The Olympics is an opportunity for me to think about such basic ideas as performance – basic as it’s one of the foundation subjects for the work I do on a daily basis. It is, as well, one of the foundation subjects for all psychologists, linking psychological wellbeing to performance. I’m not sure all my psychology colleagues see it like that, but, to me, it’s obvious. If you feel psychologically well you perform better than if you don’t.

Performance relates to everything we do, and is about achievement of tasks, no matter how small. The combination of tasks is how we move through daily life. The performance of tasks is the manifestation of behaviour, and, as such, is preceded by thoughts and feelings. We think before we perform a task. We tell the brain what to do.

Peak performance is the aim for most of us. My ‘Just a Minute’ model of performance, based on the Radio 4 show, includes the need not to deviate, hesitate or repeat actions required to achieve a task. Listening to the show you can instantly tell that the incredient for successful completion of the task to complete one minute without D,H or R requires massive concentration. Why are some able to complete the task whilst others cannot? That is the question at the centre of my current reflections on performance.

Concentration is at the centre of peak performance, and the achievement of concentration requires the elimination of interference, combined with a focus on the task. Focusing on the task brings me back to the Olympics. What has been the task for participants at the Olympics – to focus on their event, and do the best they can, and if the best is better than anyone else, they win. However, the focus is on the task to do the best they can by eliminating interference. The kind of interference they may experience includes pressure to win; the desire to stand on the podium; the anticipation of crowd support. If any of these interferes with their focus they will not achieve peak performance. If the enthusiasm of the audience acts as a positive context for concentration it may help focus; if it interferes with concentration it will impede performance.

Two things about performance are, also, important. Knowing oneself extremely well, as this helps us know if we are properly equipped to perform well, and helps us to identify the kinds of things that interfere with our concentration. Accepting personal responsibility to achieve peak performance is the second. If we accept entirely that our performance is everything to do with us, and little to do with anyone else, we will perform at our peak. What stands in the way is our ability to maintain the personal control that personal awareness and personal responsibility imply.

At work, for example, individuals may do the best they can to focus and concentrate on their tasks, and do their best to eliminate interferences, but find that their best efforts are thwarted by the cultural context and the behaviour of others. Whilst I can provide techniques and approaches that strengthen personal attitude towards events and people (resilience), many will suggest it’s impossible to change the way things are done, and, therefore, have little chance of achieving peak performance all the time. Even under these circumstances there will be tasks during the day where personal focus and concentration  should be grasped, as the interference of culture and others behaviour may not have an impact on personal focus.

One way of managing interferences to concentration is to become so confident in oneself, ones’ own abilities and sense of ‘being at one’ with the world that interferences become shadows rather than having an impact. The degree of personal confidence in oneself has a powerful impact on peak performance – it reduces or eliminates the thoughts that produce hesitation, deviation or repetition, and provides a kind of certainty that drives one on, even in a chaotic environment.

So the participants at the Olympics who have a huge amount of self confidence and the capacity to focus and concentrate on the task at hand, will, also, have the capacity to neutralise or eliminate forms of interference with their focus on the task. It enables them to do the best they can; and the best may be better than others and they may win.

Like most people, I’m now basking in a vicarious glow produced by the triumphs and participation of so many athletes and spectators at the Olympics.

What intrigues me is how top athletes achieve the success they do, as they are always required to  achieve higher performance from the same person; and the flip side, why do some achieve success at exactly the right moment, whilst others don’t yet have the capacity to do so (and may have achieved excellent performance in the past).

Coaching clearly plays a very big and pivotal part in the entire process of producing performance; coaching in techniques, coaching in nutrition, sleep, balancing life. All are ingredients of the performance cake. A major ingredient, probably the strongest influence, is encouragement, helping athletes to strengthen their self belief, helping athletes to imagine triumph before they actually do anything physical.

I have been struck, however, by how frequently everyone is saying it’s been a team effort, and it started way back when – 15 years or so ago, and it’s been a build up of confidence combined with performance enhancing activities.

For me, this is the big message to take away and apply elsewhere – the success is about the context for success, the cultural environment that nurtures the athletes to perform as well as they can, and better than others. Athletes travel to the physical environment that promotes performance; they also have the psychological environment that stimulates the brain to achieve.

So, it really is the wellbeing and performance strategy in action in sport – the positive environment, the managers and coaches and their behaviour towards the athletes, the elimination of impediments to performance (moving to conducive physical environments, for example, and the attitude of the athletes towards the challenging events, otherwise known as resilience.

Who makes it all happen?

The managers and coaches have to bring together the ingredients of the cake.

So, it’s not simply techniques; it’s about the whole process – the positive culture surrounding the athletes; the behaviours of everyone towards each other that nurtures, encourages and  applies techniques, styles, approaches – getting it right for the athlete as an individual and as teams of individuals; and the elimination of anything that interferes with performance.

