Predictably, when Sport Wales formed its Female Health & Performance team, some asked why there was no male equivalent.

The truth is that male physiology and psychology has long been viewed as the default across sport.

“For so many years we haven’t thought about females as being different,” says Esther Goldsmith, who works for Sport Wales, on the latest episode of the Leaders Performance Podcast.

“When you think about it, it doesn’t make sense because it’s obvious we’re different.”

This lack of understanding or consideration makes one ponder just how much potential is being left on the table by female athletes. The menstrual cycle, for example, was seen as a taboo and was historically not taken into consideration when female athletes trained, performed or recovered.

In seeking to redress that imbalance, Sport Wales is empowering female Welsh athletes from the grassroots through to podium potential with the support they need to succeed.

“We’re just trying to open up some of those conversations and improve the comfort and awareness of the athlete in order to help,” says Dr Natalie Brown, who works alongside Goldsmith.

Both spoke of Sport Wales’ efforts to normalise conversations about a whole range of female health issues (10:00) including pelvic floor health and stress incontinence (36:00), while busting common myths along the way (21:00).

Goldsmith and Brown also discuss the importance of encouraging behavioural change through meeting the athlete where they are in their beliefs and values (15:00); helping coaches with any potential discomfort as they learn and become aware of the needs of their athletes (31:00); as well as the question of sports bras in a market without universal standards (26:00).

They offer useful tips for any sports organisation regardless of their budget or level of resource but the important thing is to start having the conversation. Now.

Listen above and subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher and Overcast, or your chosen podcast platform.

More from Sport Wales:

How Sport Wales Is Enabling Female Athletes to Succeed on the World Stage

‘Female-Specific Considerations Should Be Part of Normal Practice’

Female Athlete Health: Five Top Tips When Discussing the Menstrual Cycle and Other Issues

By John Portch

There are echoes of coaching eras past in the way Adrian Blake Mitchell describes his ballet schooling at St Petersburg’s renowned Vaganova Academy.

“My teacher was extremely intimidating and that’s how he got good work out of us,” he told an audience at June’s Leaders Sport Performance Summit at Red Bull.

Mitchell teaches at the highly regarded Westside Ballet School, which is just across the road from Red Bull on Stewart Street in Santa Monica.

“Our training approach is really very much about fostering their love of the art form,” he continued. Rather than teaching from fear or intimidation, this “results in better artists, kinder and healthier people at the end of it”.

Those words chimed with Leaders Performance Institute members at the summit, where Mitchell spoke alongside Eileen Strempel, the Inaugural Dean at the prestigious Herb Alpert School of Music, at UCLA.

Here, we pick out four lessons in how the performing arts nurture their young talent.

1. The teachers must engender a sense of playfulness in students

If a love of art is essential, then it follows that the teacher – or coach – has to fit the bill just as much as any prospective student. “We’re also hiring teachers and thinking about the ecosystem,” said Strempel. The Herb Alpert offers a range of courses from musicology and ethnomusicology to composition and conducting. “What energies are those faculty bringing into our school?” She explained her belief that a love of art stems from playfulness. “We don’t actually talk about ‘working’ in music – we play music – and retaining that sense of play is absolutely integral.” The key is to foster an environment where the students are “playing with and inspired by each other”.

2. Individual development is about finding ‘other ways to win’

Ballet and music, much like sport, are ensemble activities and the risk is that the development of the individual can be overlooked. The Westside and Herb Alpert counter this by surfacing a student’s intrinsic motivation. Strempel said: “The solution to a problem might be X or Y, but we try to bring more profound questions such as ‘what is this piece of music about? What am I trying to convey? What am I bringing to this piece as an artist?’”

It speaks to what Mitchell called “winning in other ways”. He said: “This ties into the idea of improvisation and allowing us to experiment and find different moments in our work that can create success.”

3. They provoke failure

From the coach’s perspective, individual progress is about trying to develop solution-minded individuals who can adapt, adjust and improvise on the fly. This can lead to increased rates of failure, which the Westside readily accepts. “Sometimes when I’m really pushing my students we will repeat a variation three or four times without a break; no corrections,” said Mitchell. It provokes a level of fatigue akin to a performance but in a lower-stakes setting. “It’s important for that experience to be out of the way for them.”

At the Herb Alpert, teachers might introduce violin students to one of the two Stradivarius violins in their possession. Such is the difference in sound, colour, breadth and depth that it takes even an accomplished player six months to get to grips with the vintage instrument. Or if a student has been practising in the western symphonic orchestral tradition the school might introduce them to the completely different world of Afro Latin jazz. “The challenge is finding ways to expand the range of possibilities that allows an individual to extend themselves,” said Strempel.

4. They connect that failure with motivation and resilience

The Herb Alpert’s approach to creating a caring and nurturing environment does much to foster resilience but, as Strempel explained, it also comes back to a student’s intrinsic motivation. “If you keep it on the level of ‘I just want a great performance’ or ‘I just want to win the game’ that leaves so much creative potential on the table,” she said, being sure to include a sporting analogy. “You have to tap into intrinsic motivation to do that right, whether it’s because you want to give back to your community or because you’ve got something you want to say. It’s not about being a better musician, dancer or athlete but being a better human being”.

By Henry Breckenridge

Ciarán Frawley’s nerveless penalty for Leinster took the Champions Cup final to extra-time last weekend.

Their opponents, Toulouse, would win 31-22 at London’s Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, but Frawley’s contribution at fly-half had echoes of his illustrious former teammate, Jonny Sexton, who retired last year.

Both Frawley and Sexton are graduates of Leinster’s esteemed academy, which has propelled the club to the elite of European rugby.

A remarkable 90 per cent of Leinster’s squad was born in Ireland or born to Irish parents abroad, as Simon Broughton, Leinster’s Academy Manager, told the audience at April’s Leaders Meet: Teaching & Coaching at Millfield School. More remarkable still, Leinster provides the backbone of Ireland’s national team, which is currently ranked second in the world of men’s rugby.

