As you may have guessed by now, we have a real passion for helping people become Sustainable High Performers. You may assume that’s because it’s our business, but it goes much deeper than that. Every day, through our work with clients, we get to hear the benefits that clients experience as they shift the needle from where they were to becoming Sustainable High Performers.

Having worked with thousands of top executives, I thought it would be helpful to share with you what a Sustainable High Performer is and does.

A SUSTAINABLE HIGH PERFORMER……

_recognizes that they are not super human. They’re just someone who makes their performance and sustainability a priority (shown with action).

_has a very high level of awareness of how their behaviors impact their energy, resilience, and brain performance.

_understands that mindful pleasure is critical to high performance. In other words, they plan for fun.

_prepares for their day (e.g., big meetings, “usual” meetings, presentations, going home). They even recognize rough days and come fully prepared to meet the challenges.

_understands that they are a work in progress. They focus on the process to get there rather than crossing some imaginary finish line.

_understands that little things really do matter. They see their day as a series of small opportunities and they do simple things to make a big difference.

_is curious to learn and open to try new things because they want that competitive edge.

_has a clear picture of who they want to be (energy, emotional state, presence, etc.) in every situation.

_is aware that there are bad days, but has strategies to process, refocus, and get back on track.

_stays clear of drama and focuses on those things within their control.

_uses anchors and reminders to stay on track and focus on what is really important.

_knows they can’t be their best without a strong and integrated support system. They are grateful and supportive of those around them.

_sees Sustainable High Performance as an attitude and a mindset. They use this as their foundation for success and they improve everyone around them.

I’m sure our list of Sustainable High Performer traits is incomplete. As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts to make that list grow.

By Jogi Rippel
CEO & Founder

Recently, we read a fantastic executive report from the IBM Institute for Business Value (New Rules for a New Decade), written by Karen Butner. The very well-written report is titled: New rules for a new decade - A vision for smarter supply chain management.  Although this report focuses on the best practices in supply management, many of the themes that Karen presents are applicable to Sustainable High Performance of critical leaders and teams.

One theme that really struck us was the description of Visionaries. This most successful and effective group of leaders predict demand, use intelligence and analytics, and proactively design solutions ahead of the demand wave. In the area of Sustainable High Performance, we have also seen leaders that we would describe as visionary. They recognize the growing demands on their leaders (and their teams) and they ask critical questions about their readiness to meet these demands. They collect data wherever they can and they look for innovative solutions to proactively support these leaders before they are crashing. Even more, these visionaries understand the ripple effect that occurs when leaders lead with energy, focus, creativity, and resilience.

Another theme from the report that really struck us was that visionaries have the ability to see what others don’t see, especially in complex and volatile situations. In terms of Sustainable High Performance, this means not being limited by doing things the way they always have been done, but being willing to try the untried. We have seen visionaries create special teams (similar to special forces in the military) to quickly address critical needs of a company and support these teams with the Sustainable High Performance support they need to succeed. This is in contrast to the old way of just piling the most critical project on top of the already overstretched high performers and then rewarding them with a promotion if they survive.

The final theme that definitely applies to human performance is the need to enhance value by optimizing performance. Human performance is one of the key levers that is often under-optimized. Our Sustainable High Performance data shows that 67% of top executives have metabolic dysfunctions or other health-related risk factors that decrease productivity. Additionally, 84% of top executives state they don’t have sufficient energy to meet all of their demands throughout their day. Shockingly, 90% of top executives don’t have strategies to prepare themselves personally for their peak performances.

Visionaries don’t accept the status quo or complain that these things are the cost of doing business. They create new rules, they look outside of their business for best practices, and they don’t hide from the data. In the current VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) business world, we need more visionaries.

As always, we’d love to hear what you think.
By Jogi Rippel//CEO and Scott Peltin//Chief Performance Officer

Leadership has many benefits but it also has many challenges and many unfortunate truths. One of those unfortunate truths is that leadership can often be lonely. This loneliness can be a perception but the real fact is that it is true.

I first learned this as a young fire captain in the fire station when I realized that as my responsibility grew, so did my challenge to just be “one of the crew”. I had to make tough decisions where those around me did not always agree and this was initially painful. As I promoted up higher in the ranks, I realized that this was amplified. Quickly I realized that people not only didn’t care about my problems, in some sick and totally human way, they were happy that I had them.

