Leadership Fundamentals for Achieving Peak Performance

I'm going to kick things off with a BIG quote from Kobe Bryant. Big in length, sure, but significant because it describes the "ideal performance state" for an athlete (Haff & Triplett, 2016, p. 156), which I will argue is transferable to any profession:

When you get in that zone it's just a supreme confidence that you know it's going in. It's not a matter of if or this [or] that. It's going in. Things just slow down. Everything slows down and you just have supreme confidence. When that happens, you really do not try to focus on what's going on because ... you could lose it in a second. Everything becomes one noise—you don't hear this or that; everything's just one noise—you're not paying attention to one or the other. ... You just really try to stay in the present and not let anything break that rhythm. Again, as long as you just kind of stay there, you become oblivious to everything that's going on. You don't think about your surroundings or what's going on with the crowd or the team. You're kind of locked in. ... You have to really try to stay in the present and not let anything break that rhythm.

Anyone who has watched Kobe Bryant play knows what the ideal performance state looks like, at least on a basketball court:

• Absence of fear

• Automatic motor skills, no thought or analysis necessary

• Undisturbed concentration on the activity

• A sense of effortlessness and control

• The slowing of time and space

He understood sport psychology, and he put it into practice. He understood that by using selective attention, one reduces distraction, narrowing focus instead on what is task-relevant.

High-level athletes can access the ideal performance state that Kobe describes—and so can everyone else. Today, (using the Essentials of Strength Training and Conditioning, Fourth Edition as my reference) I want to talk a little bit about how you can do that, and about how leaders can facilitate the ideal performance state, rather than obstructing it.

The Psychology of High Performance

First, let's acknowledge a simple truth. Each one of us, even the pros, only has so much energy to give. We have to practice psychological and physiological efficiency, which is giving no more than what is required to perform a mental or physical task. The psychology of success is not to work harder than everyone else all of the time. That's a reliable recipe for burnout.

A key component of efficiency is practicing task-relevant focus. To perform at our best, we can't waste attention on worrying and catastrophizing. These imagined concerns are task-irrelevant. Many well-intentioned coaches and leaders make a lot of task-irrelevant noise. More on this soon.

Athletes will lack energy when it matters most if they spend it on worry, anger, frustration, or anxiety. They will also perform with less confidence and less focus. Instead, if the athlete learns how to use her emotions to elevate energy and concentration, she is more likely to find that ideal performance state.

When does having the proper energy matter most? When we are faced with complex or new tasks, high pressure situations, and activities that demand deliberate focus. In these moments, there are a few recommended techniques for athletes—diaphragmatic breathing, progressive muscular relaxation, autogenic training, routines, and systematic desensitization (feel free to pick up Essentials of Strength Training and Conditioning, Fourth Edition for your next pleasure read). I want to offer three rules to remember:

1. Make it simple.

2. Get skilled.

3. Stay calm when facing complex decisions/tasks.

If you can do these three things, you will reduce the chances of experiencing a total meltdown when you find yourself in a dogfight. If you can't remember these three things, remember this one:

1. Nothing inspires performance better than self-confidence.

In a world bursting with high performers, skill is never enough. You need to believe you can perform. Self-belief leads to heightened work ethic and determination. Of course, confidence isn't necessarily enough either, but it's what we've got. So before you call yourself a talentless loser, remember that no one gets far without self-confidence. Negative self-talk is akin to self-inflicted hamstringing.

Next, we’ll consider the fundamentals of psychology that all leaders should know so that they can motivate rather than demoralize. 

How Leaders Facilitate or Derail High Performance 

This might be the more important part. Well-intentioned leaders who misunderstand the psychology of performance may unwittingly pave the road to hell for their athletes (I'll use "athlete" for consistency, but you can substitute it with whatever teacher-student model you want). Let's circle back to the concepts of physical and psychological efficiency, both of which are compromised by:

• the athlete perceiving a threat to self-esteem

• the belief that one cannot meet the demands for success

• a fear of the consequences of failure

As a leader, if you contribute to any one of these perceptions, odds are you will decrease your athlete’s performance. The goal is not to mess with the athlete's mind. Many leaders go wrong here in their attempts to motivate, pushing their athletes over the wrong edge of the Inverted-U Theory with too much arousal (Yerkes & Dodson, 1908).

Illustration of the Yerkes & Dodson Inverted-U Theory accounting for task difficulty from Sport Science Insider

People need to feel senses of competence and self-determination in order to succeed. There are some basic practices that can generate those feelings, which takes us to a question as old as Hamlet: to punish undesirable behavior, or to reinforce desirable behavior?

Wherever you look—school, sports, the workplace—the results all point to the same answer: to improve performance, use punishment sparingly and reinforce with positive feedback often. With punishment, athletes focus on what they are doing incorrectly, the task-irrelevant stimuli we talked about avoiding earlier.

Reinforcement is the opposite. It leads to athletes focusing on what they should do, what is task-relevant. They also "build long-term memories of success, self-esteem, self-efficacy, and confidence" (Haff & Triplett, 2016, p. 163), all key components of peak performance. It’s no exaggeration to say that positive feedback goes a long way.

There are a few nuances worth understanding in terms of helping people learn new skills. In stressful and competitive environments, providing clear directives concurrent with the activity is beneficial. However, when someone is learning a complex skill, the more effective strategy is to offer delayed feedback, at first frequently, but decreasing over time as the person masters the skill.

Starting with instruction is good, but in order for someone to gain self-confidence and self-efficacy, a leader needs to transition to discovery, allowing the learner to perform without immediate feedback. In essence, it's harder to learn with someone breathing down your neck.

Practice the Mental Game

Against my better judgment, I put together summarized bullets to appease the scannability algorithm. It will look great on your refrigerator. Jokes aside, if you don't practice the mental game, as Danny Devito said in a Jersey Mike's commercial, fuggedaboudit!

• Develop automatic confidence.

• Don't waste your energy. Use it for what matters most.

• Become aware of task-irrelevant distractions and practice task-relevant concentration.

• Make tasks simple and get skilled.

• Reinforce the good before punishing the bad.

• Learning is a process, not a prescription. Let it happen.

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References:

Haff, G. G., & Triplett, N. T. (Eds.). (2016). Essentials of strength training and conditioning (4th ed.). Human Kinetics.

Wells, N. (2021, March 12). Inverted-U theory. Sport Science Insider. https://sportscienceinsider.com/inverted-u-theory/

Yerkes, R. M., & Dodson, J. D. (1908). The relation of strength of stimulus to rapidity of habit-formation. Journal of Comparative Neurology and Psychology, 18(5), 459–482. https://doi.org/10.1002/cne.920180503