Broughton was joined by Huw Jennings, the Head of Football Development at English Premier League club Fulham. The south-west London club enjoy Category One status under the Elite Player Performance Plan and have long been renowned for the calibre of players to pass through their doors. It stretches from Johnny Haynes and World Cup-winner George Cohen in the 1950s to more recent graduates such as Moussa Dembélé, Ryan and Steven Sessegnon and Harvey Elliot.

Bridging the gap between academy and senior level is uppermost in the minds of both academies, but it is not the be-all and end-all.

“We have to have an effective end result for everyone that comes through the programme,” said Jennings, who built his reputation for youth development at Southampton in the early 2000s. “For some, that might be an early exit, but as long as they’ve had an experience they’ve benefited from, learnt from and, hopefully, enjoyed, then that’s a decent return.”

Below, we pick out six reasons why Leinster and Fulham are doing better than most.

1. Holistic development

Both Leinster and Fulham prepare their players for a well-rounded future. Academic study tends to motivate young athletes intellectually and helps them deal with challenges, setbacks and even injuries. Leinster recruit players for their academy at aged 17-20 from clubs across the 12 counties of their province. They have adopted a ‘dual career’ model, where players pursue their studies alongside their rugby. Approximately seven or eight players are selected each year to join Leinster’s senior squad, which means the others must have something else to fall back on.

This is perhaps even more important at Fulham, whose academy recruits players at a much younger age (9 and upwards), with even fewer players making the grade as professional footballers. The club partner with sixth forms such as Raynes Park High School and Ark Globe Academy, both in south London, where older academy players can pursue A-Levels or BTEC qualifications.

2. Nurturing environments

Leinster and Fulham both engineer their environments to facilitate learning and development. Broughton, an experienced player and coach, was appointed Leinster’s Academy Manager in 2021 and has been instrumental in leading the programme at their Ken Wall Centre of Excellence, which opened in 2019. They place an emphasis on teamwork, commitment, integrity, and communication.

The Fulham Academy, which has been led by Jennings since 2008, promotes individual growth within a high-performance setting. Players receive personalised attention, focusing on technical skills, physical conditioning and mental resilience.

Additionally, all players at Fulham, from the younger Foundation Phase up to under-23s, adhere to the academy’s core values, which are known as the 3Hs: honesty, humility and hard work. The club also seeks out diversity in its players and staff to help ensure that their academy better reflects modern society.

3. A self-driven culture

Staff provide support at both clubs, but players are expected to take charge of their own development. Inspired by the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, Leinster use the phrase ‘the athletes are at work’ as one of their underlying principles. It’s up to the player to put in the work and the team around the athlete will provide them with the tools they need. The club uses blended learning to appeal to the modern academy player in 2024, which means an array of videos, music, open conversations, and presentations to inspire creativity in their players.

At Fulham, Jennings and his colleagues say it is crucial for players to be able to manage their disappointment. They also believe the players that do this best can make the most of the opportunities that come their way. They increasingly find that those perceived to be high-achievers early in their academy journey find it hard to be high-achievers at the end of that journey. “The question to ask yourself is which players can deal with disappointment and, frankly, who can’t,” Jennings told the audience at Millfield.

However, he also emphasised the importance of academy coaches reflecting on their own practice. “We have to adapt to the athlete – not the other way around,” he added. “It’s about learning, it’s about understanding. It’s not referring to it as ‘back in the day’ – it’s about understanding where the athlete is in their journey so that we can relate to them.”

4. Proximal role modelling

There are 60 players in the Leinster building everyday, 20 of whom are in their academy. It enables Broughton and his colleagues to use what they call “proximal role-modelling”. Once upon a time, academy players used their own changing room, whereas now they are fully integrated into the squad. They are able to observe pro athletes each day both on the training pitch and in meetings. “It helps to accelerate their learning and development,” said Broughton, who also spoke of the value in the informal conversations that take place en route to and from the training pitch.

5. Honest conversations

Too often, staff in academy settings put off frank conversations about an athlete’s progress. That is not the case at Fulham. Difficult conversations need to be on the agenda from the off and, according to Jennings, “everything should be couched in positive language – but not at the expense of leaving out the critical message.”

6. Parental involvement

Both clubs increasingly bring parents into the fold, fully acknowledging the role of family in the development of young athletes. For their part, Fulham recognise that young athletes are staying closer to their parental unit than in previous generations. It can be a challenge, as Jennings readily admitted, but the club tries to think of it as a learner who has just passed their driving test. “The parent is invited into the car but they’re not driving the vehicle. It’s not about exclusion: if the individual wants family members included, the club have to manage that,” he said.

Main image: Plantiga

A Data & Innovation article brought to you by

By Joe Lemire

As a freshman in 2020-21, the country’s No. 1 high school recruit, UConn’s Paige Bueckers, did not disappoint. She was a unanimous All-American and was the consensus national basketball player of the year, leading the Huskies to the Final Four.

After that season, however, Bueckers underwent right ankle surgery. The following year, she suffered a tibial plateau fracture and meniscus tear in her left knee, which required another operation. In August 2022, she tore the ACL in that knee — another surgery.

But Bueckers was fully cleared for the 2023-24 season and returned to form. She was again a unanimous All-American, leading UConn to the Final Four again. During the tournament, her legendary coach, Geno Auriemma, called Bueckers “the best player in America,” in an implied comparison to Iowa’s Caitlin Clark.

Among the modalities helping monitor her as she returned to elite performance were sensors embedded in the insoles of the sneakers she wears in practices and games. That device, made by Plantiga, is in the early stages of a multifaceted effort to collect real-world biomechanics data on female athletes. Its sensors collect data on ground forces, contact times, stride length, asymmetries and more.

Plantiga is working with the WNBA through its participation in the NBA Launchpad program. It’s helping women’s running shoe brand Hettas inform its designs and materials. And it’s being deployed to track elite athletes such as UConn’s Bueckers, Azzi Fudd and Jana El Alfy, all of whom have suffered ACL or Achilles injuries over the past 20 months.

