Clint Rahe: The Cognitive Athlete – Military Training Meets Corporate Performance

Intentionally boosting your performance as a thought leader, as a business leader. That is the focus of today’s episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders. Special guest, Clint Ray. There are so many tips in this particular episode. I’ve never before considered myself as being a cognitive athlete, but that’s a term that you’re gonna become a little bit more familiar with and you’ll understand better why this is so important to every business, not just for yourself as the leader, but also for your team.

Jam packed with tips and things for you to do and implement. You don’t wanna miss this episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders, so let’s get into it.

Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders. I know we’re going to have a very interesting discussion today covering all sorts of things, but firstly, I just want to introduce my guest. Clint, welcome to the program. Thanks, Anthony. Looking forward to it. We’ve gotta start off by letting you introduce yourself to the audience.

So why don’t you tell everyone a little bit about yourself? Yeah. Great. Thanks. My name’s Clint Ray, so I’m a high performance coach speaker facilitator and recent author. Of the cognitive athlete. So I’ve been my story started years ago in the RAF fs. I’ve taken a lot of military training that I’ve done over my career and I transitioned into a corporate life.

I’m a business owner as well, so I’ve taken a lot of those learnings from years ago, put them into corporate and as I run a lot of trainings and I do a lot of coaching and what’s really interesting is that. Back in years ago, we were actually, I think we were quite ahead of the game in terms of like cognitive performance, physical performance, whether it’s productivity, time management, or energy.

And then now in, in the corporate sphere and being a business owner, I don’t see any of that, any of these principles I learned years ago. So really, I focus on bringing. Practical, actionable steps into, in, into corporate life really to help my clients and to help business owners achieve more. And especially with the time that, that everyone has, right?

I’ve got loads of stories and no doubt we’ll get into it as we go through. So that’s me in a nutshell. Absolutely. I love it. And I, taking things back to the basics it’s such an important thing to do because it gets so quickly glanced over there’s one of those things that happens, isn’t there?

There’s this assumption of knowledge and assumption of things being done, yet they’re not actually being done. Yeah. Correct. And look, I think, we have, and especially nowadays, there are so many notifications and so many apps and so many ways of doing things and tools that. People just forget all of that stuff and it becomes too hard and they just, had a saying, you always default to level of the training that you’ve had and if you’ve actually had no training, then you’re swimming against the tide I think a lot of the time.

So let’s just delve a little bit into your background because I think it’s important for people to understand that. ’cause you touched on it a little bit. So tell me, back in high school, early university days where the study, where was the dream and where did you end up going? Yeah, good. I think out of school, I dreamt of being a professional footballer, right?

In the Premier League, like everyone does, but then reality hits and I was, I’ll say it was pretty fortunate. My, my parents were in the military, so they’re in the army back in the uk and. And there was an ultimatum, then they said Clint you’re either gonna get a job in the UK or you’re gonna come back with us.

And I was fortunate enough to apply for the RAF as a physical training instructor, and I was accepted. And and that’s when my journey started really, in, in the military. And, so many valuable lessons within there that I learned. And and I guess the dreaming, I was doing a levels, which I think it’s, I’m not sure what they’re called here, maybe hires hHSC. Yeah, HHSC. So I was doing physical education, so it was like a really natural fit. I’m, good at sport or play all different sports. And going into the military in that environment as a fitness specific fitness instructor where you actually get to train and teach all of these skills and. And sports was just phenomenal.

Let’s, it is one of the best decisions ever made. And then, you start your military career and you realize, oh, that, so there is sport and there is fitness, but there’s also military aspect on that as well. And it’s given me some, amazing opportunities. And I think being I was what, 21 at the time?

I think. And it just sculpts you, it helps with your decision making and your work ethic and puts a really good grounding into where we’re at today, pretty much. So what became the focus in the military? What were you mostly doing? Yeah, so look, I, we all start as a fitness instructor.

We start in the gym. So we, we’re training military personnel for operations in whether it’s Iraq or Afghanistan or the Middle East or wherever they’re deployed. So we keep the base level of fitness up and we work on their teamwork, resilience mindset and then. That’s one part of it.

And then we have, I’ve worked in another part in which it’s trainees. So we’re working back at recruitment level. So when people come into the military, no matter what trade they are, whether they are aircraft technicians, whether they’re pilots, whether they’re medical or navigation or or pilots, nav, we, take them through their training. So we build the robustness and resilience within them. So then when they do finished training, they go out on deployments, then they’re good to go. So that was the sort of foundational core cornerstone. And then as you then progress up my specialty, then I went into a stream of adventure training.

