Start With A Win - Sebastien Page: The Psychology Behind Elite Leadership

Episode Date: July 15, 2026

How do top leaders excel under pressure and what can AI teach us about leadership? Discover the unexpected link between high-stakes decision-making and the psychology that drives both great athletes and executives. Join host, Adam Contos as he welcomes Sébastien Page, the head of Global Multi-asset Division and Chief Investment Officer at T. Rowe Price, overseeing over $500 billion in assets. Sébastien, with decades of leadership experience and a deep dive into positive sports and personality psychology, shares insights from his award-winning research and book, 'The Psychology of Leadership.' You'll learn why leading yourself is the first step to leading others, how stress can be your ally, and the counterintuitive power of admitting 'I don't know', in this powerful episode of Start With a Win.Sébastien Page is Head of Global Multi-Asset and Chief Investment Officer at T. Rowe Price, where he oversees more than $500 billion in assets under management. With more than two decades of leadership experience, he is also a recognized researcher in psychology and investing.A two-time author and six-time award-winning researcher, Sébastien is a frequent guest on CNBC and Bloomberg TV and was named a LinkedIn Top Voice in Finance in 2022. His latest book, The Psychology of Leadership, was released in 2025.He lives in Maryland with his wife and children and enjoys exploring the intersection of leadership, psychology, and investing.00:00 Intro02:24 Lead yourself, what?05:05 HR is not what you think it is!09:20 What makes people thrive?13:20 Best people/leaders know this! 16:05 Part of leadership is this… 18:35 Leaders, TRY THIS.21:20 What are we missing to get the team to perform their best?26:17 Listen for 2 mins and then rewind, this is not in his book! 29:09 It may be this, but it still works…    https://www.psychologyofleadership.net/https://www.instagram.com/sebastienpagebook?igsh=MWk2cWV2c2JmNGhiNA%3D%3Dhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/sebastien-page/ ===========================Subscribe and Listen to the Start With a Win Podcast HERE:📱 ===========================YT ➡︎ https://www.youtube.com/@AdamContosCEOApple ➡︎ https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/start-with-a-win/id1438598347Spotify ➡︎ https://open.spotify.com/show/4w1qmb90KZOKoisbwj6cqT===========================Connect with Adam:===========================Website ➡︎ https://adamcontos.com/Facebook  ➡︎ https://facebook.com/AdamContosCEOTwitter  ➡︎ https://twitter.com/AdamContosCEOInstagram  ➡︎ https://instagram.com/adamcontosceo/#adamcontos #startwithawin #leadershipfactory

You really need to pay attention to the mental game, especially to your point with AI, with what's going on in the world of business, the pressure on everyone at work. The lack of engagement, the surveys are unbelievable. Like more a majority of employees are not engaged at work. That's part of the mental game. And we don't even talk about it. Welcome to start with a win where we unpack leadership, personal growth and development, and how to be. build a better business. Let's go. Coming to you from Area 15 Ventures and Start with a Win, headquarters, it's Adam Contos with Start with a Win. What if the biggest leadership advantage

isn't strategy, talent, or even experience? But psychology? Today I'm joined by Sebastian Page, someone who sits right at the intersection of leadership, decision making, and performance under pressure. He's the head of the global multi-asset division and chief investment officer at T. Roe Price, overseeing more than 500 billion in assets, but his influence goes far beyond markets. With over two decades of leadership experience, deep research in positive sports and personality psychology, multiple award-winning research papers, and regular appearances on networks like CNBC and Bloomberg, Sebastian brings a rare blend of rigor and real-world insight. He's also the author of multiple finance books and has a great one out now, The Psychology of Leadership.

This is going to be a powerful conversation about how great leaders think, decide, and win, especially when it matters most. Let's get into it. Sebastian, welcome to start with a win. Adam, no exaggeration. I am psyched. I'm pumped. I've been looking forward to this. Awesome.

This is obviously both of our favorite topic here, the whole aspect of leadership. But we're going to tie a lot of AI into this also. And I think that's really important in this day and age since our employees. the businesses, even the customer base. Everybody's kind of going, what about AI? How does it impact my leadership? Things of that nature. So, but I want to start with your book because there's a huge concept in there.

And you can even tie this into AI if you want because I personally do in my life. But you talk about leading yourself first before you can lead others. And, you know, we see that as a problem in this day and age, but there's also some solutions to that. So talk to us about that. What do you think? What does lead yourself? first meaning to begin with. Okay. First, Adam, I want to say, I finished my manuscript, maybe a couple months before Chad GPT came out. I wrote the entire book as a traditional author.

