Peak performance isn’t only for athletes. Executives, much like Olympians, are asked to deliver their best under pressure, recover quickly, and sustain performance over the long haul. The difference is that instead of chasing medals, leaders are charged with making high-stakes decisions, inspiring teams, and steering organizations through complexity. So how do you achieve peak executive performance?

In a recent episode of the Life + Leadership podcast, I sat down with Bright Arrow’s COO, Maggie Gough, to explore six science-backed methods that help executives stay sharp, motivated, and resilient. These aren’t abstract theories. They’re practical ways to think, lead, and live like an athlete—because leadership, too, is an endurance sport.

How can executives unlock their best thinking?

Executives do their best thinking when they enter flow state—a zone where challenge and skill are perfectly matched. In flow, time melts away, distractions disappear, and clarity comes quickly. It’s the state where strategy clicks and creativity connects.

For me, flow often happens when I retreat to a tiny cabin in the woods. With no distractions, a clear set of questions to tackle, and enough skill to engage the problems in front of me, I can unlock thinking that would never surface in between back-to-back meetings.

Maggie described her own experience this way: “I was fumbling with new technology for hours and couldn’t get anywhere. But once I had enough skill, everything suddenly clicked and progress became effortless.”

The lesson for leaders: flow doesn’t just happen by accident. It’s engineered through clear goals, the right environment, and feedback loops that tell you when you’re on track.

How can leaders use pressure to sharpen executive performance without burning out?

Pressure can help leaders perform at their best—but only when the dose is right. Too little leads to disengagement, too much leads to burnout, but the right amount creates focus and energy.

We’ve all seen the warning signs when pressure tips too far: memory lapses, irritability, decision fatigue, skipped workouts, or overreliance on caffeine and alcohol. As Maggie reminded me during our conversation: “Most of us are exceptional at performing through burnout. That doesn’t mean we’re not burned out—it means we’ve learned to power through.”

To stay in the sweet spot, treat your calendar like an athlete’s training plan. Alternate between intense and lighter weeks. Insert micro-breaks throughout your day. Guard your sleep as if it’s a performance tool—because it is. Pressure isn’t something to avoid. It’s a resource to calibrate.

What truly sustains motivation for executives?

Bonuses and public praise fade quickly. The motivation that lasts comes from autonomy, competence, and connection.

Autonomy means having choice in how you work and space for creativity. Competence means building enough skill to stay challenged but not overwhelmed. And connection means surrounding yourself with people who support your goals.

As Maggie put it: “When I get boxed into work that allows no creativity, my motivation plummets. But when I can apply my expertise and stay connected to people who cheer me on, motivation lasts.”

These three drivers aren’t perks. They’re the core of sustainable leadership energy.

How can leaders adapt without losing momentum?

Adaptability is most effective when leaders follow the discipline cycle: set a goal, act, monitor, adjust. This rhythm prevents overreaction and builds consistency.

Too often, executives skip the monitoring step and move straight from action to reaction. The result? Whiplash strategies and exhausted teams. But when you deliberately pause to track progress, you create the space to refine rather than scrap.

I’ve seen this at Bright Arrow. Documenting why we chose not to pursue a particular strategy saved us from circling back to the same idea a year later. That record kept us focused on adjustments instead of restarts.

This discipline cycle allows leaders to refine their leadership style and strategies the way athletes refine their mechanics—through steady, small adjustments over time.

How can setbacks make leaders stronger instead of weaker?

Setbacks become strength when leaders treat them as data, not personal failure. Champions don’t internalize losses—they extract lessons and move forward.

After a missed target or tough quarter, I encourage leaders to ask: What is this teaching me? What is still in my control? What will I do differently next time?

Maggie added an important reminder: “We don’t like to admit burnout or failure because it feels weak. But acknowledging it gives us the freedom to learn and move forward stronger.”

Resilient executives don’t just bounce back—they bounce forward, bringing their teams along with them.

How can leaders consistently show up with confidence under pressure?

Executives can build confidence the same way athletes prepare for game day—through visualization, self-talk, and pre-performance routines. These simple practices help the brain believe it has already succeeded.

Athletes don’t spend time imagining losing the game—they rehearse winning. Leaders can use the same tools before board meetings, negotiations, or all-hands presentations. Visualize the discussion flowing the way you want. Replace anxious thoughts with positive anchors like, “I’ve prepared for this. I’m ready.” Develop a ritual—whether deep breathing, reviewing your top outcomes, or standing tall—that primes your brain for peak performance.

As Maggie and I discussed, leadership is not a sprint, nor exactly a marathon. It’s an endurance sport that demands bursts of intensity, intentional rest, and constant recalibration. Different methods will resonate at different times, and the key is experimenting until you discover what works best for you.

By thinking like an athlete—engineering flow, calibrating stress, fueling motivation, and preparing mentally—you protect your long-term capacity for peak executive performance.

Your organization doesn’t just need you to work harder. It needs you to work smarter, with the mental game of a champion.

Transript

Tegan Trovato

This episode is a little nerdy in the best way, in my opinion. We’re unpacking the science behind what drives peak performance for senior leaders.

I’m excited to have our own COO, Mackie Goff, with me to explore six motivational methods that you can start using right away to think sharper, stay energized, and lead with clarity. Well, the big nerd in me could not be happier to record this episode. And Mackie, I’m really glad to have you here to nerd out with me too, because there’s a couple of theories we’re going to talk about that I know are totally in your wheelhouse.

