Sasha’s expertise in performance coaching focuses on decision-making skills, psychological resilience and strategies for maintaining peak performance in high-pressure environments.

Speaking topics include:

Let’s Talk About Feelings: Harnessing Emotional Intelligence and Regulation for Investment Performance

• Why your feelings matter: emotions are at the heart of every decision you make.

• Stress management and resilience: building the ability to thrive under pressure requires a disciplined approach to emotional management.

• The Art of Recovery: the ability to bounce back from losses and setbacks and reset to centre is a massive differentiator between top performers and the rest of the crowd. It is also a cognitive and emotional skill set that can be learned and enhanced with daily practice.

• Lessons from the front line of financial markets: a few real life examples of where EQ made the difference - for better or worse!

  The Key to Consistency: Why You Keep Making The Same Mistakes... and How Not To

• The brain and the motivational triad: understanding how you can put your brain to work for you and not against you.

• The behavioural patterns that don’t help you: how to identify your default behaviours and analyse their impact on the results that you are generating. (Are you taking responsibility?)

• The neuroscience behind the psychological barriers that hinder investment performance and lead to sub-optimal results: in addition to the cognitive biases and heuristics identified by behavioural finance, neuroeconomics offers a valuable lens that gives us tactics for overcoming the psychological barriers that get in the way of outperformance.

• Three key strategies for peak trading performance: emotional, behavioural, and cognitive.

  • Know thyself: what are your strengths, weaknesses and go-to responses.

  • Get ahead of your own curve with daily habits for clean thinking and optimised decision-making.

  • Learn to start from zero: practical lessons from sport, trading successes and special forces techniques.

  Decision-making Under Pressure

• What kind of decision maker are you? What types of decisions are you making? We are all better at some and worse at others, depending on our thinking, emotional and behavioural traits.

• Deciding and Doing: your (goal getting) subconscious brain needs goals it can work with and is willing to aim for so, that you can apply your (goal setting) conscious brain to optimise the decisions you make for getting there.

• Clean thinking: a clear head and focus under pressure are more available to individuals who regularly meditate or engage in mindfulness practices.

• The impact of stress on cognitive processes, decision-making strategies, preference construction and risk tolerance. Acute stress can exacerbate existing behavioural biases and cause prevalent emotions to dominate more than rational thinking. A narrowed attention span puts investors at risk of over-focus on short term goals, increased risk-taking overall, considering too few factors in deciding how to act and making errors in pattern recognition.

• Mitigating cognitive biases and heuristics under pressure: Somatic techniques and breath work for cooling emotions and clearing your head in the heat of the moment. Dual process theories help to understand the cognitive muscles that allow you to zoom out of your circumstances, facilitating self-management and second-order thinking. Post-mortems that evaluate and extract key takeaways for future reference are very valuable, reducing reactivity and associated stress and clouded judgment.

  Adapting To Change and Navigating Volatility

• All changes involve endings, beginnings and the messy middle in between, where uncertainty and a lack of clarity can be acutely felt. Volatility inherently entails the same: uncertainty and a lack of clear direction or answers, leading to reduced confidence and sub-optimal risk-aversion and decision making.

• Understanding your behavioural operating system (BOS). The building blocks of your behavioural, emotional and cognitive responses to changing circumstances are developed in early life. They also evolve over time… and can be intentionally designed and managed to optimise how you decide and implement decisions in times of change or uncertainty. Learn insights from neurolinguistic programming, psychology, physiological awareness and cognitive behavioural therapy to understand your default BOS and start to design an optimised BOS for agility and confidence.

• Strategies for thriving in evolving financial markets and maintaining confidence in uncertain times.

  • Preparatory work includes engaging with diverse perspectives and possibilities, gaming potential scenarios and black swans, pre-mortems for understanding how to avoid disaster.

  • Perspective: this too shall pass… and, in the meantime, messy is ok.

  • You’ve got to be in it to win it. Engagement builds resilience and reputation.

  • Reset to zero: how to mentally re-centre, mark-to-market, accept new circumstances quickly and start afresh.

  Holistic Performance Optimisation and The Art of Strategic Alignment

• RIPE foundational principles: Responsibility, Intentionality, Possibility, Everyone is their own CEO.

• Finding True North: the guiding light for your business is its core values and shared beliefs, exemplified in daily behaviours and reflected in SMART results and KPIs or OKRs. An explicitly identified True North provides a blueprint - even when there isn’t one in rapidly changing circumstances! - as well as the foundations for culture build. It provides clarity of vision, mapped for everyone, and is tied to tangible business outcomes. This is key for aligned agility in your organisation.

• Decision Making Protocols and Evaulation Processes: when optimally designed, these align with RIPE foundational principles and your TRUE NORTH. Designed in this way your decision making processes facilitate buy-in and collaboration, accommodate feedback and foster a cohesive approach of cross-functional collaboration for clearly identified optimal outcomes. This dynamic approach is key to facilitating strategic agility and instilling a shared culture of growth and accountability.

• The sweet spot: when your business’ decisions for growth align with its true north, your internal culture and external impact are strengthened exponentially. This is the path to a resilient culture and powerful leadership.