After working with many top executives, many CEOs and other members of executive leadership teams, we often help them deal with the complexity of emotions that come with being a leader. There are many hard decisions that even on the best day will be unpopular. This fear of being unpopular can contribute to a feeling of loneliness. There is also the issue of confidentiality. Due to the multitude of complications that any decision can have, leaders often have to hold their thoughts and decisions close to their chest until the final moment. This can contribute to a leader feeling deceitful, detached, and again lonely. Additionally, leaders must play a multitude of roles in a day. From being the ultimate decision maker to being the motivator, to just being an equal partner, or as many of us know to just being an unprepared parent.  As William Shakespeare described in Richard II’s dilemma: “Thus I play in one person many people, and none contented.” This lack of clarity can lead to feelings of loneliness.

Finally, there is the loneliness of insecurity. Having worked with many leaders and teams that have gone through significant reorganizations, we have seen how tough they are. For those who leave the company, there is the loneliness of leaving friends, leaving the company you have helped shape and build, and of course leaving your source of income. For those who stay with the company, there is the loneliness of losing friends, of losing familiar infrastructure and stability, of losing the sense of security that existed before the big change, and of having to develop all new teams and support systems. For both those who stay and those who leave, the feelings of loneliness are completely normal.

From a Tignum perspective, what can you do to help comfort these feelings? First, acknowledge to yourself that these feelings exist because you are human. This means also accepting that these feelings come with the job and since you chose to be a leader you must accept all that comes with that. Second, embrace your lonely times as a great source of self-reflection, self-growth, and re-motivation for the future. Third, take time to grieve the endings that come with being a leader (both through sadness and celebration).  Being able to let go of the past is a critical step in being open to try the untried in the future. Fourth, always remember that you are not your job and therefore maintaining a life away from your work is critical to staying grounded in who you really are. Finally, make your own Sustainable High Performance a priority. During times of loneliness, it is easy to sacrifice your own habits that you know are critical to building your energy, resilience, mental agility, and executional stamina. Without these things you not only won’t be a great leader, you also won’t be a great you.

As always, I’d love to hear what you think.

By Scott Peltin
Chief Performance Officer

For some reason, as we travel around the world working with our executive clients, one common theme we keep hearing is, “this is one of the toughest first quarters I ever remember”. They usually preface this statement with how Q4 of last year was also insanely challenging and busy. This doesn’t surprise us because we have seen this trend building. The size of teams has gotten smaller, the need for agility has grown significantly, the pressure from shareholders to grow and improve the P&L is rough, and most leaders are suffering from the acceleration trap. The current intensity is the new norm.

One way to avoid falling into this pattern of insanity by neglect is to create a personal Sustainable High Performance plan for yourself for your most rough busy days, weeks, and months. This way your brain knows that it has another choice other than panic and neglect. This way you don’t default to luck when you really need to optimize your performance, and you make the choice to design your behaviors to help you create Sustainable High Performance (both at work and away from work).

What does shock us is the neglect these executives often have with the strategies they know will improve their Sustainable High Performance. We can understand (even if we don’t agree with) the thought that you will “postpone” your health at this critical moment because you have to get your work done and at this moment you aren’t actually sick. After all, it is a human trait that we have to prioritize, and health is a “down the road” worry. This means in a challenging period you have to focus on the near-term challenges so you are willing to roll the dice on the long-term consequences.

In a period of time when you need high performance more than ever, and you have strategies that will directly impact your next performance, it seems like an exercise of insanity to neglect your own Sustainable High Performance strategies. If you aren’t diligently doing the things you know to increase your energy and resilience, to enhance your mental agility and brain performance, and to maximize your impact in everything you are doing - why are you at work? This would be the equivalent of a pilot saying things are too busy so he skipped the pre-flight check (which, by the way, includes making sure you have fuel for the flight). It would be like a firefighter running into a burning building without doing a size-up and forming a strategical plan. This would be like Rory McIlroy saying that this game was too important so he skipped his warm-up and the development of his personal game plan.

Our passion is helping people become Sustainable High Performers in the chaos of today’s business world. This is why this insanity just makes us insane :). As always, I’d love to hear what you think.

By Jogi Rippel // CEO & Founder

For thousands of years, mankind has been trying to understand fatigue. Why is it that two people of relatively equal capacity or ability can have completely different outputs? One quits after only a few minutes, while the other pushes through, sometimes producing superhuman feats. From an exercise physiology point of view we have made a couple of assumptions.