So you could either choose to be a, like a physio remedial instructor, a parachute jump instructor, didn’t fancy jumping out of planes. Perfectly serviceable planes for a living, or you can go adventure training, which is like that whole outward bounds aspect. So I really focused on that. And we used to take people for a week at a time, and we used to take them into Wales or Scotland, and we used to work on their personal and professional development.

So work on communication skills and leadership and delegation all within a week. And then we’d set them free then. So we’d give them this sort of structure. Put them under pressure, work on some really good skills that they’re gonna use out in deployment in a, I say in a safe environment. So we used to go down the mines in Wales with head torches.

So we used to go up on high ropes and, sit from down zip pines in a controlled environment. So then when they go out to, wherever they’re going out in the Middle East, they’re able to deal with the pressure a little bit better because we’ve showed them skills and techniques. And as a result of all of that stuff, I was really fortunate enough to work with premier League football teams rugby league teams loads of other different sports from skiing to hockey to, to rugby to canoeing and kayaking.

Using the skills of that we’ve learned really around robustness and resilience, especially with your mindset as well. Say that’s, in a snapshot, my background in the military. Like I said, it is just phenomenal. The experience I tell all young people, join up no matter what force it is, you’re gonna get looked after.

And, they give you some really great experiences there. What an amazing little snapshot of a career you’ve had there. Just casually dropping not only the military, but various sporting areas and things to get into. And that must have been a fascinating area for you. Obviously, as you said, the childhood dream was premier League, so getting to work with Premier League teams and work with, and back here in, and you’ve now moved to Australia and Rugby League teams and the like.

What’s that experience like and how do move away from that experience? ’cause you no longer doing that, are you? So what’s interesting that is if I go to where my book is at the moment all of the, these skills, so working, if I think around the military, so we had it’s called pre-deployment training.

So before you go out to a deployment, wherever that may be. We do 12 weeks of, and if I think around periodization, so you do conditioning phase, you do a transition phase. And then you’re in this performance zone which actually is your deployment. And then we have a decompression, so like a recovery.

Now I’ve used that with athletes. We do that naturally on deployment training within the military. And once we once actually understood that, we used to go in, so going back to your Premier League football teams and other championship teams, we would then work on their, their condition face.

So before the season started, we would take, we’d take them out, we’d build up their fitness robustness and resilience out outside of the football pitch. So then when they’re put under pressure as the season goes on, we’re building this, resilient mindset around certain behaviors and boosting their sort of base, core level fitness up.

And you will see this within I read a book recently around the All Blacks, they. They go and they work with the SAS or the, they go work with the commandos to just a different level of training, different intensity. Military and sports are pretty similar with that. When, and I’ve really loved that environment because it was, we, it was planned.

We’re planning 12 weeks here, we’re planning four weeks here. And then when you come back from your operations, then, having two, two to three weeks off, and then that whole cycle starts again. Same within sports. I think the difference is when we are working in that environment, if you get an injury, then yes, it’s a setback, but there’s a, a recuperation, there’s a, there, there’s a, we need to then fix the muscles to then do our rehab, to then get back on the pitch.

And when I came over in the corporate life, I don’t see any of this at all. We’re expected to be. After Australia Day in, in Australia, in Australia from, yeah, end of January, we’re supposed to be on peak performance all the way until December, right? So I don’t see any planning, any preparation.

There’s no rest and recovery for a lot of corporate professionals. I’ve taken all of that experience and I’m working with clients, and businesses on that as well because we have these peaks and troughs in the season. Working in, in seasons in professional sport, there’s a start and there’s a finish and we know what winning is.

Winning is being, whether it’s Premier League champions or win willing, sorry, winning the cup. Being premiers, we know that and we know it’s between these times and, corporate, we don’t have it. And I started to question that when I transitioned across and I thought, this is it’s unsustainable.

We can’t keep doing that. And especially now as a business owner. You are on all the time. But cognitively that doesn’t help you. So we’re taking the principles of sport and then applying them to, to our brains and the way that we think and how we manage our energy as well.

Yeah it is a really interesting idea that if you look at a typical sports team, a football team, doesn’t matter which code, the season is usually 20 plus weeks long. There’s no way that. Players are conditioned to be performing an optimum level round one in the same way that they’re gonna be performing grand final day.

You have to build up to that over a period of time. Yet in business, we’re expecting people day one of the year to be showing up at that high performance level and to continue sustaining that at a high performance level until such time as they take a break. If they take a break it’s crazy, really.

Yeah. Yeah. Look a absolutely. And I started to think about my experience and I thought, yeah, this is ridiculous. And I’m coming from, yeah, it got me into a bit of trouble. I’ll be honest, when I started my second career, my corporate career, because my frame of reference is different. I had boundary, I had really quite strict boundaries.

