Anyone can choose to be a hero in a videogame, but who has the privilege to be one in the real world as well? Emmalee "EMUHLEET" Garrido is best know as the captain of 5x World Champion e-sports team Dignitas, but she's also a life & death nurse on her day-to-day-job. In this episode she shares why the mental game is crucial on both high stakes areas of her life, how she keeps cool as a leader in the game as well as in the Emergency Room, and the secret way she uses her favorite emotion - ANGER - to level up when the stakes are the highest.

If it wasn't already taken, the Olympic creed could easily be a motto for this show: “The important thing in life is not the triumph, but the fight; the essential thing is not to have won, but to have fought well.” In this special episode to celebrate Tokyo 2021, we pull together the advice of 4 Olympians - 2 summer, 2 winter, with multiple medals and records to their names - around how the Olympic motto can be used for anyone to go higher (goal setting), faster (sticking to long processes) and stronger (focus under pressure) in any walk of life.

When you could be captured, tortured or killed any moment as a part of your work, only the tough can hang in there and make a career out of it. Margaret Coker lasted two decades as a foreign correspondent across thirty-two countries on four continents, including some of the worst warzones on earth in the Middle East. In this chat she takes us behind the scenes not only of the job but also her inner coping strategies, showing us how she hung in there to shine light on issues that have led to criminal trials of global banks and investigations of corrupt police officers, as well as freedom for three people wrongly convicted and incarcerated - proving that the wait can be worth all the worry in the end.

If you had your eye dislocated from its socket during the course of your work, would you go back and do it again? Chasity Melvin is one of the few people who can answer that question definitively, literally damaging her visual system while pursuing her larger purpose in life, playing in the WNBA. While she recovered her physical injuries, the vision for her life never wavered, and here she shares how that vital source of strength has acted as both a motivator and a guide - from her 12 year career as a player in the WNBA, to her journey as an international star, and then a coach for both men's and women's pro teams that has led her back to the league, now on the coaching staff at Phoenix Mercury.

In this episode - the second of a two-part special on NASA and the critical teams that drive Mission Control and the International Space Station - we take it to another level by talking about the leadership of out of this world teams. Join Holly Ridings (Chief Flight Operator at NASA) and Preston Cline (Founder of the Mission Critical Teams Institute) as we dig into how anyone can help build their team up to this standard of vulnerability simply by asking for it, as well as other responsibilities of leader when you're asking for elite performance under extreme duress. 

As the Chief Flight Director at NASA, Holly Ridings knows a thing or two about managing big moments. Not only has she overseen rocket launches & missions to both the International Space Station and the moon, she has piloted her own career to heights no-one had done before when she became the first female ever installed in her position. She's joined here by Dr Preston Cline - an international expert on the psychology of Mission Critical Teams as diverse as the FBI, surgical teams and NASA - for a chat about the methods, mindsets and motivations of those who do things that are literally out-of-this-world.

For all that Alexi Pappas knew about her body in 2016 - enough to push it to setting records in the 10,000m event at the Olympics in Rio - she knew very little of her mind back then. What followed gave her a crash course in the critical role our brains play in any performance: suffering severe depression, she began to think of suicide, only saved by the intervention of her father. Now on the other side of her darkest days, she uses her filmmaking, writing and acting to show how mental health and wellbeing are inseparable from sustainable high performance, especially for those trying to climb their own Mt Olympus.

When leading a team at the top, where do you look to find an untapped edge? Mike Tannenbaum - a longtime NFL executive who led both the New York Jets and Miami Dolphins for more than a decade - found ways of quantifying toughness in talent that was already highly scrutinized in other ways. One of the key elements of that was the work of Scott Goldman, a performance psychologist who has worked with elite players and coaches at teams like the Golden State Warriors, and the founder of AIQ - a revolutionary way of testing athletic intelligence & executive function in high performing populations.

When you don’t know where your next meal is coming from, how can you still dream big? Freddie Stevenson has lived the answer to that question - he went from growing up in a family of 5 that couldn’t afford to eat some nights, to winning a national championship with Florida State Seminoles, which led to a brief career in the NFL, which led to becoming a published author and motivational speaker. Thanks to his experiences as a Fullback (a relatively unheralded position in football) Freddie became a specialist at finding a way through when you can’t see what’s on the other side.

What do the best in the world of commerce have in common? Jordan Belfort - better known as the Wolf of Wall St - has lived the highest highs and the lowest lows in the world of finance, and now shares what he's learned along the way about what separates the best from the rest in business. Joining him is Justin Kenna, CEO of GameSquare, a pioneering e-sports brand that's a perfect case study of the type of competitive advantage that comes from bravery, being bold, and the "ruthless pursuit of short term goals".