Harriet Beveridge: The Two Questions That Took Britain From One Olympic Gold to Rowing History

In 1996, in Atlanta, Great Britain won one gold medal at the Olympics. One. The country finished 36th in the medal table. Harriet Beveridge, performance psychologist, executive coach and stand-up comedian, tells a story on the ActionCOACH UK podcast, one she admits she can't fully verify, about a prime minister so tired of watching Britain fall behind that he helped start the National Lottery partly to fund elite sport. True or not, it's the backdrop to what happened two years later, when a rowing crew that included Ben Hunt-Davis sat down and asked themselves something ridiculous. Wouldn't it be amazing if we won gold in Sydney?

"That was a ridiculous thing to have an ambition around," Beveridge says. "It was crazy." Hunt-Davis had lost at the Olympics in 1992 and again in 1996. Britain hadn't won the eight since 1912. In 2000, the men's eight won gold in Sydney anyway. Beveridge co-wrote the account of how, Will It Make The Boat Go Faster?, now in its third edition, and what she has learned coaching business leaders since is that the result had almost nothing to do with grit or intensity. It had to do with removing everything that wasn't the answer to one brutally simple question.

That is the part of the story most business owners get wrong. High performance, in Beveridge's account, is not about trying harder. It's about making the wrong thing structurally difficult to do, and the right thing the only easy option left.

Why "Will It Make The Boat Go Faster" Beats Most Strategy Meetings

The question the crew kept coming back to sounds almost too simple to matter. Will it make the boat go faster? But Beveridge says its power was in what it let them stop doing. They dropped altitude training. They stopped doing warm-up runs. They spent less time on the water than crews before them. Each decision looked reckless from the outside, until you heard the reasoning: the lakes they trained on were small, they rowed an eight, they spent too much time turning round, and their heart rate dropped every time they did. Warm-up runs were just what everyone did. Nobody had asked whether either one actually made the boat go faster. When they did ask, the answer was no.

Beveridge uses the same question with the chief executives she coaches now. "Why do we have that meeting? Why do we write that report? Why are we using that marketing approach?" she asks. "Is it because it's genuinely gonna make the boat go faster, or is it just because we've always done it?" She calls the noise that builds up around a business the bullshit, and the question a filter for it. Most organisations are not short of activity. They are short of a mechanism for telling which of that activity is doing anything.

Ambition Has to Sound a Bit Embarrassing Before It's Useful

Before the filter question comes the other one, and Beveridge is clear that the order matters. "Wouldn't it be amazing if?" comes first, and it has to be allowed to sound unreasonable. "I think what often is missed in the business world is actually asking that bold question up front," she says. "You need smart objectives, you need that kind of level of specificity to get stuff done. But I think quite often we get stuck in the space of, is it possible? Without daring to dream."

Her own version of the question has run for twenty years: wouldn't it be amazing if I saved the world but was back in time for tea. It sounds like a joke, and she uses it partly as one, but underneath it is a refusal to trade off work against home before she has to. She calls this the power of and. Rather than choosing between the business succeeding and the person running it thriving, she pushes clients to ask for both, on the basis that naming the ambition in full is what makes a business owner notice when they have quietly settled for less than they wanted.

The two questions work together. The ambitious one opens the space. The filter question then does the harder job of forcing a choice inside it, because you cannot train for strength and endurance at full intensity at the same time, and a crew chasing gold has to decide which one matters more this week. "That question, will it make the boat go faster, is introducing conscious choice," Beveridge says. "So maybe you do need to make a decision between something or something else." Ambition without a filter is just wishing. A filter without ambition is just cost-cutting.

Making the Right Choice the Only One Available

The idea Beveridge returns to most often, and the one she thinks matters most for business owners who already know what they should be doing but aren't doing it, is what she calls making it impossible not to. Her examples from the boat are physical and specific. When a rower wasn't gripping the oar in exactly the right position, the crew sellotaped his hand to the handle. There was no decision left to make in the moment. The correct technique was the only one available.

She has heard business versions of the same trick from clients and from James Vincent's guests on the podcast. One business owner told his children they were going to Disney that summer, with dates fixed, before he had booked anything or found the money. A law firm ActionCOACH coaches booked forty-seven flights to Antigua at the start of the year, on the assumption they would hit their targets. Beveridge has a client who goes to sleep in their running kit some nights, and another who let their EA physically take their phone off them and send them out for a walk at an agreed time. None of these are discipline in the conventional sense. They are structural. The person removes their own ability to choose the worse option later, while they still have the willpower to do it.

This matters because Beveridge doesn't think the problem most people have is not knowing what to do. "The biggest barrier to performance is not knowing what to do, it's doing what you know," as James Vincent puts it in the conversation, and Beveridge's answer is not a pep talk. It's an environment. Calendar control, cues placed where you'll trip over them, and other people who will notice if you don't follow through all do the work that motivation is usually asked to do on its own. She also points to a plainer version of the same principle: reducing friction. She takes supplements she kept forgetting about, and the fix wasn't more discipline, it was putting the bottle on top of the muesli box so she'd see it every morning. "You don't have to think about it," she says. "They're just there."

