Building Your Stamina Muscle

I have always been interested in human potential and human performance. How much better can people be and what can help them improve? I live this out in the workplace through my personal mission, which is To Inspire Belief and Enable Progress.

However, it’s not always straightforward. A focus on performing, achieving and improving; on striving to get better, takes a lot of effort. How can we make sure that the desire to, and mechanics around, achieving and improving, are compatible with the need to ensure that we can sustain our performance? So that we can deliver over the long-term, in a consistent way?

Whilst we are used to drawing lessons from sport across to business, many of these lessons focus on ‘winning’ or on high performance in the moment. And over the last few years it has become increasingly obvious to me that we’ve all been missing a trick. Because day in, day out, sport has been showing us not just how to improve, perform and achieve, but how to do so over the long-term. In a way that is effective and sustainable.

Leadership can be hard. It can certainly be relentless. And the pandemic wreaked havoc on the well-being, health and sustained performance of so many senior leaders. I was seeing this at the coal-face, as well as reading about it everywhere I turned. And it’s not like that just stopped when the pandemic restrictions were lifted. The legacy from the pandemic, the uncertainty and change it led to, and the new working habits it fed, continue to impact on senior leaders. And yet strong leadership remains central to the performance of each and every organisation.

To this end, and off the back of a train journey in the middle of the pandemic which acted as the final catalyst, I decided to write Staying the Distance: The Lessons From Sport That Business Leaders Have Been Missing. In Part One I look at six lessons that can help you get the best out of YOU over the long term. With each, I take insight from sport, overlay it with research and insight from the world of work more generally, and then provide simple, practical and tangible steps for how to deploy the lesson into your working and leadership practices.

In Part Two we turn to how to get the best out of THOSE YOU LEAD over the long term. Seven lessons this time, and again, taking insight from sport, overlaying it with research and insight from the world of work more generally, and then providing simple, practical and tangible steps for how to deploy the lesson into your working and leadership practices.

In doing this, I have been inspired, informed and supported by so many people. The process really has reinforced the old adage that success is a team sport.

Links to order the book are available here I have been warned that once a book is out there, you have to metaphorically let it go, for others to make of it what they will. I would love to hear readers’ thoughts however so if you buy the book, and enjoy it or otherwise, please do let me know why.