In today’s hyper-competitive and connected business environment, it is easy to forget that we are humans first and business people after.
Think of your body as the hardware and your mind as the software. No matter how well you may feel at the moment both parts will still need constant maintenance.
That’s why I decided to write this article to help you apply an “athletic mindset” to maintaining yourself. After all, maintaining yourself also spills over into good results for your business.
Yet another reason I decided to explore this “athletic mindset” is realizing that 90% of my staff’s leaves in the last four years were due to health-related reasons. The truth is that because of a combination of a lack of disposable income, and cultural, religious, and economic factors, the majority of people in Southeast Asia have poor lifestyles (especially in the lower income brackets). This inevitably has a negative effect on productivity.
Realizing the importance of encouraging a healthier lifestyle is central to our ethos at FlySpaces. For example, I ask my staff to refrain from eating junk food/fast food more than once a week. Training on the basics of nutrition and sleep hygiene is just as important to us as regular sales training. We even have a “Vitamin Wednesday” where we have a catering service that brings fruit to the office every Wednesday and other similar activities.
As a CEO/business owner over the years, I’ve realized there are some “must dos” to reach peak performance and take care of your ‘hardware’ and ‘software’. These beliefs are also backed by top business schools such as the Instituto de Empresa in Madrid, which has even incorporated modules of athletic mindset and peak performance in their MBAs and other programs.
Without further ado, below are the four pillars to reach “peak performance”.
1. Mindset
Everything starts with your mindset. After all, reaching peak performance requires relentless dedication combined with constant discipline.
Achieving the right mindset toward peak performance can start anywhere from creating a simple ‘to-do’ list to visualization techniques (which I personally love to do while doing interval jogging). One easy way to set your mindset on the right path is by setting small, achievable goals throughout the day before moving on to bigger, harder goals.
Sometimes maintaining the right mindset is easier when you have real, physical reminders. For example, I always eat lunch with somebody to remind myself not to eat so fast. This helps with digestion and caloric intake. Even doing something like replacing a can of soda with coconut water will give you the refreshing antioxidants to keep your mind sharp.
Also, coconut water helps with hangovers!
2. Rest and recovery
We all know sleep is important. But there’s so much more to it than just that.
First, the optimum time to go to sleep is between 10 pm to 11 pm—so you should already be asleep by 11 pm.
Second, you should know that our organs regenerate while we sleep in a bottom-up cycle: regeneration starts with lower body organs such as the intestine and stomach then goes up to the lungs and heart before finishing with the brain. This is why our deepest sleep is just before we wake up. This is when the brains go into regeneration mode. The whole process takes about six to eight hours, so if you go to sleep at 12 am and wake up at 6 am or so then chances are that your brain has fully regenerated.
Sometimes you’ll need extra help forcing yourself to sleep. I am no medical expert but in this case you may want to use Valerian. Valerian is a herb commonly used in sleep aids to induce sleep and help you relax.
On another note, I am personally not a big fan of afternoon naps. Afternoon naps take up time before (when you need to wait to fall asleep) and after (when you wake up still groggy) the nap itself. I personally prefer getting a full eight hours at night and staying productive through the day.
If you need to travel, I also recommend getting a nighttime outbound flight as you will have natural tiredness from the day.
3. Nutrition
Disclaimer: I am not a nutritionist. I just read a lot and tried various things. Below are the things that personally worked for me.
Nutrition itself is a very young science. We still know very very little about how the body actually responds to food. However, there is one basic rule we already know: sugar is the devil.
Most people don’t know how harmful sugar really is. This is partially because the world’s biggest companies make billions every year selling us sugar. But it’s also partially because—let’s face it—it just tastes so good. Finally, there’s no denying that sugar is just everywhere.
So what you can do is get smarter about how you intake sugar.
For example, I follow an intermittent diet program where I only eat between 12 noon and 8 pm and then again after 12 noon of the following day. It is a super easy and not extreme (like 48 hours juicing) diet. By reducing my number of meals I achieve the following:
- ) Lowered sugar intake.
- ) I will allow my body 16 hours of not intaking any food. This mimics the effects of starvation for the body which then allows it to regenerate faster: when the body enters this ‘starvation’ mode it will attack the glucose warehouse (the fat, basically) stores in our cells which will result in weight loss.
