The mental preparation of elite sport, applied to the executive board

What is mental preparation applied to business?

Mental preparation is the set of methods that allow a person to keep their clarity, their focus and their capacity to decide in situations of high pressure. Developed in elite sport, it rests on precise protocols: managing arousal, recovery routines, preparing for the unexpected, inner dialogue.

Applied to business, it does not target wellbeing for its own sake. It targets the quality of decisions taken under constraint, which is precisely the job of an executive board.

Why the comparison holds

The Paris 2024 Olympic Games made visible what elite sport had known for a long time: at that level, the gap between two athletes is no longer decided by physical preparation. It is decided by the ability to deliver on the day, once, with no second attempt.

A company director is in a structurally similar position. They decide on incomplete information, under time pressure, with lasting consequences and no chance to start again. Like the athlete, they are under continuous pressure. Unlike the athlete, nobody ever taught them how to handle it, and they have no off season, no support staff and no scheduled recovery.

That is exactly where the transposition makes sense.

What transposes, and what does not

We would rather be precise, because the sport and business comparison is often used lazily.

What genuinely transposes:

From sport	To business
Managing arousal before a deadline	Preparing a strategy meeting, a negotiation, a difficult announcement
Focus routines	Protecting decision time, managing attention in meetings
Mental preparation for the unexpected	Crisis management, judgement calls on incomplete information
Scheduled recovery	A pace of work a leadership team can actually sustain
Inner dialogue and handling failure	A hard decision, an owned mistake, a debrief
Process goals rather than outcome goals	Steering by the actions you control rather than by the result alone

What does not transpose:

• The athlete has one objective and one deadline. The company director has fifteen, simultaneous and contradictory.
• The athlete is surrounded by dedicated support staff. The company director is often alone.
• Elite sport prizes an intensity that the length of a leadership career does not allow anyone to sustain.
• A company is a permanent collective, not a dated individual performance.

Any method claiming to apply sport to business without stating these limits is selling an image, not a method.

What Camille Lacourt brings

Camille Lacourt was five times world swimming champion. At JUMP he is a co-founder and a trainer: he runs the sessions, he works directly with executive boards.

This is not a contractual detail. Most schemes that bring in an elite athlete are buying a talk: the athlete recounts their career, the room is moved, and three weeks later nothing remains. What gets passed on in that format is inspiration, which is pleasant, and has no measurable effect.

Here, what gets passed on is protocols. Camille practised them for fifteen years in a setting where they decided a medal.

Camille Lacourt in business, what he actually does

The French market for mental preparation for company directors

It consists today almost entirely of independent mental coaches, supporting one director at a time, one to one. The work is often good, but it has two limits for a company.

The first is format. Coaching the chief executive does not change how the executive board works. If the six other members do not have the same tools or the same vocabulary, the effect stays individual and stops at the office door.

The second is continuity. One to one support ends when the contract ends. Nothing is passed on to the organisation.

JUMP works collectively, on the leadership team, with a shared vocabulary and tools each person can reactivate afterwards. It is a choice of format, and it answers a specific problem.

Preventing exhaustion among company directors

A Choiseul study carried out in 2025 among 670 company directors shows that 75% of them report feeling stressed every week and 36% every day. Nine in ten consider that this affects their company’s performance.

Prolonged stress degrades working memory, reduces the capacity to arbitrate and pushes towards short-term decisions. In other words: it does not only affect the director’s health, it affects the quality of what they decide.

Mental preparation acts upstream, on regulating load and on recovery. This is not care, and JUMP is not a health service. If the situation calls for medical or psychological support, it calls for a health professional, and we say so plainly to the people we talk to. Our work is training and performance.

How it works in practice

Mental preparation is not a separate module of the programme: it runs through all four stages of the JUMP@ method, and particularly the first, J, judging myself clearly: managing stress and mental fatigue, sharpening focus, building confidence and motivation, breaking out of limiting mental patterns.

The work is done collectively, with short exercises that fit into a company director’s day, and reactivated afterwards by the mobile app.

Getting started

It all starts with a conversation about your needs and your objectives, from which a tailored quote follows. The programme then begins with the audit: an assessment and the starting indicators.

Source: Choiseul study on the mental health of company directors, July 2025, 670 directors (in French)