Flipping for gold, curing hiccups

I'm just reading some thoughts on mental toughness by Adrian Moorhouse, Olympic gold medal winner in the 100m breaststroke at Seoul in 1988. I met him 12 years ago before he started his management consultancy business, Lane4.

He seemed a really nice guy. In fact I've met quite a few people in sport over the years and they all seemed nice people. I shared a bowl of chips with Daley Thompson once at a Wimbledon match. He was very down to earth. My kids didn't know who he was.

A few years back it was not unusual to have Chelsea players knocking a ball about with the kids outside our house. That was when Andy Townsend lived next door before moving to Aston Villa. Another nice chap.

I even had the chance to play against Billy Bremner in a charity match once after he had retired from football. He was a lovely bloke....until he was out on the field.

It was then that I realised that people have their ordinary side and their professional persona that the best ones leave in the changing rooms at the end of the match. I tried to tackle Bremner (to be honest I tried to hack him) and remember seeing a whirl of feet with the ball somewhere in the middle. I never got close.

I'm not sure what any of this has to do with work but I'm trying to make it so for my FT column. It's one thing training for the Olympics and quite another to be flipping hamburgers at McDonald's. But maybe there are comparisons. McDonald's is a meritocracy where it's not unusual to rise from burger flipper to franchisee. That's hamburger gold.

I can see why you would need mental toughness to swim up and down a pool all day in training. I tried competitive swimming for a while as a youngster and struggled to handle the boredom. But it was the swimming galas I really couldn't stand - all those competitive parents screaming and shouting in the echo chamber they called a municipal pool.

You need a kind of mental toughness, I guess, to stick it out in a hamburger job too. I'm not sure whether I have much myself. I'm too easily distracted.

But some of the Moorhouse breathing exercises are useful. There is one where you breath deeply, holding your abdomen just under the rib cage to ensure the breathing reaches the bottom of your lungs. Then you hold your breath a second or so on the inhale and let it out steadily. I'm not sure about coping with pressure at work, but I can recommend this approach for dealing with hiccups. It works every time.