Mark Pollock

Pessimists lean towards the hopeless, but optimists may rely on hope alone without any grounding in facts. Neither seem useful.

Realists sit somewhere in between. And, to explain it is worth considering Aristotle’s spectrum principle called “the golden mean” that he developed 2,500 years ago.

It describes a middle ground between two extremes where the balance is found slightly to one side of the mid-point.

Realists don’t operate at the extremes. Rather, they run acceptance and hope in parallel, their golden mean pushing them to the hopeful side of the midpoint between hope and hopeless.

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.

Everything I do is about inspiring leaders and their teams to build resilience and collaborate with others so that they achieve more than they thought possible.

It sits at the top of a clarity stack that starts with my why statement, feeds into our 4-year business strategy, annual objectives, quarterly goals, weekly priorities, and daily actions.

Gaining clarity provides a filter for ruling projects in and out, it reduces cognitive load and frees us to perform at our best.

Peak performers reach an optimal state of consciousness called flow where they feel and perform at their best.

It doesn’t happen by chance and Stanford Professor of Psychology, Carol Dweck, helps to explain one of the underlying drivers of flow.

She found that people with growth mindsets who are open to learning are able to access flow more often and stay there longer compared to people with fixed mindsets.

Leaders who create a learning culture within their teams set the foundations for peak performance.

Exploration stories are filled with people pursuing success in the knowledge that they might fail.

That is what Sir Ernest Shackleton, the great Polar explorer did time and time again on a series of Antarctic expeditions - Discovery, Ni**od, Endurance and Quest.

Despite the epic nature of the expeditions, Shackleton and his fellow explorers actually failed to reach any of their primary targets.

Yet, by existing in the gap between success and failure these people contributed to scientific discovery, leadership theory and team dynamics.

To reach the boundaries of what’s possible, explorers understand that they must risk failure.

At a time when most psychologists focused on the negative aspects of mental illness, Abraham Maslow shifted focus to look at the most creative or most talented or most intelligent people that he could find.

Indeed, it was Maslow who originally coined the term “positive psychology” nearly 3 decades before Martin Seligman popularised the idea as President of the American Psychological Association in 1998.

In The Farther Reaches OF Human Nature that was published in 1971 after Maslow died, he argued that rather than sampling the whole of the population and finding out what the average was, it is worth focusing on the best specimen, the top one percent.

Creative leaders do not look to the average to understand how to deal with challenges. Rather, they learn from the explorers, the survivors and the one percenters operating at the extremes of human experience.

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.

As an adventure athlete I took part in endurance races like six Marathons in a week in the Gobi Desert, the Dead Sea Ultra Marathon, Zurich Ironman and a 43-day expedition race to the South Pole.

The physical challenge was obvious, but it turned out that the psychological challenge was equally as tough.

Of course, we had trained hard to prepare our bodies, but balancing the mental highs and lows became as important as having the physical capacity to put one foot in front of the other.

As Inge Solheim, my Norwegian South Pole team-mate, shared with me during a particularly tough day on the ice in Antarctica: “Stay neutral. Don’t let the highs get too high and don’t let the lows get too low.”

Explorers recognize that time in the mind-gym is complimentary to their physical training.

Leaders focused on sustaining optimal performance understand the fine line between anxiety that compromises performance and excitement that drives it.

It’s a combination of physiological, psychological and neurological factors that push us towards one or the other.

Lots of leaders are attempting to stay on the right side of the line through physical exercise, meditation, gratitude practices or even cold-water plunges right through the winter!

Personally, I’ve never managed to get into sea swimming or meditation, but a complimentary approach to flip anxiety into excitement is ‘box breathing’ where you breathe in for six seconds, then hold for six. Then six seconds out and finally a six second hold.

You just keep repeating this. It’s amazing and good for all occasions – when you’re trying to get to sleep, before a difficult conversation or when you’re just feeling stress levels rising for no good reason.