---
title: "Winning is an inside job: rehearse the room first"
description: "Mental rehearsal is prep work, not positive thinking. Three drills
  senior leaders can use before high-stakes rooms: rehearsal, reframing and
  pressure tests."
url: https://linusmurphy.com/guide/leadership-from-the-inside-out/winning-is-an-inside-job/
language: en-GB
type: article
author: Linus Murphy
author_url: https://linusmurphy.com/about/
---

[The 30-part series · Part 7 of 30](https://linusmurphy.com/guide/#series)

# Winning is an inside job: rehearse the room before you walk into it

By [Linus Murphy](https://linusmurphy.com/about/) • 9 min read

Focus area 7: Winning is an inside job. [Chapter 1: Leadership from the inside out](https://linusmurphy.com/guide/leadership-from-the-inside-out/).

Part of the Executive Coaching Methodology: [Know yourself first](https://linusmurphy.com/guide/#know-yourself-first)

![The banked curve of an empty indoor velodrome at dawn, lane lines sweeping away](https://linusmurphy.com/images/series/winning-is-an-inside-job.webp)

The argument in brief

High-stakes rooms are usually decided before you enter them. Leaders who treat mental preparation as a routine of specific drills, not as positive thinking, walk in with fewer surprises, steadier nerves and better decisions.

Five short drills on a timeline: test the failure, plan the response, rehearse the opening, reframe the nerves, then debrief.

Imagine a CEO the night before a board meeting that matters. The pack went out on Friday. The numbers are not good, and one director has already sent a sharp email. The CEO has read the pack three times, checked every figure and rehearsed nothing. Tomorrow they will walk in with excellent information and no plan for the moment when someone asks the question they are dreading.

That is the most common pattern I see in senior preparation. Leaders prepare the content and leave the performance to chance. They would never let a sales team pitch without a run-through, yet they walk into the highest-stakes rooms of their own year on adrenaline and goodwill.

I won the Irish National Cycling Championship, and the thing sport taught me most clearly is that you do not rise to the occasion. You fall to the level of your preparation. So my claim here is direct. High-stakes rooms are usually decided before you enter them. Leaders who treat mental preparation as a routine of specific drills, not as positive thinking, walk in with fewer surprises, steadier nerves and better decisions.

The chapter on [leadership from the inside out](https://linusmurphy.com/guide/leadership-from-the-inside-out/) describes the private scoreboard: sleep, kept conversations, recovery. This part goes deeper on one piece of it, the mental work before a room, and turns the focus area’s three tools (visualisation, framing questions and pressure simulations) into drills you can run this week.

## Rehearsal is not daydreaming

There are two kinds of visualisation, and only one of them helps. Outcome visualisation is picturing the room nodding, the deal signed, the applause. It feels good, and it prepares you for nothing. Process rehearsal is walking through what will actually happen: how you will open, where the resistance will come from, what you will say when it arrives, and what your body will do when your heart rate goes up.

Riders who study a course before a race are not imagining the podium. They are imagining the climb at kilometre 80 when the legs are full and someone attacks. That is the moment that decides the result, so that is the moment they rehearse. A board meeting works the same way. The moment that decides it is rarely your opening. It is the first serious challenge, and how you respond in the next ten seconds.

Process rehearsal for an executive has three parts:

-   **The one sentence.** What must the room be able to repeat when they leave? If you cannot write it, you are not ready to rehearse, because you do not yet know what you are defending.
-   **The first 90 seconds.** Say your opening out loud, twice. Not to memorise it, but so your mouth has done it before your nerves try.
-   **The hardest question.** Name the question you least want. Rehearse your answer, then rehearse the follow-up when they are not satisfied.

## Framing questions change the state you walk in with

The second drill is about what you tell yourself in the minutes before. Most leaders try to calm down. The research suggests that is often the wrong goal.