You’ve been talking about them since I met you, but today we’re going to talk about motivational methods for elite executive performance. The reason I’m nerdily excited about this is that, you know, as professional coaches, for those of us who coach more senior executives, we’re pretty well trained in these methods for motivation, these mindsets, these practices and disciplines, but we don’t really overtly talk about them. You know, like, I’m not going to sit with a CEO and be like, you should think about Tversovsky’s optimal experience state.

Like, no one’s going to be interested in that.

I swear. I may have a client every now and then who would love to get to that level of specificity, but for us as coaches, it’s our job to understand these things and then, you know, strategically help our clients learn to apply them in a way that makes sense for them without it being overly nerdy and science-y. But today we are going to be a little nerdy, but also kind of let you see behind the curtain of here’s some things that our clients do in order to perform at optimal levels.

Here’s things we do as practitioners to perform at more elite executive levels. So there’s six science-backed methods we’re going to share for motivating yourself. And obviously you could use these to motivate your team.

You can teach these to people in your life. We do not recommend that you’re applying all six all the time. What I want you to listen for today is what speaks to you, what seems like something you could try.

The other thing that may come up is that some of these things, maybe habits or practices you already had and you didn’t know there was a name for them. And there’s a lot of power in learning that so that you can be even more intentional about the discipline or the practice that you have, because science has proven that these are helpful for us. So one of the things I will mention too, is that I probably will off and on end up referencing athletes, because a lot of this science was developed through the practice of elite professional athletes.

And they’re often the literal guinea pigs as these methods are developed or measured, where they’ve extrapolated these theories from watching their elite performance. So on occasion I may reference that. The first one I want to go to is flow state.

Introducing Flow State

And the reason I want to talk about that one is I think it’s one of the most attainable, easy to understand concepts. I also think it’s been well published and talked about already. This is certainly one of those topics you could Google and find 12 books on right away.

But the flow state essentially is when you have a really great balance of challenge and skill. So those two things need to be perfectly matched to be in a flow state. And when you’re in a flow state, and Maggie please interject because we talk about flow state when we’re doing our own work here, when you’re in a flow state you’re feeling like you’re in the zone.

Things are just coming, the ideas are coming out, they’re flowing, your performance is really smooth. If you’re an athlete, you almost aren’t thinking sometimes when you’re in a flow state. If you look back over the time you spent in a flow state, you may not be able to track everything that happened over that window because it just naturally came out.

So I actually have learned over the years for myself how to create flow state. There are definitely conditions I need in order for that to happen and Maggie knows about this one in particular I’m going to talk about. It’s a really consistent one I do where I go off into the woods.

So if I tell Maggie I’m planning a trip to the woods, she knows what’s about to happen. I’m about to go think about some things and I have a lot of conditions I put into place. I’m going to use these as emblematic because you know the science says that we should design the right environment in order to achieve the flow state.

Again you have to have that right match of challenge to skill. I’m going to use my own example for where that may not line up sometimes. You want to set clear goals for what it is you’re trying to get out of the flow state.

You want to create some feedback loops for yourself and make sure you’re managing your energy not just your time and I have a lot of specifics I’m going to go into on this. So first of all when you’re not in a flow state let’s talk about that. So when you’re not in a flow state because your challenge and skill are not perfectly matched it could look like me when I’m doing acrylic painting.

So I love to paint and I’ve taken some painting lessons however I don’t find myself in a flow state when I’m painting because I don’t have a ton of skill at it yet. I feel like I’m having to try really hard I’m having to make really specific decisions about what I’m adding, what I’m taking away, where the brush stroke goes. I am not proficient enough in that art to be able to set up a canvas and flow but that is my dream.

That’s what I always imagine is going to finally happen one day but right now I’m having to build enough skill for that to happen. Where flow can happen for me is if I sit down at the piano and I’m not reading sheet music I’m just playing for the leisure of playing and whatever comes out of my fingers I can get lost in that for quite a while and just go and go and go. And so I have enough skill to do that much on the piano and I don’t have to think that hard and in this case I’m not reading sheet music so I’m not having to be perfect or concise with the sound that I’m making and so I do find myself in flow there.

Maggie Gough

I have a business example. So we’ve been working on a project and I had to go into a new technology to figure out how to get to the thing that we wanted. And I sat for two hours, and this is when you brought up the sitting down at a canvas and trying to paint — I was like, that’s how it felt trying to build that thing. And I fumbled and fumbled and fumbled. And it was after two hours I was like, I have to step away. And I did learn things through that period, but my skill was not yet at the point that I could flow. And then when I came back to it earlier this week, all of a sudden it just clicked. And all of a sudden I could see things that were on the screen — inevitably when I looked at it the first time. But when my skill wasn’t there yet, because I was still learning, I was not in flow. But when I had enough of this skill that it was at fumbling with the technology, with finding where things were, all of a sudden I could make progress. It was exact progress, and it moved quickly.

Tegan Trovato

Yeah great example so as you’re listening folks you may think about when work feels clunky or hard it’d be interesting to assess why that might be you can think back on these criteria we’ve given you like was the environment not right? Did you not have a great match of challenge to skill? Were you really not clear in what you were sitting down to do to begin with meaning you didn’t have a clear goal?

Designing for Flow in Practice

Were you managing your energy towards it? Were you trying to do it in chunks? So let’s talk specifically about some of those things in detail.

I always recommend, oh man actually let me go, there’s two things that I always say on this podcast and that I always say to our clients. One, thinking time is everything. If you are a senior leader and you don’t spend a good percentage of your time thinking, the organization is not getting its value from you, that is your main job. So that’s like a big thing I constantly talk about, is the thinking time.

