MINDSET: Coping with stress in business depended on whether one viewed developments as "threats" or as "opportunities", the Olympic swimming gold medallist, Mr Adrian Moorhouse, told the CIPD conference in Galway yesterday.

Some of the great leaders in business shared the mindset of a sports coach - one who allows you to live out your "dream", and does not kill your ambition, Mr Moorhouse, founder of the Lane 4 personnel development consultancy, said. To attain such success, it was "critical to start with a dream", he said. He recalled his own experience as a small and scrawny "johnny-no-mates" child with a couple of friends - "and one of them was imaginary" - and how his life changed after a conversation with a swimming coach in Leeds. At the age of 12, he had seen British swimmer David Wilkie winning the 200 metres breast stroke at the Olympics, and had resolved to do the same.

After two years of training, and coming "last" in the sessions, a coach had picked him out of the water and asked him what he was doing there. When he replied that he wanted to win an Olympic medal, the coach had not laughed, had not told him it was impossible, but had set out the short, medium and long-term goals towards this.

"He connected reality to my dream, and he didn't say I couldn't do it," Mr Moorhouse said.

He had also seen another slogan in the US which he had adapted for his own company. Written on the wall of a particular sports establishment, it read: "The aim of this establishment is to create an environment where champions are inevitable." Mr Moorhouse said he took the view that everything was possible, even though this was regarded as quite a dangerous attitude. However, it was also important to be able to confront failure, and to realise that "nothing traumatic" really happens if one fails, and one moves on.