Alison Wood Brooks at Harvard Business School tested a different approach: reappraising anxiety as excitement. In one experiment reported by the American Psychological Association, participants who said “I am excited” before a videotaped persuasive speech were rated by independent evaluators as [more persuasive, competent and relaxed](https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2013/12/performance-anxiety) than those who said “I am calm”. In another, people given difficult maths problems after reading “try to get excited” scored [8 percent higher on average](https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2013/12/performance-anxiety) than both the calm group and a control group. The logic is that anxiety and excitement are both high-arousal states, so it is easier to relabel the feeling than to switch it off.

A related line of work, by Alia Crum, Peter Salovey and Shawn Achor, looked at what people believe stress does to them. Their studies found that these [stress mindsets can be shifted](https://europepmc.org/article/MED/23437923) by short film clips, and that a stress-is-enhancing mindset was associated with moderate cortisol reactivity and a higher desire for feedback under stress. That last finding matters for executives. A leader who wants feedback in a tense room is one who can still learn in it.

So I give leaders framing questions to ask themselves in the last few minutes, instead of “How do I calm down?”:

-   What is this room for, in one sentence?
-   What would I need to believe to call this feeling readiness rather than threat?
-   What is the best thing that could happen if the hardest question comes early?
-   Who in this room do I want to learn from today?

## Pressure simulations make the surprise smaller

The third drill is the one most leaders skip, because it means imagining failure on purpose.

Gary Klein’s premortem asks a team to assume that the project, or the meeting, has already failed, and to write down every reason why. Klein cites 1989 research showing that this kind of prospective hindsight, imagining that an event has already occurred, [increases the ability to correctly identify reasons for future outcomes by 30%](https://web.archive.org/web/20201220113903/https://hbr.org/2007/09/performing-a-project-premortem). He also argues that it makes it safe for knowledgeable dissenters to speak up during planning, which most executive teams badly need.

The second simulation tool is the if-then plan. Peter Gollwitzer and Paschal Sheeran’s meta-analysis of [94 independent tests](https://kops.uni-konstanz.de/entities/publication/2e749bfb-8533-437c-8203-7e788c910c5f) found that implementation intentions, plans that spell out the when, where and how of a response in advance, had a positive effect of medium-to-large magnitude on goal attainment. In a boardroom that sounds like this: if the chair challenges the forecast, then I will acknowledge the risk first and give the downside scenario before the upside. You decide the response while you are calm, so you do not have to invent it while you are under fire.

| Drill | When | Time | What it guards against |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Premortem with your team | The day before | 20–30 minutes | The question nobody expected |
| Three if-then plans | The morning of | 10 minutes | Freezing or over-talking under challenge |
| Process rehearsal out loud | One hour before | 5 minutes | A rambling opening that loses the room |
| Reframe the nerves | The last minute | 1 minute | Spending energy fighting your own arousal |
| Ten-minute debrief | Within an hour after | 10 minutes | Repeating the same mistake next quarter |

The last row matters as much as the first. A routine that never gets reviewed slowly becomes superstition. The debrief is where you find out which drill helped and which was theatre, the same observe, adjust, advance loop I use in coaching.

## Arguments

### The case for

The case rests on three findings that point the same way. Mental practice improves performance, according to a long line of research summarised in the history note. Relabelling anxiety as excitement can improve performance in exactly the kind of moment executives face, public persuasion under evaluation. And planning responses in advance, whether through a premortem or an if-then plan, helps people find risks earlier and act on their goals when the moment comes.

There is also a simpler case. The cost is small. Thirty to forty-five minutes across a day is cheap insurance for a meeting that can move a share price or a career. Most senior leaders already spend far longer than that on the slides.

### The case against

The fairest objection is that over-preparation makes leaders rigid. A CEO with a script can stop listening, answer the question they rehearsed rather than the one they were asked, and come across as defensive. Boards notice that.

A second objection is that relabelling nerves can hide a real signal. Sometimes you feel anxious before a meeting because your case is weak. Calling that feeling excitement does not make the numbers better. The honest response may be to change the recommendation, not your mindset.

A third is that much of this evidence comes from students and laboratory tasks, not from boardrooms. Karaoke and maths tests are not acquisitions. It is reasonable to ask how well the effects travel.

