Lack of stress impacts your performance, Individual coaching vs Team coaching & Would you trade places with Warren Buffett?
5 March 2023 Newsletter
“The distance between dreams and reality is called discipline.”
Hope you’re Thriving!
It’s been a fun and productive week, with lots of meetings, working on Healthy Wealthy and Wise with some leaders, and enjoying a few days on Rottnest – our favourite island.
Is lack of stress impacting your performance?
Perhaps you read that and thought, “I need less stress, not more!”.
Understandable, but this is a follow on from my ‘rant’ last week about the four-day workweek that some people are advocating. As I noted last week, a four-day workweek could be an excellent gift for your competitors. However, this led me to think about the Yerkes–Dodson law in the past week, a simple model outlining the relationship between performance and stress. This law states that stress and performance are positively correlated, but only up to a certain point; after that, more stress reduces performance.
And maybe this feels true for you when a big project deadline is due, or you’re about to go on holiday – where increasing stress increases your performance.
Equally, low stress might be good for your recovery, but it won’t lead to high performance. And so we want a spot that’s just in the right area where it’s not too much or too little stress. An excellent case can be made that former athletes or military personnel who have spent a lot of time under stress can be some of the best hires you can make. These people are competent under stress and create large performance outputs within the high-stress zone.
Thinking about the different areas of stress, where you perform, and becoming self-aware of your optimal performance can be very useful in improving your personal performance.
Check out the Yerkes–Dodson law in the image below:
Would you trade places with Warren Buffett?
Here’s one of the ideas that have stuck with me recently. You know the type; it just keeps bouncing around your head for days or weeks afterward.
Maybe you read the above heading and thought sure, let’s swap bank balances! But would you swap ‘today’?
Would you rather have $0 and be 20 years old or have $100 billion and be 90?
Most people respond to this hypothetical with a resounding “Of course not, there’s no amount of money I would take to fast-forward to being 90 years old.” The fact that people respond in this way means intuitively that there’s something about the utility of money – that it’s not as valuable later in life. So how do we prepare for that to enjoy a fulfilling life?
The article below discusses “The Regret Gap” between wealth and health, representing an inability to enjoy certain experiences, even if we can afford them.
Individual coaching vs Team coaching
For many years we’ve been working with the centre of our business model being leadership team coaching. So much so that our job titles are “leadership team coaches”. Rather than working one-on-one, such as executive coaching, we work with leadership teams to build impactful strategic plans that make enduring, great companies.
So it was good to read an article this week about the value of coaching as a collective and how it makes a team stronger.
From the article:
“Not only does practicing this method deepen team learning around specific customer challenges, it focuses the whole team on exploring issues more thoroughly, possibly unearthing previously overlooked errors and incorrect assumptions.”
Read the article here: Coaching Your Team as a Collective Makes It Stronger
Investment Perspective
This week on The Growth Whisperers Podcast
I’m thinking about appointing my first COO or President, what should I do?
For many leaders hiring their first COO or President can be a big change. Perhaps they’ve been running the business for a long time with 6 or 7 direct reports, and need to move to the next level, or begin transitioning toward succession.
No matter how or why hiring your first COO or hiring your first president can be a big change, and comes with a set of unique challenges.
This week we talk about this unique issue, and what to do if you’re hiring your first COO or President.
Episode 151 – The Growth Whisperers
Listen to The Growth Whisperers
Or watch it on YouTube
Onboarded: Fast Track New Hires To Success with The Growth Faculty Reviews
It was great to receive such fantastic reviews for an Onboarded Masterclass I held recently for The Growth Faculty Certainly a confirmation of how prevalent the topic of onboarding is within all types of organisations.
The Growth Faculty facilitator Christine Kininmonth wrote a fantastic article about the presentation and the book Onboarded, which captured the key points really well.
You can read the short article below.
If you would like to receive our weekly newsletter as an email, simply complete the “subscribe to my newsletter” form at the top of this page.
Keep Thriving!
Brad Giles