Why doesn’t this apply to businesses and services? It’s what we do to help businesses and services thrive; pity they aren’t called sports people; they are simply called workers.

It’s now a common challenge for people at work to be asked to do more for less. Normally this is about being asked to complete more tasks in the same time. To help everyone along, there is a groundswell of interest in building individual resilience to cope with this  demand to do more in the same time.

To do more tasks in the same time relies on improving intense concentration as it’s the diversion of concentration that causes tasks to be repeated, hesitated or deviated from the straight and narrow.

What seems to be happening is that managers demanding more for less are paying no attention to how to enable greater concentration by those they manage. The same old problems occur; interruptions, unnecessary meetings; more emails for more tasks; less breaks, less support, less interest.

This is, of course, the opposite of what excellent managers should be supporting. They should be identifying the important tasks to be performed, leaving aside the urgent and not important tasks; they should be encouraging their staff with loads of gratitude; they should be lining up the supporting skills to operate smoothly to ensure tasks can be completed first time and successfully; they should be encouraging breaks for ten minutes in every hour; they should be setting mutually agreed expectations.

The knock on effect of not being aware of the needs of staff is that individual self interest will erode the process of helping others to help oneself – the most successful way of achieving personal self interest. Secretaries, or as they are now called, business support services, will not provide support; managers will not supply supervision and support; colleagues will not help resolve problems that arise. There is a general shut down of mutual support and interaction whilst the tasks keep piling up and not being completed effectively.

This trend will be very difficult to reverse, if one generation of workers follows a generation that uses selfishness as their best method of interaction. It is a recipe for perpetual under performance, at a time when performance needs enhancing.

Resilience isn’t about doing more for less; it’s a process that produces an attitude towards events. If general attitude is to look after number one first, then that isn’t the most resilient way of performing effectively. Looking after others who then look after number one will produce much higher performance and psychological wellbeing, which is precisely what we so desperately require.

There is an enormous industry built up around supplying services that are promoted to improve wellbeing of people at work. Most of them focus on the individual, and many of them are linked to our physical comfort and satisfaction – exercise or massage in one form or another. Others may be customised diets and the availability of counselling and other forms of employee support for people at work. All good stuff. The evidence of impact on the performance of the business or service is slim if any, although personal satisfaction does have an impact on motivation and degrees of engagement.

The approaches to improving performance through improving psychological wellbeing are systemic, involving changes in the way the organisation is managed as well as changes in the individual. This is because context is everything; we are hugeky influenced by the culture of organisations, our managers and how our colleagues behave within the organisational setting.

The processes that are needed to prevent events occurring at work that may trigger responses that lower performance, are the same processes needed to improve individual and corporate performance, and involve the organisation and the individual interacting effectively together to produce the high level performance.

Why is it, therefore, that time and time again managers focus only on trying to improve performance by focusing only on the individual? This has limited impact unless the context changes. It’s a bit like a stressed person who’s been off sick returning to the same job with the same people, and the expectation is that the person will be able to cope better. Nonsense.

It is less expensive focusing on improving culture, manager behaviours and resolving stressful trigger points than focusing on developing individual capacity to cope, as it has greater impact and longer lasting effect. This is simply because individual change can only occur if reinforced over time, and if the context is the same yesterday as it will be tomorrow where does the reinforcement come from?

So, my message to managers when considering an improvement of psychological wellbeing of your workforce, please consider the approaches to changing culture, manager behaviours and stressful trigger points as well as boosting the capacity of the workforce to be able to cope. The sustainable impact will improve corporate and personal performance beyond recognition.

Managers – please do not continue only with your idea of the ‘quick fix’ – they don’t fix very much unless something else happens to reinforce the fix. You know it makes sense. It is common sense but not common practice.

My wife is going for her audition to remain in the Bach Choir. These auditions occur every three years, and even the most hardened and professional singers become extremely anxious at the prospect of singing solo in front of the musical director, the world renowned choirmaster and organist, David Hill. My wife has been a member for a couple of decades, almost, so she’s been through the ordeal several times. Why, she asked this morning as we were taking our normal prevention of ill health walk, am I so nervous?

This got me to reflect why we need to be ever more resilient, and started to make my wife’s walk even more anxious making. The erosion of confidence is unsurprising in the light of the activities of Barclay’s Bank, and, we are given to understand, a whole network of banks. This comes within a week of RBS making it impossible to use accounts, although it is of interest that NatWest does manage to access accounts to take their own fees but cannot access accounts to transfer and pay others. This all comes in the middle of the general economic crisis that is eroding confidence in the major institutions – our political system that seems incapable of dreaming up ideas for improving our confidence sufficient enough to provide the energy to take risks and grow, our policing service that has been exposed as being partial, our dwindling interest in a Faith that would normally provide comfort in uncertain times, our doctors who so misguidedly took industrial action – so all the principal institutions that we would normally depend on and trust have eroded our general level of confidence by creating levels of anxiety as soon as we get out of bed.