And then secondly – we’ve recorded entire podcast episodes about my end-of-year planning private practice. So Maggie and I – of course she’s our COO – we do this together with other consultants in the room for a particular portion of our planning for the business every year. But then there’s this private reflection I do sometime between October and December, where I go off into the woods. I know exactly what questions I want to answer while I’m having this private time. They are a mix of personal reflections and business planning and reflections, the part that only I can do on my own.

And that tends to flow pretty easily for me because I have muscle for this. I’ve been doing this for decades. What I’ve noticed over the last couple of years, when I take that time away, when I get into the business planning part that I need to do on my own. I will get stuck in places where I run out of skill.

So for example, it is currently my job given the size we are to have some vision for our brand’s positioning. However, if I try to go much further down than that, I am out of skill. I do not know where we need to be online. I do not know why we need to be there. I do not know how our tech stack works to help our social media go out. I don’t know how we gather our data that tells us how we’re doing.

This is all stuff Maggie and her team own. So there’s some level of okay I’ve done enough on this topic and the rest will be up to collaboration and partnership inside of the business. So that’s a piece I want you to keep in mind. If you sit down to get in flow state, if you get stuck, you might have kind of crossed into somebody else’s lane. That’s not that unusual. So you want to plan your thinking time in 90-minute sprints. Some people say you could go two hours. I don’t actually believe that. I think we’re pretty tidy in our science at 90 minutes should be a max.

And you should have a very clear intention for what you want to get out of that 90 minutes. You want to remove distractions. So I’m pretty intense about it. I’m going off into the woods. I run a tiny house in the middle of a forest and people know how to get in touch with me at only certain times. I have scheduled my call with my kid to make sure I get to talk with her at certain times of the day. But outside of that is fully focused. No distraction. And in fact I try to get into really deep flow states by being in nature. All I cook all my food over a fire, like it’s extremely relaxed, and that really helps me get into a deeper thinking state.

So that right environment, pretty unique for me, that’s something I need. But I want you to think about as an executive – is the right environment in your office thinking in between meetings? Probably not. So if you want to get into a flow state, I would challenge you to get really creative about what environment is it you need.

Now you may not have the time capability to be off in the woods three or four times a year but you also might if you think about it hard enough. And how many days do you even need right, to be away to just get clear and to think, or to just find pockets of time. It may be every Sunday morning that you aim for a flow state. But what is it that’s uniquely perfect for you?

We’ve talked about matching challenge to skill. If you’re thinking about this with your leadership team and you want to get your team into a flow state, you definitely want to be clear about like who owns some of the expertise on particular topics. When you become a listener, when you’re taking a lead etc. And that’s important so that the team can experience flow together.

And let me tell you, it is unique and gorgeous when an executive team can get into flow. So I’ve had the personal like gift of being in the room for this many times where we will help instigate the flow state but then the coach needs to just step out – like off the team goes. Once they’re in flow it is really obvious. They’re not interrupting each other, they’re really listening, and the ideas connect. They’re not disparate. Team flow is so gorgeous, like I’m getting high just talking about it, oh it’s so good.

And it’s something I challenge you to try to create and overtly say to your team that that is something you’re aspiring to create. And then set clear goals. We talked about this, but make them time bound, like what do you want every 45 minutes, how will you know halfway through your flow setting that you are halfway there and what does the final outcome look like. Then you want a feedback loop.

So athletes’ bodies are their feedback loops. We need, as executives, cognitive feedback. So you may be the one that has to give that to yourself. Oh am I making progress towards the goal, what have I gleaned over the last 90 minutes, what new insights do I have, what interesting ideas have I had. It may just be as simple as reviewing your notes and saying – I feel good about this, I had some good ideas.

So then manage your energy, not just the time. So I want to be real about this though. You know when we want to be in a flow state. An ideal recommendation is be well rested. Start out well rested. You know I don’t know about you, I have a kid, I also have hormones of a particular age… sleep is elusive to me a lot of times. And so I will say start out well rested or well caffeinated just do your best to be as sharp as you can be whatever that is given the conditions and context in your life. I am tired of us gaslighting executives that they need to be these sleeping beauties and have this eight hours of you know gorgeous sleep every night.

Maggie Gough

I think this goes back to the whole having a space having an environment that works for you because sometimes we lost this with remote work there’s no I drove to work and then I was at work and I drove home and then I’m at home and so we have to create these really intentional pathways I think to separate one thing from another. So when you think about what environment you might create that can be physical space but it also can be time environment so do you need 30 minutes before you intend to enter that 90-minute period of flow state to let your brain wonder and clear itself out of all the stuff that’s sitting in there and then move into the next that flow state.

Tegan Trovato

I love that. You know, even an executive coaching will often invite the client to say what do you need to clear before we try to get into the work of coaching. What do you need to clear today. So that comes up for me to Maggie as a reminder that we can’t just decide it’s time. There really can be steps we take beforehand. So love that reminder and I love movement too. So like, get out, move your body. Science tells us that there’s a real connection to being able to move and to clear our minds.

So you might structure that into your bouts of thinking, whether that’s 90 minutes at a time or maybe you take a break halfway through and then think about what helps with flow triggers. So that is, you know, like minimising task switching, not having your devices on. Think about what you could do as quick hit wins. Maggie talks about dopamine hits when it comes to this intellectual work, right. So like, get your dopamine hit. Do something easy to help get your brain going.

