One of thing things I've always admired in top athletes is that, when asked about their winning streak: they're so level-headed.

They can talk simply, powerfully and without emotional charge about the simplicity of one win after another. And only being interested in the next match. Nothing beyond that. An insistence not to get too far into their own future.

In the moments of listening to someone speak like this, it can be tempting to want to step into our own winning streaks. How great would it be to have a winning streak like theirs, inside some aspect of my career?

And winning streaks can  be great to keep us going.

But all things being equal, they're just not worth the significantly damaging psychological cost when that streak inevitably comes to an end.

Have you ever had that experience? Losing your winning streak. And doesn't it threaten all the good work you've done, to date? And leave you de-motivated for the next phase? Was it worth it?

In your role as a leader: where are you inadvertently setting-up potentially damaging winning streaks? And how could you shift that to tracking our averages, instead.

Across the board, tracking our AVERAGES is far more supportive of top performance and balanced mental wellbeing.

I remember a while back, I was working on my own winning streak: meditating for 50 days in a row. The app I'd chosen to track my progress had a winning streak feature. And I was at 48 days when … they removed the feature.

Oh, man. All that work. Gone. And, of course, it hadn't gone. I'd enjoyed significant benefits of 48 straight days of meditation. And there was nothing to stop me continuing to meditate daily (which I did – and still do).

But it was hard to take. And nearly cost me my meditation practice – which I was just about in the mood to discard, completely.

And here's the best bit – and yet another of a lifetime's collection of evidence that the universe does indeed have a sense of humour – the reason they removed the winning streak feature? Exactly because they too had realised the negative psychological impact of dropping a winning streak!

A heads-up would have been nice. But … let it go, Dan.

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