The Performance Paradox
- Dave Wood
The strategy that gets many people to the top is often the same strategy that eventually holds them back.
I see this all the time with driven, high-performing people.
There's no doubt that to get anything worthwhile in this life, you've got to roll your sleeves up and get stuck in. Push yourself, work hard, take on more. That's all part of it.
And the thing is, this strategy works. You get a lot of stuff done, and it can get you right to the top. But we're not actually designed to operate like that all the time. If you're constantly busy and on the go, eventually the cracks start to appear, and you may experience things like:
- Fatigue
- Irritability
- Impacted sleep
- Low energy
- Difficulty focusing, making decisions and staying productive
The problem is, because working hard is what got you this far, even when you're experiencing the signs and symptoms of chronic overload, the natural response is often to knuckle down, push harder, work longer, take on more and just keep grinding.
Think about how that would play out in sport. The best athletes know how to push, but they also know how to pull back and recover. They understand that sustainable peak performance comes from managing the relationship between stress and recovery.
Yet in business, we often do the opposite. Busyness gets confused with productivity, recovery gets pushed aside and as demands increase, we simply do more.
I recently ran a CEO through a two-day Performance Intensive who had built a successful business doing exactly that. He was incredibly driven and used to pushing through fatigue, but he'd reached the point where simply adding more effort wasn't working anymore. One of the biggest shifts for him was learning to better read his internal state and use simple practices throughout his day to manage his stress, recovery and energy more effectively.
This isn't about becoming less driven or trying to remove all the stress. It's about understanding that if you want to keep performing at a high level, you've got to get damn good at managing your energy and recovery as well.
If you want to keep doing what you're doing for the next 20, 30 or 40 years, you can't just push and grind your way there. So it's worth asking, is pushing harder still helping you perform, or is it starting to have a negative effect on you, your close relationships and your business?
