Why High Performers Choke (And How To Fix It)

It’s been one of those weeks where the calendar looks chaotic on paper but, in reality, feels deeply aligned. Durban, Joburg, and a string of private client sessions in between. Airports, Ubers, coffee shops, boardrooms. The kind of week that reminds me why I do this in the first place. Getting in front of rooms full of entrepreneurs, some tired, some fired up, most somewhere in between, all trying to solve the same fundamental problem: how do we actually execute?

And there’s a quiet irony in that for me. Because if I’m honest, I haven’t always been the poster child for follow-through. I am, by wiring, a visionary. I get energy from ideas, from patterns, from seeing what could be. Left to my own devices, I would start ten things before breakfast and finish… well, let’s just say fewer than ten. Over time, I’ve learned that self-awareness is not a soft skill. It’s a commercial advantage. Knowing where you are strong and where you are exposed is the difference between building something scalable and becoming the bottleneck in your own business. And the Yolandas, Carens, Biancas and Abbys of the world have helped square out my weaknesses over the years, and together we built, and are building, some cool things.

That lesson didn’t arrive neatly packaged. It came through a mix of lived experience and borrowed wisdom. My father had a way of simplifying things that stuck. Later, while digging into leaders like Jack Welch during my MBA years, I began to see execution not as a matter of personality but of discipline. Add to that mentors like Jannie Gildenhuys, Terry Munro and Morne du Preez, and the message became consistent. Execution is not about working harder. It is about building systems that make it easier to do the right things consistently. 

That idea came back to me this week through a slightly different lens. The concept of choking.

We often talk about choking in sport as if it’s a failure of courage. It’s not. Choking is what happens when a high performer abandons their system under pressure. When they stop trusting the process that got them there and start trying to force the outcome. You’ve seen it. Rory McIlroy grinding over a putt that he would normally roll in instinctively. The Proteas, in a knockout game, suddenly play the moment instead of the match. It looks like nerves, but it’s actually a systems breakdown. 

And business is no different. When a strong performer in your team suddenly drops the ball, the instinct is to make it a people problem. “They’re not focused.” “They’re not committed.” But the better question, and often the more uncomfortable one, is this: did the system fail them?

Because high performers don’t wake up and decide to become average overnight. Something shifts. Either they are no longer in the right seat, or the clarity around what winning looks like has blurred, or the feedback loops have disappeared. Sometimes it is psychological. Pressure, uncertainty, lack of confidence. But more often than not, it is structural. A lack of visibility. A lack of rhythm. A lack of clear lead measures that guide behaviour before the result shows up. 

That’s why execution, at its core, is not about intensity. It is about design.

In this week's sessions, we kept coming back to a few non-negotiables. You need to define your winning condition in a way that is measurable and unambiguous. You need to separate lead measures from lag measures, because lag measures only tell you what has already happened. You need a scoreboard that is visible and alive, not buried in a spreadsheet that no one opens. And you need a cadence, a rhythm of accountability, where progress is reviewed, issues are surfaced, and decisions are made.

Staying with golf, my buddy Omar Hikal gave me a great construct years ago. And man, consultants, we love constructs. The PAR framework is gold. Plans, Actions, Results. It sounds simple, almost too simple, but that’s precisely the point. Plans give direction. Actions create movement. Results provide feedback. The breakdown in most businesses is not a lack of ambition. But rather when there is a disconnect between these three.

We plan annual off-sites and then forget. We act in bursts of energy and then drift. We look at results too late, when they are already baked in. PAR forces alignment. Every plan must translate into specific actions. Every action must be tied to a measurable result. And every result must inform the next plan. It becomes a loop, not a line.

When that loop is working, execution starts to feel less like effort and more like momentum. 

And here’s where it gets interesting. The tools we now have available through AI can accelerate this dramatically, but only if the underlying thinking is sound. AI won’t fix a broken system. It will simply scale the chaos. But if your PAR discipline is clear, AI becomes an amplifier. It can help you define metrics, build dashboards, track progress, and even surface issues before they become problems. 

So rather than just talking about it, I want to give you something practical to work with. 

PG’s Pro Tip:

If you want to tighten execution in your business over the next 90 days, start here.

First, take one priority. Not five. Not three. One. Define what winning looks like in a single sentence, with a number attached to it. If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.

Second, identify the two to three lead actions that, if done consistently, will drive that result. Be honest here. These should be behaviours you can control weekly, not outcomes you hope for monthly.

Third, build a simple weekly rhythm where you review those actions and the emerging results. No drama, no storytelling. Just facts. Are we on track or not? If not, what is the issue, and who owns fixing it?

And then, instead of trying to do this manually, use the PAR Private GPT we’ve built to guide you through the process. 

ChatGPT Prompt:

“Act as my execution coach using the PAR (Plans, Actions, Results) framework. Help me define a clear winning condition for my current priority, identify the critical lead actions, and design a simple weekly scoreboard and accountability cadence. Ask me structured questions one at a time and refine my answers until the system is tight and measurable.”

Or, if you want the full guided experience, access the PAR Private GPT here: 

👉 PAR Annual Planning Facilitator

Execution is not a personality trait. It’s a system. And the moment you trust the system, especially under pressure, is the moment you stop choking and start compounding. 

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