The Making of a Corporate Athlete: One Article That Changed How I Work

Here goes: The Making of a Corporate Athlete from HBR. Please feel free to skip everything I'm going to elaborate here; just click that link and read.

There are two core ideas in the article:

1. The work performance can be modeled as the "high-performance pyramid", consisting of 4 layers of capacities: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. Yet we often only emphasize the mental capacity and ignore the rest.
2. Stress is actually a crucial growth driver. The problem is that we tend to just go-go-go and ignore recovery.

I bumped into this article when I was still green to remote work, when my day-to-day was go-go-go. When there was no environmental cue called office, no time boundary called commute, no relationship boundary formed by the real persons you interacted with, it was just way too easy to work non-stop and call it productive. Until one day, I stared at the monitor dully, felt each keystroke was so heavy to press, felt I had given everything yet gained so little. I was burned out.

Applying the performance framework outlined, what led to my inevitable burnout was clear:

• Physical: I didn't exercise regularly.
• Emotional: I didn't allocate time for myself to relax.
• Mental: I spread myself extremely thin by juggling numerous things.
• Spiritual: I didn't give myself time appreciating the abundant time I had to spend with my family by working remotely. Rather, from time to time I took them as inevitable responsibilities just because I was at home.

Realization is one thing, transformation takes action. It was quite a journey of trial-and-error to finally settle on the new routines. Long story short, I now have the habit of daily exercises, I use my own version of pomodoro method to interweave intentional downtime throughout the day, I prioritize what's truly important on a paper notebook at the beginning of each day and execute the plan ruthlessly. There are explicit barriers between work time, family time, and my personal time. I tell myself to give my full presence to my family, and tell them that I love them whenever the time feels right.

The routine is never perfect, and I still go off track from time to time, but that's okay. Eventually what's key is to the constant awareness of which capacity is impacted, and whether your day-to-day routine implements a balanced energy expenditure and recovery, i.e. "oscillation" as described in the article.

All in all, I'd be grateful if you can maybe block an hour of your day and thoroughly digest this article to grasp the key to your IPS –– yeah, you will know what this means in the article.

Once read, here are some inquiries I'd like to invite you to reflect on:

For oneself,

• How do you score your physical/emotional/mental/spiritual capacity?
• What does higher performance mean to you?
• What's your purpose?

If you lead a team,

• Is there planned downtime for the team?
• What's the purpose of the team?
• What motivates them individually?