Last month's speaker, Jim Collins ("Getting from Good to Great"), stipulated that one of the hardest feats for an organization is to go from the middle of the pack to heading it up. This month's first speaker, Jim Loehr, sought to explain how an individual can do the same thing -- transform from a generic, going-through-the-motions manager to something exceptional, the "corporate athlete." 

Loehr painted a pathetic portrait of Dave, the generic schmoe who isn't taking good care of himself:  44 years old, 3 kids, divorced and remarried, 20 pounds overweight, high blood pressure, high bad cholesterol, drinks too much, smokes but won't admit to himself that he smokes, sleeps fitfully, puts away too much Diet Coke and coffee every day, is dependent on that 3 PM Snickers bar, is chronically fatigued and suffers from headaches. His relationships are all superficial, he comes home exhausted every day and starts to drink, his family feels distant from him, his colleagues steer clear of him, his creativity is lousy and he doesn't have one good thing going for him -- physically, emotionally, mentally or spiritually. 

In Loehr's phrase, Dave is numbed out.

To survive amid The Storm requires that we fight, Loehr said. And we need our very best energy to prevail. Therefore we have to manage our energy in our lives, building it through positive rituals, and not squandering it through diffuse behavior, as Dave does.

The key to high performance is maintaining health and happiness. Without these sources of strength, there's no way you'll ride out 40 years in The Storm.

Don't expect the organization you work for to value your whole self -- all most companies today want is "the software between your ears," your knowledge -- just as all most companies wanted a century ago was your physical presence, your muscle. 

So to become corporate athletes we have to weed out diffuse behavior and put ourselves on a training regimen. This means overthrowing our usual insistence on "being comfortable" or what Loehr calls expedient adaptation.  All of Dave's dysfunctions can be traced to his reliance on expedient adaptation -- the booze, the snacks, the TV, the emptiness inside.  

We need to become athletes or warriors for high performance -- but this doesn't mean becoming marvels of self-discipline. Self-discipline ("I'm not going to eat that cake!") is unsustainable in the long-term; the act of self-denial, in a vacuum, fuels a need to indulge oneself. You forego the cake at the party, but later you binge on it in the kitchen. 

Positive Rituals

No, the alternative to self-discipline is the development of these positive rituals -- good habits that, after a time, become automatic and unconscious, not requiring the sudden heroism of self-discipline. Here is the paradox: healthy rituals allow to become more spontaneous and fresh -- through repetitive structure!

You don't acquire positive rituals overnight, but once you acquire them, you must hold onto them, because the reason they work is that they feel natural and right to you. Drinking 48 to 64 ounces of water a day sounds like a lot right now, but it's a habit you must get used to, as water flushes the continuous toxin buildup out of your body. (And frequent trips to the restroom fit in perfectly with another positive ritual of Loehr's, breaks after every 90 minutes of work.)

Other vital rituals:

• Getting enough sleep every night. James Maas spoke to the Masters Forum at length about this topic five Renewal Days ago. All us corporate superstars are sleep-deprived, Maas said, and Loehr agrees, and eventually it catches up with us. (An ancient reason for sleep is for safety. With poor night vision and poor defense against predators, our ancestors spent the nights safely in the treetops.)
• Exercise.  You fight fire with fire -- the negative stress of The Storm with the positive stress you cultivate through working out.  This stress doesn't kill you -- it makes you stronger.
• Nutrition. You can't fool your body with diet drinks and coffee. Treat it right, with a balanced diet, and sensible portions.
• Performance. Doing well itself becomes a positive ritual, until doing well is a habit. 
• Recovery. Workouts require cooldowns. Speed up, slow down. (This goes for non-physical categories as well -- grief, for instance, is a kind of recovery.)
• Romance. Love dies the same way the frog in the experiment boils -- slowly, one degree at a time. Stay awake, stay alert, stay in love.
• Family. Loehr told how, when working abroad, he made a point of calling his children every night without fail. Not just for their good, but for his as well.
• Time alone. Beware the man who says, "I only took three vacation days last year." We need time to recover from The Storm, in order to go back into it.
• Spiritual. Meditate, reflect, pray. Numbness begins with the soul. When your convictions die, it doesn't matter how hard you work. 

Loehr asked everyone to assess his and her performance in life. On a scale of 1 to 10, how important to you is performance? Health? Happiness? Family? Work/life balance?  Now, using the same scale, how do you rate your current status in those categories? Subtract reality from the ideal, and you see what your personal challenge is. If your number is under 10, you're doing great. If it's zero, Loehr's hat is off to you. 

Oscillate!

A staple of biology is rhythm -- things happening in waves. We are like the muscles we are made of -- extending, then retracting.  Instead of a flatline heart pump, we systole and diastole. Inhale, exhale. Work and rest.

This pattern of expending and recovering energy is called oscillation, and it is an important element of Loehr's program, because it is a clue as to what works.

All work and no play make Jack a dull boy, and vice versa. A great workout isn't an all-out, pedal-to-the-metal expenditure of energy. Instead we work out, then cool down. Run, then walk. Race, then recover.

So it is with everything in our training. The harder we work, the more important it is to find opportunities to recover. The more needed we are at work, the more important it is to take vacations. 

All "success" may occur during exertion, Loehr said. But all growth occurs during recovery. This is when the body and spirit and mind restore themselves, and then some. Science has told us that every part of us is renewable, including neurons. So drink your water, and replenish yourself.

Into the storm

Loehr took a moment to make a point about The Storm, and it is really the crucial point of his talk. The Storm is pure stress. If we attack it with straightline exertion, it will bat us away. If we try to out-endure it, via Type-A behavior or workaholism, it will squash us like bugs. 

But the worst reaction is to avoid The Storm, to baby ourselves with "comfort" and wasteful habits, on the grounds that stress is dangerous to us. Because stress is not, in the final analysis our enemy. For what is stress but exercise, a test to see what we are capable of? The more we get, the stronger we get.

The trick, Loehr says, it to learn the right way to deal with stress. We need to arm ourselves for our daily bouts with The Storm by:

• cultivating positive rituals
• approach stress with all our pistons firing -- physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual
• oscillate our efforts -- get with the rhythm of success by working hard, then recovering
• training ourselves to truly be "corporate athletes"

At the other end of that effort is the peak of the performance pyramid -- a lean, relaxed, and a happier human machine.