Corporate Athletes and Cosmos🪐🎾
#hbr #qotd #lineartheory #corporate #athlete #teambuilding #worklifebalance #balance #inspirationalquotes #bookrecs #nasa #galaxy #universe
Revisiting an old favorite today: Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz’s The Making of a Corporate Athlete (Harvard Business Review, 2001).
I love the premise: peak performance at work isn’t just about skill or strategy—it’s about how we manage our energy. Loehr and Schwartz suggest that to thrive in demanding corporate environments, we have to train like athletes. Not in the physical sense, but in the way we manage our emotional, mental, and spiritual energy.
They outline four areas for high performance:
Body: Energy is the foundation. Get good sleep, exercise, and nutrition to influence how we show up.
Emotions: Performance has a rhythm—push, then recover. Manage emotions to stay positive and adaptable under stress.
Mind: Focus drives clarity. Set boundaries, and take deliberate breaks to reset and renew mental energy.
Spirit: Define your personal mission statement to fuel performance.
What practices help you recharge and stay grounded—both at and outside of work?
The full article is online or download it here:
Here’s an excerpt from the article for those interested in a deeper dive:
A Firm Foundation
1. Actually do all those healthy things you know you ought to do. Eat five or six small meals a day; people who eat just one or two meals a day with long periods in between force their bodies into a conservation mode, which translates into slower metabolism. Always eat breakfast: eating first thing in the morning sends your body the signal that it need not slow metabolism to conserve energy. Eat a balanced diet. Despite all the conflicting nutritional research, overwhelming evidence suggests that a healthy dietary ratio is 50% to 60% complex carbohydrates, 25% to 35% protein, and 20% to 25% fat. Dramatically reduce simple sugars. In addition to representing empty calories, sugar causes energy-depleting spikes in blood glucose levels. Drink four to five 12-ounce glasses of water daily, even if you don’t feel thirsty. As much as half the population walks around with mild chronic dehydration. And finally, on the “you know you should” list: get physically active. We strongly recommend three to four 20- to 30-minute cardiovascular workouts a week, including at least two sessions of intervals—short bursts of intense exertion followed by brief recovery periods.
2. Go to bed early and wake up early. Night owls have a much more difficult time dealing with the demands of today’s business world, because typically, they still have to get up with the early birds. They’re often groggy and unfocused in the mornings, dependent on caffeine and sugary snacks to keep up their energy. You can establish new sleep rituals. Biological clocks are not fixed in our genes.
3. Maintain a consistent bedtime and wake-up time. As important of the number of hours you sleep (ideally seven to eight) is the consistency of the recovery wave you create. Regular sleep cycles help regulate your other biological clocks and increase the likelihood that the sleep you get will be deep and restful.
4. Seek recovery every 90 to 120 minutes. Chronobiologists have found that the body’s hormone, glucose, and blood pressure levels drop every 90 minutes or so. By failing to seek recovery and overriding the body’s natural stress-rest cycles, overall capacity is compromised. As we’ve learned from athletes, even short, focused breaks can promote significant recovery. We suggest five sources of restoration: eat something, hydrate, move physically, change channels mentally, and change channels emotionally.
5. Do at least two weight-training workouts a week. No form of exercise more powerfully turns back the markers of age than weight training. It increases strength, retards osteoporosis, speeds up metabolism, enhances mobility, improves posture, and dramatically increases energy.
Hope you enjoy the article as much as I do.
And—since I’ll never pass up an opportunity to post galaxy photos: here’s a little cosmic reminder that perspective, like energy, expands when we make space for it. 🪐 ✨
Photo credit: Nasa 🤯 Can’t believe these are real photos
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Sometimes the best ideas come to us when we stop trying so hard and give our minds and bodies space to breathe ♡ 🌟 ✨