Start at 8, 8 30, a finish at five, and that was it. It was done and people were staying late until six, seven o’clock at night to do their work. And, I said is anyone gonna die? If you wouldn’t, if you were to leave now, is anyone gonna die from the results of that? If the answer is no one’s gonna die, leave it till tomorrow.

Because guess what? Work is never gonna diminish. Because the more effort you put into work, the more work that gets generated. So the work is always going to be there. Your health your happiness, you know that could be taken away at any point. And the interesting thing is I started writing the book and I started doing a lot of research.

Your body keeps the score. What that means is that your body accumulates this low level stress over a certain period of time, and you can get away with it when you are younger, but when you get into 50, maybe it’s 45, 45 to 50, 55, when you are a C-suite, you’re a business owner. You need to be peak energy, you’re absolutely diminished.

And you’ve got health complications on top of that as well. You’re right, we need to start thinking of our. Of our business of our working life as seasons, and we need to be able to peak and we need to recover. And there are natural peaks and troughs within everyone’s year. So we need to be a little bit more specific in and intentional with, how we look at rest and recovery.

How we look at our, just our conditioning, our habits. And then when we have these peak moments where we need to be, on the ball, we can manufacture that so that’s the whole. Premise behind, taking all this sports and military concepts into corporate to just, to be able to help.

That’s what’s interesting to me is how do you work that out, what those peaks and troughs should be? Because again, in the sports analogy, it is easy to go okay, we are working towards grand final day, so we need to know, we need to know that at a certain point we’re gonna need to peak because that’s when it has to happen.

It’s not as clear in business necessarily, because you don’t nec, you don’t know what’s around the corner and you’re operating against other things. You could say, okay, look, right now, February looks like it’ll be fairly easing into it. But then suddenly you get a phone call on the 1st of February saying, we need this now.

And suddenly you’ve gotta go from relaxed holiday mode to peak performance. How do you coach around that? Yeah. Good point. Each industry we have seasons and business owners have seasons. What you’re talking about there. Yeah, a hundred percent. I get it. Especially if you are like a solopreneur, for example, and you’re the only person to do that work.

If I think about a business owner, and I’ve worked with a few of them and they are absolutely run off their feet and they have teams of people. So I said let’s look at your year. So the first one we need to do is look at your previous 12 months and we need to then identify the peaks and troughs.

So when we were always on or when, when it was a bit slow. Then we look ahead and we try and plan out as best we can in terms of our peaks and troughs. Like in let’s take a, let’s take business owners. Maybe we could work quarterly, right? So maybe we work in quarterly sprints. And then at the end of the quarter, I’m not gonna say, oh, you need to take a week off because they, it’s pretty difficult, right?

But maybe we can take. A Friday and a Monday off. So then we have a longer holiday, and then that could be our decompression before then we go into our next quarter. I think if we look at the whole year in totality, and we don’t break it down into these quarters these quarterly sprints, you end up just running on fumes.

And this time of year you’re more susceptible to, to, for, to getting sickness and illnesses because of the let down effect. We need to, look at your previous 12 months, identify next 12 months, and then let’s start plotting in. I times when we are on peak performance, we look at automotive, I’ve worked in automotive.

There are sales cycles. Everyone has a sales cycle. If you’re like me as a consultant, we know January is a dip. So we can use this time to recover. And then it’s not until March, April that it starts to pick up. And then we have a bit of a dip again because of, Easter and public holidays.

And then we have the mid dip, the midyear dip. And then from Octobers, SEPs, sorry, September, October, November, we’re looking at p we need to be in peak performance before we then start to tail off as we get through to December. So everyone has a cycle. It’s just to really stop and reflect over our last 12 months and then look forward to the next 12 months of booking those holidays.

And how much does adrenaline play a part in it? Because, again, using the sports analogy, adrenaline’s pretty easy to to, watch because. Things ramp up in the course of the game and the adrenaline increases and so on. But in a business sense it can flow on day to day, right?

Where you have a day where things just are being fired at you and you’re having to step up until you are, and then that adrenaline carries on and suddenly you are operating at a different level. How do you manage that process as well? Yeah, look, good point. Especially if we think about this time of year in December, adrenaline is firing a lot.

So we’ve got a lot of adrenaline. We’ve got a lot of cortisol and what tends to happen that suppresses all of our immune system to keep us, working. But then when it comes to end of December, our body goes, ah, of course. Then suddenly we get sick and but what’s been happening is we got sick about two weeks ago, but our bodies, keeping the immune system fighting before we then switch off we can take if we think around periodization, for example, what I’m talking about is, let’s look at your annual training plan.