There’s little things like that that can help you really create or send signals to yourself that it’s time to get in a flow state. Personally for me, one of this flow triggers I create is having this like specific orientation on my desk before I sit down to think. So there’s a laptop. I will probably have pulled up particular spreadsheets or things that I need. I always have pen and paper because I need to switch between modalities.

So in order to get certain ideas out of my head I have to use a pen and draw it. And those, by the way, never make it back into the strategic plan. But it really is a great creative mechanism before I translate it back into a Word document or a spreadsheet. So there’s just like this setup that I’ve created that’s visually triggers for me. The beginning of a flow state. So as you become more intentional and well practiced in this you will have all your own little nuanced things that help you get there.

If you’re listening to this I want you to just think back to the last time you were in a flow state. That might be painful. Yeah, I was gonna say, if you’re having to work really hard it’s time. It’s also really a wonderful reminder. If we can step back into a flow state really soon. If you’re listening to this I would challenge you to really try to create that opportunity for yourself because it will remind you blatantly the value of flow state. The things you will get out of 90 minutes could have taken you weeks when you’re being less conscious and intentional about your thinking. So that’s my summary on flow states. Maggie, anything else you would want to share there. I know you have a lot of personal anecdotes a lot of times about flow. And are you feeling complete?

Maggie Gough

One caveat I would add is when we talk about the science that sometimes the science doesn’t always apply to a neurodivergent thinker. And so, for example, people with ADHD go into hyper focus and they can go hours in a flow state. But that also requires oftentimes a longer recovery period. And so I think when we talk about flow states we want to be really intentional about the time. We want to give ourselves the freedom, the environment, the space, the orientation. But also, as much as you may have needed a little bit of time on the front end, also give yourself some intentional action after a flow state to separate yourself from that. Maybe you’re moving into more task-oriented work. Maybe you’re moving into allowing all of the other distractions that come into your life, people to text you about doctor’s appointments and kids’ extracurriculars and all the things. But just allow yourself some time to pause and move.

Tegan Trovato

Let’s move into the next thing. Beautiful, thank you. Let’s move into our next meaty topic on mindsets and methods for performance. I want us to think about next the arousal performance curve. So that’s again a nerdy name for a simple concept that is simply this. We perform well under a certain amount of pressure. But if there is too much pressure our performance declines. We are all well familiar with the feeling of this. We know this one. I think we often operate in a state that is well overloaded. We are often not under the right amount of pressure. So I want us to start thinking about that arousal performance curve, what it might mean for us at work. And I want to talk a bit about burnout as we venture into this topic.

So first, before we think about if we are in the right arousal state, I think it’s smart to assess for if we’re already in burnout state. So if we think about burnout, the things that I will see in clients fall into four categories of burnout. So you’ve got cognitive, emotional, physical, behavioural. So as I’m interacting with a client, as our coaches are working with clients, the cognitive signs of burnout are decision fatigue, overthinking simple things, or not being able to remember well.

Now memory lapses just kind of tend to happen as we move further into our lives a little bit more often. But I’ve experienced this where I have been burned out and the inability to remember what I did in the morning was real. That’s a burnout. So we’re not talking about the occasional lapse. We’re talking about deeper like, oh my god I feel uncomfortable that I can’t remember that thing.

Overthinking simple issues, also known as rumination, can often mean we are burned out. We are overtaxed. And decision fatigue, man is that real. My romantic partner and I joke, there’s four children between us. We joke that by the end of a lot of work days the kids get to do what they want because neither of us cares to make a single more decision. What do you want for dinner. Okay, you got it. It’s that easy. I think a lot of us can relate to that. But you know if that happens on a deeper level at work, where we’re like I don’t even care what the team decides, that’s your warning sign of burnout.

Arousal–Performance Curve & Burnout

Maggie Gough

And I want to add to that we can perform through burnout most of us are exceptional part of the reason we’ve made it to leadership at performing through periods of burnout so if you’re listening to the things that Tegan’s outlining as signs of burnout and you’re thinking yeah but I’m still getting my things done that doesn’t mean that you’re not burned out it means that you’ve done a great job of learning to perform through that.

Tegan Trovato

Thank you, oh, that one hurt to hear out loud because it is so true. It is so true I mean it is I think a good portion of the executives our firm coaches would identify with that today so that’s a big one.

Maggie Gough

Let’s be honest we don’t like to admit that we’re burned out yeah it feels weak yeah it doesn’t feel good so we can point often to our performance as a sign that but yes I have all these signs of burnout.

Tegan Trovato

Keep listening to this list. If you’re identifying with too many of these you may have overlooked your own burnout. So, emotional signs are irritability, general lack of empathy for yourself, for others, certainly for others, and just feeling disengaged. Like, I just don’t want to talk, I don’t want to do more, I don’t want to be out and be social. The “F this” factor gets pretty high. That’s a good sign that we are emotionally completely burned out.

Physical — poor sleep, headaches, stomach issues, racing heart. Classic. I think any combination of those would tell you you’re over the edge.

And then behaviourally — reliance on caffeine or alcohol. So I already made a joke earlier like, hey you gotta caffeinate sometimes to keep the wheels moving. I think you can manipulate your body to a degree with things like caffeine and like a stimulant like that. But if you’re relying on it to make your brain work more days than not, you have a problem. And frankly it is not unusual that I will come across a c-suite leader who is abusing alcohol as a way to try to unwind their nervous system. I have had more than a couple of talks with our clients about my concern of their overuse of alcohol as a way to try to de-escalate their taxation.