Resilience is an attitude of mind. We can often choose to be resilient or not depending on our assessment of the events for which resilience may be required. Sometimes, the choice between being resilient or not is a Hobson’s Choice, with the room for mental manoeuvre so limited that an enforced choice is the result. Our attitudes are formed from our thoughts and feelings towards an event; these, in turn, link back to our sense of control over our ability to survive the event. If we lose the sense of control we become anxious. Resilience development is to stretch our ability to control our anxiety, and this boosts our confidence, which boosts our attitude and makes us more resilient.

So, which bit of the Bach Choir audition causes the anxiety, for which my wife needs to strengthen her resilience? Everything it seems, even though her voice has been confirmed as ‘white’ – pure and her overall abilities are fine. It seems that the anxiety is the loss of control over the decision making process, which is not a pass/fail type of process but an opinion of an expert. What has been happening to our reaction to experts? We have lost confidence in them because of the general context we live in.

The real mix of causes of anxiety is the uncertainty that surrounds the opinion of experts; do we trust them any more to produce the results that we expect, knowing that we are doing everything we can to produce the right result? The wrong footing that takes place appears to be reaching epidemic proportions. At the simplest, trying to make an appointment on time when it involves travelling – you plan the travel, but hey ho, the bus drivers are on strike (last Friday getting to my own workshop in Central London); the garage that you normally fill up at is closed for maintenance; the train that you rely on is going slow because of a signal failure further up the line (yesterday!).

It seems that there is a distinct possibility that our general resilience is reaching the tipping point from being robust (an attitude that seeks to actively face up to and overcome challenges) to a sense of helplessness when there is nothing we can do to cope effectively with the situation. The more we experience the inability to influence events and our response to them the more we adopt the learned helplessness stance. And that has a direct impact on our energy, motivation and determination, resulting is less risk taking, less performance and greater anxiety. Our possible solutions are drinking and eating more to assuage the feelings of anxiety – but these are very temporary and leave us in a worse state after the effect has worn off.

What can applied psychologists do about this? We can bash away at trying to influence context to shift context towards being more supportive – creating the resilient community or society by focusing on raising awareness amongst our leaders that context is everything. And we can do practical things at a more micro level by helping families, groups, communities and organisations to focus on their own context or mini culture to enable those within these groups to strengthen their attitude away from helplessness to a robust attitude that says we will over come the challenges.

Last week I gave a talk to a combined meeting of Chambers of Commerce in the Midlands on ‘wellbeing is good for business’. The approach I adopted was to focus first on the impact of normal working life on working people, where there may be little or no emphasis on wellbeing. Such a scenario relies on ourselves to maintain a sense of wellbeing, and this requires us to strengthen personal resilience against the risks and threats that working life brings these days. The consequences of low maintenance wellbeing may result in a gradual development of ‘learned helplessness’ – a feeling that there is little we can do to place ourselves in a better position to thrive and survive (the drivers most of us have that keeps us alert and ‘pushes’ us to grasp opportunities). I went on the describe the well known consequences of people feeling unwell turning up for work – they tend not to perform at their best because they think about matters other than their work. This is particularly dangerous for those whose work requires intense concentration, the lack of which might cause injury. It is, also, important for everyone to be able to concentrate to perform effectively at anything. Those who do turn up for work and think of other intrusive matters (including day dreaming about a better life!) contribute to psychological presenteeism, a massively expensive waste of resources – more expensive than sickness absence and staff turnover combined.

I went on to identify the steps to be taken to prevent psychological presenteeism occurring in the first place – steps that involve creating a positive work culture based on healthy organisation principles; adaptive leadership styles that provoke commitment, trust and engagement; and tackling the lifestyle@work issues that divert attention away from concentrating on work – poor IT systems, badly designed premises, open plan offices, inability to discuss confidential matters because of lack of privacy, hot desking, poor nutrition, the inability of take proper breaks and exercise, all matters that managers can do something about relatively easily.

There is now another big reason for focusing on wellbeing in the workplace. The government initiative relating to the ‘fit note’ , persuading people to return to work, is a vital element of the range of initiatives to reduce expenditure using tax revenues. A clearly sensible initiative as work of any kind has health benefits and contributes to wellbeing – a sense of feeling well. It is also sensible to lower the amount of money to support people who are off sick if they can, in fact, work. However, the initiative is clearly a shift of expenditure from the tax payer to business (and a recycling of tax in the public sector) as it is more expensive to have people at work under performing. In the private sector it is probably the biggest wasted cost. Increasing that cost, by having more under performing workers isn’t sensible. Hence an urgent need for businesses and services to tackle the problem of psychological presenteeism to improve performance and cut expenditure on under performance.

