Pete Edwards is an entrepreneur, father, and performance coach with over 20 years of experience working with elite athletes and business leaders, specializing in sustainable high performance. Pete is also developing scalable wellbeing programs for workplaces and is authoring a book on his knowledge and experience.

INTRO:

Can you tell me a bit about what you do and what success looks like in your world?

Pete: I’m a performance coach working with high performers, from Olympic athletes to corporate execs and business owners. 10 years ago, I was working with people who had lost some of their health pursuing success, and wanted to take their foot off the gas. Now, most of my work is with people that are more proactive than reactive and want to make their performance as great of an asset as possible. Success for me is the difference I make in their ability to perform at their best. When a client qualifies for the Olympics, that’s success. I live vicariously through the success of my clients.

How did you get involved in what you’re doing today? Were you always invested in sports and performance growing up?

Pete: I played basketball growing up but realized I wouldn’t go pro, so I got into strength and conditioning and became a performance director. I’ve been doing this for 23 years now and it’s amazing.

Do you find that businesspeople versus athletes have similar habits or mindset or is it totally different?

Pete: They have different weaknesses, but often their biggest weakness is also their biggest strength. For example, a strong work ethic is great, but taken too far, it leads to burnout. Being incredibly tough and resilient is awesome, but it’s also really easy to take that too far. If there is one commonality, the high performers take their strengths too far.

ROUTINES & HABITS:

Do you have a specific recovery routine?

Pete: Sleep and stress management are the mother of recovery. I have a hard cutoff in the evening. I’m a real morning person so it’s super important to be in sync with my chronotype. I know my brain doesn’t work very well in the evening, so I’m in bed by 9:30 pm every night, even if I’m not asleep yet. I protect that sleep window and wind down for 90 minutes before bed with low, warm lighting, reading philosophy or nonfiction, and spending quiet time with my partner. It’s about what you don’t do: no work, no screens, just relaxing. That’s the most important performance habit that I have.

Do you have non negotiables outside of your recovery? What about training and nutrition?

Pete: With multiple kids, life can be chaotic. I’ve found it really helpful to have a minimum acceptable level for certain things in my life. Training, for example, is easy to get in because I own gyms. I train at least three times a week, no matter what. It’s meditative and essential for my energy and mood. Magnesium supplementation is non-negotiable. Planning my workload is also critical, I limit myself to two main focus areas per day to avoid cognitive overload.

MINDSET:

Did you have an all or nothing mindset before going into this business?

Pete: My early background was in developing sport, I was the director of performance in my early days for a Basketball Academy where we had a lot of success getting kids on to scholarships in the United States, which for a British kid to get a scholarship to the United States is huge, right?

In that environment you start out with a world view that more is better. We push harder. We're tougher than everybody else. And over time, I just kind of proved to myself that that didn't really work, and that if you want to be able to perform at a really high level, you've got to be able to sustain it for a really long period of time.

There's a way of working incredibly hard and performing at a really, really high level, but you're only as good as your ability to recover, and sustain that, and you cannot recover or sustain if you never take your foot off the gas. If you're always hard, charging, always pushing, you will burn out.

There is an evolution of realizing that it is super easy to push someone too hard. The good thing is, physically, you learn that really quickly, right? You can see it in the numbers. You're not as strong in the gym or you're not as fast on the court. So, you get this immediate feedback that tells you that you can't do that. It's more easily hidden with cognitive work. There's no immediate feedback about the pace of work, right? Just work more hours, and you get more work done. Thankfully, people are becoming a lot more cognizant of it now that no matter how tough you are, you will perform better if you are well rested.

What do you tell yourself on days where you feel off or unmotivated?

Pete: Self-efficacy is key: how much you believe you are capable of handling the stress that life throws at you. If you believe that you’re capable of handling it, chances are you are going to do pretty well. Once you start questioning that, you can go downhill pretty quickly. The only way to test and strengthen your self-efficacy is to just go through loads of shit. The second thing, instead of positive affirmations, I meditate on the negative consequences of not doing the work. For example, I hate sales calls, but I think about how failing to do them affects my family’s future. Leveraging that pain motivates me more than any positive visualization

What mindset shift impacted you most?

