Sustaining Peak Performance

High-Performance Executive Newsletter: Greater success with less stress.

New challenges bring satisfaction and impact. Your current skills and methods might not be enough for your next advancement, or they can be costly in time, energy, and relationships. Upgrade with our newsletter, full of tools and insights based on extensive research in business performance, neuroscience, psychology, and more, to enhance and sustain your high performance.

The three essentials for high performance are neuroregulation (to get and stay calm), clearing negative self-talk and the beliefs that create it (including imposter syndrome), and creating new success habits.

This week, we're looking at systems and tactics to sustain peak performance.

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Sustaining Peak Performance

I found the headline image for this newsletter by searching for the term peak performance. It’s a desirable goal in business, and I found over 500 books about it listed on Amazon. But is this really what we want? Look at the picture again; a single mountaintop. Do we want amazing performance just once? Implicit in our idea of peak performance is repeated and consistent high performance. A more accurate description is a high plateau.

The highest physical plateau in the world is in and around Tibet, called the ‘rooftop of the world’. It lies at an average of 14,800 ft (4500m) above sea level and is a great metaphor for sustained peak performance. From this high elevation above sea level, there are still many higher mountains, that is, you can have the capacity for variety and extraordinary work from a high baseline.

Another example of extraordinary effort is a mother lifting a car off her injured child. Science has shown us that this is not because the mother suddenly became much stronger through willpower and motivation. Rather, she has bypassed her body’s feedback of pain, which normally prevents the overexertion that could lead to muscle damage. The mother’s peak exertion here is unsustainable, and its cost is too high for regular and repeated use.

In my engineering consulting years, I occasionally worked through the night to complete a time-critical report after unavoidable delays. This peak exertion was also not sustainable, so we need to draw a distinction between peak effort and peak performance. Repeated overexertion leads to burnout and career ending.

To create sustainable high-plateau performance, we therefore need the right tools, tactics and systems. Let’s look at these in order of ascending complexity.

Low-Hanging Fruit

I once watched a friend preparing his car before our rather terrifying high-speed drive on a German Autobahn with no speed limit. As he carefully adjusted tyre pressures, topped up fluids, aligned mirrors and cleaned the windscreen, he assured me that the brakes were new, the wheels aligned and the tyre tread was good. Why? Because at 20 mph, slightly suboptimal doesn’t make much difference, but at 120 mph, it really does!

The low-hanging fruit for high-plateau performance is optimising the basics of your vehicle, i.e. your physical body. Sara Milne Rowe outlines these basics in her book, the SHED Method. It stands for sleep, hydration, exercise and diet. If any of these essentials are suboptimal, it affects your focus, energy, clear-thinking and mood. Suboptimal means your plateau is lowered.

I take a tech approach to these, using a sleep tracker (Oura ring), a food tracker (Cronometer) and a training app (Strong). From these measurements, I’ve discovered that I sleep best in a dark, quiet room with an open window for fresh air. Everyone has a slightly different optimal, so find yours and make it your default to keep your plateau high with minimal effort.

Resilience and Rapid Recovery

The next easiest tactic is to establish a system that calms you quickly. When you have a surprise, shock or sudden stress, the body’s nervous system reacts fast and switches your nervous system to the fight/flight/freeze state. This creates physiological changes to your heart rate, blood pressure, blood flow to the brain, stress hormones and more. It affects your ability to perform: it lowers your IQ by 13 points, trashing your capacity for good decision-making. It also lowers your creativity by 50% and makes you emotionally reactive and defensive.

This nervous system shift happens in response to a perceived threat before your conscious brain has even registered the threat, so you can’t think your way out of it. If you do nothing about it, it can take up to four hours for your nervous system to get back to normal. This is a long time to be not at your best! However once you notice your nervous system has been triggered, then you can work to calm yourself quickly.

Steps to get calm quickly include vigorously shaking out your arms and legs, followed by deep breathing, deliberate body relaxation, and consciously tuning in to each of your physical senses in turn. For example, look around the room and see how many objects are blue. This flushes the stress hormones out of your muscles, resets your blood flow and communicates to your unconscious brain that there is no threat, and it can relax again.

