John Shackelton indeed tapped into the power of the minds of delegates yesterday to improve personal performance.

Mr Shackelton, a businessman, sporting coach and masters swimming champion, addressed participants of the 2016 CPA Congress at Shangri-La’s Fijian Resort.

He said his background is sports psychology and so what he really does in the corporate world is help people to understand that they can achieve an awful lot more than they think they can by reorganising what they think.

He said this can be done by focussing on things like understanding what motivates them, how they can get themselves to do stuff, what to do about self belief.

“This is because this controls all performance, how they can help themselves believe in themselves more because we all suffer from that problem and how important it is to be clear about what you are trying to achieve.

“If we can get those areas right, then just like the athletes, they get those areas crystal clear then they can get their physical performance and mental training and that is what gets them to perform.

“It’s applying same rule sports psychology do but applying it to business.”

Relevance to accountants

Mr Shackelton said an accountant would have to understand a couple of things.

“Certainly an accountant would have fears – not about the technical side of things – but an accountant would be scared of public speaking but it’s part of their job,” he said.

“So if they have the fear of public speaking, it’s an internal thing inside their head that they have to learn to cope with.

“It’s not going to go away unless they learn how to cope with it. So it is understanding how self esteem, self belief works and how fear comes from self belief.

“If we understand that, then we can overcome the fear and therefore whatever our job is, gets easier. So it is the idea of working on self and personal development.

“The mind controls everything we do so the more we can understand how the mind works, the better performance we can give.”.

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