Coming to you one day later than normal, as this is an edition I’ve been obsessing over. Or rather, over the bigger picture behind it.
“Mental performance is trainable. The cognitive athlete trains it with the same discipline an athlete brings to their body.”
- Jason Leavy
We all accept the body is trainable. That argument is over.
Your brain is your most important asset. It determines how well you think, act and feel. And neuroscience shows it is trainable. Neuroplasticity means your brain physically rewires in response to what you repeatedly ask of it.
What we know about how the brain performs under pressure has changed more in the last 10 years than in the previous 50.
At the same time, the world of work is experiencing seismic change driven by technology, culture and geopolitics.
That is why I believe this is the era of leaders as cognitive athletes.
Those who are curious about how they can lead better and live better. Those who commit to being sharper, calmer and more capable.
Those who know that stasis leads to irrelevance.
What follows is Prime Performance Labs’ definition of the core capabilities of the cognitive athlete. All are evidence-based and trainable.
How do you measure up?
The Cognitive Athlete
A Prime Performance Labs Manifesto
PHYSIOLOGICAL
Mental performance runs on physical hardware. The more you look after this, the sharper you’ll be.
1. Physical Foundation
How you sleep, move and eat affect your cognitive health and performance. The cognitive athlete invests accordingly.
2. Energy Management
Your cognitive capacity is finite. Understanding that and being intentional about how and when you deploy your thinking is a skill. The ‘always on’ mentality is a kill zone for high performance. The ability to oscillate is key.
3. Autonomic Regulation
Your nervous system has a state, and it is not fixed. The cognitive athlete can down-regulate when they are wired and up-regulate when they are flat, and trains that control under pressure.
SELF-AWARENESS
Meaningful change starts with understanding yourself better.
4. Curiosity
The fuel of personal development and exploring your potential. The willingness to keep asking how things work, and the source of innovation and creativity.
5. Metacognition
The ability to monitor, evaluate and direct your own thinking, so you can maximise your potential to think, learn and create.
6. Cognitive Flexibility
The ability to think adaptively in the face of rapidly changing circumstances. Processing the situation at speed and recalibrating thoughts, plans and actions.
BEHAVIOURAL
Repetition is what physically changes your brain. You become your behaviours, not your intentions.
7. High Agency
A commitment to taking full control of your actions and accountability for the outcomes.
8. Attentional Control
Protecting focus deliberately. Fewer inputs, greater output. Mastery comes from the same correctly executed actions done consistently. The cognitive athlete embraces the mundanity of excellence, as they know it compounds.
9. Progressive Overload
Adaptation only happens under load. The cognitive athlete deliberately takes on things that are hard and unfamiliar, because that is what builds new capability. They also understand that rest and recovery are a critical part of the process.
RELATIONAL
As a leader, your behaviours shape how others think and act.
10. Communication
The ability to express your vision, plans and actions with clarity and conviction. What you transmit is not just your words. Tone, body language and presence all carry, and all of them can degrade under pressure.
11. Empathy
The ability to interpret what others are thinking and feeling, and the awareness that your own state affects theirs.
12. Emotional Regulation
Managing your state under pressure so you can effectively respond to the challenges you face. Moods are infectious. Calm is contagious.
How do you measure up?
Change starts with awareness. Turn off the auto-pilot. Reflect.
If helpful, mark yourself out of 10 on each category. In each case, tie it to specific evidence (both for and against). Resist the temptation to tell yourself stories that the evidence doesn’t support. Give a mark that reflects your reality.
These 12 capabilities are so important because they sit upstream of individual tactics like productivity hacks and novelty tech. Such tools may help in isolated instances, but they are rarely the answer they are sold as. They are also nowhere near as powerful as an integrated, evidence-based program, which is what the Prime Performance System is built to deliver.
Imagine a future state where you have improved your capabilities in each of these areas. Is that the version of you that you want to be? If it is, that’s all the incentive you need to become a cognitive athlete.
A final word on…
Purpose
Research shows that purpose is an output. If you train like a cognitive athlete and explore, experiment and develop expertise, your sense of purpose will follow. You find meaning in the work itself, not an artificial destination.
My hope for you is this: just start. Change is always possible.
Go well.
J
🔥 LIVE BETTER, LEAD BETTER
Will return next week!
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