- ) “Organizing” my breakfast is something less I need to think about. It reduces the odds of suffering from decision fatigue.
You should also take fruits in their solid formats as much as possible. Though fruit juices are definitely tasty, they are laden with fructose (a type of sugar) without any of the important fiber components.
Lastly, there is the vegetarian vs. carnivore debate. While there are concrete studies that show eating meat increases your cholesterol levels, I personally cannot go without it. I make sure to eat no more than a weekly steak, however.
If possible, take regular blood and allergy tests to see how your body improves. Try also to check with a dedicated nutritionist instead of a general practitioner.
4. Daily exercise
There is no excuse to not exercise.
I’ve had to improvise a lot in this regard but it’s always worth it. For example, I always take my jogging shoes with me. So I’ve jogged in the most ridiculous places on the planet: from a bulletproof vest in Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea to the Namibian desert.
There were even times when I had to improvise in expensive places like Singapore and Hong Kong where the hotel gyms were way above our budget. For my investors’ sake, I instead bought myself a TRX kit from Lazada for about 50 USD. This means I can have my workout everywhere, even in my hotel room as you can hang them anywhere and weigh only 300g.
If nothing else, a yoga session only requires about 2 square meters of space and a video to perform to. You can even use tables and chairs as weights for arms and chest, on top of free jumping jacks and ab exercises anywhere. So again, no excuses.
Sidenote: I had the pleasure of meeting Franklin Templeton CEO Mark Mobius at my gym in Manila. He told me that he selects hotels to stay in based on their fitness centers. He is 80 years old, manages about 40 billion USD of assets, and still exercises. This is the right mindset!
My last piece of advice: stick to natural medicine
Again, I’m not trying to go all ‘new age’ on you. I just wanted to share my own personal experience.
One morning after a long-haul flight from Manila to Madrid (and probably after too many cervezas that night) I woke up with visual migraines. Visual migraines are temporary visual distortions that last 20-30 minutes at a time and can even temporarily blind you. These migraines lasted for more than eight months and I did everything from MRI to MRA to blood and allergy tests.
The official answer from my army of Western doctors was always: “Migraines are part of life, you should stress less”.
Until one day I got to Ubud (Bali) and sat down with a chiropractor. Admittedly, I was very skeptical about the whole ‘natural’ way of curing people. Yet in one 40-minute session, my chiropractor was able to tell me more things than all my other expensive doctors did in eight months. They were even able to guess my favorite drink (gin tonic) based on testing my pressure points.
The result? The migraines were gone after three sessions with them. They never came back.
I’m not saying Western medicine is useless. On the contrary, Western medicine is great for diagnosis. From my personal experience however, it focuses on the symptoms too much instead of the cause.
Take one of the world’s best-selling drugs Lipitor as an example. It artificially pushes down your sugar production by causing stress to the liver and pancreas (which is the organ that produces our sugar), so it solves one problem and creates two. How is this a good deal? You’ll also have to take it for the rest of your life!
Right now I take daily various nutrition supplements, from magnesium to B12 to ginkgo biloba. Consider finding a natural doctor that knows their stuff. You might just see some amazing results.
All in all, there’s a lot you can do to guarantee ‘peak performance’ every day. Although working at peak performance is important for anyone, it’s especially important when working in the ultra-competitive world of business.
Always remember the four pillars of mindset, rest and recovery, nutrition, and exercise. I promise you won’t regret it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mario Berta is an Italian who currently resides between Manila and Madrid. He is an experienced CEO in the tech industry in the Southeast Asia region with extensive knowledge in building, scaling and training multi-cultural teams. His areas of expertise cover a masterclass skill set in sales, peak performance training, strategy, and corporate culture-building.
Berta has a solid track record as a founder and sales professional, with added experience in the academe. He is currently the country managing director at Igloo and an Endeavor Entrepreneur. Previously, he was Rocket Internet’s regional managing director for Asia, IDT Telecom’s Asia Pacific business development director, and AFA Press media holding’s project director of international operations. He is also a visiting professor at IE Business School in Madrid, Spain.
As an international resource person and thought leader, Berta has been interviewed by more than 40 local and global media around the world.
Berta holds a master of Business from IE Business School and University of Turin. He graduated from the Owner Scale Up program of IE Business School and Stanford University. He is fluent in English, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese.