In partnership with

Receive Honest News Today

Join over 4 million Americans who start their day with 1440 – your daily digest for unbiased, fact-centric news. From politics to sports, we cover it all by analyzing over 100 sources. Our concise, 5-minute read lands in your inbox each morning at no cost. Experience news without the noise; let 1440 help you make up your own mind. Sign up now and invite your friends and family to be part of the informed.

Sign up today!

Have you been forwarded the DARE High Performance newsletter? You can sign up here to receive your own copy in the future.

DARE is the mental model for high performance and change.

You write your story through your DECISIONS, ACTIONS and RESULTS and a thorough EVALUATION of how you did.

A new Result requires new Decisions and Actions.

This Week’s DARE At A Glance:

Partnership: 1440 Media - Unbiased news for the intellectually curious.

Thought Of The Week: How you feel isn’t the best way to take decisions.

A Challenge For Today: Three things to do instead of being led by emotion.

Book of the Week: ‘Taming Tigers’ - as recommended by Alec Wilkinson of The New Yorker magazine.

My Week: I moved house (and nearly lost a battle with the Tiger).

Thought of the Week:

How you feel isn’t the best way to take decisions.

Focus Of The Week.

We packed up our home this week. It was dreadful.

The 6-year old’s masterpiece, still proudly on the wall five years on. The realisation that Santa would never come down that chimney again. A quiet goodbye to the spot where Elizabeth the fairy used to leave treats for children. (Do garden fairies visit your family too, or is that an Irish thing?).

Rosie is moving to a new school, and for that, and some lesser reasons, now was the time to start a new chapter. We didn’t need to change. We chose to. Carefully, together, over 12 months. DARE-ing forward.

And yet all week, it just felt so very wrong.

We second-guessed ourselves. There were tears. Restless sleep. A strong urge to stop the process, rewind, and retreat to yesterday.

"Remember, how you feel isn’t the best way to decide.”

At my lowest point, a friend said: "Remember, how you feel isn’t the best way to decide."

And then I remembered: I literally wrote the book on this.

I was forgetting what I teach, and live, professionally—because this one was so personal. It also deeply affected my child.

Change starts with an event.

You either WAIT for the event, or you CREATE it.

But if you create it—the TIGER will roar.

And boy, was I hearing the roar. So loudly it had overridden all my experience.

Worse, I was watching Rosie feel it too. Every instinct in me wanted to protect her from the Tiger.

But that’s not how resilience is taught, or learned or built. That’s not how she gets to aquire the skill transformation for her adult life. (Rosie, by the way, had full ‘adult’ agency, and veto power, through all the planning and deciding.)

But emotions weren’t the point: the design was. And the plan was good. Thoughtful. Right – or at least, our best guess at ‘right’.

Creating the event—rather than waiting for it—is at the heart of transformation and high performance. It’s the courage to close one chapter, or one way of operating, because it’s time for the next.

It’s hard as a parent. It’s braver still for a CEO with thousands of jobs on the line.

Do we evolve now—or stay “doing nicely” while the world moves on around us?

The need to act with intention, to design your future—not react to your feelings—is only becoming more essential.

Why Emotion-Led Decisions Can Be Dangerous.

1. Emotions are temporary; consequences are not.

Emotions are fleeting and reactive. Fear, sadness, nostalgia—they serve an evolutionary purpose, their ‘alarm’ deserves attention and thought, but they are not strategic. When we let them steer the ship, we often make decisions to relieve the discomfort of now, rather than to build the future we actually want.

 2. Emotion defaults to safety, not growth.

Our emotions are a chemical response to uncertainty, powerfully driving our behaviours towards the safe and familiar. But high performance demands evolution. If emotion always wins, we’ll always stay where it feels warm—even if that’s no longer where we’re meant to be.

 3. Emotion feeds ‘continuation bias’.

This is the cognitive trap that assumes the future will look like the past. We cling to what is, simply because it has been and was ‘OK’. Emotion reinforces this bias by making any deviation from the known feel dangerous, when in reality, staying still is often the real risk.

Book Jim To Speak.

Three Things To Do Instead.

1. Design First, Decide Second: Then ACT to deliver the Result you designed

Before the emotions kick in, craft the vision. Design what you want life, work, or your team’s future to look like. When the tough decisions arrive, let that design be your compass, not your current feelings.

 2. Create Space Between Emotion and Action.

When emotion is high, delay action. Sleep on it. Go for a walk. Talk to someone outside the storm. Decisions made from emotional urgency often satisfy the moment but sabotage the mission.

 3. Keep Returning to the Why.

In moments of doubt, remind yourself (and your team, or your family) of the purpose behind the move. What did you envision? What problem are you solving? What future are you building? When the why is strong, we can carry the weight of discomfort without giving up.

The truth is, designing your future takes more courage than waiting to see what happens.

The ‘Your Future: by design’ in my DARE strapline is exciting and appealing – but most people choose to turn back and then tell me a good story as to why.

High Performance is not for everybody.

Book Of The Week.

I first met Alec Wilkinson of the New Yorker at the Blue Hole in Dahab, Egypt. I was visiting my then partner, a British freediver racing Natalia Molchanova, the greatest female freediver the world has ever seen, to 100m CWT.

Alec was there to write about this historic battle for the New Yorker magazine. I found him one of the most thoughtful and intelligent men I had ever met and we clicked. I’ve since enjoyed his books.

He read the manuscript for my then upcoming book ‘Taming Tigers’ when he was there. And he wrote this for the front cover:

 ‘A shrewd, inspiring and practical blueprint for anyone determined to find greater and deeper satisfactions in life’.

Since I had forgotten this week that I had ‘written the book’, I am recommending it: primarily to myself.

And, if you wish, to you too. x 

My Week.

I packed a house and managed to deliver on a big decision despite the Roar of the Tiger. 

Write your story 🖋️

Jim