“The main problem that we see in women’s sports right now is that there’s a really big bias in the scientific literature, and there’s a bias in the resources that are often made available to women’s teams,” said Matt Jordan, a kinesiology professor at the University of Calgary who serves as Plantiga’s Chief Scientific Officer.

“Where Plantiga comes in is it affords us a brand-new opportunity to study girls and women playing in sport on the field of play, doing the things they do in the real world, not just in a lab, but on the field and on the turf. And it really opens up a new paradigm to be able to understand how training load, movement biomechanics and asymmetries, and how these things really influence the health profile of the female athlete.”

Plantiga Co-Founder/CEO Quin Sandler described the dual motivation for pursuing research in women’s sports: the altruistic idea of helping advance the science for women and also the business opportunity of supporting an underserved market. Title IX already ensures a large population of young women playing elite sports at U.S. universities, but the recent explosion in popularity of all women’s sports — pro and college — is helping grow budgets for more rigorous training tech.

Plantiga is helping women’s running shoe brand Hettas inform its design and materials as it builds sneakers for elite athletes, as well as working with the WNBA through the NBA Launchpad program. Image: Plantiga

Sandler declined to specify the price, but said it is comparable to the cost of technologies such as Catapult and Kinexon. In some instances, teams could get the same load monitoring data only from Plantiga.

The research gap between male and female athletes has been well documented in recent years, but the severe discrepancy persists. Chris Napier, Director of the Simon Fraser University Run Lab that has been conducting research for Hettas, said there’s a huge opportunity to create more optimal sneakers for women because just about everything to date has been designed based on research for men.

“Then they just make the shoe a little bit smaller for women, and we think we can do better than that,” Napier said. “We think we can actually optimize those materials and the geometries to really suit female runners and make them improve their mechanics to make them perform better. And then we think, potentially, we can also do better to prevent injury.”

The stark need became apparent when his company built a predictive model for the Canadian Armed Forces regarding knee injuries in soldiers.

Because most of the test subjects were men, Plantiga’s model became precise in identifying trends in their data. It could estimate how long ago a male soldier injured his knee down to the month.

“When we applied that model to women, it just didn’t work. Same model, same machine learning, but that goes to show you that their movement patterns are so unique that our model — because it was just trained on male data — literally couldn’t even see it accurately on women,” Sandler said. “If [the data] wasn’t on both sexes, it basically rendered it almost useless.”

Through NBA Launchpad, Plantiga is conducting a two-pronged research effort. Its technology will be available to WNBA players and performance coaches for use in practice to collect data on elite players, and it will be offered to a high-level girls’ basketball program, New Heights in Brooklyn, with a particular focus on tracking its U17 club team for up to six months.

Plantiga successfully completed the NBA’s rigorous wearables validation program, but the WNBA CBA prohibits wearable usage in games. The WNBA is introducing optical tracking for the first time this year with Second Spectrum, but there’s appeal in the potential of collecting ground forces from a device such as Plantiga as well. (The company’s athlete user investors include NBA player Thaddeus Young and Olympic gold medal-winning sprinter Andre de Grasse.)

NBA Vice President Tom Ryan described the utility of an inertial measurement unit, which is the type of sensor used by Plantiga, in the shoe: “Being able to have an IMU that is right there at the point of contact for both feet, we think is just a piece of data that is always going to be valuable, as a complement to optical.”

This is the first year Launchpad introduced a focus on the WNBA, with Ryan explaining that the league looked at technologies with application at all levels of “the basketball pyramid.” He said, “The goal on the grassroots side is to take all those learnings that an elite health and performance professional at a WNBA setting or NBA setting could teach an athlete, but then being able to take those learnings and productize it into Plantiga’s platform.”

Image: Plantiga

The goal is to collect longitudinal data that would create benchmarks of progression, just as has been established in European soccer academies, which have voluminous data on what the physical performance of each age and positional cohort should be.

“We want to collect a first-of-its-kind data set on what that player development pathway looks like,” Sandler added. “What does an elite 17-year-old basketball player look like? What does an elite 19-year-old, 21-year-old, 24-year-old look like?”

In the case of Bueckers, she began wearing Plantiga in early January, according to Andrea Hudy, UConn’s Director of Sports Performance for Women’s Basketball. Hudy noted the use of Plantiga at this juncture is mostly for information gathering. For Bueckers specifically, the data indicates “there are some things we can do after the season that I think will be helpful for her,” Hudy said, but too much intervention during a season would be unwise and impractical.

Hudy, who is concurrently in a PhD program at UConn, cited a 2019 research paper on Division I women’s soccer players who had MRI scans of their ACLs before and after the season. The study found a 10% increase in knees with edema, a type of swelling in the tissue outside of the joint, which is strongly correlated with injuries to the ligament.

“Is it an overuse injury? Is it a traumatic injury? What are we dealing with?” said Hudy, who was recruited by Auriemma in the late 1980s before a pair of ACL injuries. She instead played Division I volleyball at Maryland and said her personal injury history helps drive her research.

“It’s all coming back, in my opinion, to just gait patterns, and what happens before or after an injury,” Hudy added. “And then how does that reflect your gait afterwards? Because your body compensates in so many ways. And it’s just the kinetic chain of dysfunction if you don’t correct it right away.”

That can persist and manifest itself in future ailments. Part of the epidemic around ACL injuries, added Jordan, is the high recurrence rates, which studies have pegged as anywhere from 8 to 40 times higher risk, as well as the challenge just to return to the same level of play.

“Your ability to return to performance — that, you can’t hack unless you’re training smart, monitoring your deficits and attending to this every single day as a part of your training,” Jordan said. “We’ve known that forever, and the blind spot is essentially that once the athletes are back on the court, we have no clue how they look because we don’t have biomechanical devices that allow us to measure in the real world.”

In a world of insole sensors and properly designed sneakers, the shoes female athletes wear might finally fit.