And I have personally been there. I’ve had chapters of my career where I was working 60–70 hours a week. I would turn the caffeine on in the morning to get going way earlier than I should have been awake. And then, in order to like finish my 12-hour day, I would say, I’m working for the glass of wine. I’m gonna close my laptop and have the glass of wine. The glass of wine would become two, and then it would be more often nights than not. And it wasn’t that I was dependent on it. It was a behavioural technique to signal to my brain that I was finally done working. And that was my reward. Terrible habit and cycle to get in. Also very common.

This was for me like 15–20 years ago. I think we are in a time where we’re much more conscious about alcohol consumption than we’ve ever been. But do check yourself if you’re catching yourself at like four nights a week instead of one night socially a week. If that’s not normal for you, you could be experiencing burnout. Avoiding tough conversations is another behaviour of burnout. Execs’ part-time job is to have the tough conversations. If you are leaning out of those, know that that is a sign that you may be toast.

And then skipping your workout routine. We all know we need to be exercising and moving. It helps our brains function better. It helps us apply the very methods we’re talking about. If you are constantly ditching your exercise it is because your life is too tight and busy and you do not have the energy. And you’re likely burned out.

Maggie Gough

That one hurt my feelings Tegan. It resonates that’s the one where I’m like I have had a really hard day it’s okay if I don’t demand this of myself too. That’s how it sounds in my head.

Tegan Trovato

Yeah, that’s the narrative, right, that we give ourselves. And I totally hear you. So we think about the arousal performance curve. We have a low arousal state, which means — what do you think — too little stimulation. I’ve actually also had chapters in my career where I was just like, I feel underutilised, this work is not that interesting, the organisation’s not moving quickly enough. Under-aroused.

Optimal arousal — it’s moderate, it’s well calibrated, it’s not oppressive. It’s enough to sharpen your focus. I liken this to there are folks, and I think I’ve been this person at different points in my career, where you just had just enough pressure to produce the PowerPoint, or just enough pressure to create the deliverable. And I think when you’re in more autonomous roles that’s certainly not a problem. When you’re in more collaborative roles, or there’s other departments who have to push your work forward after you are done with your deck, that’s a problem, right.

So I was just talking with a CEO about a person who works very last minute, and she was calling it procrastination. And I was like, I don’t know that it’s that. It just may be that her arousal performance curve — I’m such a nerd — is different from yours. She may need that pressure. Now the question is, is she in the right role if that is how she must work, or can she be coached to create her own arousal sooner to produce the work product so the rest of the team can move on. So I want you to think about that as execs too, that like there’s not necessarily something wrong with someone. Maggie, what came up for you there.

Maggie Gough Well, I’m just curious — is she meeting the deadline?

Tegan Trovato She’s meeting the deadline, but putting other people behind the eight ball.

Managing Optimal Pressure Without Burnout

Maggie Gough

In this case maybe they need to adjust the deadline like if her arousal is associated with the deadline and the deadline needs to happen sooner for other people to anyway.

Tegan Trovato

So she might need her own deadline and not the deadline. Yeah, totally. That’s what I meant as I was working with the CEO. It’s like, hey, first of all, is it the right role if you can’t change things for her. And then second, is it as simple as you have to have yours turned in five days before the deadline. It can be that simple.

But my message is, according to science, there’s not necessarily something wrong with this person. It is that they require that amount of pressure in order to perform at their best. Let’s let them off the hook. Let’s just rethink how we ask them to work. So you can create — and this is a good example with this other person as reference — you could create your own arousal. Just enough arousal. So creating those self-imposed deadlines, trying things that are more novel or high-stakes.

I say this with reverence because I think we are overwhelmed with high-stakes stuff to the point where we’ve lost our appreciation and desire for it. I love some high-staked work, it’s how I’m wired. But I think we have saturated most executives with high-stakes everything. So that’s something else to think about if you’re in that burnout state. But to be able to find your way back to pleasure for high-stakes or different stakes is a way to create new arousal for yourself and produce and perform at a higher level.

Break up the monotony. That’s another way you can increase your arousal state. So that could be kind of like I talked about with the first method. Maybe you move to handwriting something or drawing it out and not always typing it, looking at a spreadsheet. Maybe you move to a different location to do your work. Maybe you literally travel to a different location to work with a team on site. Like, really get creative about breaking your monotony.

And then leverage accountability. So does your board chair need to know you need to tell them a certain date that they’re gonna get the thing from you, to just create that pressure that you need to do your best work.

So I would say, I want you to experiment with creating more arousal and preventing burnout. But some things to watch out for, so you don’t cross over from productive to burnout, is cycle the intensity of your work. Like training, like physical training. You cannot go do a full-body workout every day at the gym. You gotta break it into different muscle groups. You have to take a rest day. So evaluate your own calendar. Like, I’m having a super intense week this week myself, and I have manipulated my physical body in order to get my mental body to perform. And I have well calculated how I do it. I’ve experimented for years. But I know I cannot do this more than a couple days this week. And then I cannot have a super booked week next week.

Maggie, hold me accountable much. There’s the accountability factor – do not let me do this again next week. So you do have to cycle your intensity like you’re training for some athletic event.

Micro-recoveries. So putting in short breaks. Maggie is literally — you can attest — I will text her sometimes and say, hey, I need to push this meeting back 30 minutes. I’m going to be toast after this two-hour thing we’re doing. Thanks for always being gracious with me on that, Maggie, but…

Maggie Gough

Well, and the importance of that too is that creates a culture for other people to do the same. When we access those things for ourselves, then other people can also access them. And it becomes a norm on the team because I do the same to you.

And I don’t feel guilty about doing it when I’m saying to you, I’m spent, I got to tap out. Good.

