How to become a winner – that’s what we all want to know. From the point of view of a business mentor, it is a daily challenge for me to enable people to reach this goal.

I recently came across the works of Yehuda Shinar, an Israeli, who has developed a winning formula to teach people how ….”to win”. Yup, pun intended. And what does that mean? Well have a look a partial list of Shinar’s clients. In no order of importance: –

• He has been involved with Maccabi Tel Aviv, when they won the local football league
• He was behind the scenes when England won the World Cup in rugby
• 50% of new Israeli fighters pilots, acknowledged as some of the world’s best, have come through his course.
• Team GB at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing owed a lot to Shinar’s methodology.

And so the list goes on. However, what makes Shinar’s formula so special?

He starts with a very simple premise: that a winner has to learn what they are doing when they are winning. A winner needs to be able to recognise the bits that work – so they can then work on the bits that don’t work………The crux of Yehuda Shinar’s model of winning behaviour is his famous T-CUP analysis: Thinking Correctly Under Pressure.

Enter Sir Clive Woodward, who in 2003 steered England’s rugby team to victory at the World Cup, a most unexpected triumph at the time. Woodward, from the backbone of Middle England, had already been a friend of Shinar’s for nearly a decade at that point. Shinar’s influence can be assessed from in the complete chapter that Woodward wrote about him in his book.

However, the fairy story does not end there. Woodward progressed. At the Beijing Olympic games, he acted as Deputy Chef de Mission for Britain. He was then commissioned to complete a review of practices at the games in preparation for London 2012. Last month, Team GB won a record 65 medals, and found themselves placed third in the winners table, an all-time best. Somewhere, deep amongst that collection of gold, silver and bronze, is a brilliant Israeli philosophy showing people how to succeed under pressure.

And here’s the beauty, it is not a matter of IQ or what you achieved at school. This is a skill that can be learnt by most of us, even slow starters.