I’m Liza van der Most.
A former professional football player for the Dutch National Team, Ajax, and FC Utrecht.
I grew up inside elite sport. From the national youth teams to joining AFC Ajax at 18, my world revolved around high‑performance environments where pressure, selection, evaluation, and responsibility were part of daily life.
I ended my professional career in the summer of 2025.
Those years shaped how I understand pressure, control, and identity.
Today, I use my voice as a public speaker and content creator. I speak from lived experience about what pressure reveals, what remains when performance ends, and what elite sport actually teaches once results are no longer the centre of everything.
Alongside my speaking work, I’m active within a psychological advisory environment, where lived experience meets behavioral insight.
This is only a glimpse of who I am and the path that shaped me.
If you want to dive deeper into my work and hear these lessons come alive, let’s continue.
Perspective
I spent over 15 years inside elite performance systems. As a professional football player, performance was the environment. Pressure wasn’t something to analyse. It simply existed.
Only when my career ended did I understand what those years had actually taught me.
I learned how limited control really is. Games, training, selection, recovery, constant evaluation. My nervous system reacted before my thoughts could catch up.
At the time, I thought the goal was to stay calm. To rise above the chaos. Now I know: being stress-free was never the goal. Elite sport doesn’t teach you how to be stress-free. It teaches you to function with it.
Over time, I realized that awareness determines whether pressure works for you or against you.
The pressure itself didn’t change. My relationship with it did.
Understanding what my mind and body do under pressure reshaped the way I act. Not by removing stress, but by learning to work with what’s already present.
What I Carry With Me
My career didn’t just shape my physique.
It shaped how I take responsibility and how I respond.
I still carry the athlete mindset. Not out of obligation, but because I see it adds value in:
How I prepare.
How I stay present when things feel uncertain.
How I move forward when I don’t have full control.
That mindset didn’t end with football.
It evolved.
Why I SpeaK
I speak because much of what elite sport teaches under pressure often stays unspoken.
(Former) athletes, and organizations perform under pressure every day, yet rarely pause to understand what that pressure truly means.
The Discipline, resilience, and self-knowledge we build don’t disappear when performance ends. But without understanding, they stay unused.
What I share is about recognition.
Because once you understand what’s already there, you can start moving with it.