Jake Humphrey hits the road with his high performance show which is heading to Yorkshire

Jake hopes people find the show and the podcast informative, entertaining and also inspiring.

“I don’t want people thinking the podcast is only reserved for successful, high-achieving, wealthy, award-winning people. This is here for all of us,” he says.

“There’s so much **** around at the moment that is negative, whether it’s on social media, or the cost of living, or the energy crisis, or all the political shenanigans, or the war in Ukraine, and I just want to create something that reminds people that there are still reasons to be positive and you can still control your own destiny to a certain extent.”

It can sometimes feel like every Tom, Dick and Harry has a podcast these days, but with 160 episodes and a staggering 35 million downloads to its name, High Performance has proved to be a huge success.

The idea behind it came from Jake’s own experiences.

“I think there’s this presumption that I ended up in telly because one of my family members worked in it, or I came from money or I had a successful upbringing. The truth is I came from a small village in Norfolk. My mum was a teacher, my dad was a charity worker and I knew nobody in the TV industry and I honestly assumed that success was for other people – it was for the kids at private school, or kids born with amazing sporting ability, or were always selected to be in the school sports team, or took the lead role in the school play, and I was never any of those things. I never got good grades and didn’t really have a plan for what I wanted to do and was never a prefect or a stand out kid. So I assumed my life would be really normal,” he says.

It was only later in his career when he spent time talking to elite sportsmen and women that he says he realised most high achievers were just ordinary, hard-working people and not born to be successful. “I never showed any ambition to be on telly or in front of the camera or anything like that. I was a really quiet and reserved character, but I messed up my A-levels so I ended up doing some work experience at a local TV company to fill the gap because all my mates had gone off around the world or had gone to university.”

Having been sacked by McDonald’s he says he felt like a failure, and then an unexpected opportunity arose. “I was lucky that a local TV channel was looking for young people to write in and apply to be on a TV show to talk about politics,” he says. “It led to a job and I was lucky enough that I found presenting pretty easy.”

From here he landed a job as a presenter on CBBC’s Against All Odds. Having cut his teeth in children’s television he then looked to move into sports broadcasting, but despite being turned down initially because he wasn’t a journalist or an ex-sports professional, he stuck to his guns. “I refused to take no for an answer and I ended up doing little bits of football reporting, which was not the dream by any means, but which was a chance to show willing and my work ethic and that landed me the Formula One job and then BT Sport and so on.”

He believes luck plays an important part in any success story.

“Successful people are often afraid to talk about luck because it is this ethereal thing that you’re not really in control of. The truth is none of us would be here without luck. It has a vital role to play in all our lives. So I feel incredibly lucky, but I do also feel that I’ve made the most of all those opportunities and that I was wrong that only certain people can lead fulfilling, exciting lives.”

It's something that goes to the heart of his podcast.

“What we’re not doing on High Performance is telling anyone how to think or how to act. All we’re doing is sharing other people’s lives with them and saying, ‘this is what they did, you can ignore it, agree with it, you can love it or hate it.’ It’s about cherry picking the things from all these incredible people who’ve all lived amazing lives, and then working out how you want to lead your life.”

Some of his guests have surprised him in the way they have opened up on the show.

“Talking to Tyson Fury in a way that I’d never heard him talk before about his mental health challenge – I felt really proud of that episode because those are the kinds of conversations people need to have,” he says. “What we’re trying to do is peel back the layers and say these are multi-faceted, fascinating individuals, that just like you and I have doubts and struggles. But instead of judging them, let’s find out more about them.”

He's equally passionate about changing the prevailing attitude towards failure. “We’re so scared of failure because we’re taught from a very early age at school that failure is a negative. But failure is the most positive thing you can have in your life because failure is how you grow and how you learn. We were joined on the podcast by the former chief marketing officer of Nike, a guy called Greg Hoffman, who said ‘failure is the price of creativity.’ And I think that’s such a wonderful way to look at it. Without failure there’s no progress and without progress there’s no improvement.

It's something he hopes listeners glean from High Performance. “The key is when it looks and feels like a failure we don’t give up, and we realise that success is often just on the other side of those moments.”

He admits his own perceptions have changed since starting the podcast. “At the beginning I really wanted High Performance to be talking about being knocked down and getting back up and staggering forwards and keeping going, and actually it was Jonny Wilkinson who said he felt the same and realised that doing that just leads to more of this. My definition now of high performance is happiness. There’s no point any of us doing any of this stuff if it doesn’t make us happy, so then it becomes about realising there are some things in life we have to do, and how can we find the happiness and the joy and positivity in every little element of our lives.”

High Performance Tour, Leeds Grand Theatre, July 2. For tickets visit thehighperformancepodcast.com/live2023