This article is about the need for repositioning high performance in teams and organizations. This can be achieved by optimizing the brain-body system and working on High Performance Readiness.
Health does not discriminate. No one is immune to viruses that affect us globally. And, we all have to deal with stress and insecurity; often stress is the start of all kinds of health problems. We observe that in these times of COVID everyone addresses stress in different ways
Most governments’ fight against COVID focuses mainly on vaccinations and patient care in hospitals, care, and nursing homes. It becomes increasingly clear that large groups of employees, students and the elderly are struggling with stress and loneliness.
Companies are putting their energy and effort into facilitating the shift to remote working.
Yet they pay hardly any attention to stress-prevention for their employees, teams, and themselves. We believe more attention is needed for the positioning of resilient performance and how to pave the way to measure and improve resilience.
Performing well is not just about achieving results
As growing numbers of employees have to deal with stress, loneliness, and illness, this has become a socio-economic problem that needs to be addressed by all stakeholders.
Companies measure the performance of employees using all kinds of assessments and personality style indicators (such as MBTI, Hogan, or Enneagram) or competency assessments (such as Insights, EQ-I, TMAMethod). This is good because it is well known that people perform better when they do work that is in line with their natural talents and skills.
However, in our Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous (VUCA) world, talent management is not enough to help employees adapt to a fast-changing environment. As a result, many teams and executives are in a mode of surviving instead of thriving.
Performance can be defined as “doing the things you need to do to get the desired results“.
How do you know that you or the team is performing well when you are on your way to achieving those results? You do so gradually, so, as long as you are still on the way to the results, you can take good care of your brain-body system and prepare it optimally, so that you can achieve those results in efficient and effective ways. We define this Brain-Body Optimization as “High Performance Readiness“, as represented by the green roof in the Neurozone house model (see image at the beginning of the article)
Our brain-body system ensures that we not merely survive but thrive and flourish. It plays a central role in our striving for optimal performance. And hence it improves the output for a team, and it gets more returns for all your efforts.
“ Optimizing your brain-body system is one of the smartest things you can do to become a high performer”
What can you do to optimize this for yourself?
If you live a healthy life, it is still not guaranteed you will keep from getting COVID. But you can train your brain-body system in ways that your immune system becomes more resilient. You can learn and practice self-management toward building a healthy brain-body system so that you are prepared when the stress hits, and make yourself more resilient.
Our adaptability in times of COVID is being severely tested. People are pushing their stress-boundaries, are getting triggered, and can no longer adapt to all the changes around them. Our balance between work and private life, whatever balance we had before COVID, has been disrupted and has changed. Now perhaps we have more time at home, with more family members present, and wish for more isolated and professional work environments.
How can we achieve this?
Professor Peter Hawkins recently mentioned in a recent webinar for professional coaches from The World Business & Executive Coach Summit (WBECS) that conversations from Human Resource professionals and executive coaches with their clients are shifting from talking about work-life balance to conversations about work-life arrangements and helping employees gain flow. This is fully understandable because the line between working at the office and life at home has become very thin. We see employees on Zoom working in their kitchen or on a corner of the dining table and their young kids racing around. How then can we still thrive, rearrange our work-life boundaries and create flow?
“Flow” of your brain-body system is a state where you are completely absorbed in your activities and everything seems to go by itself. You seem to be performing, feeling no effort expended at all, and you concentrate on the results to be achieved. In “flow” all your activities yield results optimally and you seem to execute them with full attention.
We can achieve this state of flow when we take good care of our daily well-being rhythms (sleep-wake cycle, exercise & movement, nutrition, silencing the mind) and consciously work on the conditions for “brain-performance readiness”.
A new field of work for leaders and HR
The good news is that you can learn about the conditions for optimizing the brain-body system and how to measure and track High Performance Readiness.
Leaders can facilitate this for employees and teams and offer them the opportunity to manage and maintain their unique High Performance Readiness. This can be done by educating and ensuring that executives and team members are equipped with the technical tools to assess their high performance readiness, such as the Neurozone reports and the Neurozone app, which provides a dynamic high performance journey to assess and improve scores of individuals and teams.
Moreover, executives can use a neuro-coach to educate them about the basics of the neurophysiology and biology of our brain-body system for achieving high performance and to co-create the process for performance improvement.
Focus on High Performance Teams
In the article “How resilient are you?”, we expressed the need for maintaining and regulating well the brain-body system, to increase their resilience and optimal performance.
For every high performing individual and team, a roadmap can be designed for the process of Brain-Body Optimization. Companies can equip their employees and teams with tools for self-management, learning capacity, innovation capacity, and increasing resilience. With the support of a Neurozone coach, executives and teams will discover the functioning of their brain and body, and how they directly can influence and improve their performance. For example, they learn what is depleting and boosting their energy, where blockages are, and then they get many other insights and tips to optimize their unique brain-body system.
Neurozone works with a dedicated team of qualified neuroscientists and researchers, and they work together with executive & business coaches who are certified in the Neurozone framework and reporting system. Attune works in co-creation with Neurozone and partner-organizations to guide executives and teams on their way to “personal mastery” and High Performance.
Schedule here a free zoom conversation about your opportunities to optimize your Brain-Body System and how we can help you and the team grow resilience and improve performance.