Then let’s break that down into smaller, let’s say quarterly chunks, and then we can break those quarterly chunks down into weekly sprints. So if we’re looking for a week and your adrenaline is high, we need to think about, okay, let’s say Thursday for example, we’ve got back to back meetings all day and it goes all the way through the night.

What are you doing on Friday to a. Lower your cortisol, what are you doing to lower your adrenaline to recover before we go again for the next one. Because if we ha, and this is this is the low level stress we’re talking about over the accumulated effects of low level stress, high adrenaline for 30 years, that has a massive impact on diseases that, that you’re likely to get.

As a result of all that accumulated stress you could have things like cardiovascular disease, diabetes. Coronary artery, coronary vascular disease. We could have celiac, for example, any number of autoimmune conditions because we haven’t had an outlet for getting rid of the, the corsol and the adrenaline as we go through.

What do you do to recover? What are some recovery strategies? Rather than going back to back with whether it’s meetings, whether there’s high intensity work that you have to do. All the research is clear. Your brain needs a break. And what’s interesting is if you’re a female, for example, you’re 80% more likely to suffer from autoimmune disease brought on through years of stress, right?

And that’s what all the research is saying at the moment. Where’s our stress load? What are we doing about it? Can we then put in, moments of recovery? I’m not saying a week off, maybe it is, 30 minutes, a 30 minute break in the day. So you can de, deregulate, downshift before you then upshift again.

Yeah, it’s an interesting one because I know I personally, make sure that there is a switch off period from Friday afternoon until. At least Saturday night. And normally it’s Sunday as well. And it’s part of, it’s training your yourself and training your clients as well, that you’re not gonna be available in that period of time.

And it’s amazing what happens when you do train those around you that this is my time to not be at work. That it actually, people go, okay, that’s fine. And suddenly they can save things up for Monday. Absolutely. Look and we are in Australia and New Zealand, we are the poor cousins, right? And this is a fact because we, if we think if you’re working for a global organization, you are on 24 7, right?

And the higher you get, the demands and the expectations just don’t stop. And you could, you’d be starting work at 6:00 AM and then you’ll be on. Zoom and teams calls at 10, 11 o’clock at night, and then you are answering emails from your US team at six in the morning, and then you’ve got your Australian team.

So it’s just this cyclical cycle and we are people pleasers in Australia because we need the business. We wanna say yes to all these global heads of businesses, but at what cost, and I guarantee and it’s strange when I say this to people like say no. And they’re, I can’t say no to my boss.

I’m like let’s train it then. I’m not gonna say a flat out, no. I’m gonna say, Hey, are there any available other available times given the fact it’s two in the morning my time? Can we shift this to another? Most people don’t even think about that. They just accept, okay, I’ll just turn up at two in the morning.

And I’m like, are you gonna be cognitively making the best decisions because. I guarantee you’re not gonna be. So then are you making the best decision? Are you thinking clearly? No. Are you getting good sleep? No. So what is the impact the next day? Oh, I’ll just have a glass of wine before bed and I’ll knock myself out.

And I’m like, yeah, but you’re accumulating all this, sleep debt all this cortisol, all the adrenaline at two in the morning. It’s really disrupting your hormonal balance. So it comes back to a lot of discipline. But what you said there, training people around you is so important.

I’m not gonna say to people you need to say no, and you have to these boundaries. It’s let’s see, set these boundaries up. And the way we do that is by communicating our availability and training people. So we delegate and we train and say, Hey look, this is what I want you to do. Here’s, here is the outcome that I’m looking for.

Here’s a template. Go and use that between these hours and those hours. And, intentionally unavailable. So we talk about time blocking. So if, for example, Fridays us, let’s say you are you are slower day because everyone solved their problems for the week and you’ve got like a block or two or three hours, use that for strategic planning.

But. Block it out. Book a meeting room, turn everything off. You know your phone off. Do not disturb. Put your out of office on turn, your notifications off. Then you can work in deep work and you can have that break. Same when you are resting and recovering. If Friday afternoon you want to go and play golf, go and do it, but put you out of office on Do Not Disturb.

What I tend to find is when people, they’re like, I can’t do that because I get emails all the time and I get phone calls. I’m like, yeah, but you put your do not disturb on. Guess what? People have to phone twice. So it’s a bit of a barrier to stop people, getting hold of you for you to solve their problems because we’re, we’re creatures a habit.

We try and take the path to least resistance. So I’ll just phone my boss. Hey Anthony, can you handle with this? Oh yeah, absolutely. Just do this. So what we’re trying to do is actually empower our teams to take greater responsibility by delegating effectively and then blocking those times in our.