The Beliefs That Quietly Sabotage People Who Are Already Capable

When Beveridge and Hunt-Davis wrote the book, they expected the crew's advantage to be tactical or physical. Instead, she says, "they worked just as much on their beliefs as they did on their technical skill or their tactics." Four beliefs kept surfacing: do I deserve this, is it important, can I do it, and is it exciting. Shoehorned together, they spell DICE.

Beveridge admits she used to think belief work started and ended with the "can" question, the confidence-building most people expect. What surprised her was how much damage the "deserve" question does quietly. The crew, she says, carried "a little bit of intimidation of like, we shouldn't be on the podium. Little old us, we don't deserve to be there." The way they unblocked it was almost dismissive: it's just a race. Not a referendum on whether they were allowed to want something, just a race, the way running a business is just running a business. Stripping away the self-imposed weight around an ambition, she argues, does more than any amount of extra confidence-building.

For the "can" belief, the crew built what they called an evidence wall in their boat shed: erg times improving, role models who had already done what they were attempting. Not affirmation, evidence. Beveridge keeps a private version on her phone now, notes she looks at before she goes on stage or into a difficult meeting, reminding herself concretely why she has got this, rather than simply telling herself she has.

Why the Stress That Actually Stops You Is Rarely the One You'd Guess

Beveridge is careful to separate two different problems that get discussed as if they were one. There is the steady, ongoing wellbeing that acts as a buffer, what she calls the bedrock, built from unglamorous maintenance like sleep, fresh air and exercise. And there are the sharp, specific spikes in pressure that need their own strategies, because generic calm-down advice rarely fits the actual trigger.

Her own example is deliberately unheroic. She loves being on stage and finds it energising. What she finds genuinely stressful is the travel to get there, and she has stopped arguing herself out of that. "It feels ridiculous to go, I'm going to Düsseldorf, really looking forward to it, not looking forward to Düsseldorf Airport," she says. Instead of overriding the reaction, she plans around it: padding time, always carrying a snack and a drink. The lesson for a business owner isn't to be less anxious about the wrong things. It's to be honest enough to identify which things actually cause the reaction, because the fix for the real trigger is usually mundane and specific, not motivational.

For bigger pressure, financial fear especially, she offers a plainer sequence. Get it out of your head and onto paper. Schedule a specific time you're allowed to worry about it, rather than letting it run all day. Get support, whether that's someone to cheer you on or someone blunt enough to challenge what you've missed. Then break the fear into its separate parts, because a vague dread about money is unmanageable while the fear of missing a specific payment, or letting a specific person down, has an actual next step attached to it. "It's much easier to get solutions for the little bits of it," she says, "rather than this big, blobby, what the hell is it fear."

She also names something most leaders do without noticing: running on what she calls the should engine. Should drives the decision to skip a break, to stack meetings back to back, to treat rest as indulgent. Gareth Southgate's line, manage your energy first and your time second, sits behind her own observation that calendars show blocks of time and hide the energy cost of what happens inside them. A meeting that looks like an hour on paper can cost the rest of the afternoon.

The Habit High Performers Have That Most Businesses Skip

The piece of the crew's method Beveridge singles out as most transferable, and least practised in business, is the review. Before a training session, they decided in advance what they were trying to achieve. Afterwards, they asked what worked, what didn't, and what they'd change. "We don't wanna row just junk miles," she says. "We want every stroke to count."

She contrasts this with how business meetings usually end, which is to say abruptly, with no review at all. Her own habit, learned partly from watching Hunt-Davis ask for feedback constantly once he started speaking professionally, is to build in three minutes at the close of almost anything. What went well, what could have gone better, what would we do differently. "I guarantee if I have a meeting, if I can devote three minutes of that meeting at the end to let's just have a little review, all of us, I guarantee the meeting will be better next time," she says. "But we don't do it. We don't do it."

The same discipline applies to communication inside a team, which she thinks is the hardest lesson she's seen high-performing groups learn. No one ever knows what's going on inside your head, however well the team appears to function. That means checking not just what you meant, but what actually landed, and understanding what genuinely drives the people around you rather than assuming it matches what drives you. Early in her career, a boss told her she wouldn't get a bonus that year. She didn't care about the bonus. What she wanted was her Fridays left alone for comedy. He looked bewildered, because for him the number was the whole conversation.

None of this, taken individually, sounds like the material of Olympic gold or of a business turnaround. That is Beveridge's point. The crew that hadn't won since 1912 didn't get there by wanting it more than everyone else. They got there by asking one honest question about ambition, one honest question about relevance, and then building an environment where the answers were the only ones left standing. "It's really simple," she says. "It's just marginally simpler not to bother."