And by the way, AI is awesome to help write. There's nothing wrong about it. And I hope we'll talk about that. But you're asking about managing yourself before you manage others. It's a big theme in the psychology of leadership. I bring in resilience into the practice of leadership, super important. Adam, it was important in my own development. I got the idea for the book when I was stressed at work. And not only was I stressed, but I was stressed about stressing. You know, I was telling myself, oh, you've been doing this for 25 years in the rough and tumble world of money management. you can handle this, why are you stressed? And I discovered sports psychology initially, talking to a sports psychologist.

And I became completely fascinated with the whole world of positive psychology. In society, we think of psychology as treating mental illness, super important role, anxiety, clinical depression. But half the academic research, at least half, if you go on Google, scholar is now on the positive side. What goes well when you do things the right way? What makes people thrive? What makes people happy? What makes athletes perform? What about the mental game behind leadership? So that's how I weave in, know yourself, your ability to improve your resilience, and you'll be a better leader over time. That's the whole idea, Adam. So I'm glad you

starting with that. It's fascinating to say this because, I mean, when you talk about performance psychology and super achievement and things of that nature, and then, you know, obviously, folks like yourself and myself, we get together in small masterminds with other key business leaders. And it's interesting. It always seems to start with, tell me a life hack, or what are you doing to make yourself better? But when we go to the office, we never have that. conversation, it seems like. Is that safe to say? We don't. We don't. I think the world of business at large does not spend enough time on the mental game of it, whether it's entrepreneurs or large blue chip companies. We think HR is just this thing that we go to and we have issues to

resolve. It's not. We really need to pay attention to the mental game, especially to your point, with AI, with what's going on in the world of business, the pressure on everyone at work, the lack of engagement, the surveys are unbelievable. Like more, a majority of employees are not engaged at work. That's part of the mental game. And we don't even talk about it. I like to use the example in terms of super achievement and the positive side of psychology of Felix Boomgartner. Now, Adam, does that name ring a bell? He's not as famous as he should be.

I think he jumped out of a balloon, didn't he? Yes. Yes. It's amazing what he did. And I'm glad. I'm glad you know him. It's a Red Bull. He was sponsored by Red Bull. He got into this small capsule attached to a giant helium balloon, went up 24 miles vertical to the edge of space. He basically was in space, but there was just enough gravity to bring him down to Earth. wearing a special suit, but nothing with any equipment beyond that, a helmet, he jumped out and skydived. He was in free fall for four minutes. He fell for 10 minutes. First human being to break the sound barrier without any equipment. He didn't know if he was going to pass out.

This is like a crazy achievement, right? Felix Boomgardner famously was coached by a sports psychologist. his achievement was driven by, in great part, the mental game. Once you reach an elite level, in business, in sports, what's the differentiator? It's not the skills anymore. It's the mental game. He had his coach prepare him. He had his sports psychologist talk to him the day of the event.

The sports psychologist's name is Michael Jervais. He's actually a great book author as well. It's got great books out there. I use this as an introduction to say, look, you think of psychology as treating anxiety and depression super important and basically the rates of anxiety and depression are only going up in society. But there's a whole other world on the positive side that we constantly underestimate. Adam, that's why I ended up writing the book. I ended up writing the book to improve myself too.

In the intro, I'll say, you're reading this for self-improvement. I wrote it for the same reason. I love that. You're talking to yourself in the book to make yourself better. I got an anecdote about this. Okay. So I had to switch book agents. And my first book agent was very critical.

And we had creative differences. But as an example of that, and he was right, and it's not in the book anymore. But I was talking about this concept. that basically goes back to Marcus Aurelius. One of the best stoic philosophy books of all time is meditations by Marcus Aurelius. It turns out most scholars think that when he wrote this, by the way, he was a practitioner. He wasn't just a thinker. He was a Roman emperor, you know, a small job.

But most people think that he wrote the thing not to publish as notes to himself, talking to himself. So in my intro, I go, just like Marcus Aurelius, we're on this journey together, dear reader. And I'm going to dig into the research for you because I'm a research nerd. And my book agent was like, dude, you're not Marcus Aurelius. Don't compare yourself to Marcus Aurelius. Take that out. So I took it out. But now I mentioned it today.