Tegan Trovato

Yeah, micro-recoveries are worth their weight in gold. Now, here’s what tricky. Please, if you’re going to take a micro-recovery, recover.

Don’t use that 15 minutes to send emails. Get away from the desk, take a breath, go for a walk, pour yourself a glass of water, chill out. Guard your sleep as a non-negotiable.

This is hugely important. One of the things I was thinking about as we were approaching recording on this episode is how when times are really busy for me, like they are this week, I just try to take sips of energy back. So sips of energy for me is, well, like I told Maggie, like maybe after a two-hour sprint, I’m not going to make that meeting.

We got to move it. But for me in my personal life, it means I’m not going to watch that TV show tonight. I’m going to use that to unwind in bed, because I know it’s going to take me longer to get to sleep because the amount of intensity my intellect has been in for a couple of days.

It means that I will prioritize the gym, but I may have to do it way earlier in the day than I like to, but it will help me sleep. And it also helps me get like some of that micro-energy back. So really thinking in smaller terms, like we don’t always have to rewrite our entire schedule in lives.

In order to perform at our peak, we can make those little micro-changes. As long as we’re working in sprints and not marathons, those little sips of energy can make the entire week go. And then I am a big nerd for biomarkers.

So y’all have probably heard me before in other episodes talk about my interest in longevity and science. And I think that there’s a good portion of the population that I think is very intuitive about their bodies. I don’t think you have to have a device or a wearable to have a clue about what’s going on.

I’m personally just very interested in that and I’m able to make changes in my life and my work based on how my health looks according to the data I can get from the thing I wear on my wrist. So heart rate variability tells me if I slept well or not. Like I may have slept eight hours, but was it restful?

That makes a difference. Knowing that makes a difference in how I may rest and proceed about my day. Think about how you might create more awareness in your own life about how your body is trying to signal burnout to you.

Because intellectually, we’re powering through it all the time. So let your body speak to you. And if you need a wearable to figure that out, go for it.

They’re not terribly expensive anymore. So, and then build psychological safety net. So that’s a good way to prevent burnout or to come back from burnout.

And those include working with coaches, working with therapists, having mentors or advisors who’ve maybe walked in your very same shoes and understand your lived experience. And they can reflect back to you when you’re showing those signs of overload or burnout and really try to hold you accountable to doing it a different way. If I were to give advice to a CEO or an executive today, I would say start out your week with a high arousal challenge.

So think about, do you have a big sales call coming up? Do you have a really big business problem to solve? But then midweek, rotate that intensity.

Take a break. Do something that may be more creative. Tackle some problems in partnership with others.

Don’t be the only one sitting and thinking about them. And then end the week with some reflection. I love Friday for looking back on the week and planning what I’m gonna do for the next.

Like largely our calendars are planned out months in advance. I’m sure everyone’s real familiar. But I’m looking at those little pockets of time.

Where can I take some control back? And what do I wanna get done in the time that is available for me in the next week? So having those cycles is just one example of how that could work for you as a way to get into a rhythm and create the right amount of arousal to get to the performance level you want.

Maggie, I want you to tell listeners about self-determination theory. I will just say, when I first met Maggie, it’s one of the very first conversations we had was on this topic because she loves it so much. So I’m gonna let you take it away.

Self-Determination Theory (Autonomy, Relatedness, Competency)

Maggie Gough

Yeah, at the beginning of this podcast, she mentioned sometimes we end up experiencing something and then backing into the theory. This is exactly that for me and why I talk about it ad nauseum sometimes. So self-determination theory basically posits that there are three things that will increase our likelihood of healthy behavior change.

It’s a motivational theory. And essentially, those three things are autonomy, relatedness, and competency. And so autonomy was huge for me.

I found in my own work as a leader that the more that I get boxed into a very specific set of deliverables, that I don’t have any ability to bring my own creativity to the table, to apply my own expertise, or even have a say in how those things are gonna be delivered, the less motivation I have. So the more I’m just box checking, and we have to box check. There are times in all work that we have to do that.

But if I am stuck in work for a long period of time, my autonomy decreases and my motivation wanes. And the second thing is competency. You know, this brings me back to flow state.

There’s some overlap there where it’s talking about our ability to have enough skill. So when I first learned about this, I was in the corporate wellness world. The example I would give is, we ask people to eat healthy food.

But if you don’t know how to cut a cabbage, if you’ve never done those types of things, that’s a new skill that you have to learn. So your ability to opt into that behavior is more likely to happen if you have enough competency. It goes back to the example I gave where I was fumbling around some new technology to achieve an end goal and how I just didn’t meet the goal.

And I texted Tegan in the middle of this and I was like, this project is driving me nuts. I had to step away. I had no more motivation to sit there and do it.

And so then after I built a little bit more competency around those skills, I could come back and try to tackle it again. And again, think about that example. There’s a ton of autonomy.

I got to come into the thing when it felt right to me. I got to apply my skillset when it felt right to me. I got to back out of it autonomously when I decided that was right.

So that also amplifies that motivational piece. And the third piece is probably one of the most fascinating to me. And there’s loads and loads of research about this, that we have to be in relationship with people who support our goals, who support the change that we are trying to make.

They’ve studied this both in the business world, but also for personal behaviors. And there’s an example of people who are attempting to quit smoking are significantly more likely to fail if the people around them also don’t support that change. And the reason for that is it’s rooted in our desire to belong to each other.

