FROM THE BLOG
Become a Corporate Athlete
Posted by Prospera Financial on February 24, 2021
One of our friends and advisors, Ari Baum, Endurance Wealth Partners, passed along an email blog from Steven Kotler of the Flow Research Collective that we couldn’t wait to share. The email, titled The 4 Steps to Become a Corporate Athlete, describes the intense training a professional athlete goes through to achieve peak performance, and compares it to executives, who are expected to be at peak performance at all times, but often don’t put in adequate practice or training time. I played tennis growing up, and let’s face it, I never had the chops to make it pro, but shouldn’t I train, perform, and recover at my corporate job in the same way? According to this article, maybe so!
While athletes experience months-long off seasons of rest, most executives get only a few weeks of vacation every year. The career of the average professional athlete is seven years while an executive can expect to work for 40 to 50 years. Imagine how refreshed you’d be coming back to the office after three continuous months off of work every year. What would you do with the time? And think about what it would feel like to put everything into a job (like you do every day) and then be done with it in less than a decade – seems crazy, right?
We put pressure on ourselves to be the very best, but Steven says this is a problem – “The failure of executives and entrepreneurs to train and then recover effectively caps our performance. The number of hours in a day is fixed but the quantity and quality of energy available is variable.” When we are performing our best.. and I mean our very best.. it’s in part because of our effective management and mobilization of our energy.
Steven describes the four steps to becoming a corporate athlete as:
1. Leveraging oscillation
2. Deploying active recovery
3. Adopting a binary approach to work
4. Systematizing flow state
Lots of fancy words here, but what a great parallel he draws for us. We, as corporate professionals, shouldn’t take our energy for granted… we should be leveraging that energy and taking the proper recovery time and training time in order to not burn out and keep performance at its highest level.
To read more of Steven and his team’s work at the Flow Research Collective, click here.
Talk soon,
Katie Wengler Mohan
Account Manager – Corporate Branding & Events
