What Survives
Under Pressure
I teach performance because life forced me to learn what survives under pressure.
Everything else was chopped away.
1 Why I Teach Performance Under Pressure
When I was young, my sister died in a car crash. No warning. No meaning attached. At the same time, my parents were in the middle of a divorce. What followed was not a single painful event, but a collapse of structure — emotional, practical, relational — while life kept going regardless.
That was my first encounter with existential threat. Not stress. Not challenge.
The simple fact that life can hit you like a truck — and that no intelligence, talent, or good intention will protect you when that happens.
Exposure like that changes you. It forces depth. You can no longer remain on the surface. You start paying attention to what actually works — and what doesn't — when pressure is real.
2 Pressure Is Not a Metaphor
Pressure is not stress.
It is not workload.
It is not intensity by choice.
Pressure is what happens when consequences are massive and there is no pause button. Under pressure, systems reveal themselves.
People don't rise to their ideals. They fall back to what is trained, deeply rooted, and embodied.
Everything else collapses.
This is as true in business as it is in life. Intelligence helps. Experience helps. But when structure is missing, both fail.
That is when performance stops being optional.
3 Three Gaps That Break Performance
Performance does not fail for one reason. It fails for three:
The Knowledge Gap
There is first a knowledge gap: many people simply do not know what actually works. They operate on assumptions, habits, or second-hand advice that has never been tested under pressure.
The Knowing–Doing Gap
Second, there is the knowing–doing gap. Even when people know what to do, behavior does not follow. Attention drifts. Energy drops. Temptation and fear win. Insight alone does not organize action.
The Endurance Gap
And finally, there is the endurance gap. Even when people start doing the right things, they struggle to keep going once pressure, resistance, or monotony set in.
Most approaches address one of these gaps and ignore the others.
That is why they fail.
4 What Actually Closes These Gaps
I have encountered all three gaps — repeatedly — as a student, as a professional, and as a leader. Not in theory, but where consequences were real and failure was visible.
What does not work is addressing them in isolation.
Information alone does not close the knowledge gap.
Motivation alone does not close the knowing–doing gap.
Mindset alone does not carry people through difficulty.
Each helps — briefly. None holds under pressure.
What does work is structure. Integrated structure. A system that aligns clarity, behavior, energy, and meaning — so that action does not depend on mood, willpower, or circumstance. When structure is right, performance becomes reliable. When it isn't, insight evaporates the moment conditions turn hostile.
That understanding did not come from a single insight or model. It emerged through disciplined experimentation — keeping what worked, discarding what didn't — across years, roles, and contexts.
This is where solutions stop being theoretical and start holding under pressure.
5 Tested Where Consequences Matter
The work I teach was developed and tested in environments where outcomes had real consequences — institutional, financial, and human.
Over the years, I've held senior leadership roles in higher education, including serving as Vice Dean Education and later Executive Vice President of one of Germany's leading private universities, where I led major transformation initiatives and large-scale executive education engagements. Earlier, I built a business school from the ground up as a joint venture between Duke University and Frankfurt University.
I later led the Executive Education unit at the University of Liverpool, and subsequently the corporate customized education programs at THNK School of Leadership in Amsterdam — working closely with organizations facing complex strategic and leadership challenges.
Today, I serve as Academic Director of the NYU-SPS & Intellibus AI Masterclass for C-level executives and board members, while continuing to work with companies and startups on strategy, leadership development, and performance under pressure.
What matters here is not the titles. It's the through-line: this work has been applied across institutions, cultures, and leadership levels — repeatedly, under conditions where failure was visible and costly.
That is the difference between teaching concepts and carrying responsibility.
6 The Framework That Emerged
Over time, a pattern emerged.
Across roles, institutions, and contexts, the same questions kept returning: What actually sustains performance? What holds under pressure? What allows people to act with clarity without burning out, drifting, or fragmenting?
The answer did not come as a single insight.
It emerged gradually, through trial and error under real conditions — keeping what held, discarding what didn't.
This work is not armchair integration — it is selection under load.
That synthesis is what I now call the CH²AMP-Framework:
Clarity, Health, Happiness, Achievement, Meaning, and Peace.
These are not abstract ideals. They are load-bearing pillars — each addressing a specific failure mode that appears under pressure. When one is missing, performance degrades. When all are aligned, performance becomes sustainable.
CH²AMP is not a checklist. It is a system. A way to design a life and a way of working that can carry responsibility without collapse.
7 Science. Craft. Inspiration.
My work is built on a three-pronged teaching methodology: Science, Craft, and Inspiration.
Science provides rigor — frameworks, evidence, and conceptual clarity.
Craft translates understanding into practice — habits, structure, and execution.
Inspiration supplies direction and fuel — not hype, but orientation toward what matters.
Each on its own is insufficient. Science without craft stays theoretical. Craft without science becomes mechanical. Inspiration without both collapses into noise. Effective performance requires all three — working together, under pressure.
(This triadic logic follows the model articulated first by Henry Mintzberg in Managers Not MBAs.)
This work is not motivational theater.
It is not self-help entertainment.
It is not built on charisma, hype, or borrowed certainty.
8 Bringing This Into Practice
All my seminars and online programs grow out of the same foundation.
They are designed to help people improve how they operate under pressure, translate insight into action, and make change sustainable over time — through structure that holds when conditions are difficult.
I work this way because I've spent more than three decades studying performance, teaching it, and living it — under circumstances that demanded more than theory. What you'll find in my programs is not a philosophy, but a system shaped by experience, refined through practice, and taught with care and precision.
The formats differ. The depth does not.
If you choose to engage further, you'll encounter work that can materially change how you operate and what you can achieve — but it asks for seriousness. This is not a list of hacks.