The demands that senior leadership and top executives are required to maintain each day, quarter, and year are far greater than a trained athlete. The average professional athlete spends 90% of his time practicing and the remaining 10% competing. The average executive spends absolute zero time training and devotes 12-15 hours a day meeting high demands. Athletes typically enjoy a few months of the off-season, and the executive if lucky gets 3-weeks of vacation. The career average for a pro is roughly seven years (pending the sport), and the executive clocks in 40-50 years. Corporate athletes will have a string of bad days. For many who are time-starved, life only gets tougher.
And that’s the key point. We can’t control our external conditions (e.g. weather, opinions from others), but we can control our inner conditions such as our state of mind, emotions, attitude, and determination. When you are mentally, physically, and emotionally balanced, only then do you have the capacity to thrive in complex, difficult circumstances.
The rituals and routines that athletes focus on have profound psychological effects. They understand how to slow down their heart rate, calm the mind by taking deep breaths, or pausing 10-20 seconds before taking the next foul shot or power serve. Visualization and deep breathing are simple everyday techniques that work just as well in the office. Why? Because when you get past the physical part, which certainly is hard and many do burnout, only then do you realize the mental and emotional capacity to overcome the next hurdle is more powerful. The “more” will keep knocking on your door and will arrive in many forms: more pressure, more time, more patience, more deadlines, more adaptation, more profit, or simply more purpose. When the company culture demands more high performance corporate athletes, you better understand that psychological resilience (responding quickly and constructively) and spiritual capacity (meaning the energy that is released by tapping into your deep values such as motivation, determination, and intention) will be the key to winning.
Winning doesn’t stop after round one. You will be expected to rise up, and will need the cognitive health as your source of motivation to put out the daily fires while not loosing sight of the bigger picture. Often this is achieved by breaking away from the linear, same-old-style of thinking to reach a period of recovery or reflection. It is sometimes painful and exhausting. However, you have to break a vicious cycle. If you don’t, it is still a cycle. It has no beginning or end; just a continuous feedback loop. You have to learn how to balance the physical, mental, and emotional challenges that work and life will place in front of you. And most executives and athletes need an end. A success point. A finish line. Because that’s where the reward will be for you.
Source: On Mental Toughness, The Making of a Corporate Athlete, J. Loehr and Tony Schwartz, Harvard Business School 2018.
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