There you go. Do you think writing this book made you a better business leader? Oh, 100%. A hundred percent. because I discovered so much about sports psychology and positive psychology. What makes people thrive? It's not your positive emotions day to day. It's your engagement, the quality of your relationships, the meaning you bring to your work,

and your long-term accomplishments. That's called the perma model. Positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning accomplishment. I learned all of this. And then this idea that, you know, optimal performance, especially in sports psychology does not occur at a stress level of zero. In other words, like we walk around trying to reduce our stress to perform better, but you can flip that on its head and say,

if you're not activated enough, you're not going to perform at your best. And to me, that was one of the most important insights. And you can translate that into how much pressure you put on the team when you're managing a team and so on. Of course, stress is bad. Once you reach the point where your performance decreases because you're too stressed, it can kill you. I mean, it'll mess up your appetite, your sleep, your sex drive, everything will go wrong if you're too stressed. But up to a point, stress increases performance.

It increases your ability to focus. Put two athletes side by side, ask them to run 100 dash. The one that's more anxious is probably going to run faster because he's got the adrenaline pumping. He's got the biologically things are happening that are going to improve his performance or her performance. I think that's a really important aspect. You know, I've heard the analogy of leadership is like a muscle. If you don't exercise it, if you don't put it under pressure, it's going to atrophy. So I really like what you're saying there, you know, adding that stress, functioning under stress, things like that.

do you think goals add to that stress and help us get better? You know, you have a section about goals and don't die on Everest or something like that. Yeah. Goals are super important, right? For a leader. What's your job as a leader is to set the goals? If you don't, who will? That's your job.

And by the way, your job is to set long-term goals. Show people the long-term direction for the organization. So I end up spending quite a few chapters. on goals, what happens in high-performing organizations is not a lack of goals. It's overusing the goals, creating measurable goals that lead to goal-induced blindness. So I introduced my readers in the psychology of leadership, of course, to the importance of goals, but that's right, to the risks of goal-induced blindness. And goal-induced blindness in the literature and psychology is defined as being so obsessed with your measurable goal

that you neglect everything else in your life that's not goal-related directly. It could be your health. It could be your ethics. You know, people get so obsessed with reaching certain metrics and certain goals, they start cheating and lying. So that's goal-induced blindness. The famous example in the literature in psychology is about Mount Everest, because, you know, Adam, I'm going to ask you that, to me, it's a large number. I would not try to climb Everest, but do you know, like, the death rate if you want to reach the summit of Everest?

Like, what percentage change that you, what's the percentage chance that you die if you want to reach the summit of Everest? I'm going to guess 50%. Oh, that would be horrible. Probably lower. Like, how about, let's go 15%. Okay, so it's 4%. And maybe given your guest is you feel like that's low. But 4% to me as a risk manager that's in my day job, it's huge.

It is. Think about every hundred people at Summit Everest, four die. And in order to get to the summit, you've got to have to step over frozen dead bodies. This is what this goal-induced blindness does to you. But you know what the best climbers do? Someone has the world record of Everest summits over 30 times. times. Wow. Do you know what they're good at? They're good at knowing when to quit. They're good at managing their goal-induced blindness. They know when the risks are too high, even though they've

invested so much to get so close to the summit, and they'll quit. They're good at that quitting decision, which is greatly underrated in life and in business. Yeah. Interesting. And that's something we obviously don't talk about in a meeting at work. is, you know, that particular risk. But also, I mean, you know, you talk about goal-induced blindness. We're seeing a lot of trends with AI being pressured into achieving the goal versus being truthful around that. And, you know, businesses are depending upon AI now.

I think you want it to tell you the truth in your leadership and in your capabilities. I like how you frame that. And I'm going to push this a little bit. further. Most of the large language models right now, the top AI models, have some goal-induced blindness built in. Those models are calibrated to keep you as the user engage and to please you. They're extremely agreeable. I study personality psychology in the third part of the book, in the psychology of leadership. And this was before AI,

but I talk about as kind of a lucky thing where I actually talk about what could happen with AI and what the personality of AI would be. And you know what? That's a problem because it'll lie to you, goal-induced blindness, right?

Its goal is to keep you engaged. It'll hallucinate, still, still the top model, still elucinate. And it'll lie to you, and it'll please you. And there are extreme cases where if you have a thought pattern that's not healthy, that's self-destructive or violent, it might actually take you down that rabbit hole. Somehow we've got to calibrate the goals of the LLMs to reduce that goal-induced blindness,

to make them less agreeable for the whole process to work better for large-scale deployment and productivity gains. I think I'm going to come up with a whole bunch of prompts out of this conversation in your book. Don't be so agreeable with me. Right. I mean, you know, you talk about flow state and flow goals and things like that. You know, it's you like mowing the lawn because you like to see the progress. Yeah.

