Rugby World Cup October 2015
Fifty-five thousand people watching at London's Olympic Stadium. Bryan Habana, the fastest man in rugby, has just scored three tries in nineteen minutes against the USA. He's drawn level with Jonah Lomu's World Cup record. Fifteen tries, a record standing for eight years. Now he's over the tryline with the ball in his hands for the one that breaks it.
He drops it.
Everyone saw what happened. I could see why.
I watched that and my first thought was: that's not what it looks like. That's not nerves. That's not a bad day. Something else just happened.
Three weeks later. Bronze final against Argentina. Four more chances. His teammates were feeding him. His coach wanted it for him. Four chances went begging. He was substituted with thirteen minutes to go and his World Cup career was done.
Now I was sure. I didn't know what I was looking at yet, but I knew it wasn't bad luck.
Then came the interview. "I can never be compared to Jonah."
That's when I had it. This wasn't humility. This was a man whose body had already decided where he sat. Alongside the record. Never above it. He could match Lomu. He could not overtake him. His body had been showing me that for five weeks across two matches, and his mouth just confirmed it.
I'd been working with beliefs and emotions for over a decade by then. EFT practitioner since 2006. Belief workshops. Hundreds of people sitting across from me while the same patterns repeated. I knew how beliefs are made, how they generalise, and how they lock people into convictions that cost them.
So I could see what was operating in Habana. I could read it.
I just couldn't get to it.
My tools worked often. They didn't work always. And "often" isn't good enough when you're looking at something this specific. I could see the problem. I had no reliable way to reach it.
Two years later, together with my partner in 5th Place, Chantal, I started building. Not for sport. We were working in resource-constrained schools in South Africa, and we needed a process that could work at scale, with children and adults, that reached the root of the emotion rather than the cognitive surface. At the time we didn't know if what we wanted to build was even possible.
February 2018. It went live. We called it "Shape of Emotion". A body-based process that works beneath the thinking, beneath the emotion itself, at the level of the body sensation sitting underneath it. The person doesn't need to cognitively tell their story. Their body already knows. I facilitate and the body does the work restoring balance.
Shape of Emotion worked. Consistently. Again and again. More than 30,000 people across 87 countries have now been through the process, many of them in group settings through our Emotional Fitness Classes.
Then it started showing us things we hadn't originally envisaged it for.
It was possible to take something that had been there for years, in the past, and shift it, more easily and elegantly than we had ever seen. And we could take something that hadn't even happened yet, in the future, and shift the emotion attached to it too.
At some point in this work, I stopped. Because this was it. This was what I'd seen in Habana. The thing I couldn't reach. It was happening in the present but it had been made somewhere in the past and his body was still carrying it.
Shape of Emotion worked across cultures. It didn't matter where the person was from, what language they spoke, or what their story was. The body sensation underneath the emotion turned out to be the same everywhere.
And the body knew when it was done. You could feel it. Like eating a meal and knowing you're full. No open-ended sessions. No coming back every week for months. The body got to where it needed to be for a particular experience or block and it stopped.
This changed everything for me, as I realised what was potentially possible.
Every athlete carries a level of certainty about what they can do. In training, against weaker opponents, in familiar situations, that certainty is high. The body says yes and everything flows.
But in specific situations, a specific opponent, a specific stage, a specific scoreboard state, that certainty drops. The body says something different. The athlete doesn't decide to doubt themselves. The body has already made the decision before they've had a chance to think about it.
That space between full certainty and reduced certainty is called the "Certainty Deficit". It's specific. It's measurable. And it's usually built around a belief that the body holds.
Many of the tools commonly used in elite sport work upstream, at the level of thinking. Things like breathing, visualisation, reframing, arousal management. There are somatic approaches too that work with the body. What Chantal and I had built went further downstream. Beneath the cognition, beneath the somatic surface, to the sensation underneath. That's where the deficit lives. That's where the work happens.
The deficit shows up in the present. What creates it was laid down in the past. And now I had something that could reach back and release what was stuck in the past.
I spent the next eight years using it. Hundreds of one-on-one sessions. Groups of five, fifty, five hundred. Boardrooms, classrooms, coaching rooms, living rooms. Session after session. Person after person. Learning what it could do. Finding where the edges were. And the more I saw what was possible, the more a question I'd carried my whole life kept getting louder.
What would happen if we invested the same energy we pour into remedial work into people who are already at the edge of what's humanly possible, enabling what's innately there or been honed over time. What kind of world do we create when the people pushing the boundaries of human performance actually get the support to fully deliver what they're capable of?
