Peak Performance for Executives: You are reading this post because you are achieving or you have have already achieved some outer success and got to your current executive leadership position. But growth doesn’t have to stop here.
Peak Performance for Executives.
The difference between ordinary and extraordinary is that little extra.
There is a thrill and satisfaction in challenging yourself, stretching and seeing how much you can achieve. Have an impact and make a contribution in your community.
The talents, skills and tools that have got you to this point will not necessarily take you further. Or the approaches you have used to achieve the success you have may have been expensive in terms of time, energy, stress and effect on your relationship. You need new or upgraded power tools to make sure you can sustain or advance your position more easily.
I am writing this post so that you can level up, as gamers would say. It draws on many areas of solid research into peak-performance in business, including neuroscience, psychology, physiology, trauma therapy and flow-state study.
The three essential areas for peak-performance are neuro-regulation (to get and stay calm), clear the negative self-talk and the beliefs that create them, and create new success habits.
Today we are looking at neuro regulation in leadership.
Nervous System Co-regulation: Empowering Leaders for Success.
You can regulate your own nervous system as a way to make effective leadership decisions, using your energy well and focusing.
ESADE Business School did a study where they explored how to predict ‘transformational leaders’; those who had an outsized positive impact in a group.
They hooked students up to EEG and heart rate monitors and gave them a group case study to solve. The researchers observed all their interactions.
The transformational leaders were not those who had more airtime, used the right words or had the best ideas.
They were the ones with the ability to keep their nervous system calm.
But the researchers also discovered something else.
These same transformational leaders could also influence and regulate the nervous systems of those around them. This was a secret to their impact.
Before this starts to sound like magic or mind-tricks, let’s explore the neuroscience of how it works.
Peak performance is about pushing your boundaries and discovering what you are truly capable of.
Reactions of the Nervous System.
When our nervous system gets triggered by a sense of danger or threat, it activates the sympathetic nervous system (survival mode) and we react with a fight, flight or freeze response. Our caveman ancestors would be primed to fight off wild animals, run and hide from them.
The nervous system changes blood flow to the muscles, (hands and legs) by stopping the flow to body parts which are not involved in the process of fight or flight response in order to preserve energy. It the nervous system also changes our heart rate, breathing, blood pressure and even vision.
It produces stress hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol which prepares the body to do battle. (To either fight or run and hide)
This is a fully automatic body reaction refined over millennia to give us the best chance of surviving life threatening incidents.
Activation of the Nervous System.
A part of our nervous system called the sympathetic nervous system gets triggered when the brain detects situations it identifies as threats.
These threats can be real or just imagined in your head.
Most threats are learned via our experience and the model of the world we create.
For example, children who have been taught that speeding cars are dangerous, they will cross the road carefully watching out for cars. This can be taught by parents and friends or by the experience of an accident.
Whenever this child sees a speeding car, he or she will associate it with danger and hence activating fight or flight response or he/she will jump back from a car coming too close before he/she even thinks about it.
The part of the brain that determines threats is called the amygdala. It sifts through information coming in from all of our senses, and our thoughts, and checks for danger, much like a computer virus checker will scan incoming and outgoing emails.
Modern-day humans rarely have to face threats such as tigers, but we still have plenty of situations stored in our amygdala that is interpreted as a threat.
Things that threaten our ‘survival’ these days include loss of income, loss of status, and rejection from a group to name a few.
The amygdala also learns situations that have caused us pain in the past, stored as ‘emotional memories’ and stores them as potential threats. These form the unconscious beliefs that drive a lot of our behavior.
Though these are rarely life-and-death situations, the amygdala errs on the side of caution (survival) and treats such threats as serious, and activates the fight or flight response anyway.
In this way, we are primed to respond quickly with an activated nervous system whenever we detect something even vaguely threatening.
Nervous Systems in a Group.
Early humans survived by being in communities, which is why group approval is a survival imperative at a primal level. Because rejection from the group would drastically reduce your chances of survival.
Living in a group also meant that there are more brains looking out for potential danger. When one person reacts to danger, then other quickly follow until it is solved.
You can see this influence in any group. If someone gasps loudly in surprise, heads will whip around, looking for the source of the possible danger.
In this way, our nervous systems are influenced by those around us. It explains why fear can sweep through a crowd, even when people don’t know what has caused it.
This is an automatic, unconscious reaction to other people’s cues of detecting a threat.
People communicate vast amounts of information about their nervous system state with each other. Posture, muscle tension, tone of voice, facial expressions, breathing rate, bodily smells etc. And that’s all without using any words.
Our brains take in this information from everyone around us, even though we are not consciously thinking about it. This is why we can suddenly get triggered into fight or flight response and you don’t know why.
Business Groups.
We see nervous systems getting triggered and spreading through the group in business meetings. Tempers get frayed which communicates on the primal level that there is a threat nearby. Some people get anxious while others stop talking or even moving much
Coming back to the ESADE research study, the superlative leaders were those that best regulated their own nervous systems.
That is, their nervous systems are triggered less and/or they can get out of fight or flight response quickly after being triggered.
But their nervous system state is communicated to and provides input to the nervous systems of those around them.
So if a leader is able to regulate their nervous system, and get back into the calm, ‘social engagement’ state, then they help others around them get calm too.
It’s like the leader’s nervous system is saying, ‘hey don’t worry, there is no danger here, you can relax.’ And calm can spread through the group. As more people relax, it helps others relax because the message of more in the group is ‘there’s no danger here.’
The leader that can stay calm when others are not can co-regulate the group member’s nervous systems. How?
You can cause your nervous system to be triggered less, by effectively ‘reprogramming’ your amygdala to stop identifying specific things as threats.
This is deep belief-change work, which is highly effective and creates a significant upgrade in your performance as a leader. This is also the same process that eliminates imposter syndrome, which plagues over 70% of peak-performers. The result is a significant increase in calm and resilience.
Once your nervous system has been triggered, however, then getting yourself out of the fight or flight nervous system state quickly is essential. There are many different tools you can use to do this, and you can find all of them in this book.
One quick way to calm your nervous system is through consciously controlling your breath, which is also explained in the book.
Using tools and techniques to calm your nervous system will not only help you navigate your day but it will also make sure you have the most positive impact on those you head.
