Why all top performers in the future will have a Personal Chief Performance Officer...and my path to becoming one
My throat tightened, my heart began to race like a runaway freight train, quickly followed by the inevitable quaking of the voice that comes right before the moment when the eyes drift upwards and the room begins to lose focus as the mind starts to panic. Before I knew it they were all there, the four horsemen of anxiety ready run amok.
Fighting through it to deliver the material got me to the end but it was neither elegant nor eloquent--and one thing was very clear to me...
This was not something I wanted to repeat.
It was the fall of 2014, I had been presenting our M&A strategy to the Board of Directors--the work our team had done was great, but at that moment I wasn’t even good.
I had gotten through it, but barely.
As I sat down awkwardly, I felt the anxiety dissipate as a simmering sense of shame settled in its place. That was rapidly replaced by confusion as to what had just happened. I struggled to think of something to say to my business partner as the board meeting continued.
I mustered the best I could come up with as I grimaced slightly and quietly whispered to him,
“That was weird.”
“I know-- what’s up?”, he said as he looked at me with a look that told me all I needed to know.
It was a look that was part perplexed and part pity.
A look that in an instant let me know that this had not been a little case of nerves that I desperately hoped had gone unnoticed amongst the other executives, our CEO and our Board of Directors.
No, this had been a very obvious, very public, full blown case of public speaking anxiety. It did not fit with how he had previously experienced me or how he viewed me as an executive.
I knew who he thought I was: hard charging, extroverted, CONFIDENT and as the leader responsible for growth and future strategy, someone who had LOTS to say on deals and our best path forward in the market.
I knew I WAS that person and I generally relished the chance to debate different points of view...
But I also knew that was clearly not who I had been in the front of the boardroom--and that the full picture was now much more complicated.
The company was a warm collaborative place to work and the boardroom no exception. But a public company boardroom is also a bottom-line type of place and I knew if I didn’t fix whatever was going on, my time in that room was going to be severely limited and my ability to do my job effectively was going to be in question.
Now the most important question I had to face was what was wrong and what was I going to do about it?
The most obvious place to start was with public speaking--and I asked for and rapidly received support to get a communications consultant/coach. That helped me brush up on my skills but the truth of the matter was that while you can always improve skills I didn’t have a skills problem--I consistently got positive feedback for both my communication and public speaking. It was something else. I couldn’t put my finger on it but somehow I intuitively knew I needed to zoom out, look more holistically at what was going on in my life.
This is my story but the reason I’m sharing it is that it is also the story of a gap in the modern knowledge economy that COVID has only exacerbated--or more precisely the lack of a gap.
The gap and the problem with “balance”
Work in the internet age can be all consuming. There may have been a time when work stayed neatly at the office but--even before COVID and WFH--in an era of smartphones, email, text, Slack and Zoom the only boundaries that exist are the ones we construct in our minds. Which brings me to the gap.
That gap between work and life?
The one that supposedly exists between work and life and enables that sense of stasis always on the horizon when we finally achieve the mythical “work-life balance”?
It doesn’t exist. Never has.
You see, for something to be balanced it has to be seperate. In the modern era, this just isn’t true when it comes to our work and our lives. In my case, what became clear was that my challenges at work had very little to do with work and a whole lot to do with my life--and how I was managing it. Over the next few years, I went through a journey to not just rebuild my professional life--but my whole life. In doing so, I stumbled on a realization that all top performers are struggling with this lack of a gap and that I needed to approach my life as a craft and not just my work.
You see what I learned the hard way is that we are people before we are professionals and whatever is going on in our lives comes with us everywhere we go--whether we want it to or not.
Our lives can not be balanced--they must be integrated.
Integration is reality for top performers--top athletes know this already
In this modern knowledge economy, whether we admit it or not, the challenges and rewards of our decisions and work are on par with the most competitive professional sports leagues in the world. In a very real sense, we are the professional athletes of our sector but very few build their lives the way top athletes do.
Professional athletes are famous across many sports for the lengths they will go to construct their lives in ways that allow them to perform at their best professionally. They would never dream of answering the question I was facing from a purely professional lens.
This shouldn’t have been a surprise to me. Many years prior I had approached my own fledgling professional soccer career with a similarly relentless and holistic approach when I was one of the first Americans to attempt to play professionally in England. But by the time I faced the crucible in the boardroom I was much more of a stereotypical work-obsessed Valley executive than I was a professional athlete.
Taking stock--what integration showed me about life
In the fall of 2014 at the time of the Board Meeting there was a LOT going on in my life--I was less than a year into a big new job in a big company going through a total transformation. Things were going phenomenally well--I had led an all day strategy offsite earlier in the year that had been very well received and together as a leadership team we had set a vision for the company we would ride from a $30B market cap and $4B in revenue to more than $200B and $12B+ respectively today. I was enjoying the culture and my colleagues. However, as much as I enjoyed the collaborative culture, I had begun to feel like pressure was somehow building.
At home, things were tough, at times even tense, and the kids were at critical pre-teen ages where they needed more from me than I sometimes had to give. Most impactfully, I was losing my Dad to cancer and flying back home to North Carolina every chance I got to see him.
It was a lot.
In hindsight it makes sense that this intense pressure and anxiety was going to show up somewhere--and likely not where or when I wanted or expected. In the end, it really didn’t matter why it showed up, what I knew at the time was that if I didn’t figure it out I was going to severely limit my ability to both do my job and have the impact I had hoped.
I didn’t know what to do. But I knew I needed to do something--my life was obviously not working for me.
I decided I’d start with a simple philosophy--if it’s not working, try something different.
No rules, just keep moving forward.
Moving to action
Step one was to take stock--I had always been an athlete and a believer in living a healthy lifestyle even if my body was no longer my job. I had no idea if reconnecting with myself as an athlete was the answer but I knew it was an answer and as good a place to start as any.
Physically I was in shape and still went for runs, threw some weights around, rode my bike, and played the occasional game of soccer. It was reasonable, if sporadic, stress relief but truth be told I didn’t feel like the professional soccer player that I had once been and it was eating at me. I was a walking version of soft-tissue russian roulette every time I played and “weekend warrior” was rapidly becoming a better description than “athlete”.
What followed was a multi-year journey of experimentation and iteration where I rebuilt not just my physical life but all of my professional and personal life--from fitness to nutrition to sleep, recovery, and mental health and performance. You name it I tried it--personal trainer, executive coach, speaking circles, therapy, meditation, sleep trackers, floating, deep tissue body work...and gradually over the next three or four years I realized I had found a path that pulled me forward--one that didn’t really have an end. Along the way I found products that were transforming health, wellness and performance and begin to invest in these companies as I realized that it was a journey that many--if not all--of us face if we want to build a life and a career that truly work--actually, not just work, but work for us. My investments started with Rise Nutrition (now part of OneMedical), Tonal, and others and now includes Oura, Zone7, Crossfit and ValorPerformance.
Treating not just my profession but my life as a craft changed everything.
Performance Teams in Professional Sports
The world of professional sports has dramatically changed from my playing days. When I first went to Europe as a young athlete, I was trying to squeeze every ounce of potential out of myself just to make it in a place where very few Americans had been before. I did not view myself as a gifted athlete and knew I had a very thin margin for error. My teammates thought my obsession with sports nutrition, sports psychology, plyometrics, and strength and conditioning were a bit strange and even evidence of an amusing, quintessentially gung-ho American approach.
Fast forward to today and every team in every sport around the world has vast teams of specialists, from strength and conditioning coaches to nutritionists to psychologists. A High Performance Director presides over them, coordinating the data and the plan in concert with the team coaches. Moreover, the truly elite athletes now not only take advantage of the team resources but create personal teams around themselves as individuals to maximize their athletic potential. From LeBron to Steph Curry in basketball to Russell Wilson and Tom Brady in football to Novak Djokovic or Serena Williams in tennis--all of them employ a personal performance team to perform at their best.
In contrast, here we are attempting to perform at the highest levels of Silicon Valley and somehow we think that our sleep, recovery, and mental and physical training are either irrelevant or a problem of merely personal concern for when we achieve “balance”. But the professional sports world knows mental and physical performance are intimately intertwined.
My path to Personal Chief Performance Officer
When I left the corporate world in May 2018, I had a plan to move immediately into an operating role at a high growth startup--it was a totally rational plan, but it wasn’t the right plan. After a moment of sanity three weeks later I decided to give myself time, did a hard right turn, shut down the conversations I was having and ultimately took a full year off--a year in which I took vacations without email and followed my nose on whatever interested me. I got trained as an Olympic Weightlifting coach, took meditation classes, and every three months found myself a different person from when I started.
In reflecting on my journey from that boardroom in 2014 to today, I realized it was strange that I had taken a DIY approach to building a performance team and program. Sure in the home improvement world there is the DIY crowd that head to Home Depot every weekend and every once in awhile chase down an electrician or tile contractor to help with the bigger projects, but then there are the rest of us who hire a general contractor--an expert on listening to what you’re trying to do, helping build a plan, find the experts and arrange the sequence of experiments and iterations to move towards your goal. If most people wouldn’t remodel their homes without a general contractor why was I left on my own to remodel my personal and professional life on my own.
That realization made it clear that through all of these iterations, I had ultimately become my own general contractor or what I now call Personal Chief Performance Officer (PCPO).
I now believe that those looking to perform at their best professionally and build a life that works will need to find their own PCPO to help them take responsibility for the meta-dialogue around not only how they perform today, but how they can improve their capacity to perform in the future.
From theory to practice
Yet this was theory built on purely personal experience and I realized the best way to test my theory was to run an experiment. I needed to see the problem through other people's eyes and that the seat closest to the general contractor or PCPO was the Executive Coach. I realized that those conversations were wide-ranging--focused on professional performance but with the latitude to explore all areas of your personal and professional life.
It was October 2019, I quickly enrolled in the most established executive coaching training program that had trained more that 60,000 coaches and effectively created the coaching industry thirty years ago--the program was normally completed over 18 mos but I decided I needed to finish it by the end of the year to launch by the start of the year. It was a push but I completed the program in early Jan 2020, put the word out to my network and carved out a day a week to coach a small group of Founders, CEOs, and Investors.
That experiment is now a small underground community of leaders exploring not only their craft and their performance but how they integrate them into their lives in a way that works for them. Going forward, I’m going to be using this site to share more about what I’ve learned, how it’s going, and what’s coming next. How could a Personal Chief Performance Officer help you? This is one of the questions I'll be exploring in the coming posts.