This article was brought to you by SBJ Tech, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SBJ Tech content in the field of athletic performance.

By Luke Whitworth

We’ve taken a step back and asked ourselves: what has stood out to us across the sessions and conversations that have taken place at the Leaders Performance Institute in recent weeks?

In answering that question we have composed another Debrief that is specifically designed to set you up for success. We’ll keep you on the pulse of contemporary thinking across the high performance space and provide members with the inspiration to engage with the variety of opportunities on offer through their membership. Do check out some of our upcoming events and virtual learning sessions to connect, learn and share with fellow members from across the globe.

And now, let’s reflect on the pressing performance issues of the day.

Leaders Meet: Teaching & Coaching

Thank you to all our friends at Millfield School and those of you that attended a two-day event devoted to teaching and coaching.

Our thinking was challenged from the outset, and there were several nuggets around how to optimise the learning and development of athletes.

The Leaders Performance Institute’s Henry Breckenridge explored neurodivergence in sport in this eye-opening feature. We also touched upon the student-teacher relationship in a discussion of metacognition – the practice of being aware of one’s own thinking.

As a starting point, we considered the notion that when a teacher teaches, the content is substantially less important than the message they are delivering.

What is the critical factor in getting young people to recall content and skills? Encouraging the student to think about what they’re doing rather than simply just doing it. As a teacher, this means getting them to think about the thing you are telling them and engaging them in active thinking.

The metacognitive cycle encourages learners to be active thinkers. It has three distinct phases:

1. Planning: At the outset, learners consider how to approach a task or problem. They set goals, identify strategies, and decide on an action plan. For example, before studying for an exam, a student might plan to review lecture notes, create flashcards, and allocate specific study time.
2. Monitoring: During the learning process, learners continuously reflect on their progress. They monitor their understanding, evaluate their strategies, and assess whether they are on track. For instance, while reading a complex article, a student might pause to check if they comprehend the main points or if they need to adjust their reading pace.
3. Evaluation: After completing the task, learners evaluate the outcome. They assess the effectiveness of their strategies, identify areas for improvement, and reflect on their overall performance. For instance, after writing an essay, a student might review their writing process, consider feedback, and think about how to enhance their next essay.

Community calls

The struggle to balance medium and long-term planning

The balance between medium and long-term planning was a major theme for our Performance & Strategic Director community of practice group during April.

Members of that group shared how they are making this process and smooth as possible and what aspects were important to get right.

Here are seven factors that emerged from those conversations:

1. Have a really clear destination that is shared and agreed. Is there clarity on what you’re trying to get to and achieve?
2. Assign clear responsibilities and resources for each person or team.
3. Don’t get distracted for the long-term by short-term drama.
4. As a leader of a team or organisation, be transparent.
5. Ensure your debrief process is thorough and includes a broad representation of stakeholders.
6. Engage in comprehensive environment scanning, both internally and externally.
7. Be comfortable with the notion of change. There needs to be both honesty and understanding around the group that, in order to change the reality, you need to change things and, therefore, change is inevitable.

Virtual Roundtables

There were three Leaders Virtual Roundtables in April that covered social media, creativity and wellbeing.

Below, we have lifted some of the key insights delivered by members of the Leaders Performance Institute.

How are you helping your athletes and staff navigate the negatives of social media?

There are positives and negatives to athletes and staff using social media and, in this recent virtual roundtable, Leaders Performance Institute members shared some of the initiatives that have helped them to reduce the negative and elevate the positive.

Lived experience storytelling: athletes in particular tend to have a lot of respect for their peers and the opportunity to listen and engage with them in conversation tends to lead to positive outcomes and reactions. Have alumni or other reputable figures share their positive and negative experiences.

Education: this can be linked to the storytelling point. There is also scope to bring in those with technical expertise who can help people in our teams to better understand the intent of use with social media.

Support structures: it is important to have the right structures in place to support athletes and staff. It may sound simplistic, but do you have a key point person or dedicated welfare support for your people? And if you do, is it communicated early?

Role playing activities: in contrast to passive activities, playing people in scenarios and giving them the chance to experience how it might feel has the potential to be even more powerful.

Mindfulness: mindfulness practice is a growing feature of high performance routines and there is benefit in trying to reduce the noise and distractions that come with social media usage.

If you’re merely hoping for creativity to happen, you’re wasting your time

We’ve always enjoyed this quote: “Creativity is an underrated skill. Creativity is just creating more options – with more options you can make better decisions.” These were the words of Kirk Vallis, Global Head of Creative Capability at Google, when speaking at our Leaders Sport Performance Summit back in 2019.

This roundtable allowed members to discuss how to elevate creativity in our environments. Their work raised five questions to consider when putting in a process to foster creativity:

1. Is yours a conducive environment? it is all well and good talking about being creative – your environment has to be shaped to allow that to happen. It is crucial to create an environment that incentivises and permits creative solutions.
2. What does ‘creativity’ mean to you and your team? Is it, for example, more time for ideation or more time to make better decisions?
3. Do you have an intentional structure that encourages creative thinking? Allow thinking time after meetings or even dedicated interventions during the working week. Leaders should provide clear invitations and dedicated time for creativity, whether they connect the dots or allow their team the space to connect those ideas for themselves. You also need to define what you’re looking for because creativity is the process, not the outcome.
4. Do you understand the barriers in your team? Attendees highlighted common barriers such as the fear of failure, a lack of resources, and a lack of skillsets conducive to creativity.
5. Is this a one-time-only deal? You need time and the structure to review, follow-up and capture ideas to assess if they’re working in practice. You can ask what went well in the journey of considering an idea through to its execution in order to create a continuous learning cycle.

What does it take to build a wellbeing programme?

To end April, Dr Meg Popovic wrapped up her three-part learning series centred on wellbeing, specifically what’s having the most impact and what has and hasn’t worked when embedding a wellbeing programme within an elite sporting environment. A key theme that ran through the conversations was how learning and growth is a key contributing factor to positive wellbeing.

