Leadership is challenging

As a leader, you need to be a source of inspiration, confidence and control. You are required to make strategic decisions, develop new ideas that will change the course of your organisation and, in addition, lead people.

Leadership was already challenging enough pre-pandemic, and now it’s even more demanding as you’re pulled in different directions and forced to adapt to a new way of working.

Most leaders work long hours and engage in many different tasks and projects, so it’s easy to see how you might neglect your own wellbeing.

But you must recognise and understand that you will diminish your ability to perform and encourage the people you lead if you don’t practise self-care.

It’s common for leaders not to ask for support or guidance because they feel they need to set an example to their colleagues, direct reports or teammates. But we all need help. That’s where high-performance coaching comes in.

Coaching Shifts Your Mindset

The Cognitive Athlete high-performance coaching will help you shift your mindset and see things as exciting challenges rather than obstacles.

The program will provide you with clarity to enable you to execute decisions about improving your performance, health, wellbeing, and that of your team, leading to financial gains for your organisation.
The global picture of how organisations work has changed due to COVID-19, and understanding strategies for sustaining organisational performance is complex but highly achievable.

High-performance coaching will help you to answer these questions:

How do I want to lead during this time?
What skills do I need to develop as a leader?
What actions do I need to take to grow as an individual?
What practices are currently improving my physical, mental and emotional health?

The benefits of remote performance coaching

I have been using virtual coaching long before COVID-19 and found it to be a great way of delivering high-performance coaching. Whether you’re a senior business leader or not, everybody is busy, and remote coaching allows flexibility and increased contact time.

My Cognitive Athlete program will give you a confidential sounding board to discuss the answers to the questions above and help you increase energy and focus, reconnect to your passion and purpose, and navigate tough decisions.
The importance of bespoke performance coaching

Everyone is different and, when it comes to coaching, there is no one size fits all. An open and honest discussion between us will provide clarity and structure to help you as a leader guide and inspire your organisation through negative and positive times. The key is to set clear goals that allow systems and processes to enhance performance. Senior leaders and high performing talent will benefit from performance discussions surrounding current skills, strengths and areas that need development. And also show insight to bind spots that might be causing an adverse effect on performance, health and wellbeing.

We also need to realise that it is impossible to perform at 100% all the time. The Cognitive Athlete program helps you see areas that might reduce performance and also helps you create recovery methods and practices to enable continued improvements.

Benefits of High-Performance Coaching

I have been coaching in elite performance for over 20 years, so I have seen first-hand the benefits of performance coaching, which include:

Increased emotional intelligence: Understanding your thoughts, actions, and the thoughts and actions of others, has an impact on successful leadership.

Improved health and wellbeing: Self-care is not selfish. By highlighting the latest research and practices of health and wellbeing, we can develop methods to improve both.

Enhanced ability to understand the situation/problem: Recognising the situation/problem and how to react is essential in making the right decision.

Leading others by coaching: By being coached, you will be able to highlight the importance of coaching to others. This is the theory of marginal gains and the fact that it is more efficient to improve 1% of everyone in the organisation than improve your own performance by 5-10%.

The most critical part of performance coaching

Coaching is a relationship. The stronger the relationship, the better the results. Recognise that it is pointless to work together if, after a few sessions, that connection is not forming. I want people to reach and be able to sustain their peak performance.
What does a high performance coaching programme entail?

Openness and willingness to work: Most of the work is done outside of the coaching sessions. The best performers are open to new ideas and willing to spend time developing skills and practices.

Honesty: If an area is not going right or you are not fulfilling your commitments, then creating those systems and processes is impossible, leading to you not achieving the clear goals.
Be Open + Be Willing + Be Honest = Be Successful. Become a Cognitive Athlete