Pete: Realizing that fear and ego protection often hold us back, and the dragons of the uncertainty of risk or failure are way bigger and fiercer in your head than what they are in reality. Courage is the difference and always feels uncomfortable. If you wake up in the middle of the night worried, it doesn’t mean you should retract, it may mean you just don’t have the right voices or help in your corner. Success is a team sport; you can’t do it alone. No one made the Olympics on their own ever; you see the individual event, but you don’t see the massive team behind them: the coaches, the equipment managers, everyone. I’ve also learned to lean on others who complement my weaknesses instead of avoiding them.

TOOLS & TRACKING:

Do you track metrics on your sleep or training?

Pete: I’m skeptical of most wearables. They often have the exact opposite effect of what you want it to have; they cause anxiety or provide inaccurate data: they overestimate steps and calories burned, and underestimate sleep. My rule that I teach my clients is to only focus on direct measures like heart rate variability, heart rate, body temperature, and annual blood work, and interpret those over time. The best sleep tracker is how you feel when you wake up. The wearables you wear at home aren’t remotely as accurate as sleep lab technology, so don’t focus on what your wearable tells you your REM sleep is, only focus on the direct measurements. If there is one thing that I would recommend tracking, it’s HRV, because that is a real indicator of how stressed you are.

More on Tracking:

Pete: If you're going to make decisions based on bad data, you're probably going to make bad decisions, so you got to be very sparing with what you track. I think a lot of people give the wearables way too much weight, instead of just focusing on the basics.

In order to get somebody to a point where they really understand what is important for their health, 80% of the food that you eat should be Whole Foods. I don't care if you're vegan, Paleo, keto. There's terrible versions of all of those diets. The healthy ones are always based on real food, not a lot of crap. Are you exercising? I don't care what you're doing. You climbing rocks? Are you running? Are you hiking? Are you exercising four times a week? Overall, I think we're losing sight of the wood for the trees a little bit at the moment.

CLOSING:

What is something you’re looking to improve in your health, business, or personal life?

Pete: Health-wise, I want to get back to the shape I was in two years ago. Business-wise, I’m working on scaling beyond myself and building my business to outgrow me by building a bigger team and recruiting experienced advisors. Psychologically, I want to master helping people get out of their own way. I could tell people exactly how to eat and train and everything on their sleep, but some still wouldn’t do it. It’s the gap between knowing what to do and actually doing it, so I’m committed to becoming a master in helping people with that behavioral side and recognizing and conquering the resistances to do what they could be.

I think it’s amazing what people do when they get out of their own way. The successful people can just tolerate the uncertainty of decision, rejection, and failure better than others because they have done it over and over again, and if you prevent yourself from taking the first step, your potential drops to zero.

90% of the benefit of having a coach is them asking you, what is stopping you? That's not a rhetorical question. What is stopping you? It's just that thing of making the implicit feel explicit, and explicitly said and articulated, is such a powerful mentorship.

Which habits or routines truly move the needle for you? And what’s one thing you would advise others to do that could move the needle for them?

Pete: Sleep is the biggest. Sacrificing sleep for “productivity” is a grave mistake. Another thing to add to that is knowing your chronotype and living in line with your natural circadian biology. If you’re a morning person, build your entire day around that. When you start living according to your chronotype, which is genetic, not conditioning, magical things happen.

Also, coaching: having someone who calls you out and helps you see your blind spots is invaluable. If you’re the CEO of a company, everybody works for you and is scared of you, so no one tells you the hard truth. Who do you go to when you’re scared or worried? The role that I play as a coach and on the receiving end of coaching, is having that sounding board where you can be really honest and have somebody ask you things in a way that make you articulate your thoughts out loud and call you out on your bullshit. I think anyone who wants to be a real high performer should have a real, good coach in their corner.

CLOSING:

Edwards Performance/Thrive Management

Beyond one-on-one coaching, Pete owns and operates multiple gyms, which serve as both training hubs and community centers where he applies his proven systems for fitness and wellbeing.

In addition, Pete leads Thrive Management, a wellness consultancy focused on designing effective workplace wellbeing programs. Drawing on extensive research, Thrive Management helps companies build initiatives that genuinely improve employee health, engagement, and retention, moving beyond superficial “tick-box” solutions to create measurable impact.

Pete found that with a lot of his successful clients, one of the biggest negative impacts on their wellbeing was their workplace and practices. So, he spent all his spare time researching and learning and found that a well-designed wellbeing program brings huge ROI for a company: a $2.71 ROI for every dollar spent on wellbeing, according to his research. He currently works with businesses locally but will eventually scale and is curious how AI disrupts this industry.