Does the very thought of working on your performance mindset leave you with a knot in your stomach? Perhaps it conjures up images of learning survival techniques on an outward-bound expedition or an even earlier alarm in the morning to make time for a fitness regime.
While these endeavours have merit, in the everyday environment it’s not about climbing Mount Everest (although kudos if that’s something you’ve achieved!). It’s about being in good enough shape to navigate the specific challenges your work and life present.
“Mindset” is defined as the attitudes that determine how you interpret and respond to situations. Getting the right mindset to achieve your goals is the first step in identifying what is required to achieve peak performance in your chosen field.
This is when the highly trained experts at Goldcrest Partners can help. We take a holistic approach to the pillars of performance – cognitive, physical, emotional, physiological – and focus on what is important for you to perform better more of the time. It’s a complex, inter-related dynamic, but get it right and all the elements will slot smoothly into place – leaving you better placed to perform (and enjoy) life at work and at home.
Don’t follow the herd
Whether you’re a fund manager or a firefighter, in essence, performance coaching asks, “How do you do what you do better?”
To achieve this there’s been a tendency for ‘business’ to over-borrow techniques from the worlds of elite sport and the military. This choice is natural as they are environments where performance psychology has been an implicit and explicit part of training for decades and is a highly developed area of competence.
The reality though is that the financial workplace is a different environment with a different timeframe and different operating rhythm. Some qualities like discipline and teamwork tend to crossover well but as the performance criteria and the persistency demanded are different, so is the emphasis of the performance coaching.
At Goldcrest Partners our observation is that financial services over-index on cognitive performance, physical conditioning is the go-to stress management activity, and the emotional and physiological dimensions are most often overlooked. This makes sense because from an autonomic nervous system perspective, high achievers in financial services tend to be sympathetic dominant with a bias to action over rest.
This approach can work but it is akin to driving through a muddy field in a 2-wheel drive. The car can be as high-performance as you like but until its power is distributed evenly, it just spins away and potentially burns out before reaching its destination.
This behavioural tendency can also play out in the way finance professionals demonstrate an over development of technical and tactical skills with more emphasis needed on interpersonal and strategic aspects that are crucial to successful performance of the most senior roles.
Role specific
An accurate diagnosis of the key actions required to execute a role is essential.
There is no one-size-fits-all solution. Different roles in the finance industry are unique and evolve over time, so the performance criteria are different to begin with and then change.
For example, successful investment decision-making takes cognitive clarity and emotional intelligence, so a focus on those elements may be the primary areas of focus to elevate performance. Effective leaders of organisations benefit from having a clear purpose, being physiologically well-regulated and forming strong relational bonds, so that could be the emphasis for boosting performance in those roles.
What is consistent is the accurate identification of the capabilities needed to perform a role well and focus on these. Other elements that may be the most important in other elite performance environments could just be hygiene factors or not relevant to high performance in the financial services industry.
Individualised and effective
The assessment of the needs of the role is complemented by an internal appraisal of the individual. How you are doing, both personally and professionally.
This ‘diagnostic’ process can include many different inputs and tends to massively raise self-awareness which informs where to build up and balance out our capability to perform the task at hand.
We then work with you to design an easy and enjoyable framework that takes into account your professional and personal values and goals.
But a bit like business strategy, the success rate for a process such as this is low. Plans are often misguided, don’t get started and if they do, they seldom stick and that’s where the value of performance mindset coaching comes into its own.
Support, challenge – and have some fun
It takes practise and time to change habits. A combination of support and challenge in the right balance is a winning formula.
Receiving permission to rest and guidance on how to develop parasympathetic renewal techniques is important support for those who tend to be ‘always on the go’.
Shifting mindset that the process doesn’t need to be a painful 180° switch in lifestyle is invaluable. Often the smallest changes can have the biggest impact. Consider the 1 in 60 rule in which pilots learn that flying just 1 degree off course means after 60 miles they’ll miss their target by an entire mile. Now flip that on its head and apply it to the trajectory of your career, a small change to your direction of travel today can make a big difference to your destination in a few years.
Challenge lives in the coaching relationship and in the things you commit to do. It can take the form of acknowledging fixed mindsets that don’t serve you or your goals anymore. Holding you accountable to your plans and actions. These might be as simple as getting up an hour earlier to incorporate some exercise into your routine – or hitting the snooze button to get an hour’s extra sleep because you don’t really need to be in the gym six days a week. It could be a challenge to develop new interpersonal skills and upgrade your communication to transform the way you engage with your teams, peers and leaders.
The most effective approach to support and challenge is carefully calibrated and, most importantly, fun. Not only can it be enjoyable, but we also believe it has to be, otherwise it is just another chore on an already never ending to-do-list.
Perhaps this is the biggest mindset shift of all. It is easy to sustainably elevate your performance and enhance your long-term wellbeing while having fun!
