There are two things which happened recently which have influenced the thought for this article.
The first the sudden demise of legendary leg spinner Sharne Warne. A true wizard in his art of leg spin he mesmerized us with many unbelievable bowling spells and unimaginable deliveries which were a treat to watch. I spent some time imagining how he would have spent countless hours practicing bowling those different unplayable deliveries.
The second, being March, which happens to be the time of annual appraisals I have been busy trying to list out all the various achievements that me and my team had done and evaluate myself and my teams on the basis of various achievements and misses during the year.
It made me draw the parallels between the corporate and the sports world in my mind … while we talk about the great daily routines that great players and athletes build up and which have enabled them to sustain that kind of great levels of performance over sustained periods of time, a normal player plays for 3 months or a maximum of 6 months during a year depending on the kind of sport they are in. Also, it’s not that they have events every day of the 6 months that the season is on or for that they must play for 12 hours a day.
However, come to think of any corporate executive who in today’s world works 10 to 12 hours daily. With increased connectivity they are available for 7 days a week and around 300 days in a year. And unlike any sportsperson the best of whom can last a maximum of 15 years in their sports a corporate career easily spans close to 40 years or more depending on the persons ambition and competence.
We have seen in sports also how careers of equally talented 2 sports persons follow very different paths during their career spans.
Being a cricket fan the best example that comes to mind is how the careers of Sachin Tendulkar and Vinod Kambli have spanned so very differently despite both being equally talented. Just to refresh everyone’s memory both Sachin and Kambli played together at the school level for the same school, and both together held for a very long time the biggest partnership at a school level. When Kambli made his debut for India a couple of years after Tendulkar, he started with a bang and in a couple of years had built up the best test average for any Indian to have played test cricket. Even today he continues to hold the best test average among all the stellar Indian cricketers, surpassing greats like Sachin, Dravid, Gavaskar and Kohli. But within a few years he lost his place in the Indian team while Sachin continued to play for another 15 + years. So, to a have a successful career for a long duration it’s not just about having the right talent and getting the right breaks initially, it’s also about how you can keep improving and developing your skills by staying focused on your goals.
I also read in a recent interview how Mr. Chandrashekhar Chairman of Tata Sons mentioning how he used to travel for close to 200 days in a year during his initial years as CEO of TCS to ensure that the right culture was build up. So, if you build in about 100+ days of business travel also into your corporate routine do we really do enough to ensure we are able to continue performing at our best across the 40 odd years of our careers?
Another major differentiator is that sport personnel train for a very high number of days and compete for very few days. If you take a corporate person, he is always competing with rarely any training at all.
What would be a good means for maintaining that peak performance or what is referred to the Ideal Performance State over a long period of time. The capacity to mobilize energy on demand is the basic building block of the Ideal Performance State. There are two key components in this. The first is the capability to swing seamlessly between energy expenditure and energy renewal or recovery. Very often people say the job is very stressful but very often the stress to perform at a particular level is the actual stimulus for growth. The stress to complete something on time ensures that we do our best to complete the same within the given deadlines. The same is the case with almost all cases. But am sure sometimes we feel drained when we work in high stress atmospheres. This happens not because of stress but because we aren’t finding the time or the routine to recover from the stress. When this happens it starts taking a hit on our performance and makes us into a pale shadow of what we are. One of the reasons for the different paths that Sachin and Kambli career took could be because of this lack of routines which help bring about this recovery. We also find several tennis stars the best example that comes to mind is that of Rafael Nadal who are so good at playing 4 and 5 hour matches and five setters which totally drains out his opponents.
Before we get into the ideal routines which helps build the right oscillation between the stress and recovery lets also understand a bit about High Performance Pyramid. Very often in corporate life peak performance is considered as directly proportional to the persons brain power. But what studies have shown is for maintaining the ideal performance state all the below factors become crucial:
1. Physical Capacity
2. Emotional Capacity
3. Mental Capacity
4. Spiritual Capacity.
When all these work in sync with rituals which enable swings between all these capacities enabling them to in ideal state are we able to maintain the Ideal Performance State over long periods of time.
Physical Capacity
As corporate executives some of the critical habits that I feel we need to consciously avoid are as below.
Not having breakfast, very late lunch, and even later dinner, very less water intake, Continuous rounds of coffee and tea, no fixed time for going to bed and getting up which puts the body clock totally out of sync.
There is this interesting observation which came out of studies of tennis players. After every two games before the players change sides during a tennis match, they get a very small break of 90 seconds. The very successful players were found to have devised a routine very often unconsciously to recover from the stress of the two games during these 90 seconds.
We will also need to find routines which help us to refresh every 90 minutes or so. It has also been found that the bodies hormones, glucose, and blood pressure levels drop every 90 minutes. The short break to refresh is what will get our energies back up and help maintain the same levels of peak performance throughout the day and every day.
Emotional Capacity
Some the normal negative emotions that we face in day-to-day corporate life are frustration, anger, impatience, fear etc. The interesting part is our body gives us enough signals whenever these negative emotions are affecting the peak performance of our body. But what do we do we quickly swallow a pill and continue with the never ending rat race.
There was also this interesting study that was done on actors by measuring all their body vitals while they were portraying anger on the screen and then compared to their body vitals when they were genuinely angry. There was no difference in any of the body vitals when they were acting and when they were genuinely angry. So, at times of stress at work this could be a good way to ensure your body is not affected by the stress by using effective body postures.
So, building such routines when you understand that you are getting angry will help you control your anger and focus your energy on the real tasks. Once done over a period this becomes a habit and our body automatically follows that routine.
Mental Capacity
This is the area where most of the normal training programs that we receive in corporate life are aimed at. The normal training programs that we receive are all aimed at improving mental capacity by providing trainings on time management, process engineering, knowledge management etc.
But there are lesser-known methods like meditation and visualization which help to give the mind the time to refresh after a period of stress and ensures that we can maintain peak performance for longer periods of time. There are these well documented stories about famous tennis player Andrea Agassi, Famous golf player Tiger Woods and ace diver Alka Wilkinson. Very often we consider these are spiritual methods and choose not to use them.
Spiritual Capacity
The Spiritual capacity mentioned in the pyramid is not the one linked to any religious beliefs but to the energy that is unleashed by tapping into one’s deepest values by linking the action to a strong sense of purpose. This probably explains why soldiers perform extraordinary feats in battlefield. We have also seen how some players take their playing levels to a whole new level when playing for the country. The best example that comes to mind are the singles heroics of Indian tennis player Leander Paes while playing the Davis Cup for India. While Leander was the world No 1 player in doubles for several years and won several grand slams, he was just a good player in individual singles events while playing the professional circuit. But when playing for India in the Davis Cup or in the Olympics he would raise his game to a totally higher dimension which is why he has beaten several of the top seeds in the Davis cup and also won an Olympics Bronze medal in tennis singles.
In corporate environments where changes are happening at a very fast pace its crucial that all individuals can be at their peak performance not only for the individual but also for the organization. When individuals and organizations understand the importance of finding routines that will help them get the required recharge in between the stress only then will they be able to maintain their peak performance throughout the day.
Similarly, its only when individuals and organizations understand the importance of all the four capacities namely Physical, Emotional, Mental and Spiritual and figure out individual routines which will help them maintain their peak performance in all the 4 capacities will corporate athletes be able to maintain their peak performance for the 40 odd years that they are in the corporate race.
See this pyramid for more clarity on the same …
and keep watching this space for more…
