Easier Peak Performance

You're here because you have already achieved some outer success and got to your current executive leadership position. But growth doesn't have to stop here. There is a thrill and satisfaction in challenging yourself, stretching and seeing how much you can achieve. Have an impact and make a contribution.

The talents, skills and tools that have got you to this point will not necessarily take you further. Or the approaches you've used to achieve this success may have been expensive in terms of time, energy, stress and effect on your relationship. You need new or upgraded power tools to make sure you can sustain or advance your position more easily.

The High-Performance Executive Newsletter introduces these tools, so that you can level up, as video-gamers would say. It draws on many areas of solid research into high-performance in business, including neuroscience, psychology, physiology, trauma therapy and flow-state study.

The three essential areas for high performance are neuro-regulation (to get and stay calm), clear the negative self-talk and the beliefs that create them (including imposter syndrome), and create new success habits.

This week we're looking at neuro-regulation and optimal stress for high-performance.

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High performance in sports is different from high performance in business, even though they’re often compared.

In sport, athletes train heavily and only compete in their events for a short period of time.

But in business, every day is a competition day – all day.

It stands to reason that executives need different?tools and techniques to achieve and sustain peak performance.

Stress and neuro-regulation

One such tool is neuro-regulation – the management of your body’s nervous system - especially when you feel threatened or under pressure.

That is, how well you handle stress.

Stress is the body's reaction to feeling threatened or under pressure.

Too little stress and life feels dull, uninteresting and purposeless.

Too much stress and you get exhausted, overwhelmed, burnout and start making mistakes and poor decisions.

The right amount of stress (eustress) is exhilarating, exciting and the adventure of achievement.

The trick to neuro-regulation is keeping in the zone of optimal performance.

This means becoming attuned to the point where your nervous system gets triggered - the red arrow in the graph above.

As soon as your nervous system gets triggered, it shifts into a fight, flight or freeze state. In a cascade of body changes, your bloodstream gets flooded with stress hormones (adrenaline and cortisol) and your blood distribution changes. Your muscles get increased blood flow ready for defensive or evasive response to physical danger.

And the blood flow to the front of your brain decreases. But this is the logical thinking and strategic planning part of your brain.

A Princeton University study shows that this changed blood flow not only leads to poor decision making, increased emotional reactivity, impulsiveness and increased risk-taking, it also decreases your IQ by 13 points.

You literally do not think so well.

For a caveman escaping from a tiger, that temporary loss of critical thinking was no big deal. After all, there's a tiger attack to survive!

In a modern business environment, the 'threats' are not real tigers, but your body's nervous system responds as if they were.

For sustainable peak performance, then, you need to have your nervous system triggered as little as possible. You need to master neuro-regulation.

Neuro-regulation means having ways to keep your stress levels from exceeding your trigger level.

Reducing stress

The most obvious route would be to reduce stress from your external environment. However, remove too much external stress and you slide into under-achieving and not challenging yourself.

If your nervous system is chronically triggered, you won't be able to perform so well.

At the high-performance level, you find yourself in a dance back and forth between eustress and distress. Take on too much or experience sudden external challenges and you can easily find yourself triggered.

Quick Recovery

Your nervous system can get triggered instantaneously, and you can suddenly find yourself in the fight, flight or freeze state.

It can take hours or even days for your system to settle down again if you do nothing to help it. The faster you can get your nervous system back to a calm state the better.

Simple techniques like shaking out your arms and legs, box breath, or going for a run gets you back on track faster. I'll cover more of these techniques in future issues.

Cultivate Calm

Stress is cumulative on a daily basis and is affected by sleep, hydration, exercise, diet and physical health. It is also affected by relationships, support or lack of support, and your thoughts about yourself, expectations, and judgements.

Stress is also cumulative on a longer timescale, affected by chronic situations such as a toxic work environment, bullying or simply long-term high-stakes projects.

Anything you can do to bring yourself back to a calm state on a routine basis will benefit you. This explains the popularity of meditation and mindfulness practices in the corporate setting over the last decade. Especially in the form of guided meditation apps.

This continual reset lowers the overall stress that you experience. Which means you are less likely to reach the trigger level for your nervous system.

In the graph above, this is lowering the grey stress curve as a whole, to the green curve. This means your nervous system gets triggered less.

Changing your threat perception

Continually calming yourself is certainly a healthy practice, although it needs daily maintenance to be effective.

An alternative is to change your brain's perception of what is a threat in the first place.

Your brain's threat detector is called the amygdala. It stores the combination of emotion (fear, sadness, pain) with memories of experiences and information learned.

These emotion-memory combinations are part of your internal model of the world i.e, your beliefs.

Recently, science has identified neuroplasticity - the brain's ability to adapt and update throughout your life. This is a game-changer for beliefs because it means you can change them with the right method.

When you change specific beliefs, especially around your worth, identity and achievements, then your amygdala stops seeing certain situations as the threat it did before. You have changed how you perceive the world.

The result is that situations that would have triggered your nervous system in the past no longer do so. You remain calm effortlessly. You move the stress curve down on the graph and it stays at that lower level permanently.

Of all the neuro-regulation techniques, changing these triggering beliefs is the most powerful, effective and easiest way to create long-term, sustainable peak performance.

However you do it, neuro-regulation is well worth investing your time, energy and effort to master.

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What I’ve loved this week:

Weighted Blanket

Weighted blankets - they have weights sewn inside - use deep touch pressure to relax the nervous system, much like how a swaddle calms a baby.

It causes your brain to release serotonin, which helps you feel calm.

At the same time, deep pressure stimulation reduces the body's stress hormone, cortisol, and can lower blood pressure and pulse rate and so helps relieve stress and anxiety.

The guideline is a blanket that weighs 10% of your body weight.

After just 5 minutes lying under my weighted blanket, I feel much more relaxed. It's better than a glass of wine for me!

Some people sleep under their weighted blanket?all night.

Experiment with time and duration and see what works for you. Add it to your power tools for neuro-regulation for high-performance.

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An action step you can do today…

Self-awareness is the key to managing your stress levels and keeping you in the optimal performance zone.

Make a list of all your usual work tasks and note which activity causes you the most stress or discomfort.

With that awareness, use your best neuro-regulations tools and techniques both before and after that activity/event. Pay most attention to your stress levels around these activities/events, and watch any time you pass the red arrow!

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We'll cover more on neuro-regulation in future issues.

Do subscribe and share!

I’m Dr Tara Halliday, Imposter Syndrome Specialist.

I’ve been a holistic therapist and high-performance coach for over 21 years.

I'm the creator of the Inner Success for Execs programme - the fastest and best solution to imposter syndrome.

My book, Unmasking: The Coach’s Guide to Imposter Syndrome was an Amazon #1 bestseller in 2018.

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Check out the Inner Success for Execs programme for fast 'up levelling' of your internal leadership tools.

https://www.completesuccess.co.uk

Think you may have imposter syndrome? Take this free quiz to find out:

https://bit.ly/ImpostorQuiz

Want to fast-track and have a chat about your inner success, book a quick 15-minute call here:

https://bit.ly/callTara

Have an excellent, refreshing and recharging weekend!

Tara

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