In our calendar for us to be effective and deregulate ourselves, so our on peak performance. There’s so much in what you just said there and I know, but just it made me recall a story. And this goes back I, I’m gonna say it’s go back. It’s gonna go back, 20 plus years. And so phones weren’t quite as sophisticated as they are now.

And so the do not disturb and, switching off notifications wasn’t as available. And I’ll never forget there was A-C-E-O-I was working with at the time. Was traveling. He went to the uk. He didn’t tell everyone that he’d gone to the UK and one of the senior managers rang him to ask him something and the CEO picks up the phone stupidly at what was two o’clock in the morning in the UK and said, is it something urgent?

No. And he said look, I’m actually in the uk. It’s two o’clock in the morning. And the senior manager said I’ve got you awake now, so I may as well ask you the questions and proceeded to, take him on for the next 10 minutes. And we all had a bit of a laugh about it at the time, but the truth is you do have to respect.

People’s boundaries and part of it is putting on those notifications and keeping to them and understanding I’m not going to respond at this time because I know personally I’ve been very guilty over the years of just being completely responsive to it. And if you are responding to emails and phone calls all day long, you’re not gonna get any work done.

You think about this, most people, that’s the case, right? And the more, guess what, the more emails you send, the more work that you are gonna get back, the more emails you get back. And we can put another, a layer on top of this as well and think about what’s your chronotype. So are you a morning person?

So you got your peak energy in the morning. Is it afternoon or is it, are you an owl in the later hours of the day? Do you come alive? Our body’s got these natural rhythms, circadian rhythm. It’s a 24 hour timing device that your body’s got, and people have got different circadian rhythms, so it’s working with your rhythm too to get the best outcome.

If I take, if you’re a morning person, for example, your peak window is probably gonna be from eight 30 to nine 30. So about an hour where you are on peak concentration, peak focus. So what are we doing between those two tho that hour? We’re checking emails, we’re, firefighting. We’re putting all these things out, and then our bodies naturally will go into this trough which is your mid-morning slump, which we then bridge with a coffee or a red bull or something like that for us to then go up to our afternoon peak, and then we dip down again.

So we have these like peaks and troughs as we go through the day. So we need to be prioritizing ourselves, for us to be able to deliver effectively. The work that we need to deliver. So my advice a lot of the time is, here, fill out this questionnaire. Tell me what chronotype you are. Let’s look at your calendar.

Let’s start really protecting these peak performance hours. Because if you are working against your circadian rhythm, it’s taking you more often, not twice as long to do your work. Yeah, I’m an afternoon person, so between three and five I am on fire. But in the morning it takes me ages to get going, so I wouldn’t, do any accounting or finance or spreadsheets or anything I need to spend detail on, because my natural energy is not peaking in the morning.

It’s peaking in the afternoon. So it’s working with those with your body type as well to really protect that. But you really need to communicate that to your team. So I would recommend getting a team in to, to look at each individual and then look at your. Workflow as a whole and then really time block and be disciplined about saying no to things.

A lot of the time, you know a lot, and you’ll know this a lot, a lot of my clients, they get bombarded in the morning and the first thing they say to them is if anyone comes into you says, oh, hey Anthony, can you help with this? You say, tell you what come back at five 30 if you’ve still got that problem.

How many people come back at five 30? None of them. It’s the same with teams messages. If they message you on teams and you work for an organization, I would just intentionally leave it until the afternoon. Nine times out of 10, you just send them a little message to say, oh, hey, I’m just catching up on this problem.

Oh no, it’s all fixed. No worries. We’re building in some little filters to filter people out. Because guess what? If they. If on your phone they phone twice in a row, that comes straight through. So you know something’s urgent and important. If it isn’t, then you know they’re gonna leave a message and then that’s another triage thing, and then you can get your phone to email you that message or to text you that message.

So we’re building in these barriers to say no, but it all comes back to that discipline to. Not look at your emails when you’re on holiday or schedule a time in to look at your emails and then push everything out because we, we can’t be living in this world of constant triggering. And, our attention is being grabbed by everywhere.

So when we’re recovering, and when we’re working. So it’s just you’re working with your rhythm whether it’s you, your body your team. It’s interesting what you say there because it just made me flash back to a Seinfeld episode from that going back somewhat sometime, but talking about the fact that we don’t give people an opportunity to miss us anymore.

They’re constantly able to access us no matter what, and you get frustrated when they don’t. I know this morning I had to go to the shops and my wife had asked me for a couple of things. I’m at standing at the shops and I’m not sure which one she wants, and I’m trying to phone her, and then I’m getting frustrated that she’s not answering her phone.

