Think 2 Win Performance has been involved in performance research and applied projects across elite sport, business and high-performance education. The work below reflects the breadth of that experience, and the rigour we bring to understanding what actually drives performance in real-world environments.
Objective: Examine the communicative strategies sailors use to collaborate in a dynamic environment, and how they influence performance.
Method: Race starts were audio and video recorded and coded for frequency and type of communication, analysed with descriptive statistics and Conversation Analysis.
Findings: Overall frequency had no association with starting performance, but the consistency, phraseology and structure of communication, and an individual's communication frequency, did. Clear, short, consistent messages helped form the communication that led to higher performance.
Focus: Explores emotional intelligence as an important construct in the sport domain. While it is widely accepted that emotions play a large part in the development and performance of athletes and teams, little research explores these relationships directly.
Why it matters: Understanding how athletes read and regulate emotion, and how that interacts with competitive anxiety, informs how we build steadier performers.
Focus: Explored what triggers self-talk, and how it shapes the effectiveness of communication, in high-performance sailing.
Method: Semi-structured interviews with six British Olympic Development Squad double-handed sailors, analysed using causal networks.
Findings: Seven antecedents shaped communication, from environmental conditions and stage in the race to boat handling and emotional state. Self-talk served clear positive functions, including focus, understanding, memory, thought-sharing and a sense of control, and at times negative ones. Communication and self-talk continually influenced each other.
Objective: The start is the single best chance to gain an advantage. This work sets out a new way to choose between the six main starting strategies.
Method: Each strategy was analysed with game theory and agent-based simulations, generating a utility function for every time step by iterating backwards.
Findings: By letting boats on weaker strategies update to stronger ones, the model evolves towards a stable state, where no boat gains by changing strategy: a practical lens on how a start actually plays out.
This is the research that informs every Think 2 Win Performance engagement. Let us bring that same rigour to yours.