Why I wrote The Performance Prescription

My experience from working with organisations for 30 years is that high performers are not lacking in ability. What's often missing are the strategies that allow success with sustainability. And this is essentially what my latest book - The Performance Prescription: The Science of Healthy High Performance – is about.

Through my work, including personally advising more than 8,000 business professionals and executives, I have seen up close how easy it is for people to be ground down by professional pressures. Many individuals have physical or psychological issues. Some, though, are simply struggling with performance and a sense of overwhelm. 

However, whatever the precise nature of someone's challenges happens to be, what I've consistently seen is that resolution will almost always be found by attending to four key areas – what I refer to in the book as the Four Fundamentals:

EMOTIONAL REGULATION 

How we respond to stress and challenge, and our ability to keep our emotions in check, is critical to success in work and life. However, work pressures are the norm, and so is domestic stress in one form or another. This first section of the book reveals the true cause of stress (it's not what a lot of us think it is) and how to use mental tools and specific breathing techniques to think more clearly, make better decisions, and be more resilient.

ENERGY

Abundant and reliable energy is essential for leading an engaged, fulfilled and productive life in and out of the workplace. Several factors are at play here, with the key ones being nutrition, exercise, and sleep. Here, I unpack the science behind each of these factors, and how to leverage them to support performance in both the short and long term.

ENVIRONMENTAL DESIGN 

Our immediate workspace can have a surprising impact on our performance and output. However, beyond ergonomics, this area gets scant attention. But other important factors here are light, sound, and air quality. In the book, I explore these factors and how to engineer them for increased clarity and focus. Examples include simple fixes around the air we breathe that can literally double our cognitive capacity, as well as how to use sound technology to transform focus and concentration.

EXECUTION 

Almost every business professional and executive I have spoken to feels overwhelmed. Ironically, for many people, the technology that was supposed to make work easier – collaboration platforms, communication tools and, of course, AI – has actually added to the load. This final section of The Performance Prescription provides field-tested strategies for managing time and tasks to boost effectiveness and productivity. As with the rest of the book, the advice is not based solely on the science, but on what people find works in practice.

While the paperback version of The Performance Prescription will be available to order from 16 August, the Kindle version is available to pre-order now via this link https://amzn.eu/d/07fGPoik

If you feel others may benefit from the actionable advice in the book, please share!

Also, if you read The Performance Prescription, please let me know how you get on with it. You can leave a comment or DM me. I'm always happy to hear directly from people regarding their experiences. After all, it's people's experiences that form the basis for the information and advice in the book.