Source: Sporting Excellence — Ted Garratt (1998). Applied to the 8 Steps of the Repeatable Sale.

Kevin Keegan didn't motivate his England players with speeches. He gave them a process.

Before a match, each player ran through a precise five-minute sequence: review the goal, reconstruct the success state, run the SWISH, visualise performance, commit to process. In the locker room, with 80,000 people waiting outside, that ritual was the difference between a player who performs to their ability and one who tightens up under the lights.

Ted Garratt documented this in Sporting Excellence (1998). He worked with Keegan, with Dean Richards' England rugby team, and with corporate clients across Europe. His finding: excellence is not a personality trait. It is a learnable set of cognitive and physiological patterns. Study them. Extract them. Install them.

The anxiety trigger fires before you say a word. The buyer feels it before you know it happened. By the time you walk into the room, the conversation is already in the wrong state. The technique you learned, the 8 Steps, the questions, the sequence, is fine. What undermines it is the automatic wiring underneath.

Why Conscious Intention Cannot Fix an Automatic Response

A rep who has run Steps 1-8 a hundred times will still soften "To which starting date are we committing?" to "When were you thinking?" when the pressure gets high enough. The question disappears not because they forgot it. Because an older, faster reflex fired first, an automatic anxiety response wired below the level of conscious technique.

You cannot overwrite automatic responses with conscious intention. The research Garratt draws on is consistent: the automatic response lives in a different system than deliberate knowledge. Teaching the right question does not replace the anxious reflex. What works is replacing the reflex itself.

That is what the SWISH pattern does.

The SWISH: Replacing the Reflex Before the Call

The SWISH is the most specific pre-call tool available. Here is the full sequence:

Step 1 — Build the cue image. Think of the moment that triggers the anxiety. Walking into the room where the high-value prospect sits. Make the image big, bright, fully associated, you are inside it, seeing through your own eyes. Make it bright enough that you feel the tightness in your chest starting. That is the signal you have hit the right image.

Step 2 — Create the excellence image. Now build a small, dark, dissociated image of yourself performing at your best in that exact situation. You see yourself from the outside, composed, in control, the questions coming from certainty rather than need. Small, like a thumbnail in the corner of the first image.

Step 3 — SWISH. Simultaneously: shrink the cue image to a dot, and expand the excellence image until it fills the frame, bright and vivid and associated. You are now inside the peak state.

Step 4 — Clear the screen. Repeat five times fast.

Test it: think of the original cue. Notice what fires automatically now. If the SWISH worked, the resource state arrives before the anxiety does.

Run this over five days before a high-stakes pitch. The rep who walks into that room has already replaced the reflex dozens of times.

Signals of Success: Your Personal Performance Checklist

Keegan's coaching staff didn't just build rituals. They filmed each player at their best and catalogued what was present: posture, breathing rate, focus direction, the quiet before a key moment, the register of the player's voice in the tunnel. Garratt calls these "Signals of Success."

The insight: when you are at your best, your body is doing something specific. Your shoulders hold a particular position. Your breathing has a particular rhythm. Your internal voice drops to a lower register and moves more slowly. These are not symptoms of peak performance. They are access points to it. Reconstruct the physiology, and you reconstruct the state.

Build your own Signals of Success file after a call that went well:

1. What was my body doing differently before and during that call?
2. What did I say to myself, and in what tone of voice?
3. What was I focused on, outcome, process, or the person in front of me?

Once catalogued, these become a pre-call physical reconstruction. Set the posture. Set the breathing. Set the internal voice to the right register. You have rebuilt the conditions of your best performance without waiting for inspiration to arrive.

Meta-Programmes: Why Rapport Fails Before It Starts

Most salespeople who fail at rapport think they lack connection skills. Garratt's diagnosis is different: they have mismatched processing styles.

Meta-programmes are the filters through which people receive information.

Toward vs. Away motivation. Some buyers move toward what they want ("we are aiming to double revenue by Q4"). Others move away from what they fear ("we cannot afford another quarter like Q2"). The seller who speaks only in gains to an away-motivated buyer sounds naive. Listen for which direction the buyer is moving in their Step 2 answer. "Avoid" and "prevent" signal away. "Achieve" and "reach" signal toward.

Big picture vs. detail. Some buyers need the framework first and find granular specifics irritating. Others want the outcome and find strategic abstractions ungrounded. Listen for their Step 5 answer: do they name a number (detail) or a direction (big picture)?

This is why two reps with identical scripts close at radically different rates with the same ICP. Processing style mismatch produces friction before the first question lands.

The 8 Steps Through the Sporting Excellence Lens

Step 1 — Rapport & Trust. The SWISH fires here, before the first word. Mirroring and pacing are technically sound; their effect depends entirely on the state the seller is in when they use them. A rep in their resource state mirrors from genuine presence. A rep in anxiety mirrors from performance.

Step 2 — Frustration. Listen for the meta-programme in the answer. "We keep losing deals at proposal stage" (away). "We want to be winning the enterprise accounts we're targeting" (toward). The next question adjusts to match.

Step 3 — Importance / Context. Genuine curiosity produces different information than procedural obligation. "What is happening around this that makes it particularly important right now?" asked from real interest opens doors that the same question asked mechanically closes.

Step 4 — Cost of Inaction. For many reps, the silence after "what happens if you do nothing?" fires an automatic reflex, they fill it before the buyer feels the weight of their own words. Build a SWISH specifically for this silence. Replace the automatic filler response with an automatic holding pattern. One slow breath. Then stillness.

Step 5 — Deliverables. Write verbatim. Their exact words carry the full emotional charge of the problem. Your translation carries yours. The SOW headline should activate the buyer when they read it. That requires their language, not yours.

Step 6 — Investment. A toward-motivated buyer hears "time, people, money" as investment in a future they are building. An away-motivated buyer hears three things they might lose. The sequence stays the same. The framing shifts.

Step 7 — Starting Date. "To which starting date are we committing?" is a process commitment. Help the buyer hear it that way: "Let's agree a date so we can build the plan backward from it." The date is not the close. It is the process start.

Step 8 — Statement of Work. Before you open the document, reconstruct your resource state. The buyer signs a proposal sent by whoever you are in that moment.

The 5-Minute Pre-Call Mental Warm-Up

Adapted from Garratt's athlete protocol:

1. Goal review (30 seconds) — State your process objective. Not "close the deal." "Get to Step 4 clearly and hold the silence." Specific and within your control.
2. Signals of Success reconstruction (1 minute) — Physically rebuild your success signature: posture, breathing rhythm, internal voice register.
3. SWISH (2 minutes) — Five reps. Replace the anxiety trigger with the resource state.
4. Visualise the call (1 minute) — See yourself moving through the steps in the right state.
5. Commit (30 seconds) — "I am here to understand this person's problem. The outcome will take care of itself."

This works if you use it before the next call, not as something to try eventually. Most people read this and nod. The ones who close differently are the ones who run the first SWISH today.

What Keegan and Richards Knew

Both built teams where individual excellence was the floor, not the ceiling. The rituals were not about motivation. They were about consistency, every player performing at their reliable best, not their occasional brilliant best.

The same applies to a sales team. Five reps all running their pre-call sequence, all matching meta-programmes in Step 2, all holding silence in Step 4, that is a team that compounds.

Excellence is not a personality trait. It is a set of learnable patterns. Study your own. Extract them. Install them before the next call.

If you want to run the 8 Steps with a spotter who knows how to build the pre-call sequence with you, that is what we do at Strategy Sprints: https://www.strategysprints.com

Happy hunting. Simon & The Sprinters 🐬⚡️🐆