Peak Performance and Getting into Flow
Shifting your approach to life, leadership and performance in the short term may feel like a risk and a challenge, but the long-term gains of a flow energy approach will have your key stakeholders thanking you and asking how you managed to create such a sustainable high-performance culture.
On Sunday night Egan Bernal of Ineos Grenadiers won stage 9 of the Giro D’Italia, taking the pink jersey and setting up the team for an overall victory in the first of this year’s grand tours.
It was an impressive win and his explosive finish over the last 500 metres of the 158km stage was something very special to witness.
What I love best about this win is how it actually happened.
Those of you that are cyclists or follow cycling will know that grand tours are all about team tactics and strategy.
You have to be very clear on your goals and wait patiently for the right time to execute your plan.
It’s simply not going to work to try and go out and win every stage. Using that approach is a surefire way of maybe winning the odd battle or two but losing the overall war.
Ineos are masters of strategy and picking the right time.
The team was on or setting the pace all day.
When the time was right to make their move, they shifted gears and really got into flow dominating the main pack. They kept up this cadence at around 80% of their capacity (dropping most of the peloton in doing so) until just 500 metres from the finish when Bernal stepped up into peak performance at 100% to win the stage.
What was a genius about last night was explained humbly by Bernal in his post-win interview?
“I was thinking of doing really well today, but I wasn’t sure if I’d go for the stage. But my teammates had a lot of confidence in me. I wasn’t sure, but they told me, ‘you can do it’...I think this victory is more for them because they really believed in me.”
Yet when it comes to life, leadership and performance it’s very rare to see this type of strategy executed with such conviction and precision in teams or organisations.
Often optimal or peak performance is seen as something that can be sustained over long periods of time. This simply isn’t the case.
Extended periods of high-intensity exertion eventually lead to significant drops in available capacity, energy and performance.
You can see this in the way that breakaway groups, more often than not, are caught by the peloton. And typically when they’re not caught, it’s not because the peloton didn’t have the energy, it’s simply that catching them wouldn’t make a difference to the overall standings.
As such, chasing them down on that stage would be a waste of energy.
Pacing, recovering and flowing are just as important as peaking in the performance cycle, especially when you’re playing a long game.
An important moment of reflection:
Take a minute to think about your personal approach, your team’s approach or your organisation’s approach to life, leadership and performance.
Are you in LOW energy, with a short-term focus and little capacity or energy available to perform?
Are you PACING yourselves keeping your energy use to the minimum waiting for the right time to step up?
Are you trying to optimise PEAK performance all the time, with no time or capacity available for recovery?
Or are you in FLOW energy, maintaining a healthy balance between capacity and energy availability so you can change cadence and step into peak performance for short periods of time when required and when it’s really needed, just like Egan Bernal and Team Ineos Grenadiers?
Taking the time to honestly reflect on this both personally and as a team really can be the difference between living and leading from a flow state in sustainable high performance or a low energy state in unconscious over-performance.
Shifting your approach to life, leadership and performance in the short term may feel like a risk and a challenge but the long-term gains of a flow energy approach will have your key stakeholders thanking you and asking how you managed to create such a sustainable high-performance culture.