And there are times when the opposite is true. Some leaders genuinely perform best with little structure, and some rooms, such as a crisis call at midnight, give you no time to prepare at all. In those moments the preparation that counts is the habit you built months earlier, not the drill you did that morning.

### Where I stand

I agree with the warning about rigidity, which is why I ask leaders to rehearse decisions, not words. You should walk in knowing your one sentence and your response to the hardest question, and then listen as hard as you can. And I agree that nerves can be a signal. That is precisely what the premortem is for: if the failure story is convincing, fix the case before you fix the feeling.

In my [seven-step coaching process](https://linusmurphy.com/services/impactful-leadership-7-step-executive-coaching-process/), this work sits mainly in Step 5, Improvement, where we use live business moments, such as board preparation, talent reviews and customer escalations, to practise the observe, adjust, advance loop. The premortem draws on Step 3, Challenges, where obstacles are ranked by business impact and reframed as solvable problems. And Step 6, Impact, is where we check whether decision speed and the quality of outcomes actually changed. My condition is practical: run the routine for your next three high-stakes rooms, debrief each one, and keep only the drills that earned their place.

## Try this

Before your next high-stakes meeting, run this routine. It takes under an hour across the day.

1.  **The day before: premortem.** Gather two or three people. Say: “It is the day after the meeting and it went badly. Write down why.” Collect every reason. Fix the two biggest.
2.  **The morning of: three if-then plans.** Write three sentences in the form “If they challenge X, then I will Y.” Cover the hardest question, the most likely interruption and your own worst habit under pressure.
3.  **One hour before: rehearse out loud.** Say your one sentence and your first 90 seconds twice, standing up.
4.  **The last minute: reframe.** Ask yourself one framing question. Tell yourself you are ready, not calm.
5.  **Within an hour after: debrief.** What happened that you rehearsed? What happened that you did not? Which drill helped? Write three lines.

Then reflect on these:

-   Which room this quarter am I preparing for with content but not with performance?
-   What is the question I most hope nobody asks, and have I rehearsed my answer?
-   When I feel nerves before a meeting, what do I usually tell myself?
-   What is my worst habit under pressure, and what is the if-then plan that interrupts it?

## Where to go next

Mental preparation is closely tied to resilience, so if the problem is not one big room but a long run of hard weeks, read [dealing with discouragement](https://linusmurphy.com/guide/the-price-tag-of-leadership/deal-with-discouragement/) and [counting the cost of leadership](https://linusmurphy.com/guide/the-price-tag-of-leadership/counting-the-cost-of-leadership/). The same drills work before [the tough conversations you keep postponing](https://linusmurphy.com/guide/trust-under-pressure/have-tough-conversations/). In this chapter, [self and team awareness](https://linusmurphy.com/guide/leadership-from-the-inside-out/self-and-team-awareness/) gives you the data your rehearsal should be built on, and [leadership from the inside out](https://linusmurphy.com/guide/leadership-from-the-inside-out/inside-out-leadership/) sets the personal rules you are rehearsing to keep.

I write more about what the bike taught me about pressure on [from elite sport to the boardroom](https://linusmurphy.com/services/from-elite-sport-to-the-boardroom/) and in [what elite sport taught me about boardroom performance](https://linusmurphy.com/articles/what-elite-sport-taught-me-about-boardroom-performance/). If you want a coach in your corner before your next big room, read about [personal development coaching](https://linusmurphy.com/services/personal-development-coaching/), or [book a confidential 30-minute conversation](https://linusmurphy.com/contact/).

Where this came from

Athletes have rehearsed in their heads for as long as there has been sport, but the evidence base is younger. In 1994 James Driskell, Carolyn Copper and Aidan Moran published a meta-analysis in the Journal of Applied Psychology asking a plain question: does mental practice improve performance? Their answer was yes, with a positive and significant effect, and they found the size of the effect depended on the kind of task, how long the rehearsal lasted and how soon the real performance followed.