I think the AI tries to give us progress to keep us mowing the lawn. Yeah. So, you know, it's, it seems like it could be a, you know, a flow state enabler or something of that nature that gets us hooked on feeling good about our answers. I don't know. Because the part of leadership is telling the truth and helping people see outside of where they land, where they could have gone further, better, faster, different things like that. And a lot of leaders lack the ability to provide clarity and truth to people in an accountability manner. You know what leaders have a hard time saying and that can become a super skill?

Two things. Leaders have a hard time saying I'm wrong or I was wrong. And a real hard time, and I'm in that camp, real hard time saying I don't know. But if you have the ability to say this counterintuitively, it reveals strength. it's counterintuitive but that vulnerability makes you stronger as a leader more credible

more relatable more honest of course you just don't want to go around and saying I don't know anything you know you don't want to make that false modesty either but if you're honestly improve your ability to look at people in the room and say I was wrong team

or I don't know the answer to that you're going to improve as a leader. There's lots of counterintuitive conclusions in the psychology of leadership. And that's one of them. On AI, Adam, I don't want to sound like I'm like as someone who doesn't like AI or is it AI skeptical. I actually use it quite a bit. I think it's transformational. We're harnessing intelligence. This is a big shift for humanity. I'm not I'm not, I'm not minimizing the impact this could have over time, especially if models keep improving exponentially. And one thing leaders can do, if, you know, we should all try this if you're listening to this

podcast. If you have a tough conversation to have with someone, just humor me and go into an LLM, chat GPT, and ask for advice on how to have that tough conversation. Give me three bullets on how I should approach that. And you know what? That'll sharpen your leadership skills. It might help you have the tough conversations. What do you think about that, Adam? I think that's a great idea.

I mean, the reality is if you're not reviewing your responses with AI, you're not going to find some of your blind spots. So we have to have that humility. And there's that fine line that you're talking about between, you know, displaying incompetence and displaying humility. And nobody wants to be called incompetent, but they do want to be called humble. So I think there's some learning there in utilizing the AI to help, you know, create that humility.

So I love that idea. Check your blind spots. And you know what's wonderful about this is you're not talking to a human. That's a feature, not a bug. Because you can be vulnerable. Who cares? you're talking to an AI. So you can actually be more open, you know.

And that's wonderful. On the humility thing, I have this paradox, you know, you imagine two really big egos, billionaires talking to each other. And so you see this in society pretty often. And one says to the other, I'm more humbled than you. You know, is that funny? there is some of that in business. And I guess when I talk about humility and saying things like I didn't, I don't know or I was wrong, I mean doing this in an honest way, not just for show, right?

Right. Interesting. Yeah, it's, it's a good lesson. Obviously, you know, ego is, is the blocker of humility. And I love your your little paradigm there. That's, uh, I'm more humble than you. Yeah, I mean, that's incredible. Paradox. It's, I, I, I, you see it all the time, right? Absolutely. Which, I mean, it, it really is, I mean, you talk about like authentic communication. Right. In, in your book. I mean, it, it might be authentic communication where you're allowing someone to show their cards or their lack of humility by saying that.

Tell me about authentic communication in leadership a little bit. How, And I love in your book, you talk about getting the mission done versus helping the people to achieve the mission type mindset. And I think a lot of that is because we're missing authentic communication. We're trying to put up this ego shield or something of that nature. Talk to me a little bit about that. Well, the reality is that as a leader, especially as you climb the ladder, it's no longer about you. It's about your ability to make the team help the team perform at their best. That's a big mindset shift.

And of course, authentic communication, candid feedback where there's trust is crucial to that. It's unbelievable how athletes are open to feedback and authentic communication, if you will, hey, you're holding your racket wrong, right? There's no sugarcoding with the coach with the athletes. It's just like direct, relevant feedback. But you go in business, we hate it. We just hate it. Athletes love it. Tell me, coach. Tell me, is my footwork right? Is my form right? Yeah, and live feedback and you continue to improve. There's no year-end review between a coach and an athlete where the athlete learns something new from the coach. It's ongoing. And the athlete loves it. But somehow in business, we just, it's just a fight or flight response. If someone comes to me and says, actually,

let's do an experiment, Adam. I'm going to ask you a question. Okay. Okay. And then you're going to tell me how that question makes you feel, but again, like in a kind of reflex way. Okay. Okay. You ready for the question? Go ahead. Adam, can I give you some feedback? Yeah, it makes you start to go, oh, no, here it comes. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's like you raise your mental boxing gloves here when I say. Totally.

