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As Ash Barty’s mindset coach, Ben Crowe helped steer the tennis champ to victory. Now he’s on a mission to help leaders embrace their imperfections and build resilience.
Mindset and leadership coach Ben Crowe is a master at helping his clients find their “aha” moments, those bursts of illumination that enable the most stressed and pressured of executives and athletes to forge forward. In the case of two recent clients — CEOs at large, publicly listed companies — the awakening occurred when they realised their vulnerability was a strength, rather than a weakness.
“These two CEOs got up in front of their organisations and said, ‘I am so sorry. I thought I had to be the perfect leader with the perfect strategy and have it all figured out’,” says Crowe. “They said, ‘I just want to be honest with you. I’m imperfect, but I’m also worthy of being the CEO and leading you through this difficult time’.”
The result was a discernible shift within both companies, as employees felt empowered to be vulnerable.
“It created this extraordinary connection within both organisations, because both CEOs finally understood that when you see vulnerability as a strength, you’re more open-minded, curious, creative, innovative, adaptive and compassionate to yourself and others.”
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Crowe is best known for working with sports stars, including tennis players Ash Barty and Dylan Alcott. Now, as founder of professional training company Mojo Crowe, he continues to work with athletes, but has added the nation’s top executives to his roster. “I help them to understand their relationship with uncertainty,” he says. “A big part of vulnerability is making sense of your story — learning to accept your imperfections and reframe your belief system. That involves identifying the beliefs holding you back as a leader.”
Crowe says the fear of not being good enough and a lack of self-trust commonly stymie productivity and potential. “If you believe in your potential, and trust that if you keep working hard and stick at it you will find a way through, it fundamentally changes your relationship with uncertainty,” he says. “It becomes one of excitement, not anxiety.”
Age of the pressure cooker
Crowe’s own most recent “aha” moment came during a 2024 trip to San Antonio, Texas, where he was helping sports teams to manage stress. An executive at the University of Texas Health told him many first-year students were dropping out of college and self-harming due to overwhelming pressure.
“I thought, ‘OK, something really big is happening here’,” says Crowe. “Whenever I hear the word pressure, almost always it’s because that person has an unhealthy or unrealistic relationship between what is expected of them and what isn’t.”
This oversized pressure comes from the common misconception that leaders must live up to someone else’s expectations, rather than their own. “We’re so distracted today, focusing on the many things we can’t control, mainly because we look externally rather than internally for our sense of self-worth.”
Crowe took much of 2025 off to write Where the Light Gets In, a book designed to help readers make the kind of “perspective shifts” that lessen the mental load and quieten the inner critic. Similarly, he encourages clients to shift from extrinsic motivations — the desire to make money or achieve a certain promotion — to more internal motivations, such as “play, purpose and potential”.
“A major part of my work,” he says, “is helping someone remove pressure and redefine expectations as the things they can actually control.”
This article first appeared as 'The coach' in the February/March 2026 Issue of Company Director Magazine.
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