“If I knew what I know now I would never have started on this journey.” “I was so naïve when I set up this business.” “I really didn’t have a clue what I was doing.” “I started off on a wing and a prayer.”

These are phrases that we hear so many times from entrepreneurs and business leaders, and ones I hear frequently within my coaching relationships. I always welcome it — it is a brilliant opportunity to discuss the nature of belief, optimism and realism in long-term, sustained success.

Let’s start with belief. Sport has some powerful examples that demonstrate the power of belief. Perhaps one of the most famous is that of the four-minute mile. The story of how Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile in May 1954 is well known. What’s less well-known is what happened shortly afterwards. Bannister’s successful attempt was months in the planning. It was the result of a carefully targeted training regime, and a forensic approach to the race on the day. And it was a goal that runners had been trying to break for decades.

It’s easy to imagine that it took a while before anyone else was able to repeat the feat. In fact, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Just 46 days after Bannister’s feat, John Landy, an Australian runner, broke the barrier again, with a time of 3 minutes 58 seconds. One year later, three runners broke the four-minute barrier in a single race.

Then there’s the power of belief through religion. Jonathan Edwards’ triple jump world record, set in 1995, still stands. Edwards was a devout Christian, and his belief was that he had an ability given to him by God and that it was his responsibility to make the most of it. He has talked about how his belief helped him in the big moments of pressure, where he felt the result was almost out of his hands and more about God’s will. And then of course, we have Muhammad Ali who once said: “How can I lose when I have Allah on my side?”

What’s going on here?

David Robson’s book The Expectation Effect, published in 2022, contains a central argument that our brains are “prediction machines”, steering us through life by generating expectations, and only revising them when unavoidable. These expectations play a vital role in shaping what we experience. In this science-backed book, Robson provides comprehensive evidence of the power of our belief and expectations on our outcomes.

Reading his book brought to mind Henry Ford’s well-known saying: “Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right.”

Is success as straightforward as just believing that it will happen? Of course the answer is no, but let’s dig a little into the dangers of flawed belief.

Many readers will have heard of Jim Collins and his book Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap … and Others Don’t. Collins writes: “Every good-to-great company faced significant adversity along the way to greatness, of one sort or another … In every case, the management team responded with a powerful psychological duality. On the one hand, they stoically accepted the brutal facts of reality. On the other hand, they maintained an unwavering faith in the endgame, and a commitment to prevail as a great company despite the brutal facts.” Collins and his team came to call this duality the Stockdale Paradox.

Collins adds: “The name refers to Admiral James Stockdale, who was the highest-ranking United States military officer in the ‘Hanoi Hilton’ prisoner-of-war camp during the height of the Vietnam War. Tortured over twenty times during his eight-year imprisonment from 1965 to 1973, Stockdale lived out the war without any prisoner’s rights, no set release date, and no certainty as to whether he would even survive to see his family again…”

Wanting to understand more, Collins sought out Stockdale and asked him how he had not just survived when so many had not but had come out of it and flourished. Stockdale responded by saying: “I never lost faith in the end of the story, I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.”

Collins then asked Stockdale: “Who didn’t make it out?”

Stockdale replied: “Oh, that’s easy. The optimists.”

Now completely confused, given what Stockdale had said a few seconds earlier, Collins asked him to clarify. Stockdale explained that the optimists were the ones who had unrealistic expectations, unable to confront the reality they were facing.

After a long pause, he then turned to Collins and said: “This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end – which you can never afford to lose – with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”

So how can organisations use this insight to drive long-term success?

1. Consistently reinforce your vision and purpose. It should provide the North Star that everyone is working towards. Leaders need to sound like a broken record on this.
2. Do what you can to reinforce the understanding and realisation that working towards the purpose is not going to be easy. Progress won’t be linear. Huge amounts of well-targeted effort will be required. Initiatives will need to be trialled, with no guarantee that everything will work. People will need to be comfortable with the uncomfortable. The culture will need to support innovation, bounded risk-taking and a rapid learning from both success and failure. All underpinned by a central understanding that achieving the aspirational is possible, only with tremendous effort from all. 
3. Use data, KPIs, performance reviews and other tools to monitor progress closely on the ground, ensuring that the second half of the Stockdale Paradox is always front and centre.
4. Let your people know that you believe in them. That you have high expectations and know they can achieve them. Equally, help them confront the reality in front of them. Let them know that to do so, they are going to have to develop, grow and work hard. If they believe they can, and you help them to do so, you will enable them to perform and achieve over the long term.

Catherine Baker is the founder and director at Sport and Beyond, and the author of Staying the Distance: The Lessons from Sport that Business Leaders Have Been Missing