Corporations today are committed to helping organizations empower their people with high-performance work styles. People who are identified as peak performers, even in high stress environments have mastered the skills top achievers in all disciplines possess. We share the secrets of renewing oneself in a high-stress world.
In a fast-paced and ever-changing workplace, we are all concerned about stress, burnout and how to achieve peak levels of performance on an ongoing basis. We propose the Sports Metaphor to help your people move away from burnout, stress and chaos toward peak performance.
Part of the answer to reversing declining levels of performance lies in empowering individuals at all levels of the organization to effectively combat stress and to rise above daily challenges to strive toward self-mastery, which ultimately leads to organizational wellness. All levels of the organization can then learn how to partner to create individual and organizational health.
BURNOUT AT ALL LEVELS
Burnout may be characterized by a generalized energy depletion, a sense of isolation and poorly-functioning levels of achievement and satisfaction with life. People feel helpless and resigned to their condition. How is it possible to deal with the demands of our work, our lives and to protect ourselves from illness and distress?
Today’s environment is starkly different from that of the past. Formerly, life was more stable, predictable, orderly and understandable. Change was slow and manageable and responses to challenges could be met with a limited, narrow set of coping skills and mental responses. The last two decades have brought an ultra-paced, ever-changing, confusing, complex, inter-related existence requiring rapid personal and organizational responses to the chaotic landscape.
This new, demanding, high-stress environment in which we live calls for novel, creative ways of coping and for new levels of awareness. This new environment demands that we adapt, change and develop a new set of tools for dealing with its challenges. We must become more resilient and more hardy to withstand the daily tests that come our way. Rather than admitting defeat or running from life’s stressors, the peak performer reorganizes in response to intense pressure and rapid change. In this way, humans operating at peak plan better, have a vision of new behavioral alternatives and reframe stressful situations by turning them into opportunities for peak performance. Peak humans become self-determining by expanding their stress management/peak performance tool kit, which involves increasing awareness abilities, taking responsibility for decisions, taking wise risks, changing maladaptive patterns of thought and behavior and dealing with life’s demands in a powerful, effective manner.
PEAK PERFORMERS REINVENT THEMSELVES
Classic management practices and organizational systems have neglected the needs and skills of each person to ward off excess, unyielding stressors and have actually contributed to the increase of burnout in the workplace. A core value of the corporate athlete is to be continually renewing, to be continually reinventing oneself. and to learn how to self-manage and rise to consistent levels of peak performance in their work and in the rest of their lives. Just as traditional external management of resources and people is important in organizational life, the internal climate is vital in the creation and maintenance of the corporate athlete.
Corporations need training programs designed to allow individuals to respond creatively and with a renewed sense of enthusiasm to the pressures and demands of work and life. In this sense, such programs move beyond traditional stress management courses where stress is merely reduced, to a new paradigm whereby stress is embraced and utilized as an energizing force to catapult the peak performer to higher and higher levels of achievement. The result? The creation of a finely-honed corporate athlete.
The peak performer learns about and utilizes three critical areas of functioning in a high-stress environment. First, self-awareness is the foundation of all change. The peak performer examines current practices around stress control and begins to actively reflect on their efficacy. Next, self-renewal is the conscious, ongoing efforts to rejuvenate and regenerate oneself, a necessary factor in combating regular, potent stressors. Finally, the peak performer formulates strategies and tactics for dealing with the demands of work and life. This self-management is the key differentiator that makes peak performers stand out from individuals who give in to life’s challenges. The corporate athlete is in charge of his or her destiny.
To be continued…
Article by: Bill Cole, MS, MA, the Mental Game Coach™ at www.mentalgamecoach.com/Programs/MentalGameOfTeamBuilding.html.
