The ordinary blueprint
Dr Alia Bojilova, psychologist, author and former Lead Psychologist for the New Zealand Special Air Service, on why the people who perform under pressure are made of the same material as the rest of us.
For six years I was the lead psychologist for the New Zealand Special Air Service, working with the people we send into the most demanding conditions anyone faces. When people hear that, they assume I spent those years surrounded by extraordinary human beings. I did. What I found, again and again, was how ordinary those extraordinary people were. They carried the same fears and the same private doubts as the rest of us about whether they were good enough. We are all made of the same material.
When I stood on the Revved stage in August I gave the room three principles: the unrelenting pursuit of excellence, the highest standard of discipline, and humour and humility. They are pieces of something larger, and it is the rest of it that decides whether a career, a company or a life holds when it is tested.
We think the moment is where it gets decided. It isn't. Nobody becomes capable on the day they need to be. By then the work is either done or it isn't, and willpower on the day won't change that. The training is the excellence and the discipline I talked about on stage, and it looks unremarkable while it is happening: the same drills, the same standards, the same small corrections, on ordinary days when nothing much is at stake. What it buys you is that your body know what to do before your mind has had time to panic. That is why the people who perform when it counts are not lucky. They have rehearsed the moment until it was no longer unfamiliar to them.
When nothing is asking anything of you, you will find something to be gripped by. This is the part that catches successful people. Remove the real pressure and the worry doesn't switch off, it simply loses its object, so we find a new one. We replay a conversation from Thursday. We worry about a competitor who isn't coming. We keep hold of a problem we can't solve and can't put down, and we call it being across things. A quick way to see how much real pressure you are under is to notice what you are worrying about at ten o'clock at night. If it's small, be suspicious. Something that mattered has gone quiet, and attending to things that don't matter is an expensive habit.
The thing that breaks first in a change is not the plan. It's the person. Every significant change asks someone to stop being who they have been. The founder who has always had the answers finds the market has moved. The leader who built a career on being needed can't work out why letting go feels like a loss. Twenty years of expertise does not dissolve politely, and no strategy document comforts someone who is grieving a version of themselves. Most of what we call resistance to change is exactly that. The useful question is not how to get them on board, but what am I for, now that the job title is no longer the answer?
We do not attempt what we cannot picture ourselves doing. Almost everyone I work with, including people whose achievements would silence a room, lives below what they are capable of because of what they believe is available to them. William James said it plainly a century ago: human beings ordinarily live far within their limits.
You can push through almost anything for a while, and that is the problem. We admire endurance, so we train it, and then we are surprised by people who fall over after years of never stopping. Coming back is a different skill from carrying on. It needs recovery, honesty about how you are actually going, and enough rest that your judgement stays yours. A frightened person cannot be curious, and someone who has stopped being curious has stopped being able to solve difficult things.
Nobody gives you their best work while they are wondering whether they belong. Belonging and trust decide how much of themselves people bring, and this is measurable rather than sentimental. It is also why humour matters more in serious work than in easy work: fear narrows attention, and laughter gives it back. In every strong team I have worked with, people were serious about the mission and never about themselves.
So if you are engineering a change this year, the question is not whether the plan is good. It is which of these is failing, because it is almost never the one being discussed in the meeting. Teams rarely fail because the strategy is wrong. They fail because the people carrying it don't believe it's possible, or can't picture themselves in the business it requires, or are too depleted and too unsure of each other to do anything hard.
You do not need to be more than you are. The people you admire built the same ordinary things on purpose, in the months, when nobody was watching. That is the whole of the difference between them and everyone still waiting to feel ready.
At Revved, Anna Mowbray asked the room to name the one thing they would change. I would add a second question to hers. What capacity does that change ask of you? Then begin quietly, on an ordinary day, before anyone is watching.
We are capable of far more than we realise.
- Dr Alia Bojilova
About Dr Alia Bojilova
Dr Alia Bojilova is a psychologist, author and one of the world's leading experts on human capacity under pressure. As the former Lead Psychologist for the New Zealand Special Air Service (NZSAS), she was responsible for selecting, training and developing the nation's most elite soldiers, work that took her to operational theatres overseas and earned her a United Nations Commendation for leadership.
With a PhD in Resilience and two decades working with elite forces, Olympic athletes and high-growth founders, Alia has spent her career studying what humans are truly capable of in extreme environments, and what unlocks or wastes that capacity. She is an Operating Partner at Movac, New Zealand's most experienced venture capital firm, where she builds high-performance cultures inside the country's most promising tech companies.
Her life's work is built on a single belief: we are capable of far more than we realise, and she has spent her career proving it.
