Mark Pollock

For optimal performance we must be calm and alert, not hyped up and on edge which are performance blockers.

According to Dr Andrew Huberman at Stanford, there are 2 types of tools to help us do that as we face stress inducing challenges.

There are tools to be used in the moment like the ‘deep sigh’, where you breathe in completely a few times and take a sharp inhale at the top of each deep breath. It helps to lower your stress in the moment by activating the parasympathetic nervous system that promotes calmness when you feel under pressure.

And, there are tools to be used in advance. Some help us to calm down like mindfulness, meditation and yoga nidra. Others raise the ceiling of what our bodies and minds consider stressful like an intense workout, an ice bath, deep tissue massage, saunas and lots of other things that add more stress in.

Be warned, if you are already battling another acute stressor, like having a cold or a bad night’s sleep, be careful as your immune system will be under pressure already. Too much acute stress can tip you over the edge and leave you feeling run down.

The point is that for optimal performance we must be calm and alert, not hyped up and on edge, which are performance blockers. Effective leaders understand this, and they create an environment where their teams can do just that.

Stress is normal. It is our built-in response to danger that produces a fight, flight or freeze response.

According to Dr Andrew Huberman who is a Stanford Neuroscientist, those stress responses produce a mix of calmness and alertness along a continuum.

At the extremes of calmness, we have people in comas who are deeply calm but not alert. And, each step along the continuum sees our alertness increasing, starting with sleep and moving to drowsiness, alertness of varying degrees, then acute stress through to chronic stress which sees excessive alertness and panic.

At the upper end of the continuum, variations of anxiety, overwhelm, burnout, distraction, sleeplessness and apathy are the exact opposite of what we need for optimal performance.

To perform at our best, we need to be both calm and alert and this doesn’t happen without taking regular breaks and longer recovery periods.

In fact, rest and recovery are performance non-negotiables. Effective leaders create space for both.

Leading through a crisis, any crisis – man-made or a natural disaster, requires decisions to be made in a world of imperfect knowledge and uncertainty.

It demands the strengths we saw in Sir Ernest Shackleton’s thwarted but ultimately heroic Endurance expedition of 1914 to 1916– the ability to try something, fail and immediately try something else.

That’s the leadership challenge for all of us - a relentless focus on moving forward and parking what has gone before.