I Studied Psychology at 57 — It Changed How I Lead

I enrolled in a psychology degree at La Trobe University at 57. I want to say that again because I think it needs to land properly. 57 years old, former ASX CEO, Army officer, and a business owner. And I sat down in a lecture theatre with students young enough to be my children, opened a notebook, and started learning things that made me realise I'd been missing something fundamental in leadership. for the best part of 30 years. Not everything, but something that mattered. Something that no amount of experience, no MBA, no board role, no peer group had ever given me. This video is about why I did it, what I found when I got there, and why I now believe the psychology underneath the performance is more important to your CEO readiness than almost anything else you can invest in. Let's start with a question that got me there, the question I couldn't answer. My time as a Vistage chair, 2 years sitting in a room with 14 CEOs every single month, has given me the opportunity to start noticing something I couldn't explain. The executives who were struggling were not struggling because they lacked intelligence. They weren't struggling because they had the wrong strategy. Or insufficient resources. Most of them had all of those things in abundance. They were struggling because something was happening underneath the knowledge. Something in the way they responded to pressure. The way they reacted when they felt cornered. The way they kept returning to the same problem even after solving it. The way certain conversations never happened, no matter how obvious they were to everyone in the room. And I kept asking myself, what is that? What is actually going on underneath the performance? I had language for it. In my coaching work, I started calling it the interior game. I could see the patterns and describe them, but I wanted to understand the mechanism. I wanted to know what was actually driving these patterns at a deeper level and whether anything could be done about them. So I enrolled in a psychology degree at 57. What I expected versus what I found. I expected to confirm things I already knew. 30 years in business gives you a real pattern recognition. I assumed I was walking into that lecture theatre to put academic language around practical experience I'd already accumulated. What I found was different. In the first semester, I encountered attachment theory— the way we form bonds early in life with caregivers, with the world, with safety itself. This creates what psychologists call internal working models— templates for how we relate to other people. And those templates are not left behind in childhood. They travel with us into every role we ever hold— into the workplace, Into the boardroom, into the CEO office. An executive who learned early that approval was conditional on performance will lead differently under pressure from one who grew up knowing that connection was stable regardless of results. Neither is better or worse necessarily, but they are fundamentally different. And when the stakes get high enough, those early templates get activated in ways that look like leadership behaviour, but are actually something much older and much deeper than strategy. I sat in that lecture and thought, I've watched this exact dynamic play out across 30 years of executive life, in myself, in the people around me. I just didn't have a name for what I was seeing. The second thing that stopped me was the neuroscience of threat response. When the brain perceives threat— not physical danger, but social threat, status threat, uncertainty about the future— it activates the same survival circuitry as a physical emergency. The prefrontal cortex, where strategic thinking lives, goes partially offline. Reactive patterns take over. For an executive under sustained pressure— and the CEO role is sustained pressure by definition— This is not a peripheral issue. It is absolutely central. The capacity to remain cognitively clear and strategically effective under conditions that your nervous system is reading as dangerous is arguably the most important capability the top role demands. And almost no leadership development program in Australia addresses it directly. What has changed? Here is what studying psychology at 57 for me practically— it changed the questions I asked. For most of my career, I asked what questions. What is the strategy? What is the problem? What needs to change? These are important questions. They are questions of competent and effective executive, and I'm not diminishing them. But the questions that actually unlock performance at CEO level are why questions. Why does this leader keep reacting the same way when challenged in a room? Why does this executive keep avoiding that one conversation that everyone around them can see needs to happen? Why does this person keep making the same decision even when experience tells them it doesn't work? The what questions live on the surface. They're important, But they are limited. The why questions go underneath. And it is underneath where the real work happens and where the real breakthroughs occur. Studying psychology didn't give me a magic solution to these questions, but it gave me a map, a genuine evidence-based map for understanding what is actually happening inside the people who carry these questions. And the map changes everything. Why this matters for where you are now. Let me connect this directly to where you are. If you're a senior executive preparing for the CEO role, genuinely preparing, not just waiting, you're almost certainly focused on the outside game. The track record, the credentials, the stakeholder relationships, the financial results, the visible boxes being ticked. And all that matters. I'm absolutely not suggesting otherwise. But the CEO role is different from every role that preceded it in one specific and critically important way. There is no ceiling above you, no one to calibrate you, to manage your patterns, to pull you back when something gets activated under pressure. The board will hold you accountable for outcomes. They will not coach you through Your interior life. That is entirely your responsibility. That means whatever is unresolved in your psychology— the patterns, the triggers, the blind spots, the templates you've been carrying since long before you walked into your first executive role— will be fully expressed at the top. Unfiltered, unmanaged, fully expressed. I've watched this play out more times than I can count. Capable, credentialed, generally talented executives who made it to the CEO role and discovered that the job amplified everything that was already true about them, including the things they'd never examined. So the interior game is not a metaphor. When I talk about the interior game, I want to be precise about what I mean. I'm not talking about mindset in the way that word is used in motivational content. I'm not talking about positive thinking or resilience frameworks, or any of the surface-level work that fills most leadership development calendars. I'm talking about specific, identifiable psychological patterns. Patterns that have names. Patterns that have been studied extensively. Patterns that show up in predictable ways under the specific pressure of senior executive leadership. And patterns that can be understood and generally worked with. If you know they're there and have the right support to examine them. That is what I'm building with deep leadership, not another layer added on top of the performance work that goes into the foundation. If I had started this work 20 years ago, not instead of the career but alongside it, I believe I would have led differently. Not more successfully on every metric, but with more clarity, less reactive noise, More of myself generally present in the room rather than managing a version of myself for the people around me. That is the work, and it starts with being willing to look. If this resonates, if something in what I've described today touches something you've been circling without being able to name it, I want to encourage you to keep going. Subscribe to this channel. There is more of this work here every week. And if you're ready to go deeper, if the question of your own CEO readiness is generally alive for you right now, there's a link below where you can start a conversation. I'm Greg Stevenson. This is Deep Leadership. And let's get to work.