It’s but this is the norm, right? This is what the expectations are. So we have to change those expectations for the people around us. And I think one of the challenges though, that many businesses face is, and even smaller businesses, is you’re dealing with time zones. And that might be internally as well as externally.

Many teams have. Or many small businesses, I should say, have teams that are located overseas, and so there are time differences that you have to deal with. So then when you’re talking about optimal times for people to perform. It could be that you have two people that are morning people, but one’s three hours behind you.

And so by the time you are hitting your lull, they’re in their peak. So you have to be mindful of all of those things as well. And I think that’s an important idea that you are suggesting is mapping out where everyone in the team is. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. And we’re not always gonna be in the same zone, right?

People are so different, but. What we can do, let’s say they’re two or three hours behind, or maybe two or three hours ahead, is maybe to share the pain, right? So maybe we have one meeting in my time, one meeting in your time. Maybe we do the questionnaire together. We work out, ah, actually guess what? It works out that your afternoon, when you’re on peak is my morning.

So that works out really well for us to be able to, to work together. But what I’m saying really that this whole thing is just to be mindful, right? Yeah I’m working on my own different time zone in terms of my peak focus and energy. You are working on your own. There are gonna be times when you’re gonna ask me a question and I won’t be able to think straight.

So I need to then be able to respond effectively back to that. And it’s the same thing with these back to back meetings in teams, since COVID, everyone’s on teams and they can look at your calendar and just b, keep booking appointments. I think the practice of being intentionally unavailable is so key.

Our parents, like you mentioned, had this where you finish work. There’s no mobile phones back then. There’s no emails. Everything was left at the office, and guess what? They all survived. So I know the expectations though, it will be around customers, right? So when customers phone you, how long does it take for you to answer that phone call?

And this is where I think it’s really interesting times at the moment with AI and chat bots. And is there some integrations that you can then work into to the way that you do things so then customers don’t feel disappointed? Or can you just automate some of your processes to, to take the. The heavy lifting off.

’cause what? What we are ultimately, we’re cognitive athletes, we are knowledge workers, so we use our brains to, to make decisions, to think clearly, to be creative. All the processing stuff of a production line worker, for example. That can be done by ai. So you’re not having to then look through your calendar and go, oh, I’m available between this time and that time.

You can just send them a link. It’s all done automatically now. So we need to really be able to harness our zone of genius as a human, which is using our brain to make decisions to, to look at information, to be creative, to think clearly. Rather than just being a production line worker going through emails click.

It’s I love the term, and this is a good bridge into the book that you’ve got the cognitive athlete that’s that whole idea of what that is. I guess we don’t traditionally think of ourselves, particularly if you’re, a business owner as many of the people listening to the program would be, you don’t tend to think of yourself as an athlete in that way, but what you’re suggesting is there is a.

Cognitive athlete inside of us that we have to look after and so how have you found that term resonating with people? Because it’s certainly the first time that I’ve thought of it in that particular way. Yeah. The first thing I get is that I’m not an athlete. I don’t spend hours in the gym.

I’m like, you’re right. You don’t spend hours in the gym. However. You are an athlete of your mind, how much time do you actually use conditioning your mind and the researchers of some great research from Microsoft, the Human Factors Lab, in which they put EEEG skull caps on people to monitor brainwaves and they had back to back meetings and, by the third meeting, the stress levels were high.

When stress is high, you’re unable to think clearly because oh, I’m gonna get nerdy and neuroscience. But cortisol inhibits the, goes into your prefrontal cortex, which it, which inhibits your thinking. You get brain fog, you’re unable to think clearly. Your, you got weaker control of your thoughts or emotions.

And that just increases the more meetings we have back to back and what they did, they had that study. They had one group. That. And then they had another group have five minute breaks in between meetings and it was massive stark difference night and day between, decision making outcomes and clarity of thought, and also just being calm and un under control.

We need to. Think of ourselves as athletes of the mind. We may not move like athletes, but we’re using our brain like an athlete, and we need to be able to train our brain for us to peak at the right time. So in, let’s say a difficult conversation or a pitch or even a podcast, we’ve done the pre-work.

So then we’re able to perform and we’re able to take questions, we’re able to think clearly. We’re able to be able. To relay information and communicate and things like that. And I guarantee most people have, whether it’s a performance review or conversation, they’ve ended, they’ve gone in there prepared, but when the pointy end of the stick comes, they’ve forgotten what they’re talking about or they get sidetracked really easily.

So it is all around being really intentional with, how we set ourselves up for us to. To peak at the right times. Hence goes back to that question like let’s look at our year. When do we need to be on Foreman and on five for us to be able to get the result? And then we need to recover.