Perhaps the local muscles fatigue because the accumulation of waste products (lactic acid) changes the pH of the tissue and prevents contraction from occurring. Perhaps the muscle cells simply run out of energy at the cellular level and therefore can’t create a contraction any longer. Perhaps the cardiorespiratory system reaches its limit to deliver oxygen to the working tissue or to take away waste products from the tissue.

All of these are partly true but they don’t explain the complete picture. Recently, Timothy David Noakes published an article in Frontiers in Physiology (April 2012) that proposed another element. His interest started by reviewing some of the early works of A. Mosso from the 19th century where he wrote: “The thought that fatigue at first sight might appear an imperfection of our body, is on the contrary one of its most marvelous perfections. The fatigue increasing more rapidly than the amount of work done saves us from the injury which lesser sensibility would involve for the organism” so that “muscular fatigue also is at bottom an exhaustion of the nervous system.”  Noakes goes on to present the idea that the brain actually uses the emotion of fatigue as a “governor” to protect the body from damage.  This would make sense since at their root, all emotions are subconsciously created by the brain to improve our survival.

As the challenges in the VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) business world continue to grow, the by-product we see is a growing fatigue. Some of this is clearly physical fatigue (although most of us don’t have physically demanding jobs when compared to other jobs), but most of this is mental fatigue. So the question is, how can we acknowledge the brain’s creation of the emotion of fatigue as a way to protect us while at the same time use our Performance Mindset skills of controlling our emotions to push through?

Just as with all emotions, the first step is to develop an accurate awareness of what you “feel”. By being able to quickly recognize your emotional state and label it, you can consciously decide what to do with this unconscious product of the brain. Once you consciously identify the “feeling” of fatigue, you can now take several options. From a Tignum perspective this would always mandate the total integration of Mindset, Nutrition, Movement, and Recovery.

Mindset: I recognize the emotion of fatigue. I understand it is a warning sign to protect me but I do not allow it to control me. I visualize a fork in a road where I can either take the path to fatigue where it controls me or I can take another path towards a more desired state (happiness, excitement for the challenge, passion for the results, etc.). Having chosen another path, I visualize myself heading down this path. Dominant thought - I am in control of my emotions.

Nutrition: I maximize my hydration. I avoid simple sugars and processed foods and instead choose great brain foods (fish, nuts, dark green leafy vegetables, deeply colored fruits such as berries or apricots). I avoid the habitual use of caffeine and instead use it strategically (maybe even choosing green tea instead of coffee for its added benefits).  I take time (to savor and relax) with my meals to help my body optimize digestion and uptake of nutrients for fatigue management.

Movement: I choose regenerative movements (low intensity movement, Daily Prep, Walking,Tai Chi, Yoga, etc.) to help my body reduce tension and increase blood flow without adding additional stress on my entire system.

Recovery: I make sleep a priority. I take power naps to quickly recharge. I oscillate throughout the day with quick mini-breaks (5 minutes) every 90 minutes. I use breathing techniques whenever possible (even a 1-minute breathing break can rebalance your Autonomic Nervous System).

Taking this approach doesn’t take more time, it takes more purposefulness. It requires that we challenge our own stories and “badges of courage” of how tired we are as a symbol of our importance, and instead we take responsibility for our choices and for our internal emotional responses. This is Sustainable High Performance at its best, and this is how you can choose to be the person who dominates fatigue rather than letting fatigue dominate you.

As always, I would love to hear what you think.

By Scott Peltin
Founder/Chief Performance Officer

Anyone who has ever worked with us at Tignum knows that when we talk about Sustainable High Performance and increasing your energy, mental agility, resilience, and stamina, we are talking as much about at home as we are about at work.  Recently, I was speaking at an event and one of our clients shared a personal story about how this impacted his life.

He bravely shared that prior to becoming a Sustainable High Performer he approached home after work as a place to eat, finish work, pretend he was listening to his wife and kids, and crawl into bed so he could hopefully get enough sleep to make it into work the next day. While he usually accomplished making it into work the next day, what he badly missed were the benefits of being deeply involved with his family. Not that he didn’t want to. He often told others how important his family was to him. Unfortunately, his disconnection with his family was from the lack of energy and mental agility to connect with them.

When he started working on his own personal innovation, one commitment he made was changing this. Not only did he want to apply his new strategies to be better at work, he wanted to walk in the door at home with the same focus, energy, intention, and passion that he usually walked into work with. To make this happen, he approached going home every day like the peak performances that required excellence at work.