The third session discussed creating a wellbeing programme that operates on three levels:

1. The organisation: this is the notion of ‘systems intelligence’. How do you ‘do’ growth mindset so the organisation can be the growth mindset?
2. The ‘teams of teams’ (departments and units): What does each staff or athlete sub-cultural group need and want to grow in their work and impact? This is a consideration of relational intelligence.
3. The individual: this is rooted in the notion of emotional intelligence. What can be created to amplify individual experience and learning of self, profession and leadership?

By Luke Whitworth

Whatever your thoughts on social media platforms, they are here to stay and will continue to have an impact on your athletes and coaches.

The figures emerging in research are stark: 95% of 13-27-year-olds use YouTube, 67% use TikTok, 62% use Instagram, 59% Snapchat and 35% of those users do so ‘almost constantly’. On top of that, 95% of teens have access to a smartphone and 97% of those ‘use the internet daily’.[1]

If you consider your playing groups, the numbers are probably similar.

Leaders Performance Institute members on a recent Virtual Roundtable agreed that while there can be positives to using social media for their athletes, coaches and staff, their experiences tended to be negative, with inevitable consequences for mental health, wellbeing and performance.

Across the 60-minute session, the group explored a few questions:

• What are some of the ways social media is impacting both athletes and staff?

• What are you experiencing in your environments?

• What are some of the initiatives or practices you have implemented or used in your environments around the impact of social media?

How social media is impacting athletes and staff

The negatives…

Increased exposure to criticism: this is well-documented for athletes but coaches and other staff have noticed an increase in online criticism e.g. if there is a spate of injuries, the medical and other performance disciplines are being targeted. On top of that, several members noted that social media can cause a disconnect between athletes and teammates.

Increased stress and anxiety: athletes in particular are experiencing heightened pressure and the increase of doubt. Social media can stoke feelings of impostor syndrome, prove a huge distraction, and lead to a negative self-obsession. Several members observed that much of what we see and engage with on social media is a false reality.

An increase in threats: this is manifold. There are written threats but also security risks that come with increased accessibility and engagement with false information and a large number of uninformed opinions. There is also a lot of short-termism and it can lead to an unhelpful rollercoaster of emotions.

The positives…

• Athletes have more curiosity in relation to the world.
• The ability to engage with fans can be a positive given how distant the two worlds tend to be.
• Social media enables teams and athletes to build a brand.

Member initiatives that reduce the negative and elevate the positive

Lived experience storytelling: athletes in particular tend to have a lot of respect for their peers and the opportunity to listen and engage with them in conversation tends to lead to positive outcomes and reactions. Have alumni or other reputable figures share their positive and negative experiences.

Education: this can be linked to the storytelling point. There is also scope to bring in those with technical expertise who can help people in our teams to better understand the intent of use with social media.

Support structures: it is important to have the right structures in place to support athletes and staff. It may sound simplistic, but do you have a key point person or dedicated welfare support for your people? And if you do, is it communicated early?

Role playing activities: in contrast to passive activities, playing people in scenarios and giving them the chance to experience how it might feel has the potential to be even more powerful.

Mindfulness: mindfulness practice is a growing feature of high performance routines and there is benefit in trying to reduce the noise and distractions that come with social media usage.

Reference

[1] Putukian M, Blauwet C, Currie A, et al Social media impact on athlete mental health: #RealityCheck British Journal of Sports Medicine 2024; 58: 463-465.

By Henry Breckenridge

What is ‘neurodivergence’?

The term ‘neurodivergence’ can often be perceived to be a blocker in sport, but as Dr Julie White, Head of Learning Support at Millfield School, put it to our members at Leaders Meet: Teaching & Coaching, “neurodivergence is when there are differences from the ‘neurotypical’ as opposed to perceived weaknesses”.

In fact, neurodiverse learners have been known to display high levels of perseverance and demonstrate transferrable resilience into the classroom. They embody the words of Harvey Blume, who was one of the first journalist to cover neurodivergence. In 1998, in the Atlantic, he wrote:

Neurodiversity may be every bit as crucial for the human race as biodiversity is for life in general. Who can say what form of wiring will be best at any given moment?

You may be familiar or have heard of neurodivergence through familiarity with such terms as dyslexia, dyspraxia (cognitive learning and gross motor skills), autism (speech, communication and language processing), ADHD (social, emotional and mental health difficulties). But, a lot of the time, the signs and symptoms of these conditions are hidden or less obvious for coaches to pick up on.

It’s critical for coaches and practitioners to have a baseline understanding to ensure they know a) what to look out for; and b) how the various conditions affect decision-making and subsequent performance.  

White breaks down one of the core neurodiverse challenges into two areas related to speed of thinking and recall:

1. Processing speed: individuals who struggle to think on their feet. 
2. Working memory: individuals who struggle to remember verbal instruction. 

Many neurodivergent people will have a weakness in one or both of these areas, regardless of their label.

It’s easiest to think about it as a bucket.

For most of us: information comes in the top, there’s a steady flow. It’s being processed in the middle section at a good speed, and it comes out of ‘the tap’. 

But if your processing speed is slow, your ‘tap’ lets out a lot less water. The info comes in at a fair speed, the bucket fills up very quickly, it can’t drain quickly enough and so it overflows. That’s what happens in young people’s brains where they can’t take in any more information, and they feel overwhelmed. 

On the field/pitch/training, you might see this as: 

• Athletes having difficulty in remembering info from one session to the next.
• Pupils having difficulty sequencing and with routines due to co-ordination difficulties.
• Athletes drifting or being easily distracted as focus is affected.
• Athletes struggling to multi-task (and end up freezing).
• Individuals often having little or no concept of time/urgency.
• Athletes becoming very tired mentally more quickly than others. 

