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The prevalent expectation in business is that exceptional performance should be the norm every day, every week, and every month, and then in a busy season it’s dialed up somehow. So my real question is, when do we dial it down? Or, some of you may be thinking, isn’t that what vacation is for?
Absolutely not.
For professional athletes and professional musicians that I’ve been interviewing on the Glowe podcast lately, it’s so clear to me. THEY have games and performances and they also have intensive practices where peak performance is necessary. But, there are also hours upon hours of other “practices” which include REST and recovery. It’s built into the overall plan and the overall evaluation of how they do.
How do we translate this into business? As per usual, it starts with you. Knowing how you’re designed, how you operate optimally, and what your body needs as far as recovery, (not vacation, not spa days), built into your life. What does good recovery mean in order to fuel your performance? Does it mean you can do three things exceptionally well in a day and then you require breaks? If that’s your threshold, do it. We are all built differently, so we must think differently about how our biology fits into our peak performance at work.
Zoom out to the calendar level, and this is where the seasonality of each department gets interesting. When is there real room to ease off, and when do you need people to push? No athlete runs at max capacity year-round, and no department should either. Building this into your year strategically means it will look different by department: sales, ops, and client delivery each have their own busy season and their own room to let the air out. Back in the day, accounting firms did this well. You worked your butt off through busy season, and then summers were genuinely light, come in late, leave early. That’s mostly gone now because it’s counter to the “max hours worked wins” mindset, but it used to be normal to build relief into the year, not just survive on one or two weeks of PTO.
I know it’s possible. I’ve seen it, and we’ve been trying to help our clients reimagine what these cycles could look like in their businesses.
Setting boundaries around your own peak and practice time is a great thing to model, and it doesn’t mean you’re any less accessible. It means you’re aware of your own design, that you don’t perform as a steady state but in waves, and you want your people to notice that for themselves.
I can hear some eyes rolling. I’m not going soft. People have the capability to perform at extremely high levels, but you don’t get there by pushing every minute of your 8 to 6 day. That’s the biggest lie there is in business. You will most assuredly burn out.
I’ve been experimenting with some peak performance shifts for myself the last six months, since I joined a group working on flow, and the new tips and creative micro dosing and awareness of the flow cycle has shifted me. I’ve accepted that all of these new protocols and tools have become part of my growing list of practices, and like many others I’m constantly amazed how integrating this cycle into my weekly habits has yielded massive results. And that keeps me coming back to it.
If we’re going to move from command and control to clarity and flow, it starts with the pursuit of clarity. Start questioning, start analyzing, get curious, and then experiment. What would this kind of shift do for YOU?
What is your natural cycle? What is your business cycle? What is your team’s? What is the practice season, and when is the recovery? What’s a micro shift you could make this week?
Let me know how it goes. Let’s continue to witness what’s possible without force.
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