As he told his story to the crowd, I could sense that he was quite emotional because this was deeply personal. He talked about the new relationship he now has with his wife and his kids and about how much satisfaction this not only brings to him personally, but actually how it feeds him professionally. The truth is that wanting something and actually being able to achieve it are two completely different things. Relationships take the right mindset, they take energy, they require the right intentions, and they require resilience.

John Medina, the author of Brain Rules, is often approached by men looking for the silver bullet of fathering. In one way or another, they all come around to asking, “What is the most important thing I can do as a father?”  His answer, though often shocking, is “Go home and love your wife”. The point is, when you put your Sustainable High Performance strategies into play with the people you care about the most, you change their lives and ultimately in some small way, you change the world. Additionally, the other benefits include being more resilient, more balanced at work, more creative, a better leader, and happier.

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

By Scott Peltin
Chief Performance Officer

Happy New Year to you all. I hope everyone got a chance to regenerate and refocus over the break. Based upon my coaching conversations with so many of our clients, 2013 has taken off with a bang.
While I was on holiday, a friend of mine sent me an article that appeared in the New York Times about The Power of Concentration: http://nyti.ms/QZ49Sl He ac.companied the link with a fantastic question: What kinds of exercises would you recommend to achieve increased mindfulness?

This was a great article and a great question. I thanked him for starting my Sunday with some deep thinking and then I started to reflect on the Performance Mindset and all the ways we encourage the development of mindfulness. I also reflected on the huge impact the leaders we work with could make (both at work and away from work) if they committed to becoming more mindful in 2013.

So, what is mindfulness? This is a topic I have given much thought to over the years. In the meditation and yoga world it is something esoteric that occurs from a deep practice and can only be attained after many years of faithful repetition. To me it is something very simple and very attainable in our normal lives. Mindfulness is the skill of moving from an unconscious/subconscious life where you are driven by habits, to a life where your awareness is keen, and through the application of focus and attention you consciously and purposefully create a higher level of living. This is a little broad but let me explain.

When a Sommelier grabs a bottle of wine, he takes in the label, he thinks about the winery, the landscape where the grapes were grown, the weather in that area that particular year, and the type of grape that created the wine. He opens the bottle and purposefully aerates it while he thinks about the full potential that this experience will bring to the wine. He then pours the wine while observing the way it covers the glass and settles in the bottom. He then swirls the wine, fully inhales the aroma, and then puts just the right amount into his palate so he can experience all of the individual tastes that make up the wine. I don’t know anything about wine, but I know this is mindfulness. I also know that every time he does this, he derives the exact same benefits as the buddhist monk who meditates.

When you wake up and purposefully engage in Daily Prep, you are practicing mindfulness. If you just whip through the movements with no attention to what you are feeling, how you are breathing, where you have tension, or what you are trying to attain, you are practicing movement with very little mindfulness. When you begin to think through your day, to visualize your most critical interactions, to question where your oscillation moments are, and to breathe deeply to put yourself in the exact emotional state that you want in each moment, you are practicing mindfulness. If you open your laptop, quickly scan your calendar while you slam down a piece of toast, at the same time checking your email and trying to scan the newspaper - you are practicing multi-tasked induced chaos - the antithesis of mindfulness.

Each time you make yourself fully present, where you slow time down so you can allow your awareness to take in all the detail of the Sommelier, you are creating mindfulness. At Tignum, we teach multiple strategies to do this. When you create and implement work-to-home and home-to-work transitions, you are practicing mindfulness. When you do your Daily Prep, you are practicing mindfulness. When you slow down your meal and think about the benefits of the foods you have chosen, you are practicing mindfulness. When you reflect on what you did well in a meeting, or at the end of the day, and consciously visualize how you would do things differently, you are practicing mindfulness. When you take a short oscillation break to breathe, you are quieting your mind from the chaos of the outside world and turning your focus inward to rebalance your autonomic nervous system and you are practicing mindfulness. When you go for a walk outside and you purposefully control your breathing and correct your posture, while you take in the smells of nature and allow your mind to clear, you are practicing mindfulness.

The benefits of truly becoming Tignumized are far greater than health, wellness, energy, and resilience. There is a real power in becoming fully present, to being purposeful and mindful, of being focused and aware, and of creating more with less. This is why we travel the world to work with top leaders and their teams, why we help these leaders infuse Sustainable High Performance into every nook of their culture, and why we continue to speak and write on the topics we do. The demands of our busy work and private lives are huge (and never getting smaller). But the potential for us to really impact everything we do requires a different approach, a new level of mindfulness, and a commitment to Sustainable High Performance.

I look forward to engaging with you because I think mindfulness is a great topic. I’d love to hear what you think.

