Making Waves

So the tan is fading, and you're already feeling nostalgic about your summer vacation. But tell the truth: did you ever really let go, chill out, and leave the office behind? or are you among the 47% of businesspeople who now take their laptops on vacation? did you slip away from the family once or twice each day to check your email (rationalizing that otherwise you'd be facing about 800 unread messages when you returned to work)? What about checking your voice mail? Or maybe you're one of those who never got away at all this summer. The pressure at the office was just too high -- too much to do and too few hours to do it in. It's the 24x7 culture: Perform or perish.

The by-product of such behavior is that you're helping to fuel one of the fastest-growing industries in America. No, not the Internet. I'm talking about the legion of speakers, coaches, trainers, psychologists, workshop leaders, and consultants whom companies are hiring in ever-increasing numbers to help people like you cope with change, avoid burnout, and increase productivity.

Amid all this clutter, Jim Loehr offers a unique approach to the challenge of optimizing performance. Now 56, Loehr was a competitive athlete in his youth. In 1976, after earning his doctorate, he became one of this country's first sports psychologists. For the next 15 years, Loehr spent countless hours analyzing what makes it possible for world-class athletes to perform at their best under the most stressful conditions. Today, he is president of LGE Performance Systems in Orlando, Florida. He and I first met a decade ago, and I've been following his work -- and occasionally working with him -- ever since.

Loehr's first key insight was that the skill that athletes call "mental toughness" can be taught just as systematically as a golf swing. In addition, that skill can be strengthened just as predictably as a muscle can through weight training. Even more intriguingly, Loehr concluded that the traditional view of stress as something harmful and insidious simply misses the mark. The only way to expand the capacity of great athletes to handle stress effectively, Loehr discovered, was to expose them to stress in increasingly larger doses.

Loehr's biggest breakthrough was recognizing that, just as training for stress is critical to growth, so is training for recovery. If stress can be defined as anything that prompts the expenditure of energy, then recovery is the means by which energy is recaptured. Rather than viewing recovery as a passive function, Loehr argues that it is integral to high performance -- yin to the yang of stress. A balanced relationship between stress and recovery -- a rhythmic pulsing, not unlike that of a healthy heart -- turns out to be optimal.

Loehr named this capacity for resilience the "ideal performance state," and he began developing techniques to help cultivate it. Then, in the late 1980s, he realized that the techniques that he was using successfully with athletes were also applicable to executives who operate in high-pressure, performance-driven work environments. These "corporate athletes" often felt the same relentless pressure as traditional athletes did, and typically they had to endure that pressure for longer hours, with shorter "off-seasons," and over many more years.

"In the vast majority of companies today, people lead very driven, linear lives," Loehr explains. "The body is meant to move, but businesspeople sit at their desks for endless hours, they often overeat or go without eating at all, and they work in a state of chronic anxiety, fear, or anger." Loehr's work, described in his most recent book, Stress for Success (Times Business, 1997), focuses on a deceptively simple solution: teaching people how to switch gears -- physically, emotionally, and mentally -- in a rhythmic fashion throughout the day. Creating such a program requires integrating and orchestrating disparate approaches -- from fitness and nutrition to time-management and emotional-intelligence training -- which other experts typically offer only in isolation.

Loehr and his LGE colleagues have worked with organizations ranging from the FBI to the American Heart Association, from Merrill Lynch to Estee Lauder. For me, the most compelling evidence that the LGE system works is how powerful it has been in my own life. I began using the system several years ago, during a period when a tough deadline demanded that I be more productive. My first instinct was to push harder, to work longer hours. Loehr convinced me that "making waves," or "oscillating," would be more effective.