And so if I’m gonna make a change that separates me from my relationship with Tegan and I no longer belong in this group, then I am less likely to make that change. So there’s a part of bringing people into the changes that we need to make and things that we’re motivated to go do. So making sure that you have accountability partners is a piece of that, but also cheerleaders, that’s huge.

And the third way I would say relatedness plays a role into our own motivation is also the ability to say, I’m having a bad day. And I need to talk to somebody about it. So I have a handful of people that I will text and say, do you have time for like a boost call so that we can just give each other that moment to step out and not be in our own world for a moment and hear from somebody else, somebody else’s perspective on a thing, or to just remind us that we got this.

That’s so critical to motivation is our connectedness with other people. So those three things for me, just each one that I learned about that, and the more that I learned about it, I could just look back at my own life and see how that had played so critically in my own advancement and motivation and perseverance year over year.

Tegan Trovato

Yeah, oh, I’m thinking back to a couple of different chapters in my life too, where I can see that that’s what was afoot, that combination, so great, great explanation. My next one is simple. It might be the simplest one that we have to talk about today, and that is the self-regulation theory or the discipline cycle is how we would refer to it.

The Discipline Cycle (Set, Act, Monitor, Adjust)

So there’s just a few steps. You set a goal, you act, you monitor, you adjust. Now it sounds simple, but because it is so crazy and volatile at work, what I see is that people set a goal, they act and they react.

They don’t even have enough time to monitor something through, certainly not to completion, maybe to a midway point. I argue that we’re probably not monitoring well when we set up something new, and then I don’t know that we’re always adjusting. I think we’re pivoting a lot.

So this is a habit we have in our work, and we have it in our teams. We have it as enterprises. It’s set a goal, act, react.

What I would like to see people do as individuals with this mindset and this method for performance is to set the goal, act, monitor, and adjust. We don’t always have to throw away a plan and start over. We don’t always have to make a big pivot.

So where this feels super important for me to emphasize is that senior leaders don’t need to go broader in their performance. They need to refine and go deeper in the things that make them excellent. If we set goals and act, and then monitor and adjust or refine, we’re talking about tweaks over time, like feel the gentleness of that, feel the intentionality of that description.

And this goes for our leadership plans, right, and our strategic plans. If we’re really gonna see something through, it should also look like that at the enterprise level. So the tricky part is that we need to be able to do this and not lose momentum.

So for individual performance, let’s go back to that athlete again. An athlete is going to just refine their techniques. They have a set of techniques, they have a set of mechanics for the way their bodies move.

It is arguably the same for us as executives. So it’s really just that refinement and that tweaking. So the discipline cycle in practice is having your own set of goals personally.

Let’s make this a real personal example. So set your goals that are personal to you. If you own a company, if you lead a company, you could have some company growth in there, you’d wanna set like your quarterly targets and then your personal targets within that.

How are you gonna behave? How are you gonna show up? How do you want people to feel about you while you get the work done?

And then take intentional action. So we’re back to that strategic thinking time, having critical conversations, keeping your stakeholders up to date, prioritizing the decisions that only you can make in your unique seat, prioritizing your health and your wellness and your sleep, and then monitor your performance. So set the measurable results you intend to create and then look for them relentlessly.

I cannot tell you how often we ditch them. It makes me just insane. And it makes our leaders insane.

They feel the same way. I don’t know who is going to be the one that eventually squeezes the reins and like pulls it back to say, we’re going to see this thing at least to the midpoint before we decide if we’re moving or pivoting. The same should be for us as individual leaders.

Then just adjust your strategy a little bit. If things are trending in a particular direction, you don’t like it, adjust it. Think about that at the personal level.

Think about that at the enterprise level. So super simple concept. Arguably, that’s what we need more than ever are super simple concepts to get back to some of the basics.

Maggie Gough

I have a really perfect business example of this. So start of the year, we had a marketing strategy. We want to deploy.

It was a robust and it was going to move fast. And Tegan made the point that if we do not track the decisions that we’re making along the way and the data that we’re bringing back into the model, into this strategy, we are going to forget. And that’s when we end up reacting and saying, oh, well, let’s go and a new idea comes and we’re going to follow that down.

And so it was really interesting for me is every month going in and actually was probably a couple of times a month that I was going in documenting the data that was coming in. And then we would have a meeting and say, this is what we saw. Now, what are we going to do?

And for me, going in and just documenting that data kept me so close to that body of work that it was motivating to keep going and getting more and to keep coming back to the conversation to say, how do we want to adjust now that we know this? And then to document the decisions we made so we didn’t go back and make those same decisions over and over again.

Tegan Trovato

Yes. Let me tell you, there was a particular thing we decided to stop doing last year. And well, 18 months, no, it was about a year ago.

We decided to stop doing this particular thing in our business. And it was one of the things we documented that our decision to stop doing the thing and why we would stop doing it, what data told us we should stop doing it. And I’m so glad because here we are a year later and I’m like, well, now this other thing we’re trying isn’t working.

Maybe we should go back to that first thing. And I was like, what did we put in the document about why we didn’t do it? And I’m so glad that we had it documented.

Yeah, Maggie is too. This is how we stop our own groundhogs day, right? But it’s also how we then can make more minor adjustments instead of like constant stops and restarts.

So I’m glad you pulled that example, Maggie. It’s a good one. Well, tell us about like the mindset shift and the champion’s mindset, Maggie.

That’s number five for us. Like what comes up for you around that topic?

Champion’s Mindset & Imagining Success

Maggie Gough

When I think about a champion’s mindset, it comes to creativity and imagination for me. I think that we often in as business leaders and as a COO, this is so critical to my role is I am here to help develop different scenarios. This is the data we have.

