Everest record holder Kenton Cool on fear, trust and building teams under pressure

Kenton Cool is a leading mental resilience speaker, high-altitude mountaineer and performance coach whose lessons on fear, trust and high performance come from the world’s most unforgiving environments. In May 2025, he reached the summit of Mount Everest for the 19th time, extending his record for the most Everest ascents by a non-Sherpa climber. In 2026, he is attempting to make that 20.

Through In Cool Company, Kenton works with organisations on performance, culture and leadership, using a Five Pillars framework built around direction, collaboration, communication, agility and drive, all held together by trust. His approach draws on decades of expedition experience, where confidence is earned through pressure, reputation is built over time, and fear can sharpen judgement rather than stop action.

In this exclusive interview with the Mental Health Speakers Agency, Kenton Cool explains why there is no single blueprint for optimal performance, how teams can turn fear into focus, why trust sits at the centre of high performance, and what leaders can learn from building confidence in dangerous environments.

Question 1. In your work with performance teams, why do you reject the idea of a single blueprint for optimal performance?

Kenton Cool: “I don't think there is one blueprint for optimal performance.

At In Cool Company, I co-founded and run a performance coaching company, and we spent nearly a year working with the human behaviour faculty of Leeds University. What we did was build what we call the five pillars of high performance.

The five pillars lead into high performance. It's things like collaboration, communication, drive, direction and agility, but underpinning that, the glue to it all, is trust.

You have to trust in the process, and there is no one single process for a multitude of teams because teams are individual. They have individual talent, and they have individuals themselves within that team.

So, there isn't a single blueprint, but if we invest ourselves in the five pillars, and if we have the relationships with our clients or customers, we have trust in the process. We have trust in our colleagues, that collaborative behaviour that we see in the five pillars, then having an understanding of what each pillar is.

You don't need to be an expert in each of the five pillars, but you need an understanding because within the team, there are going to be the individuals that are going to double down on each of the five pillars.

But the glue, as I mentioned, is that trust, and to build that trust over time. To build that trust, in my mind, comes from experience. You've got to spend time working together on projects, on expeditions, spending time with each other, both professionally, but also to a certain extent, on a personal level. That's where you build trust.

The five pillars are not rocket science. It is very similar to Lencioni's five dysfunctions of teams but looking at it in a slightly more positive light.

Those five pillars, as I said, lead into high performance. There is no one blueprint because everybody and every team is individual.”

Question 2. When fear is present in high-risk environments, how can leaders turn it into focus rather than paralysis?

Kenton Cool: “Fear is a really interesting subject matter. We all experience it.

Certainly, in the big mountains, it keeps us sharp. It keeps us focused.

I often use the term, let's not get dead. It's a little bit flippant, but if one knows the consequence of the actions, we're about to partake in, then we are in a position, as a team, to break apart what the action looks like.

We all know what the potential consequence is because that is really important, and we need to be accepting, to a degree, of what that consequence is. Obviously, nobody wants to get dead.

But to have that fear of the what if: yes, if it goes smoothly, that's brilliant, but what happens if it doesn't? What are our contingencies and what are we going to do if it doesn't work out?

Having that fear, to an extent, the fear of failure is a very powerful tool. What we need to do with fear is almost turn it into a superpower. We need to feed off the fear so that we're focused on the success of whatever the action is that we're about to partake in, rather than necessarily the failure.

That focus and sharpness comes from fear.

There's a brilliant podcast by Dan Carlin called Hardcore History, and he talks about the destruction of the Gauls by the Romans. He starts this particular podcast by saying: how far would you go if you knew that your family was at risk? How far would you go if the society that you know and are part of is in jeopardy? How far would you go if the negative consequence of your actions is the destruction and removal of your community?

Well, you would go all the way. You can look at, say, the Holocaust, some of the actions that the Jewish populations did. How far did they go to try to save their very existence? Because they're fighting against a negative in exactly the same way that the Gauls were.

And if we use that negative motivation rather than positive motivation, what do we mean by that? Well, if something goes right for us, maybe we're going to get an accolade from work. Maybe we get a pay rise. Maybe we get a good bonus.

But these are quite hollow victories, and they very quickly dissipate from our subconscious.

But if we look at it the other way round, how hard would we work and how invested are we going to be in a project if we know that if we don't deliver the project, we're going to lose our jobs, or we're going to lose face with our cohort, or we're going to be demoted, or perhaps have a salary reduction?

I realise that this doesn't really happen in big organisations, but what happens if it did?

All of a sudden, you would get those individuals and the teams hyper-focused on delivering on what they have been given to work on. They would definitely deliver on promise. It would definitely be delivered on time because the fear that we have on the negative connotations, I believe, drives us that much harder.”

Question 3. How do teams build confidence without allowing success to turn into complacency?

Kenton Cool: “Confidence, I think, comes from experience. You've got to go through enough experience as a team, both success and failure, to build confidence within the team.

Continued success in what we're doing will build confidence and trust, but at the same time, continued success can make us complacent.

So, we have to be pushed. Projects have to be challenging enough that the outcome is not simply a given.

And if we start to deliver on those projects or on those expeditions, then that builds confidence within the team.

When we then project what we're doing to an audience, a client base or a customer base, the confidence that the client has in us is built on reputation, on that continued success.

Reputation is, I believe, paramount. If we're going to attract clients or customers to our services, we need a good reputation, and we need to defend that reputation rigorously, as if our lives depend on it, because as soon as there's a dent in our reputation, customers or clients are going to think twice about whether they're going to be investing with us.

So, if we look at our continued success on Everest, we're in this really lovely situation whereby we've got one of the best success rates on Everest, and we have a continued relationship with our clients after Everest because they trust in what we do. They have confidence in us, and that's down to our reputation.

That takes a long time, like trust. It takes a long time to build. And once you have it, you need to defend it. You really do.”

This exclusive interview with Kenton Cool was conducted by Tabish Ali of the Motivational Speakers Agency.