As a coach, you need to… 

Pay attention to the language you use and the quantity of information you give:  

• Keep it chronological: keep it on order in accordance of the process. So, “first do X and then do Y”. Get rid of superfluous language (avoid metaphors). 
• Avoid overwhelming your athlete: limit to three instructions (or less).
• Limit distractions where possible: think of where and how – establish eye contact to ensure you have the player’s attention.
• Tone of voice and audience: Be direct, use short sentences. Translating info into the player’s long-term memory will be more challenging, so be patient.
• Organisation: key dates; planning ahead; prioritising.
• Concept checking: check ‘what have you understood?’ Repeating it will allow you to understand if the recipient has got it. Incorporate show and tell (visual and verbal).

You have to make adaptations. We’re not all the same. It’s about equity and giving them equal access.

Dr Julie White, Head of Learning Support, Millfield School

Coaching checklist

Don’t assume you know the full picture – many players will not acknowledge that they have a difficulty, because:

• They have never been given appropriate support before.
• They be unaware they have difficulties.
• They don’t wany any attention.

A coach should:

• Be an emotionally available adult.
• Break down instructions and check for understanding.
• Use the vocabulary the athlete uses when they’re talking about their own neurodivergence. Avoid abstract phrases such as ‘we need more intensity’. Otherwise, it’s conceptual.
• Remember that athletes may not recall the information long enough to apply it – this is not wilful behaviour and they’re not intending to be rude.
• Find the time to get to know your athlete better. Think ‘I’d love to spend a day in your head’.

A Data & Innovation article brought to you by

* * * * *

Our Startups series looks at companies and founders who are innovating in the fields of athlete performance, fan engagement, team/league operations and other high-impact areas in sports.

* * * * *

World’s shortest elevator pitch: “WorkRate translates athlete-centered research into practice through diagnostics and evidence-based training to reduce injury and boost performance.”

Company: WorkRate, Inc.

Location: New York, New York

Year founded: 2020

Website/App: https://workrate.fit/

Funding round to date: “Self-funded.”

Who are your investors? “We do have some family and friends investments and that was up to around $30,000.”

Are you looking for more investment? “Yes. That would expand our capability development.”

Tell us about yourself, founder & CEO WorkRate Rondel King: “I was born and raised in the twin island republic of Trinidad and Tobago. In my formative years, I had a deep passion for science and sport. I co-founded a soccer team in my neighborhood that competed in the official youth league in Trinidad and Tobago. After one year of competing as a founding player, I migrated to New York. I studied exercise science at Brooklyn College and continued my sporting career by joining the soccer team at Brooklyn College. I experienced a series of injuries which severely hindered my development. I experienced sub-optimal results with my athlete care team, which included pain doctors, athletic trainers and physical therapists. This frustrating experience galvanized my passion for research. I made investments in continuing my education and completed my Masters in exercise physiology and sports nutrition at LIU Brooklyn. It was at this point I gained a deep understanding of my biomechanics and physiology, and I was able to solve my own problems that my care team wasn’t able to solve. After my personal success, I started asking questions. Why was my care team unsuccessful? What was missing in my care approach? Ultimately, I learned a huge disconnect exists between evidence and practice in athlete care. I started WorkRate to narrow this gap and improve athlete-centered care.”

Who are your co-founders/partners? “My co-founder and COO is Janna Szangolies. Janna is special in many ways, but if I had to choose one way that makes her stand out it’s her versatility. Not only is she a problem solver, but she also plays a pivotal role in translating the deep science into a customer-facing narrative. As a scientist, it’s sometimes difficult to cut the jargon. Janna helps keep me in check and to ensure we are communicating effectively with our users and collaborators.”

How does your platform work? “WorkRate designs and builds data models to enhance human performance. We have developed two diagnostic models and a training recommendation model to address two pertinent risk factors identified by the WorkRate scientific team – lack of movement skill and neuromuscular fatigue. The primary goal of WorkRate diagnostic testing is to obtain objective information to guide the training process properly and systematically. From a movement skill perspective, we developed a self-guided biomechanical analysis algorithm that objectively measures movement quality. The data from this analysis is manually entered into our platform by the user to individualize corrective exercises and identify orthopedic abnormalities. To diagnose neuromuscular fatigue, we invented a graded exercise test (GXT) that evaluates the integrated cardiovascular, pulmonary, musculoskeletal, and neuropsychological systems. We accomplished this by leveraging commercially available heart rate monitors – i.e. Polar H10 – and Inertial Measurement Units like Garmin and Apple smartwatches. The 21-stage running protocol is designed to objectively measure locomotor performance in free-living humans through the utilization of Human Activity Recognition (HAR). HAR is the art of identifying and naming activities using Artificial Intelligence. The rapid proliferation of wearable technologies and advancements in sensing analytics have greatly enhanced our capability development over the past four years. Our novel analysis functions similarly to lab-based graded exercise tests, whereas it can analyze critical running dynamic metrics such as ground contact time (GCT), cadence, stride length and vertical oscillation. Furthermore, the protocol calculates running economy and identifies heart rate zones – i.e. Zone 2 – to fine-tune aerobic and anaerobic metabolism for enhanced performance and fatigue mitigation. Data analytics from our diagnostic models are used to create our training recommendation models, which include respiratory muscle training, corrective exercises, gait training, neuromuscular training and zone-based conditioning. Ultimately, our product is the way we harness human performance data. Our model-based system promotes a classification of athlete performance that helps us to understand and analyze how various training methodologies affect performance and injury. WorkRate models are housed and delivered through the WorkRate Performance App for individual athletes, coaches and organizations.”

What problem is your company solving? “Athletes are still getting injured at a very high rate, from professional soccer all the way to your everyday runner. Research shows a significant gap exists between practice and scientific evidence in sports science that restricts the advancement of effective injury prevention and performance enhancement strategies. At WorkRate, we take a very evidence-based approach. We have curated a powerful, problem-solving model for sports science practice that incorporates the best evidence from well-designed studies, athlete and coach perspectives, documentation, performance diagnostics and the knowledge of the WorkRate Scientific Team.”

