How World Champions Turn Stress Into A Competitive Advantage

Coming up in today’s edition:

1. One quick win: to increase your “first draft speed”

2. One proven system: to turn stress into an advantage

3. One million-dollar question: to create meaning within your team

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1. INCREASE YOUR TEAM’S FIRST DRAFT SPEED

Increasing your “first draft speed” in business can 10x your growth.

You set the pace of the company or team.

If you take a week to respond to an email thread or reply to a client, they will tend to emulate your standards.

The best founders and leaders I’ve worked with get things down on paper and start making moves from idea to execution as quickly as possible.

I wrote about the benefits of “increasing the intensity” across your business as one of the most successful CEOs of our generation labelled it critical for new leaders (read more detail in this edition).

This is why the idea of “first draft speed” from entrepreneur Shaan Puri resonated so much 👇

Next time you are discussing an idea or project, measure your own first draft speed on a scale of 0 - 10:

• 0 = extremely slow (bottom of the priority list)

• 10 = super speed (action/prototyped delivered on the same day)

The more you can move your and your team’s speed levels to 10, the more successful you will be as a unit.

2. TURNING STRESS INTO A COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE

Stress doesn’t have to be negative.

The best athletes in the world use it to make them perform at a higher level.

A study of 200+ elite and non-elite swimmers found that before the race, both sets of swimmers experienced the same intensity of cognitive and physical stress.

The difference?

• Non-elite swimmers viewed stress as something that would hurt their performance and needed to ignore, avoid or try to quiet it.

• Elite swimmers viewed stress as an aid to their performance that they needed to get the best out of their body.

Further research on the topic published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology highlights that instead of trying to suppress pre-event nerves, we should reframe our anxious arousal as excitement to perform better.

Simply telling yourself, “I’m excited” will shift your demeanour from a “threat mindset” (stressed and apprehensive) to an “opportunity mindset” (ready to go!)

The way you view “stress” has a monumental impact on your performance.

It will even affect your lifespan 👇

A 2010 study found that people who view “stress” as facilitative have a 43% lower chance of death than those who view stress as destructive.

How To Use Stress In The Right Way For Your Team

The business world has brainwashed us to think stress is “toxic” and to try to minimise it at all costs.

But as we saw with the impact on athletic performance above, stress can be used positively.

In her book, The Upside of Stress, Stanford University PhD & Health Psychologist - Kelly McGonigal - showcases how some individuals learn to view stressors as challenges rather than threats.

People with this outlook, commonly known as a “challenger response”, use stress to perform better and as a stimulus for growth that they feel they can proactively control.

Why should we get everyone in our team to adopt this response?

When we are stressed, there are two main hormones that our bodies release that have a significant impact:

1. Cortisol - causes inflammation, impaired immune function & depression

2. Dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA) - reduces anxiety, depression, heart disease and neurodegeneration

When under stress, you want to release more DHEA than Cortisol.

If you frame stressors as challenges, it has been proven that we release more DHEA and negative emotions like fear or anxiety decrease.

How we view stress really does impact how stress influences us!

Blocks Of Stress

Whether we like it or not, building a team that competes at the highest level will always come with a level of stress.

So I looked into how best to optimise this to prevent burnout or team disruption.

Great performers understand and respect that there is a limit to how much stress they can tolerate.

After years of studying experts from the creative industry to athletes to chess players, world-renowned Swedish Psychologist and Performance Expert (Anders Ericsson) found that top performers across all fields are unable to sustain intense work and deep concentration for more than 2 hours.

His research found the optimum blocks of work was:

• Deep, focused work (high stress) - 50 to 90 minutes

• Recovery breaks (low stress) - 7 to 20 minutes

Regardless of industry or job description, every study that has analysed the most successful employees shows this cycle generated the best output.

A German manufacturing company that experienced high employee burnout, added a mandatory 5-minute break plus 2 longer breaks throughout the day (essentially giving away an hour or “paid work” per employee).

They found that the output remained unchanged but more importantly, employee absenteeism and burnout decreased.

There was a reason that German running coach, Woldemar Gerschler, introduced interval training in the 1930s. It enabled his athletes to accomplish the greatest possible amount of high-quality output before fatigue.

Main Takeaways

1. Divide your work into 50 to 90-minute chunks.

2. Set a 2-hour max workout block alarm.

3. Reframe “stress” as a facilitator to help you reach peak performance.

3. WHAT WILL MATTER THE MOST IN FIVE YEARS TIME?

As humans, we often overestimate what we can achieve in a year but underestimate what we can achieve in 5 years.

When you are leading a team, there are a million things on your mind at all times.

So the question above has been a game-changer to help ground and refocus me attention on the areas that matter the most.

Actions To Take This Week

• Set aside quiet time to think about what the world will look like in 5 or 10 years.

• Reflect on your values and long-term goals.

• Use this reflection to create a vivid picture of your ideal future in your career or industry.

Use this clarity to guide your daily decisions, which relationships you prioritise and the experiences you select rather than temporary achievements.

• Once you have a solid vision, share it with your team.

• Ask for input on what will matter most to them about this team and mission you are on.

• Create a safe space for discussion where no idea is too outlandish.

This is a great way to understand their true motivations and how you can align the company’s mission and vision to what they personally want to achieve over the next 5-10 years.

MY TOP FINDS OF THE WEEK 🔍

For your performance:

• Venus Williams 🗣️ The one thing you can do to remove anxiety when performing (Link)

For your team:

• The Netflix Keeper Test - Is this too harsh a step for leaders? (Link)

For your health:

• Dr. Peter Attia 🗣️ The most important thing you can do to live longer (Link)

Hope you enjoyed this week’s tactics. I’ll be back next Sunday with a new lineup 👋 - Alex 

P.S. Did you get something useful from this email? Do me a solid by sharing this link with 1 newsletter pal… 🙏

P.P.S. If you want some one-on-one time to apply some of the concepts to specific challenges you are having with your own team, please get in touch.