Business borrowed the idea slowly. Gary Klein’s project premortem, described in Harvard Business Review in 2007, built on 1989 research on prospective hindsight by Deborah Mitchell, Jay Russo and Nancy Pennington. What has changed is the target: not a race or a putt, but the board meeting, the investor call and the difficult conversation.

Source: [Performing a Project Premortem](https://web.archive.org/web/20201220113903/https://hbr.org/2007/09/performing-a-project-premortem)

## Questions I am asked

**Is visualisation not just wishful thinking?**

It is if you picture the applause. That is a daydream, and it can make you feel prepared without being prepared. The visualisation I use is process rehearsal: the first 90 seconds, the hardest question, the moment someone pushes back, and exactly what you will say and do. If the picture does not include the difficult part, it is not rehearsal.

**How long does this take before a big meeting?**

Less than you think. A premortem with your team takes 20 to 30 minutes the day before. Writing three if-then plans takes ten. Rehearsing your opening takes five, and reframing your nerves takes one. Thirty to forty-five minutes across a day is small compared with the cost of walking into a board meeting and discovering the question you should have expected.

**I perform better when I improvise. Will rehearsal make me wooden?**

Only if you rehearse words instead of decisions. I do not want you memorising a script. I want you clear on the one sentence the room must hear, the three hardest questions and your response to each. Improvisation is much easier when the risky parts are already decided. Jazz musicians improvise well because they have practised the scales.

**What if I feel anxious no matter what I do?**

Then you are probably human and the stakes are real. I do not try to make the nerves disappear. I try to change what you call them. Nerves before a high-stakes room are arousal, and arousal can be useful. If the anxiety persists for weeks, or affects sleep and health, that is a different conversation, and one worth having with a professional.

## Sources

1.  [Getting excited helps with performance anxiety more than trying to calm down, study finds](https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2013/12/performance-anxiety) — American Psychological Association, 23 December 2013
2.  [Rethinking stress: the role of mindsets in determining the stress response](https://europepmc.org/article/MED/23437923) — Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (via Europe PMC), 25 February 2013
3.  [Performing a Project Premortem](https://web.archive.org/web/20201220113903/https://hbr.org/2007/09/performing-a-project-premortem) — Harvard Business Review, September 2007
4.  [Implementation intentions and goal achievement: a meta-analysis of effects and processes](https://kops.uni-konstanz.de/entities/publication/2e749bfb-8533-437c-8203-7e788c910c5f) — Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (via University of Konstanz), 2006

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**[Linus Murphy](https://linusmurphy.com/about/)**

Elite executive coach. Linus spent 25+ years as a CEO in technology and services, where the businesses he led averaged 45% annual growth, and has coached hundreds of people from more than 20 countries. He is a former Irish National Cycling Champion.

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[![Rain on a café window, a road bicycle leaning on a lamp post in the wet street outside](https://linusmurphy.com/images/series/deal-with-discouragement.webp)Part 20 of 30 · Chapter 5**Deal with discouragement: a 24-hour reset so a setback does not become a spiral**](https://linusmurphy.com/guide/the-price-tag-of-leadership/deal-with-discouragement/)[![A blank paper price tag tied to the handle of a worn leather briefcase](https://linusmurphy.com/images/series/counting-the-cost-of-leadership.webp)Part 11 of 30 · Chapter 5**The price tag of leadership: agree the price before the seat sends the invoice**](https://linusmurphy.com/guide/the-price-tag-of-leadership/counting-the-cost-of-leadership/)[![Two coffee cups on a small table by a window, two empty chairs drawn close](https://linusmurphy.com/images/series/have-tough-conversations.webp)Part 22 of 30 · Chapter 9**Have tough conversations: hard truth, delivered well, deepens respect**](https://linusmurphy.com/guide/trust-under-pressure/have-tough-conversations/)[![A round mirror on a plaster wall reflecting an empty meeting room with an oak table and chairs](https://linusmurphy.com/images/series/self-and-team-awareness.webp)Part 2 of 30 · Chapter 1**Self and team awareness: clean data on how you actually land**](https://linusmurphy.com/guide/leadership-from-the-inside-out/self-and-team-awareness/)

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