These are the potential outcomes. What do we need to shift in different functional areas? And so part of looking at scenarios is looking at worst case scenarios because we have to be prepared to respond to those, right?

But I’ve heard you say, Teagan, like once you’ve written those, put them back in the drawer. And I think that that is so key. And when we think about being somebody who is a high performer, as much as we are exceptional at being able to walk right up to that worst case scenario and have a plan for it and be solid in a crisis, we also have to imagine what winning looks like.

And I think that we easily get lost in the I’m prepared for the crisis, especially when we’ve lived through a period of a lot of crises, of a lot of unprecedented events. When I think about my own athletic performance or exercise, I am often imagining myself being successful, but I forget to do that in my work. And so I have to credit Teagan for holding me accountable to this one.

But it is a poignant example where we often will ask ourselves, what does winning look like? What does winning look like? And what are all the ways that that could happen?

Because it is equally as effective as looking at the potential worst case scenarios. And our minds are hardwired to look at worst case scenarios. So it makes sense that we tend to do that.

It is an intentional challenge to do the opposite.

Tegan Trovato

That flows perfectly into where I want to bring us to our last method, and that is the game day tools. One of them is visualization, the other self-talk and pre-performance routines. So let’s break those down a little bit.

Game-Day Tools: Visualization, Self-Talk, Routines

So what comes up for me when I think about visualization, first of all, we have clients do this a lot in coaching. We’ll have them write this visualization out, we’ll have them talk it out, we’ll have them close their eyes and imagine it in their own minds. Like we know from neuroscience, it literally wires our brain as if the positive thing has happened.

So that is a beautiful experience to give yourself. What also is so interesting is that in business, our job is to mitigate risk, is to be proactive, it’s to be preventative, it’s to try to see the future and build a today for that. Like it’s a mind game.

And so most of us are laying in bed at night thinking about the things that could happen that would hurt us or the business and that aren’t good or the threats that we perceive real or not. And what I posit, and this is what I encourage all of our executives to work on and that I practice myself and I have for decades is positive visualization. So for every thought about how the world’s gonna burn, you gotta have another one that it doesn’t.

And it is our job to control that part of our mind and assert that new thinking. So athletes do not lay in bed and imagine losing the game. That’s not how they do it, right?

They don’t imagine running up to the pole vault and crushing into the bar. They imagine and visualize how well it’s gonna go, how they move their bodies, what they’re thinking about, what the temperature is, where their footing is, right? The same should go for us as executives.

It is our job to proactively think ahead and do the scenarios like Maggie just said. We cannot live in that space. We have to also imagine it going well and ask ourselves what conditions we created in our imagination that made it go well.

That is time really well spent. So I would challenge you to try it. I would also challenge you when you create a positive visualization to then notice how your body feels, how your breathing may have changed.

So I had the great fortune, like my first year of college, to do biofeedback training. And I got hooked up to the machine and I was led through these thought exercises and I got to watch how my heart rate and temperature and pulse and blood pressure responded to my own thoughts. And so I was introduced very early in my life to the power our thoughts have, not just on our body, but our ability to create the future.

So it sounds so fruit loopy when I say it like that, but I say that with confidence because there is so much science on this. And if you are not spending some time giving yourself the break of positive visualization, I would encourage you to start now and experiment. Also positive self-talk.

We cannot be going into a board meeting saying, this is gonna be a shit show like last time. I’m gonna totally fall on my face. My team didn’t create the deck the way I wanted it.

Nope, the story has to be, we’re gonna win this. If we have any bumps, we will recover from it. That’s what we’re wired to do.

We’re gonna be okay. That rumination is so unpleasant and it takes up so much space. It is so common though, we have articles on our own website about this because we work so much with executives on rumination and positive self-talk and imagining a better future.

And then pre-performance routines. So we talked about the sleep thing. It’s important that you may come up with your own pre-performance routines with your team.

Maybe you have strategic planning pre-game. Maybe you have board retreat pre-game. What do you want it to look like to get yourselves hyped up, healthy, ready?

I’ll tell you it’s not as going out as a team and drinking before the thing, but we still see it a lot. So like, what’s your pre-game? Think like athletes.

Think like elite executives. How do they have their game together before they go in? And do you wanna sign up for some of that to do it a little bit differently than maybe you have before?

So all of these are super attainable. None of these require for you to go buy anything or become anything or even read anything else. These are practices.

And I would encourage you to listen, pick one, see what works for you and really level up in another way. Know that what maybe has worked for you before isn’t working now and that’s okay. It might be time to try another method. So Maggie, any thoughts from you as we close out

Maggie Gough

No, I just love this conversation. I also loved your energy in it because you were like, this is the conversation that I’m gonna have.

I love it.

Tegan Trovato

Yeah, I love this stuff. I mean, it’s why I created the company. I really believe in the ability we have.

It’s not about discipline. It’s about practice, like to be in practice in our humanness and learn to control more of what’s truly controllable and flow through the rest that is truly not. But it takes some years and some practice and some wisdom to cash in on it.

And I know our listeners are those folks who are in the cash-in zone. So that’s why I’m excited to really push everybody to try one of these. And we’d love to hear from you if you give something new a try.

So Maggie, thanks for nerding out with me today. I appreciate it. We covered a lot today from flow states to resilience to game day readiness.

Think about which of these methods speaks to you right now and commit to practicing that one as a start. That’s how you build your edge as a leader. I’m grateful to have had Maggie here with me and I’m grateful to you for tuning in.