in a small mining town in northern Quebec, led to a fascination with sports psychology. “From a very young age, I competed in everything: baseball, hockey, football,” he says. “I had a very excitable personality, and learned that my excitability got in the way of performing at my best in certain situations.

This was a lesson that laid the groundwork for his philosophy as a performance coach. “If an endeavour is at all competitive, the mind can play a huge role in success or failure.”

His work with national teams, Olympic coaches and premier athletes led Jensen to found his consulting firm, Performance Coaching, in 1991. Helping athletes win Olympic medals is one aspect of Jensen’s business; helping people in organizations perform like Olympians is the other.

But just how can we achieve our potential? Jensen and a few medal-winning athletes share their best advice.