For high-performing individuals
I'm Matthew Green. I work with athletes, coaches, and performance teams on the Certainty Deficit, a pattern I've spent the last twenty years learning how to see and ten years learning how to reach.
It all starts with a belief
I started with beliefs and emotions in 2006, training as an EFT practitioner and running workshops. I coached and worked with many people, all the while observing how many of the same patterns kept repeating. I learned how beliefs are made, how they generalise, and how they lock people into convictions that cost them. The tools I had worked often. They didn't work always, and "often" isn't enough when you're looking at something specific.
The pattern I couldn't unsee
In October 2015 I watched Bryan Habana score a hat-trick against the USA to equal Jonah Lomu's all-time World Cup try-scoring record. After the match he said: "In 2007, I don't think I can ever be compared to Jonah. The way he changed the game, you know he was a class act. He did it in two tournaments; it's taken me three." Three weeks later in the bronze final against Argentina, with the chance to break the record outright, he missed three or four clear chances and was substituted. He said afterwards "sometimes things don't happen for a reason" and "maybe rightly so that record stays around for a bit longer." That wasn't humility. In my view that was a man whose body had already decided where he sat. Alongside the record. Never above it. His words the night he equalled the record had simply confirmed what his body had been showing for weeks. What I saw in Habana that day became the pattern I couldn't unsee. I just couldn't reach it, yet.
Let's build something unique
Two years later in April 2017, with my partner Chantal Dawtrey, I started building something, unaware that it would eventually lead to that unreachable place. We were working in resource-constrained schools in South Africa and we needed an approach that could work at scale, with children and adults, that reached the root of the emotion rather than the cognitive surface. By February 2018 we had it. We called it "Shape of Emotion". It's a model, tool and body-based process that works beneath the thinking, beneath the emotion itself, at the level of the feeling sensation that sits at the foundation of our emotional experiences.
Eight years & 87 countries later
Eight years later, more than 30,000 people across 87 countries have experienced Shape of Emotion. Thousands of hours, one-on-one and in groups of five and fifty. Boardrooms, classrooms, coaching rooms, living rooms. All the time I was noting what it could do. Finding where the edges were. And somewhere in the middle of this journey, the pattern I'd seen in Habana came back into focus and I realised that I had a way to reach it.
The "Certainty Deficit"
The "it" is called the "Certainty Deficit". The space between what someone can do and what their body will let them do when it counts. It is context-specific. A person or athlete can have zero deficit in one situation and a significant one in another. Zero against one opponent, significant against the next. Zero in the league and significant in the knockout.
The work doesn't replace what's already in place. It complements it. Coaching, sport psychology, breathing, mental skills. Real work done by good people that helps a lot of athletes in a lot of moments. The Certainty Deficit shows up where the existing toolkit can't reach, at the body level. That's where I work, beneath the cognition, at the source of where the decision or belief lives in the body.
Does this resonate with you?
Today the Certainty Deficit is where my attention sits. With athletes and people who are still carrying patterns the existing toolkit can't shift. With coaches and performance teams who can see something is happening but don't have a way to reach it. With anyone whose body keeps making a decision their training has earned the right to override.
I'm co-founder of 5th Place. I live and work from a leafy suburb in Johannesburg with Chantal, and if you're seeing the pattern in your athlete, your team, or yourself, I invite you to reach out.