What does your product cost and who is your target customer? “We are pre-market. We are targeting soccer athletes and runners as our primary target market to start with.”

How are you marketing your product? “We are marketing our product through collaborative channels with our partners, such as InjureFree and Gateway Athletics Trinidad & Tobago. We have tapped into running communities throughout New York City. We’ve conducted pilots within these ecosystems. We’ve launched soccer performance ecosystems in Tampa, Fla., through collaboration with Flex Soccer. It’s very much a controlled and systematic deployment of our technology, and we do this to ensure our models are scientifically valid before we go into scale and a wider market. These collaborations will be guided by WorkRate Labs. WorkRate Labs is a boutique-style research and development hub that was built to bridge the gap between athlete-centered research and practice. The fully portable laboratory was designed to ensure that WorkRate diagnostics and interventions are scientifically validated via medical-grade diagnostic testing. WorkRate Labs is the cornerstone of the WorkRate evidence-based practice model.”

How do you scale, and what is your targeted level of growth? “We will scale through our collaborative channels where we intend on acquiring up to 60,000 individual athletes and 5,000 coaches within the next 12-24 months.”

Image: WorkRate

How does your platform work? “WorkRate designs and builds data models to enhance human performance. We have developed two diagnostic models and a training recommendation model to address two pertinent risk factors identified by the WorkRate scientific team – lack of movement skill and neuromuscular fatigue. The primary goal of WorkRate diagnostic testing is to obtain objective information to guide the training process properly and systematically. From a movement skill perspective, we developed a self-guided biomechanical analysis algorithm that objectively measures movement quality. The data from this analysis is manually entered into our platform by the user to individualize corrective exercises and identify orthopedic abnormalities. To diagnose neuromuscular fatigue, we invented a graded exercise test (GXT) that evaluates the integrated cardiovascular, pulmonary, musculoskeletal, and neuropsychological systems. We accomplished this by leveraging commercially available heart rate monitors – i.e. Polar H10 – and Inertial Measurement Units like Garmin and Apple smartwatches. The 21-stage running protocol is designed to objectively measure locomotor performance in free-living humans through the utilization of Human Activity Recognition (HAR). HAR is the art of identifying and naming activities using Artificial Intelligence. The rapid proliferation of wearable technologies and advancements in sensing analytics have greatly enhanced our capability development over the past four years. Our novel analysis functions similarly to lab-based graded exercise tests, whereas it can analyze critical running dynamic metrics such as ground contact time (GCT), cadence, stride length and vertical oscillation. Furthermore, the protocol calculates running economy and identifies heart rate zones – i.e. Zone 2 – to fine-tune aerobic and anaerobic metabolism for enhanced performance and fatigue mitigation. Data analytics from our diagnostic models are used to create our training recommendation models, which include respiratory muscle training, corrective exercises, gait training, neuromuscular training and zone-based conditioning. Ultimately, our product is the way we harness human performance data. Our model-based system promotes a classification of athlete performance that helps us to understand and analyze how various training methodologies affect performance and injury. WorkRate models are housed and delivered through the WorkRate Performance App for individual athletes, coaches and organizations.”

What problem is your company solving? “Athletes are still getting injured at a very high rate, from professional soccer all the way to your everyday runner. Research shows a significant gap exists between practice and scientific evidence in sports science that restricts the advancement of effective injury prevention and performance enhancement strategies. At WorkRate, we take a very evidence-based approach. We have curated a powerful, problem-solving model for sports science practice that incorporates the best evidence from well-designed studies, athlete and coach perspectives, documentation, performance diagnostics and the knowledge of the WorkRate Scientific Team.”

What does your product cost and who is your target customer? “We are pre-market. We are targeting soccer athletes and runners as our primary target market to start with.”

How are you marketing your product? “We are marketing our product through collaborative channels with our partners, such as InjureFree and Gateway Athletics Trinidad & Tobago. We have tapped into running communities throughout New York City. We’ve conducted pilots within these ecosystems. We’ve launched soccer performance ecosystems in Tampa, Fla., through collaboration with Flex Soccer. It’s very much a controlled and systematic deployment of our technology, and we do this to ensure our models are scientifically valid before we go into scale and a wider market. These collaborations will be guided by WorkRate Labs. WorkRate Labs is a boutique-style research and development hub that was built to bridge the gap between athlete-centered research and practice. The fully portable laboratory was designed to ensure that WorkRate diagnostics and interventions are scientifically validated via medical-grade diagnostic testing. WorkRate Labs is the cornerstone of the WorkRate evidence-based practice model.”

How do you scale, and what is your targeted level of growth? “We will scale through our collaborative channels where we intend on acquiring up to 60,000 individual athletes and 5,000 coaches within the next 12-24 months.”

This article was brought to you by SBJ Tech, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SBJ Tech content in the field of athletic performance.

By Luke Whitworth

There has been plenty happening but, before we look back, let’s look forward.

Leaders Meet: Teaching & Coaching, an in-person member event, is just around the corner so, if you haven’t already, do check it out and register to join us at Millfield School in Somerset. We have some excellent topics on the agenda, including pedagogy & andragogy, non-directive coaching, coaching neurodivergent athletes, the language of coaching, complexity science and much more besides.

The day will be most relevant to anyone working with athletes on a day-to-day basis, whether in a first team environment or within the pathway. There’s just a couple of weeks left to register so don’t miss out.

Our Debriefs are designed to set you up for success. We’ll keep you on the pulse of contemporary thinking across the high performance space and provide members with the inspiration to engage with the variety of opportunities on offer through their membership. Do check out some of our upcoming events and virtual learning sessions to connect, learn and share with fellow members from across the globe.

And now, let’s reflect on the pressing performance issues of the day.

Virtual roundtables

March was a busy month for roundtables. From topic-led conversations around Sustaining Team Culture and the Influence of AI on Performance Programmes, to a Leadership Skills session focused on Building Persuasion and, last but definitely not least, part two in our series of learning around Wellbeing and what is having the most impact.