By Scott Peltin
Chief Performance Officer

At times you wake up and swear you’ve lived this day before.  Everything feels like a memory of an experience you have already had - similar to the movie Groundhog Day.  Here we sit, at the end of 2012, and I realize that 2013 will start almost exactly how 2012 started. The US is dealing with a fiscal cliff, Europe is in the midst of an economic crisis, there is unrest in the Middle East, and the business world is poised to approach their challenges with the same response they have habitually used in the past. In fact, the business world is the only place where tough challenges are met with franticness and knee-jerk reactivity.

At Tignum, our hope is that even though the world may feel the same, our clients can see and take another path. We encourage them to apply their Tignum strategies so they can bring calmness, purposefulness, agility, and new solutions to their challenges. In fact, our excitement for 2013 is huge because we know that within huge challenges sits some amazing opportunities for those who are prepared and who refuse to allow the three I’s (intensity, immediacy, and insecurity) to dominate.

This is why we are putting our 2013 Tignum Manifesto out there -  a written public declaration to rebut business as usual and to take a bold and committed stance. MAXIMIZE YOUR REACH is our mantra, “Be Better in 2013” is our clear goal, and our Manifesto 2013 is as follows, which hopefully gives some guidance:

.01 more fun - less boring (meetings, people, and initiatives)
.02 more promise and deliver -  less excuses
.03 more meaning - less crap (emails, meetings, projects, processes)
.04 more boldness - less hesitation
.05 more design (travel, meetings, coming home) - less luck
.06 more me time - less others and other stuff
.07 more good questions - less assumptions
.08 more high performance habits - less energy draining
.09 more humility - less facade
.10 more agility - less franticness
.11 more less - less more

We hope this list provides you some inspiration to think and plan your performance in 2013. Share it //Challenge it // Adjust it // Live it // and make your personal Sustainable High Performance your default.  We will continue giving leaders a helping hand in bringing ambition, drive, inspiration, and insights back to human performance.

Team TIGNUM wishes you great holidays and a fantastic 2013.

by Jogi Rippel
Founder & CEO

Everywhere you turn there is talk about the need for more creativity. Thomas Friedman calls it the currency of the future. Living in this information age, where everyone has access to the same information at the click of a mouse, this makes complete sense. But the question is: How do you make yourself more creative? Creativity requires the brain to make new connections from old information. In other words, it needs the proper environment and ingredients to think different.

Unfortunately, the brain is not hardwired to be creative. It needs the right conditions to have maximum creativity. In order to be efficient (save energy and thinking resources), it tries to constantly create patterns of thinking that it can store away and not have to think about. This means it labels things and attaches a known meaning to those labels. For example, that flathead screwdriver is a tool that turns flathead screws. Or, Susan is an accountant who rectifies balance sheets. On top of this, in the VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) world that we live in, our brains are highly stressed, which makes the brain want to rely on known, similar, efficient patterns even more. In these intense, high stress conditions, the brain is too often operating in the High Beta Frequency range where creativity is even more dampened.

What this means is if you want to maximize your creativity, you have to understand the importance of your Sustainable High Performance habits. Without the best brain foods, the brain will not have the energy or nutrients it needs to operate properly. Without Recovery strategies that balance the autonomic nervous system and bring the brain into its Alpha and Theta Frequencies, it can’t think differently. Without Movement, it is unlikely that critical neuro-circuits in the brain will be activated which will promote new thinking. Finally, without a different Mindset, your old thoughts will not let go to allow new thoughts to be created. In other words, without taking the Tignum total integration of Mindset, Nutrition, Movement, and Recovery approach, you won’t have the proper environment in your brain to even have a chance.

Now assuming you are Tignumized (the Sustainable High Performance state created by implementing Tignum strategies), some recent research from Tony McCaffrey, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, will provide some great insights. He found that by removing the known label from something and breaking it down into its parts, the brain was more likely to quickly think of it in new ways. For instance, that flathead screwdriver became a metal rod with a plastic handle. The metal rod could be used to pry things, conduct electricity, spread glue, or many other things. The plastic could be melted down to fill cracks or paste something together. Susan, the accountant, was now a capable person who has a multitude of analytical, computer, and problem-solving skills. This means she may be a perfect fit for a multitude of projects within the team outside of accounting.

Like so many other things that involve high performance, you can wait to have that lucky creative thought or you can do it by design. I hope these thoughts help you do the latter. As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

By Scott Peltin
Founder//Chief Performance Officer