The public knows Gary Kirsten as one of South Africa’s most admired cricketers, the coach who guided India to its 2011 Cricket World Cup triumph, and more recently the man entrusted with rebuilding Sri Lanka’s national side. But listening to him speak at a recent Private Client Holdings (PCH) client event in Cape Town, it became clear that the lessons he values most have surprisingly little to do with cricket itself.
Instead, they are about something far more universal: how people make decisions when the outcome is uncertain.
Kirsten was joined by Mark MacSymon, Certified Financial Planner® and wealth manager at Private Client Holdings; performance coach and author Tom Dawson-Squibb; and Nicola Langridge, PCH wealth manager and the Financial Planning Institute’s 2025 Financial Planner of the Year.
Kirsten explored the similarities between elite sport and long-term wealth creation. Under MacSymon’s moderation, the discussion ranged from leadership and trust to market volatility and human behaviour, but one message surfaced repeatedly.
Success – whether in sport, business, or investing – is rarely built on a single defining moment. More often, it is the product of countless decisions made consistently over time.
Winning starts long before the big moment
For anyone expecting stories from World Cup finals or tense dressing rooms, Kirsten was more interested in what happens long before either.
MacSymon asked how much of winning actually happens before a match begins.
“Everything. It is everything.”
The competition itself, he explained, is only the visible outcome of weeks and months of preparation. By the time athletes walk onto the field, most of the important work has been done. Coaches spend their time searching for small advantages that, taken together, shift the odds in their favour: better preparation, deeper analysis, clearer roles, and stronger habits.
“In cricket, you’re not seeing many teams that aren’t relatively even,” he observed. The difference lies in finding a competitive edge through preparation rather than hoping talent alone will carry the day.
Financial planners face much the same challenge.
One of the biggest mistakes investors make, Langridge said, is trying to predict what markets, currencies, or geopolitical events will do next. Even experienced professionals cannot do that consistently.
Instead, successful investing is about being prepared for a range of possible outcomes.
“It’s helping people understand that you can’t predict, but you can prepare,” she said.
Rather than trying to build a financial plan around a single future, advisers should help clients to create one robust enough to withstand many different futures. That is where expertise matters, she explained – drawing on specialists in investments, tax, and estate planning to test a family’s financial strategy from multiple angles before life inevitably throws surprises their way.
Neither a cricket coach nor a financial planner knows exactly what tomorrow will bring. Their role is to ensure that when uncertainty arrives, it does not become a crisis.
The danger of chasing quick results
If preparation is one pillar of sustained success, patience is another.
Kirsten believes modern society has become increasingly uncomfortable with processes that take time. Whether in professional sport or elsewhere, the pressure to produce immediate results often causes people to abandon strategies before they have had a chance to work.
“I think the one thing that scares me in sports and in life as well is that we have moved very much into looking at success in a very short space of time,” he said. “If we don’t have that success, we’ve got to fix it… We don’t allow a process to unfold.”
He described how teams can easily fall into a cycle of constant change – replacing players, changing coaches or overhauling systems after every setback. The result is perpetual rebuilding rather than long-term improvement.
Real progress, he argued, is rarely linear. Teams improve, plateau, sometimes even regress before they move forward again. The challenge for leaders is to maintain confidence in the process during those inevitable periods when results lag effort.
Financial advisers often face much the same challenge when markets become unsettled.
Langridge recalled one recently retired client who checked his investment portfolio several times a day, calling whenever markets dipped and again when they recovered. Eventually, they agreed on a different routine. Instead of checking his portfolio every day, he began reviewing it once a week. Later, that became once a month.
The aim wasn’t to ignore market movements. It was to stop short-term noise from drowning out long-term thinking.
It’s a pattern Langridge sees regularly. Clients often become anxious after a few weeks of poor market performance.
“I get a lot of calls going, ‘I’ve seen the last two months, my portfolio is really down.’ […] But let’s look at the last 12 months. If you zoom out, you see a completely different picture.”
Helping clients “zoom out”, she said, allows them to reconnect with the long-term objectives that shaped their financial plan in the first place, rather than making decisions based on the latest headline or market movement.