Energy and Mood Scheduling

The following step is to tune your schedule to your strengths and stressors. What improves your creativity, focus, and mood? For example, this morning, I mapped out this newsletter in my head before I wrote one word. I used my usual long walk to plan the structure, examples, and theme. I know this is my personal creative style, and I gave myself the most pleasant environment for it.

High-plateau performance does not mean the most effortful or the most painful.

Indeed, the peak performance flow state is characterised by a sense of ease, energy and joy.

You may also notice you have a time of day or week in which you are most creative, productive or focused. Plan your day to match your energy and mood to your tasks. For example, I really dislike doing my VAT returns, and it doesn’t need high focus. So I plan this task for late afternoon when my energy is usually lower, and I can go out and do something more pleasant afterwards. I never do my VAT before a high-stakes meeting, giving a talk, a client session or a creative project.

When you identify things in your working day that cause you the most stress, you can schedule these as far apart as possible. This gives you time to reset your nervous system afterward if something has triggered it.

Mindsetting

Your performance is also influenced by how you think about your environment and yourself in it. There are plenty of great books about how to purposefully create the most helpful thoughts for your work on a weekly or daily basis and ahead of important events. Creating an optimal mindset is essential for your highest performance. Done well, you engage your unconscious brain (the reticular activation system) to pay attention to supportive, uplifting, motivational and energising information.

The dark side of mindset is trying to use it to change unconscious blocks because it doesn’t work for that. For example, you can’t make yourself feel more worthy by telling yourself in the mirror that you are worthy. Why not? Because unconscious beliefs are a part of your brain’s logical map of the world and how you perceive it to work. You can't simply talk yourself out of such beliefs.

However, there is a systematic way to change such beliefs, using the brain’s existing neurochemical mechanism to create beliefs. Unconscious blocks include self-doubt, imposter syndrome, overthinking and feeling not good enough despite your success.

Systematically eliminating unconscious blocks is the power play for ultimate high-plateau performance.

It only needs to be done once to create a permanent change. The block itself dissolves, and you no longer need to spend time and energy fighting it. It releases a massive burst of energy, removes an internal climate of fear and worry, and makes your high performance effortless.

Purpose and Satisfaction

The final key to developing high-plateau performance is the meaning you give to your work. Define your core values and align your work to those values (not the other way around). Seek to express your values in your work, then explore what would give you joy and satisfaction. Is it contribution, creating, legacy, or making a difference? You can also find satisfaction in adventure, stretching yourself and exploring possibilities – your work looks like this when it is free from fears and blocks.

High-plateau performance can be immensely enjoyable when you feel switched on, engaged, growing and producing. The better systems you create for your performance, the more capacity you have to achieve consistently.

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What I've loved this week:

My 40-minute morning walks have been brilliant this week. A? month ago, I hurt my foot and couldn’t walk, so this week, I’m back walking and really noticing how it improves my energy, mood and creativity.

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An action step you can do this week …

Reflect on all of the points in this newsletter, not just one or two. The tools and systems here work together to create the best internal working environment for you to achieve your dreams and relish doing it.

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I’ll take a look at peak performance in future issues.

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I'm Dr Tara Halliday, specialist Imposter Syndrome Coach and best-selling author. I run the 5-star Inner Success programme for executives; the most effective, proven method to eliminate imposter syndrome for good.

I’m unavailable for one-to-one work until 2025, as I’m running a research project in October on imposter syndrome. In this, I’m training 30 coaches to facilitate Inner Success (to show it’s not a ‘therapist effect’). These experienced coaches require confidential case-study clients, fully supervised by me.

If you’re interested in experiencing this impressive transformation at a massively reduced price (because it’s research), click here to get the details: https://bit.ly/2024IS-CaseStudy

Have an excellent, refreshing and recharging weekend!

Tara

P.S. Thank you for reading to the end of the newsletter, I appreciate your interest and attention!

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