Sustainable High Performance: Mental & Emotional Fitness Primer (Part 1 of 4)

By Sherman Lo & Isabelle Goldfarb, Co-Founders at Soar.

From Skyscraper to Monastery?

Over a decade ago sitting on the 37th Floor of the tallest building in Hong Kong I was a high-performing corporate lawyer smashing out 80-hour work-weeks.?I burnt out.?Several years later my professional career was flying, but I had high levels of anxiety fuelled by ambition. ?I ended up living in a monastery to recover.?That was the second-best thing that ever happened to me (the first was meeting my wife).?

I started asking myself some important questions:

What do I really want - filtering out the expectations of society, my peers, my parents. ?How can I perform and grow in the long-term without burning out??What is the nature of my mind and how can I tame it??

This 4-part series provides a summary of the experience I’ve had working with some brilliant psychologists, master coaches and hundreds of high-performing professionals exploring these questions.

The long-tail implications of covid and isolation on stress and mental health cannot be understated.?If ever there was a time to turn your attention and intention on your mental and emotional fitness, now is that time.?

The Framework for Sustainable High Performance?

“People who thrive have an edge—they are highly energized—and they know how to avoid burnout.” (Spreitzer and Porath, Harvard Business Review).

?To “thrive” means to be prosperous and grow: to flourish.?Sustainable high performance is the ability to thrive in the long-term.?It feels like you are “Soaring” rather than hammering, craving or drifting through life.?

The three interrelated dimensions that promote sustainable high performance include:?

1. Authenticity // Being More You – personal authenticity or alignment with values – moving in your direction and not someone else’s – raising self-awareness and self-acceptance.

2. Results // Taking Effective Action – doing the "right" things in line with your authentic self, managing your energy (not your time), designing to build positive habits and break bad ones and taking balanced risks from the edge of comfort.?

3. Unblocking // Creating Inner Harmony – skilfully working with unhelpful thoughts and emotions – being able to move forward when stuck and preventing self-sabotage (going backwards).

Taking effective action to produce results for something you don’t care about feels like trophy collecting or “hammering” away at work.?Knowing where you want to go but not having the energy or habits to get there leaves you with a sense of “craving”.?Neither knowing where you want to go or the means to get there feels like “drifting”.?Unhelpful thoughts and emotions can paralyse or self-sabotage efforts to move effectively towards your valued direction.

To know who you are, where you want to go and take effective action to get there while maintaining inner harmony feels like you are “Soaring” in the realm of sustainable high performance.

As the most tangible expression of “performance” we tend to place disproportionate focus on the second dimension, whilst neglecting the first and third.?This is low-hanging fruit for most people.?Any one dimension can derail (unsustainable), and all three are interrelated.?

In subsequent articles (parts 2, 3 & 4) we will dig deeper into each of these dimensions to flesh out the theory and how you can apply them practically.

How can this help me? There's no free lunch without practice and consistency

The frameworks and theories described in this 4-part series work.?But reading alone will bring you limited progress without personalised application, practice and consistency.?The same applies to your physical fitness.?If you train at the gym, chances are you know how many sessions you’ve done this week, which muscle groups to focus on and how many sets and reps you’ve done for each exercise.

A similar approach can be applied to your mental and emotional fitness, but most people do not – this is the main obstacle – “if you can’t measure it you can’t improve it” (Peter Drucker).?

Are you keeping track of how many actions you took this week to manage your energy levels?? Were there any triggering events that affected you emotionally and what did you do? ?If you used a technique, how did that work out for you? ?Relative to the week before how do these outcomes compare??

By shining the light of awareness and intention on yourself you can begin to experiment to find the actions that work for you. You can begin to craft your personalised mental and emotional fitness regime and collect data to see whether you’re on track and make adjustments accordingly.??

Fortunately, there are many evidenced-based methods to work on each of the three dimensions above.?Many are simple and intuitive to understand, but not necessarily easy to implement into daily practice.?They take time, persistence, introspection and courage.?

Don’t do it alone - reach out

The term “self-help” is not helpful.?On average, people wait 11 years between the onset of mental health symptoms and seeking professional help.?Working with accountability through a trained coach or therapist, or in a group setting is highly recommended to move from theory to an ingrained way of life. This is what we do at Soar.

In our next article (Part 2 of 4) we will focus on the first dimension of sustainable high performance - Authenticity or Being More You. How can I walk to the beat of my own drum instead of someone else's?