Good decisions are made before the pressure arrives
If patience helps people to stay the course, what happens when pressure inevitably arrives?
For Dawson-Squibb, that’s precisely the wrong moment to start figuring out how to respond.
Borrowing a phrase often attributed to the US Navy SEALs, he said: “We don’t rise to the occasion. We sink to the level of our training.”
Under pressure, people tend to fall back on their habits. If those habits have been developed deliberately, good decisions become more likely. If they haven’t, emotion often takes over.
Kirsten sees it much the same way.
Although instinct has its place, he said, the best decisions are rarely emotional. His coaching teams build systems that gather information, analyse conditions, and create consistent decision-making frameworks before the pressure of competition arrives.
The eventual decision may still prove wrong – no coach or investor gets every call right – but it is grounded in evidence rather than panic.
“I try and build as much consistency in my decision making as possible,” he said. “We have systems that we put in place that help us make those decisions.”
That, he believes, allows people to make more cognitive decisions instead of emotional ones when the stakes are highest.
Markets will always produce uncertainty, Langridge said, but not every bout of volatility demands action. The challenge is knowing the difference between reacting emotionally and responding through a disciplined investment process.
“There’s a difference between being reactive and being responsive,” she explained. “Reactive is driven from fear. Responsive is your asset management team… making those small tweaks instead of being reactive and jumping at any kind of volatility.”
Whether on the cricket field or in a client’s portfolio, the quality of decisions made under pressure depends largely on the systems and habits built long before the pressure arrives.
Success is never a solo performance
Although elite sport often celebrates individual brilliance, Dawson-Squibb challenged one of its most enduring myths.
“If it’s to be, it’s up to me.”
“I don’t believe that,” he said.
Instead, he argued that exceptional performance is built through relationships – people making one another better.
“I think if it’s to be, it’s very much around how we connect and interact with people.”
He summed it up in a single sentence.
“The antidote to pressure is connection.”
Whether it’s a bowler trusting advice from teammates between deliveries, colleagues sharing information instead of competing in isolation, or families working with trusted advisers, performance improves when people stop trying to solve everything alone.
Kirsten sees the same dynamic inside successful teams.
Trust, he said, isn’t built through motivational speeches or dramatic interventions. It grows through small, consistent behaviours repeated every day until teammates develop confidence in one another.
“I think what we are looking for… is what are we doing every day, even the smallest of things, that gives each of us more belief in each other and gives each of us a bit of confidence in each other,” he said.
Langridge described financial planning in similar terms.
Clients often see only the wealth manager sitting across the table, but behind every long-term financial plan sits a wider team – investment specialists, tax advisers, and estate planning experts – all contributing different perspectives to help families prepare for the future.
Just as championship teams rarely succeed because of one star player, sustainable financial outcomes rarely depend on one individual alone.
Knowing yourself may be the greatest advantage
Kirsten drew on his own playing career to explain why self-awareness matters.
Early in his career, he admitted, he wanted to look like the perfect player.
Eventually, he realised that trying to look good was getting in the way of playing well.
“I learned to accept who I was,” he said.
“I started accepting that I wasn’t going to look good… but I could be an effective player.”
That shift in mindset transformed his performances. Instead of comparing himself with others or trying to meet someone else’s idea of success, he focused on playing the game in a way that suited his own strengths.
It’s a lesson that applies far beyond cricket.
Investors are constantly exposed to stories of extraordinary returns, fashionable assets, and the fear of missing out. Businesses compare themselves with competitors. Professionals measure themselves against peers.
Yet enduring success rarely comes from imitation. It comes from understanding your own objectives, building systems that support them, and having the discipline to stay with them when the world around you is demanding something different.
By the end of the discussion, the parallels between elite sport and wealth creation no longer felt like clever analogies.
They felt remarkably practical.
Preparation instead of prediction.
Process instead of panic.
Connection instead of isolation.
And perhaps most importantly, the understanding that success is seldom the result of one spectacular decision. More often, it is built quietly, through thousands of disciplined choices that almost nobody notices until the results finally appear.