It’s always been a mystery to me why the Government hasn’t written off the credit card debt of every person with a debt, allowed them to keep their cards, and boosted the economy by enabling people to buy the things they want through re-using their credit cards. The economy might have been boosted a long time ago. Instead, whilst countries are deemed to be in danger of collapse with interest rates on their own borrowing at 7%, mere mortals are being charged, by the banks, over 14% and sometimes much higher (44%) for personal borrowings, making it impossible to pay off debts and build personal capital. Whilst there would have been a danger that mere mortals would rebuild their massive personal debts, something no one should encourage, nevertheless, the personal motivation and energy that individuals would have found by this arrangement would, no doubt, have stimulated all manner of ideas for further growth and development. Instead, we have a depressed population, and banks that no one seems able to do anything with, and the need for an injection of billions now to help weary and de-motivated people to seek out a tiny little bit of energy to forge ahead. This move is unlikely to work for more than a few people who have a blemish free credit rating. Meanwhile the bulk of the population will slide further into de- motivated existence, worrying about jobs, pensions, debt, whereas it’s the people who risk a lot who have the motivation to take risks, which is what will make us all grow and find again out mojo.

Since the Department of Health withdrew its funding for a patient satisfaction survey – the NHS part of The British Social Attitudes Survey – patient satisfaction has lowered dramatically. The DoH probably knew this was going to happen. Their withdrawal of funding for the survey means what exactly? That Ministers aren’t interested in patient satisfaction; that Ministers aren’t interested in a voice of the people they represent; that Ministers believe they are absolutely right, and ‘let me make myself absolutely clear’ , I am right – about the need for change costing an economy money the economy doesn’t have. Interestingly, in another survey, inpatient surveys have shown that over the past four years or so, inpatients have rated their care as good, very good or excellent. Why spend money changing an infrastructure now if patients are scoring such high positive responses to their actual care?

Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power.” -Laozi, Ancient Chinese Philosopher believed to have written the Tao Te Ching, Laozi books//
People who possess a lot of personal power, or influence, know a secret about life that others tend to overlook. It’s not a complicated secret, but it is one that has a significant impact on self-confidence and personal growth.
The secret is as ancient as the study of philosophy – it originates with man’s first inclination to understand himself.
So what is this hidden knowledge that gives you power over yourself and others?
As Laozi alludes, it is as simple as to Know Yourself.
Know your essence. The most significant qualities that truly define who you are as a person. This is not about your physical DNA; it’s about your spiritual, emotional and psychological DNA.
Know your values. The things that matter most to you in life. Your priorities; your personal commitments; your beliefs; and, your faith.
Know your strengths. The natural abilities that you possess, cultivate and develop. These are the skills that you leverage to get things done, either on your own or through influencing others. Your strengths are the tools in your personal lifebox.
Know your passions. These are more than your wants and desires; your passions are those things that you cannot live without. They are the objects of your intense desire to both pursue and obtain for increased satisfaction and the betterment of your life.
Know your tendencies. Habits can be good; and, habits can be bad. You should know all of your habits, as well as the frequency you typically act upon them. Tendencies are deliberate and purposeful actions, and they often produce predictable results. Knowing your habitual tendencies will help you to better identify areas of self-improvement.
Know your limitations. You will never be good at everything you want to achieve. It’s better to know which skills or activities are beyond your capability to perform at a level of excellence. Influence is derived from expertise, so you need to be able to narrow your focus in order to maximize your time and energy spent.
Know your goals. The things you really want to achieve in life must be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time sensitive (S.M.A.R.T.). Nebulous, or vague, goals are not conducive to maximizing your personal performance, development or ability to influence others. Clarity is key when it comes to setting your goals.
Know your mission. Pull it all together – essence, values, strengths, passions, tendencies, limitations and goals – and then, give it some direction. This is your mission in life. This is the point on the horizon that you’re working toward yet never reach. It is the star by which you navigate yet never touch. It is the motivation that compels you to be constantly moving forward, striving to make the most of every opportunity presented.
Knowing yourself gives you tremendous power because it enables you to exude confidence and exert influence over others. Think about the people who positively influence your life. How do they carry themselves? How would you describe their level of self-awareness? Do they seem to ‘know themselves’ and possess a clarity of purpose? Ask them about their mission.
Then, when you get the opportunity, think about what you know about yourself. Write down your thoughts. Read them aloud daily. Modify them as needed.
Also, feel free to share some of them here in the comments. We’d all like to get to know you better too!