Achieve Peak Performance: 3 tips from a gold medal-winning athlete

We recently announced Lucy Evans, a former international athlete and marketing professional, as our newest leadership advisor. As a gold-medal-winning runner, Lucy competed at the Commonwealth Games, World Championships and Grand Prix events. Lucy recently went through our modern leadership programme, and now, in her first blog for Hack Yourself, gives her perspective on what it takes to move towards peak performance at work.

1. Build your unique formula

As an elite athlete, when it came to high performance, nothing was left to chance.

I would strive to run the perfect race at every opportunity, using a personal performance formula for success. To create this formula, during the lead up to the competitive season, I would work with my coach to identify what the perfect race looked like. We would “rewind” to a week before the gun was due to go off and consider all of the elements which needed to come together to allow me to deliver the best performance possible.

This included everything from having a smooth journey to the venue and getting a good night's sleep, to having great conditions (sun shining and a following wind please) and a fantastic warm-up. The diagram below shows my perfect race:

Once we knew what the ingredients to the perfect race looked like, we would work together to “control the controllables”, focussing on the things we could change and influence, so that we had total ownership of the result. When it came to delivering the best performance possible, nothing was left to chance.

So, if you think about your goals, other than “chancing it”, what is set up to support you to deliver the best performance you can, every day?

As part of your self-leadership, how can you set up a performance formula, to enable you to deliver outstanding results? I completed my ‘work’ personal formula with the team at Hack Yourself, and highly recommend it.

Top Tip: Rather than worrying about things that are outside your control and influence, focus your energy on the aspects of a situation or task that you have direct control over.

2. Find your focus

In the world of track and field, where every fraction of a second counts, focus can be the difference between success and failure.

To deliver the best results you must be fully focussed on the task at hand, by being present, committing to the process, and using mental strategies to stay in control.

Away from race day, within the training environment, it’s just as important to keep distractions to a minimum and get the best out of every session. To help me do this, I established a “hit list” of distractions:

Next, I took action to minimise the impact of each distraction, through elimination and management, as well as using dedicated methods to train and refine my focus.

Similarly, in the workplace, powerful external forces can steal our focus, making it difficult to pay attention. Research shows that most of us don’t have more than one hour of uninterrupted focus, which can result in all sorts of costly negative impacts such as loss of time, inaccuracies and creativity drain.

So, how can you become more focused? A good place to start is to think about what’s stealing your focus in the first place. The list above shares some of the culprits within the world of sport, but why not create your own list, which might include message notifications, chat boxes, emails and interruptions from your family or colleagues.

Next, think about how you can manage expectations, if people are requesting your time, effort and energy? How can you manage their expectations against your goals and your teams’ goals? One way I did this was by switching my phone off during training and managing expectations of “being available”. Friends and family knew that if they needed to contact me in an emergency during training, to call my coach. Otherwise, I would respond when the training was done.

Finally, what methods can you put in place to help you stay focussed? Athletes dedicate time to practicing and refining very specialised techniques to help them focus within a noisy, highly competitive environment. These may not be that relevant when transferred to the 'real world', but the concept remains the same – practice methods for focus.

Recommendations from the team at Hack Yourself include:

Train the brain – monotask for 10 mins, then 1 min rest. Gradually increase.
Write down the distractions as they come and set a time to address them all later.
Timebox rather than ‘to do’ lists.

Top Tip: Recommended reading - The team at Hack Yourself recommends Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention by Johann Hari - A beautifully researched and argued exploration of the breakdown of humankind's ability to pay attention.

3. Hone your habits

One of the foundation cornerstones for any athlete is positive habit forming. Small, consistent activities performed regularly all combine to create a performance lifestyle to support your potential. Having an awareness about how your habits impact on your ability to deliver high performance is one of the keys to success.

Key habits I established included keeping a detailed training log and journal, stretching daily, practicing visualisation techniques every day, correcting negative self-talk, establishing positive nutrition habits and sticking to a consistent bedtime.

So, how did I form these habits? Well, unfortunately for me, at some point in my journey as an athlete, these good habits were bad habits! As a younger athlete, I never tracked my training, I ate McDonald's on the way home from the track and went to bed pretty late! But with support from my coaches, I evolved and learned the error of my ways, changing these bad habits into good ones along the way, and experiencing the benefits firsthand!

Outside of sport, habits can be one of the most powerful tools for personal and professional development. By cultivating positive habits, you can create a more supportive environment for you and your team, to enhance your skills, and, over time, cultivate transformative change.

So, when it comes to leveraging the power of habits, what does the team at Hack Yourself Say?

Start by identifying your “bad” behaviours, which can be anything from typing in meetings to not having a work cut-off time. Next, decide what needs to change – what must stop happening and what must start happening for you to get to where you want to be. Start to implement these changes and pay attention to how differently you feel, having made these changes, notice how others react to you, and remember that the small changes start with you!

Top Tip: Sometimes, you may need help identifying your bad habits. I am grateful that I always had support from my coach. However, you may want to ask friends, family or colleagues to help you identify the things you really need help with. Follow Lucy on Linkedin.

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