And a lot of the time when I talk about recover people, they see it as a weakness. But actually it’s, it’s such a positive. And nasa, did a study on nasa. I call them Nana Naps. Like a 26 minute nap, how that boosts cognitive performance. So we need to, that’s why I’m bringing all of this in to help people to be able to think clearly, to get better results.

And you’ll find that, you’ll be more productive with that as well. So rather than time, it’s looking at your energy. We’ve talked about a number of things and I’ve appreciated all of this, so thanks. Gimme a bit of a, so much. Yeah. Give me a bit of a rundown. If there’s a top three kind of ideas that you would recommend people take on board, what would they be, aside from number four being read the book and we’ll tell them about the book in a moment, but what would be the top, what would be the top three things that they should start thinking about?

Yeah, look I think that the first one is we need to, then, we need to look at our previous 12 months. To then inform off our next 12 months and look at it as a performance gap to go here’s my season, these are the most important times. And then what I can do is then schedule in holidays, whether it’s a week or whether it’s two weeks or whatever.

And then we can then look at that the sec. So that’s the first part. The second part, we need to then work out what our rhythm is, like what’s our circadian rhythm, and then we need to then third bit is then look at your calendar to go, what can I say no to? When am I in my peak focus area, I need to then block that in to do my project work or deep work.

And then the final part is learn to say no. And you can do that really simply by putting in do not disturb. We can, turn your notifications off out of office, off train people how you know how to solve their own problems. I think if we are always available then. We’re not getting our work done, which we’re being paid to do, right?

We’re running round with our heads and fire. And then as a result, if we’re not doing any of this when we are 70, 75, we’ve got these chronic health conditions brought on by long-term stress. I guarantee you people are not, looking at themselves going, man, I wish I said yes to more of those little meetings with no agendas.

I really miss those complete waste of my time. Or whether they said, man, I wish I actually booked in more intentional recovery breaks for me to sustain my performance over the long term. Definitely it definitely very great advice to be looking back on those kinds of things.

’cause you just can absolutely spot on. When you look over a year, how many wasted meetings we all have. How many times meetings have gone well over what they should have because we haven’t contained them. It’s really quite interesting when you say to someone, I have a hard out at this particular time.

And yeah, people tend to respect that because they’ll get to a point and they’ll start speeding up or they’ll say, look, can we book another time? And you can make that decision much more deliberately rather than just allowing things to continue to go on. So there’s lots of great. Advice here. So tell me a little bit about the book and what people have to look forward to with that.

Yeah, can I just add one? This is the, one of the best tips before we get on the book is you can go into Microsoft right on your calendar and outlook, and you can change the default setting for your meetings. So in the Dece the default set is 30 minute meeting box, right? Change it to 25. And then if they book an hour, change it to 50 or 55 minutes, that’s gonna give you a five minute buffer.

And then if you’re working in a team, then what you can say to your team is right, you are gonna be the timekeeper, you are gonna keep us on the agenda, you’re gonna be the note taker, and then we can then spread. Spread this word out to say, look, our time really matters. Again, there’s more research to say between 30 minutes and 45 minutes, you are getting no extra value outta that meeting.

So being very disciplined within that. But those are the hacks that you can do. So then when people go into calendar to try and book a 30 minute meeting, they’re like, oh, why is this 25 minutes? And they’ll send you an email. I can only book 25 minute meeting. And you say. That’s because I’m a cognitive athlete.

I need a five minute break in between my next meeting to go to the toilet, to have a drink, to have some food, for me to be, on a point when I’m at that meeting. And a lot of, yeah, I was just gonna say, and there’s a lot of software that people will be using, whether it’s through your CRM or various booking things that you might be using bits of software that also have that opportunity to add up.

Buffer on either side of the meeting. So even if you decide to have the meeting as a 30 minute meeting, you can actually put a five minute buffer so the next meeting can’t start at until five minutes after that. So you can have that break. So it is an important tip and whether you’re using Outlook or something else, and I’m pretty confident you can do it in Gmail as well.

Which is probably the other main hosting for emails. As I said, all the other software do allow you to create that, and it’s such a simple but easy tip to have. Yeah and look and I do come across quite passionate about this. Do I still struggle with that? It’s a daily work on for me, right?

So there are times where I get sidetracked, but I always come back to what’s the most important thing I need to get done today? And then I’ll come back to that. It’s a work in progress for everybody and it’s just been intentional behind how we spend our energy rather than the time factor.

So let’s bring it down to the book, because we are running out of time in this podcast particular, so we don’t we’ve kept people waiting for a little while. So tell me a little bit about the book and what people can expect. Yeah. Cool. So here it is. I’ve got a copy, Vance copy so that the book is all my experiences from.

