From the Daily Grind to the Bike: Why Your Mind Doesn't Know the Difference Between a 100km Race and a Monday Morning.

Ever looked at your to-do list for the week and thought that it feels exactly like trying to ride a bicycle up a mountain peak in a heatwave? Right now, the riders in the 2026 Tour de France are battling gruelling terrain, intense tactics, and massive elevation. Pogačar the machine! I am mesmerised by the entire event and watching them reminds me so much of our daily professional lives. Whether you are running a business, steering a company as CEO, or operating as a consultant juggling a mountain of deliverables, the environment might change, but the requirement stays exactly the same. You need deep resilience, commitment and passion for pushing through the mental pain cave and just doing whatever it takes to finish the race.  I recently read an interesting article about the 1+2+3 formula for living. Have an undeniable passion for it, do it to the best of your ability, learn and master one new thing every day and the rest will flow.

I often equate my life to this duality of managing demanding stakeholders, juggling unexpected crises, and trying to land a critical project deadline before another one hits the inbox. then on weekends this energy shifts to a rugged dirt road on a bike, navigating single track or loose gravel, dealing with a flat tyre, or looking up at a steep hill that looks less like a path and more like a vertical wall, fighting brutal headwinds, and desperately pacing the remaining energy, realising that professional and physical success both just come down to the exact same thing, Don’t fall! and cross that finish line!. Different worlds, same panic, exact same mental engine.

The best athletes are trained to reprogram their subconscious to become great. They do not just train their legs; they train their minds to see the win before it happens, mentally conquering the physical event before their body even moves. If you can see it in your mind, and create the feeling, the goal is crystal clear to ensure you cross over the line, your subconscious mind has already won the race or done the hard work, believe it, and you can truly do and be anything.

Of course, some of us practice this high-performance mental sculpting in far less majestic settings. My early morning spin class, lycra ready with disco music, dimmed lights and strapped into a stationary bike, going absolutely nowhere. With a spin instructor screaming, gun it! And upper level!, to the point that my legs feel like they have left my body by the time I get to 130rpm.  Logically, I am just a person in a mirrored room staring at a blank wall and the instructor. But my subconscious? Oh that wonderful creation made of magic and fairy dust, that subconscious creature is fully convinced I am currently sprinting ahead of the peloton to take the yellow jersey. I feel like absolute royalty in my gear and I am of course I am the king of the mountain as I change over to the hard gears. My cute little brain does not know the difference because it just knows we are in a race, and we going to win it.  As Giuseppe shouts over the music Infinity.  “Gooooo!!.  By now the last thing I am thinking of is chaos or non-delivery! All I know is this is a win, even if my heart has made an exit and my guardian angels have left the building!

Whether you are navigating a major corporate restructuring, delivering a high-stakes pitch, pushing through the final kilometres of a weekend ride, surviving your marriage or an aggressive stationary sprint, the rule remains the same. The only thing that matters is that you keep moving forward. Keep your eyes on the finish line, have a passion for it, do it to the best of your ability while keeping up the pace in whatever you do, design your mind for success, trust your training, and when the pressure hits, just gun it!

Find your hill this week, in anything, stay resilient and become the king of your mountain, you be sure to see another more wonderful higher mountain once you peak, just so we can all do it again, your subconscious will bring forth all kinds of wonderful as you become more and more resilient with the goals in mind.

Caveat: No tokens were hurt in the writing of this short article, and real people and real events have been used to ensure the humanness of it.