Stay Strong With Will Foden

19/04/2026

15/04/2026

It’s always a great plan until you hit contact.

High-performance to seek and more capacity but the reality is you find capacity before you hit challenge most people that I deal with are trying to navigate high performance and the challenging environments real time and that’s the reason why they’re struggling.

If you don’t understand the leaves of high-performance when it comes down to reaching your true potentially your capacity this is what you’re the work that needs to be done of Q2

06/04/2026

Public holidays used to be the hardest days of the year for me.

Not because anything was wrong. Because I was never actually there.

Physically present.

Mentally somewhere else entirely.

Already on the next move, the next decision, the next version of what I was building.

While the people I loved most were sat right in front of me, I was living three months ahead of where I actually was.

This weekend was different.

Family. Friends. Combine harvesters, chocolate eggs and sausage dogs. All of it. And for the first time in a long time, I was genuinely inside it.

Not just nodding my head and moving along with it but actually there.

That shift did not happen by accident. It took me years to understand that the same wiring that makes you push your limits in business is the exact same wiring that makes it almost impossible to switch off and be with the people who matter most.

If you are built for pressure, you chase challenge.

You lean into difficulty.

You feel most alive when something is on the line.

The problem is that wiring does not come with an off switch. So you end up carrying it into every room you walk into, including the ones where you should be a husband, a father, a friend, a human.

Presence is a skill. Not a personality trait you either have or you do not. A skill that has to be built and protected with the same discipline you bring to everything else.

Connection is probably the most fundamental human need there is. And yet it is the one most high performers consistently sacrifice, not because they do not care, but because they have never been shown how to genuinely switch the other thing off.

The people I work with do not have a work problem. They have a calibration problem.

If you know everyone around you deserves more of you than they are currently getting, that is worth paying attention to.

Mega weekend, now another set of seven to get the ball rolling.

04/04/2026

If you keep shifting the goal posts you’ll never be satisfied.

The reality is that you’re never going to complete this game, so relish being in the challenge

27/03/2026

If you feel like you’re bottlenecked

Then the reality is you haven’t got one leave it to pull.

When it comes down to high-performance things don’t work on it singular level and the name of the game is done like which people to put at the right time, it’s just some easy access information if you could take him still heading into Q2

26/03/2026

Every business leader I work with comes to me looking for the same thing.

Control.

Control over their mind.

Control over their body.

Control over how they respond when the pressure is on, when their energy drops, when their decisions start to cost them.

They come in thinking it is a mindset problem. A discipline problem. A focus problem.

It rarely is.

What is actually happening is that the physiological, biological, and neurological systems running underneath their performance are out of calibration. And no amount of mental toughness fixes a system that is structurally unstable.

I learned this the hard way.

When I was younger, all I wanted was to be good enough.

Good enough to play at the professional level. Good enough to compete. Good enough to belong in the room.

I kept chasing the outcome. Kept measuring myself against the result. And the harder I chased, the less control I felt.

The shift came when I stopped trying to control the outcome and began to understand the process beneath it.

The physiology. The recovery. The energy systems. The neurology of decision-making under stress. Once I understood those mechanisms, I stopped feeling out of control.

Not because things got easier. Because I understood exactly what I was working with.

That is what I do with the people I partner with.

We do not start by trying to fix thinking. We start by understanding what is driving the thinking. Sleep. Hormonal output. Stress load. Nervous system regulation. The biology of pressure and how your body is responding to it.

Most performance conversations sit entirely above the neck. Mine start below it.

Because the leaders who feel most out of control are almost never lacking willpower. They are running a system that has never been properly calibrated.

Recalibrate the system. The control follows.

If that resonates, tell me where you feel most out of control right now. I am curious to know and I can help I will.

23/03/2026

This is the Trojan horse to take your business to the next level.

As we head into Q2 I see so many business leaders scrambling trying to find their edge and try to be at the forefront of what our currently climate has to bring.

But the elite level skill that separates business leaders who seem to keep winning and those who’re always struggling are the ones who actually train with intent.

Something to consider when it comes to assessing your process:

Are you training with intent or are you just shying away from the work?

21/03/2026

The most productive half hour I had this week started with doing nothing.

I trained this morning. Took my boy out for a walk. Had a coffee. Sat down and ran my After Action Review.

No meetings. No phone calls. No inbox. Just space.

And in that thirty minutes, I got more clarity than I had managed in the two days before it.

For years, the only gear I knew was attack. In professional rugby, that worked. You train, you compete, you push, you repeat. The idea of stepping back felt weak. It felt like you were losing ground.

I carried that same mentality into my career. And for a long time it cost me. Not because I was not working hard enough, but because I never gave myself the room to actually think.

Here is what most high performers get wrong. They confuse constant movement with actual progress.

They think that if they are not charging forward every hour of every day, they are falling behind. So they keep going. Past the warning signs. Past the fatigue. Past the point where good decisions are even possible.

The reality is different.

Space is not the absence of performance. It is where performance is actually processed. It is where you separate what matters from what is just noise. It is where clarity comes from.

If you are overwhelmed right now, if your decision making feels heavy, if your energy is inconsistent and you cannot work out why, the problem is probably not effort.

It is the lack of space to actually audit what is working and what is not.

Create it deliberately. Build it into the day the same way you would a critical meeting. Train, review, reflect, plan. Then execute from a position of clarity rather than reaction.

The After Action Review is one of the simplest tools I use with clients and with myself. What happened. What worked. What did not. What changes tomorrow.

Thirty minutes. That is all it takes.

If you are running on empty and attacking everything, this is your nudge. Slow down enough to go faster. The space is not wasted time. It is where you actually sharpen the blade.

19/03/2026

Update and new episode of the podcast out

If you’re following along just a massive thank you.

Some big evolutions pending

Stay tuned

15/03/2026

Rest used to be the lowest priority in my performance.

And for years I was proud of that.

The mentality was simple.

Train harder.
Work longer.
Push more.

As a rugby player and someone who has always chased the edge of my capacity, rest felt like the least important part of the equation.

And if I’m honest, the younger version of me said “rest is for the weak”

This weekend reminded me how wrong that thinking was.

We celebrated my son’s birthday.

Nothing extreme.

No big performance milestone.

Just time with family.

But I’ll dig a little bit deeper to say that for years I struggled to actually be where my feet are.

What do I need to do next week?

What invoice do I need to send X?

What could be the next power play to take me from here to X?

The list goes on.

But the last three weeks have mainly been about development, business and just getting back into routine.

And knowing that rest, actually, is the biggest multiplier of performance you can have as thats there the true development happens.

It’s still a work in progress for me as my default is to attack everything that moves.

But as the boy grows up and wants to learn more about the world the reality is that rest no longer is just about my performance it’s actually a game changer for my family unit.

This is reflection of what I’m feeling, but I know many other high performers struggle with this to whilst running companies that want to dominate.

But until you understand that your performance is dictated by how recovered you are and keeping a strong family unit in place then you’ll always feel like you’re on the hamster wheel.

I’m writing this whilst the family are asleep, after action review dialled in, weekly planning and then a roast, job done.