Working in the military and working in high performance sport. And I’ve taken all of those concepts and I’ve got loads of stories in here, not just from my time, but some really good case studies. It’s all backed on really, validated research in neuroscience to look at ourselves like we mentioned as a cognitive athlete, someone who uses our mind to make decisions, to think clearly to look at information and dissect it.

So it’s really taken that lens of it and it goes through all the different phases of cognitive periodization, from conditioning phase to transition phase, performance, and then recovery. So we, I break it down in, into really bite-sized chunks and steps. And at the end of the book, it gives you a really robust, four step strategy for you to take away and to implement, not just individually, but also teams as well.

And I’ve, yeah, and it’s got loads of case studies in there from real clients that I’ve worked with over the past, 10 to 15 years to implement a lot of this information that that I’ve accumulated over time. Just in there. It’s, it’ll be available, it is available to pre-order now, but it’s in, it’s gonna be in the shops on the 29th of December.

Published through Wiley. So they’d be really good to, to get it out. It’s gonna be. In the airport. So a January must read if you are doing any traveling to just, really think about yourself in a different way. It’s not a productivity hack or a book about that. It’s about you and it’s about, spending time for you to look at your season, to work out what your peaks and troughs are for then.

You’d put a plan into place, so then you’re not looking when you’re 75, 80 back on your life going, man, all those meetings you’re looking back going, yeah, I’ve still got the energy, I’ve got the drive and the motivation for me to still be producing, whatever that looks like at 80. I’m not 80.

Yeah. But I do know, that the more that we look at. The way our brains function the clearer thinking that we’re gonna have and the better results that, that will naturally fall out of all of that. Amazing. And the, and correct me if I’m wrong, but there’s a scorecard as well, isn’t there, attached to the attached to the book that people can access now?

Yeah, absolutely. So if you go onto the website, cognitive athlete.com au, there is a scorecard. So right now you can go on there and you can find out, where you score, so you know whether you are at risk of burnout, whether you’re actually a cognitive athlete already and not knowing about it.

And it’ll give you a really good strategy for you. A couple of things to think about for you to then implement moving forward. It comes down to like things like sleep. It comes down to breaks, comes down to focus. Alcohol is another one. Exercise your diet and nutrition. All of these have a big impact in your score.

You are of all of those, and give you a result. And then you, yeah, give your report so you can take that away and have a think about it. There’s a link, to talk about if you wanna conversation with me about it. So it’s, there’s Elizabeth and there’s also the podcast as well that he dives into a lot more detail.

That’s in the book. So my first draft of the book was like 75,000 words and publisher said, no, it needs to be 50. So I’ve had to take a lot out. And that’s what, the podcast and the newsletter I’ve got on LinkedIn, on Wednesdays. It goes into a lot of the research and and things like that.

Fantastic. And we are going to make sure all of the information on how to get in touch with you and all those links are going to be in the show notes. Just one final question to wrap things up that I do like to ask all my guests. What is the aha moment that people have when they come to work with you that you wish more people knew they were going to have?

Yeah, that’s a great question. I think really it’s not a drastic change. People are already using some of these tools, resources, techniques but it’s really to look at, okay what’s one thing that I can do to boost my performance? And it’s different for everybody. So people are already doing good stuff, but now it’s being intentional.

And then when we start looking at people’s calendars that Oh yeah, emails, yeah, I should maybe push them out. ’cause there are other people’s jobs to do lists, right? A lot of the time they’re doing the right things, but it’s about. Really dialing down and then looking at what’s my recovery strategy?

And not many people have a recovery strategy. They don’t even factor that into their diaries. For me, that probably from all of this is around, that recovery. So what am I doing to recover? And it’s not going for a holiday. It could be I’m going out for a walk in between meetings, I’m listening to some music, I’m talking to a colleague.

And if you intentionally put that through the day. People end up, being happier at the end of the day. And then that has a flow on effect into their, family life, a outside of work. So it’s like schedule recoveries and you all yeah, you do well. I’m feeling much better after talking to you.

’cause now I feel like I’m, I can call myself an athlete, so that’s, yes I’ll live by that. So thank you so much for being a part of the program. It’s such a fascinating area and absolutely encouraging everyone to pre-order the book or if you’re listing and it’s. The book’s already out. Go and get the book.

It’s it’s gonna be a must read. So many great things that you’ve given us in that episode. So thank you so much for being part of the Biz Bites for Thought Leaders podcast. Hey, thank you Anthony. And yeah, it’s been good to be on. Excellent. As we said to everyone, take a look at the show notes for more information and don’t forget to share and subscribe so you never miss an episode.

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