‘Pressure reveals who you really are,’ says leadership strategist Felix Riley

After studying Mental Philosophy at The University of Edinburgh, Felix Riley built a career across comedy, finance, turnaround leadership and business strategy. Now, he helps organisations understand why smart people think small under pressure and how teams can break out of limiting beliefs.

Felix Riley | Picture: Champions Speakers Agency

Felix Riley’s career has taken him from comedy writing to global finance, business turnarounds and boardroom strategy, but the thread running through it is human behaviour: how people think, freeze, adapt and decide when the stakes are high.

A former BBC comedy writer, Founder of ChoiceOdds, Managing Director and Global Executive member at MF Global, and Penguin-published author, Felix brings an unusual mix of commercial experience, storytelling and behavioural insight. His work now focuses on moonshot thinking, learned helplessness, resilient leadership and helping organisations challenge the invisible limits that hold teams back.

In this exclusive interview with the Champions Speakers Agency, Felix discusses pressure, storytelling, learned helplessness and why creativity can help teams think bigger than they believed possible.

 

Question 1. Having worked across comedy, finance and turnaround leadership, what have you learned about how people respond under pressure?

Felix Riley: “Everywhere is the same. There is no particular bias to each profession.

“If you have a thoughtful profession like law, they will behave in a thoughtful way. The military will run their procedures through their heads. But people are people, and under pressure, the individual shines.

“That individual might be a nurse, a teacher or a CEO. Pressure is the ultimate exposure of who you really are.

“When I ran my first company, my team used to say to me, “We hate it when small things go wrong because you blow your top, but when really big things go wrong, you're so calm.” Sometimes small things would happen, and they would say, “Make it worse, because then he'll be calm.”

“I didn't deal with stress back in the day. I do now. I think stress is amazing. There is a lovely expression: calm waters do not good sailors make. Pressure is good for you. It really toughens you up and teaches you.”

 

Question 2. Why does storytelling remain such a powerful tool for leaders trying to influence people?

Felix Riley: “We are hardwired for stories more than anything in the world. It goes back to the campfire in the cave as prehistoric man and woman.

“Anyone who doesn't realise that story is everything is mad. I mean, 85% of TED Talks are made up of stories, and they should be, because that is what we connect with.

“The most powerful beginning to any sentence in the world is “once upon a time”. If someone says “once upon a time”, they still have my attention. What are you going to say? What is going to happen now? There is going to be a dragon.

“The thing about story is you have to empathise, and empathy is the golden ingredient.

“When a princess is stuck in a tower, you empathise with, “Well, you're trapped. I don't want you to be trapped.” In the old days, someone would come along and do the right thing, protect her and all that. Nowadays, you have Tangled, and she gets herself out, and that's lovely.

“Stories create empathy, and empathy is the golden emotion between humans.”

 

Question 3. What does learned helplessness look like inside a business?

Felix Riley: “Learned helplessness is ubiquitous. It is everywhere, and it is something you have to be vigilant against.

“Learned helplessness is where, in life as in business, we have so many setbacks. We hear the word no, or we fail, or your salesperson is on her 100th call and she hasn't sold the last 99 times, so she thinks, “I'm not going to sell this.”

“Learned helplessness is giving up. It is where you sell out your dreams and learn to be helpless.

“My talk, The Flea Jar, builds on that. If you take a flea and put it in a jar with a lid, it will jump up and down, and you will hear a tick, tick, tick. Then the tick, tick, tick will stop, because even fleas aren't that stupid. It will start adjusting its height to just below the lid.

“When you take the lid off, instead of jumping for the skies, it stays there because it has developed learned helplessness.

“I see that when I go into all stripes of organisations. It is a very sad cognitive bias that can afflict an entire company. But it is fixable, and that is why I get excited and give my talks.”

 

Question 4. What do you want audiences to take away from your speeches?

Felix Riley: “The chairs. I hope they take a chair each, so they have got something out of it.

“But that aside, I want them to change.

“I started giving the talk The Flea Jar as a passionate response to what I saw in the workplace. I have been a moonshot strategist, which is a very ambitious business strategist, for over a decade. I kept seeing very smart people thinking much smaller than they needed to, and I became obsessed with it.

“I realised it was cognitive biases and limiting beliefs. I thought, how do I fix that? I don't want people to suffer from that.

“If you just say, “You're suffering from this cognitive bias,” people dig in a bit. It doesn't really work. You have to come at it from a different angle.

“We go back to story. By telling stories about how we get through it, and showing that creativity is the way out, people can be liberated to do much bigger thinking.

“When I have those talks with companies, we have my keynote and then go into a workshop, where people have fantastic ideas because they have changed.

“I want people to leave with much more belief in themselves, much more belief in their organisations and much more belief in what they can achieve as a team.”

This exclusive interview with Felix Riley was conducted by Tabish Ali of the Motivational Speakers Agency.