Now there's research in neuroleadership by Dr. David Rock that will give leaders and organizations, you can call it a hack, a technique to do away with that fear of feedback that we have in business. and we should be more like athletes and welcome the feedback. Dr. David Rock shows that this little change will reduce the stress response from the feedback process for the giver and the receiver by 50%. The change is the following. You ask for the feedback. It makes a world of difference.

If you're running a team, go and ask the team for feedback. Hey, how did I do? You just made a presentation about the strategic plan. Get off the stage. Go ask your team members. Was that okay? What do you think? And a good way of asking for this is not the dissection of what you did.

But, hey, if I had to tweak it for the next one, for the next presentation, how would you tweak it? That's more forward looking. It's more improvement oriented. You start doing that. And then you model the behavior. And then team members start asking for feedback. makes a world of difference. To your question, increases authentic communication because we don't have those mental boxing gloves.

And it's one of those small things that make a big difference to organizations. It seems like it's a behavior that will be modeled, you know, and kind of reflected. You get one or two to start doing that. The rest of the team is just going to hop on board, it seems like. Yes, and we do need the feedback to improve. Now, feedback is not perfect ever. I think it's maybe near perfect between a coach and their athletes, but in the squishy, qualitative world of business and leadership, it has all sorts of issues. In fact, there's research that shows that if you ask a peer group to give feedback, say, on yourself, a big part of the feedback, a third to a half, half will reflect the feedback givers attitudes and mindset more than yours. So the feedback you receive sometimes says almost as much as your performance as what's in the mind or the actual performance or mindset of the person giving the feedback.

The other thing is we have this obsession with improving, looking at errors. there's a famous example from the 70s that I love. It's not in the psychology of leadership because I came across this example after I wrote the book. It's from the Dallas Cowboys and famous coach Tom Landry in the 70s. He had this process where he would show players videos of the game and then pause it around mistakes and then replay the mistakes the players had made and said, you got to fix that, you got to fix this. He then realized that this was not effective

because it increased anxiety in the players and all they were doing mentally in the background is rehearsing mistakes. He made a shift and then looked at the highlights as opposed to the low lights. And then in the video room, the new cadence, the new way of working was for him to show the players

what they did right and asked the play to do more of that. And that improved performance and they went on to win the Super Bowl and so on, legendary team. But so let's be careful, you know. Feedback is definitely welcome. We need more of it to improve.

But it's better to give it live, to ask for it, then give it unsolicited, and to look for the positive more than the negative. That's great. That's great feedback, Sebastian. I think your podcast is great, Adam.

That's my feedback. I think your tone of voice is great. I think your lighting is, your video file is going to look awesome. We'll do more of that then. So awesome. Sebastian, our listeners want to know where they can find you online

and where they can, you know, maybe find your book, purchase it, things like that. I'm sure it's on Amazon. But where can we look up, look you up online?

Sebastian Page, the psychology of leadership, definitely go to Amazon probably the easiest way. LinkedIn, if you do a simple search Sebastian Page, you'll find me. That's where I have the biggest presence. I talk a lot about money management there, but also leadership and self-improvement. Or Instagram, I'm there as well, Sebastian Page. Great. Sebastian, it's been an absolute pleasure to have you on Start with a Win today. Likewise.

Everyone, make sure you check out Sebastian Page online. make sure you connect with him on LinkedIn and Instagram and everywhere else on the internet, you can find him. He's got some great information. We always need to be learning about leadership. We need to be deploying new thoughts in leadership. It keeps us fresh. It keeps us evolving in our leadership. And it makes us better for the people we lead in the organizations that we serve. Sebastian, I have one question. I ask all the amazing leaders on Start with a Win. How do you start your day with a win? exercise i know it's not original but i have a streak at them sometimes i do easy exercise but i have a

streak of daily exercise minus maybe five days when i had to have minor surgery um of over 10 years wow that's that's quite a streak and you know what you look great so thank you you too thank you i i did my exercise this morning as well so you got to lead yourself first so So anyhow, Sebastian, I really appreciate your time today. Your time is extremely valuable. We'll let you get back to your hard work in the finance space and leading the teams that you lead. Thanks for all you do and thanks for being on Start with a Win. Thank you.