Elite Performance

The Role of Appropriate Challenge in Elite Performance

There is much passionate discussion about the differences between 'good' stress and 'bad' stress as it relates to performance and wellbeing. Good stress, which is technically known as 'eustress' is distinguished from other kinds of stress, e.g., distress, such as chronic, toxic, and traumatic stress. Good stress is beneficial and increases the adaptive resourcing of our systems, helps us break through barriers, and helps us perform at an elite level. Good stress can become the gateway to capacities that we didn't know we had. In certain conifer forests, it takes a wildfire for some seeds to sprout. This is an example of eustress, and a good illustration of this phenomenon. Good stress is this kind of good fire that breaks seeds open. Unless things get hot enough, our full potentials may not develop.

That said, this is a kind of stress we need to approach with some degree of reverence. That same fire, clearly, could burn the forest down.

I propose to you that there is no fundamental difference between kinds of stress. This classification of events into 'eustress' and 'distress' completely misses the mark. That is because events are not stressful. Stress, either good or bad, is our interpretation of the events. This interpretation is not cognitive. Said with more precision, stress is how our Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) interprets events.

It is a refrain in the trauma healing community to note that trauma is not in the event, but rather in the nervous system: our interpretation. The concommitant observation, on the growth side of our developmental house, is that eustress (good stress) is not in the event, but rather in our interpretation of it.

One person views the opportunity to deliver a TED talk as the most exciting and auspicious event in their career. Another views it as a terrifying hurdle to overcome. Same opportunity, different interpretation.

I recently discovered, and I use this word gingerly, aware that this may cross the boundary into TMI (too much information) that I can tell how important a business meeting is by how many times I throw up beforehand. In a meeting with the global executive team of an international leadership development firm in December, I threw up 11 times in preparation. I was excited about the meeting, sensed the opportunity, and my body knew I needed to perform at an elite level. About thirty minutes before the meeting I was crouched over the porcelain.

Later in our negotations, I realized, after throwing up 8 times before a meeting I thought was incidental, that it was more important than I realized. For someone else, who is not living in my body, the idea of throwing up as an adaptational metric of healthy challenge might be foreign, deeply unpleasant, even horrifying. They might, after throwing up the first time, determine that the event was an overwhelming challenge to their nervous system. Lest this sound odd to you, I know of many elite athletes who throw up before big matches. I personally understand this phenomenon as an extraordinary neural re-balancing, a ventral vagal act in extremis. I embrace the barfing. This is an interpretation I am making, intentionally, that helps me.

I play competitive tennis. I compete regularly. If my opponent is not strong enough, my full performance capacity will not awaken. This happens to be regularly enough to be predictable, and to be obvious. I can coast through a match, like a car working in second, third, and fourth gears, without ever really entering a competitive gear. If the opponent is strong enough, I will feel the pressure of the match building viscerally. At a certain point, if I pay attention to cultivating the proper internal context, I will breakthrough into what I understand as my competition gear.

Until I enter this gear I am a competent tennis player. Once this gear fully engages, I can hit shots that I do not understand how I am hitting. Something new opens in my body, my coordination ratchets up, my timing improves, my touch refines. We can call this a flow state, but that misses something, which is that there is a precise autonomic calibration undergirding it.

What is the secret to this elite level of performance? The right level of challenge–not too great, not too little–and the ability to stay ventral. The ability to enter a heightened sympathetic state with safety, and therefore the Connection system, fully online.

There is much attention paid, in elite athletics, to physical training. What is implicit, but generally not called out, is the degree to which neural training, e.g., of the ANS, needs to be paired with this to elicit optimal performance.

For those whose arena is not a court, nor a field, but a boardroom, operating theatre, sales convention, or classroom, the adaptational challenge will not be physical but emotional or relational. And in these domains, although much attention has been paid to the psychology of leadership, again what is under-developed and under-trained is the crucial role of ANS regulation in keeping us in an internal place where we have access to enough connection resource to experience challenge as healthy and adaptional.

We need to train the ANS to baseline in a connection state as its foundational state. If we focused the same discipline and awareness on this that we do on physical reps, or leadership trainings, we would create the internal context for experiencing many more challanges as adaptational opportunities to grow our capacity.

And this is not only what we need in order to grow, but in fact what the world needs of us now.