193 Mental Agility: Why it's so Important & How to Train it | Andrew May, Angela Poon, Jacqui Louder

Some people get sharper when the pressure lands. The meeting turns hostile, the plan collapses, the number comes in wrong, and they are still thinking clearly while everyone around them has gone quiet or gone hard.

That is Mental Agility.

The capacity to move between demands, tasks, roles and relationships while staying grounded and effective when conditions change. It is trainable, and it is the capability every organisation is now asking for without ever having taught it.

PQ founder, Andrew May, PQ COO, Angela Poon, and Sports Psychologist, Jacqui Louder, spent 6 months building mental agility into six layers.

What your brain does to you under pressure. Why your body sets the ceiling on your thinking. How your identity decides what an event means before conscious thought gets a say. The six seconds that stop you saying the thing you regret. How to actually retain what you learn. The hardiness that has you growing through pressure instead of surviving it.Now, they are walking you through all six layers here, with one strategy from each you can use this week. Andrew brings you into his real life test of mental agility with a gripping story of being upside down, underwater, strapped inside a helicopter fuselage in the dark, with an instructor offering him a way out.

But what he does next is where mental agility shows up...

00:00 The word everyone uses and nobody can define

04:12 Your brain under pressure is not a character flaw

07:21 What AI can't give you

11:10 Elite sport, clinical psych, actual clowns

14:24 Why an insurer is training this

17:51 Leaving KPMG for a startup