These are the insights that resonated with us most.

The potential impact of AI

We identified some of the enablers and outlined some of the key questions we still have around the technology.

So, where do we think AI can have a positive impact on our programmes?

1. Greater efficiencies: AI can be used to speed up processes and automate insights, such as in the case of scouting reports or player tracking. It can also help streamline workflows.
2. Deeper insights: there has long been a wealth of data in sport but often far more limited means of interpreting the numbers. AI can pick up that slack and even potentially unearth insights we haven’t yet considered.
3. Enhanced injury prevention & rehabilitation: we think AI can support athlete monitoring and overall health monitoring to better inform decision-making around training loads, future scheduling, and athlete development programmes.
4. A better tactical and on-field understanding: AI can simulate fixtures and help to deliver a better understanding of how to beat opponents with the most effective tactics, which can then be shared with coaching staff as they build a gameplan.

All sounds good, doesn’t it? However, we still have some questions that need answering. Have you explored and come up with answers to these in your environments?

1. How do we make AI work? An obvious question, but there’s no consensus. It leads to further lines of enquiry: who do we need to engage to make this work in terms of disciplines, personnel, and how will their perspectives be used to educate the collective? Who are your big AI stakeholders? AI mapping, one member noted, can be a valuable tool. What type of expertise do you need? There is some uncertainty over who might be the best profile of person to help with the internal development of AI use.
2. How do we set the right foundations? Have you implemented the correct data privacy and cyber security processes? How do you intend to educate your athletes and staff around its use? One attendee spoke of the need for a working definition of ‘intelligence’. Clarity is essential for effective interdisciplinary collaboration.
3. What could AI change? One of the most common issues is the ‘role replacement v role enhancement’ debate. How will the skillsets of roles in your environment evolve as the technology begins to take affect? One member suggested that the analyst’s role may shift from collation and interpretation to communication. Coaches will need to be provided with data literacy skills too. Teams will also need to be mindful of not losing the subjective human element, which demands human interaction rather than machine learning alone.
4. How do we measure the quality of data? How clean is your data? It’s a crucial question to answer when making data-informed decisions. If there are any issues then you will need to get your house in order first.

Why persuasion is an important skill in modern day leadership

How can you master the art of persuasion? We have some tips for you. Having good ideas is not enough. In order to change thinking and enact change, we need to be able to persuade people.

The Trust Equation

The equation is a conceptual formula used to describe how to build and elevate trust. To go into a big more detail, Credibility speaks to words and credentials and simply put, how authentic are we? Reliability is the perception of someone’s integrity,  are your actions connected to your words? Are you credible in how you present yourself? Intimacy refers to the feeling of safety or security in the sharing of information and how safe and secure others feel in sharing with us. Finally, Self-Orientation reflects an individuals focus and where it is directed – is it towards themselves or others?

Essential steps in mastering persuasiveness

There was lots of gold in this skills session but as we reflected on the essential steps to impact the notion of persuasion well, there were four steps to reflect on in developing your persuasion muscle:

1. Embrace feedback and recognise areas for improvement in your own field.
2. The consistent practice and conscious application of persuasion techniques – they help to refine your leadership over time.
3. There are easy, everyday wins that elevate persuasion skills, from how you position yourself, the level of status you reflect, to how you convey a logical thought pattern.
4. Just as athletes relentlessly refine their techniques and strategies to achieve peak performance, leaders must adopt a mindset of continuous improvement and adaptability to persuasiveness.

Additional reporting by Lottie Wright

Something a little different…

As many of you will know, we at the Leaders Performance Institute pride ourselves in exploring the world of high performance outside of the elite sporting context. With this in mind, we wanted to push your attention to some golden insights from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and their Director of Actor Training. To read more on their approach to elevating performance here and also how they’ve worked to redesign their curriculum here.

Skilbeck shared with us five factors that underpin their process to developing their talent. Are yours similar?

1. Breaking the constraints of habits: these habits have developed from earliest infancy, whether physical, mental, imagination or emotional. RADA believes these can impair an actor’s work.
2. Expanding an actor’s performance capacity: as a follow on from the above, actor training aims to break habits and expand technical, emotional and imaginative capacity. Lucy shared that what they’re training is how to be a human being and how to embody human experience in imaginary circumstance.
3. Managing fears and trauma: breaking habits can be a difficult process and can potentially being up fears or trauma from past experiences. RADA works with a psychologist who hosts sessions with students on resilience early in their training, that is both psych education and giving them strategies for managing what might be potentially overwhelming traumas. The psychologist is also working with the teaching faculty to develop trauma-informed teaching spaces and practices so that teachers know how to respond and the material is less likely to provoke overwhelming responses for students.
4. Reflective practice: RADA works with students on taking the observer position so that they can create some space from the sensation and the experience of the release. Students are encouraged to keep reflective journals.
5. Embracing failure: RADA talks a lot about embracing failure because they’re encouraging people to not to try and get it right and to allow failure to be part of one’s creative practice. Lucy shared that you can’t have a creative practice if you’re not willing to fail. You can only have a complacent practice because you’ll only try the things that you know will succeed.

Additional reporting by John Portch

Community groups

In March, our Performance Support & Science community group took centre stage.

With 2024 bringing new projects and streams of work, we looked into the pressing questions and topics that are currently occupying the minds of those in this group.

Some of these will look familiar. How are you trying to approach some of these issues in your environment?

Sustaining staff health & energy

A few different people as part of the group discussion alluded to the topic of staff energy and sustainability, from the lens of the performance support and coaching team. Some of the spin off questions referred to how do we best integrate support and what does that look like, particularly due to the intensity of competition and in some environments, where there is uncertainty.

AI is coming, so how do we prepare?

Firstly, we’d recommend revisiting some of the bullet points above on what came out of the conversations of this topic in one of our roundtables. A lot of performance teams are evaluating it’s possible impact and the input it could have into our worlds. Will you be an early or late adopter and do you have a clear strategy in place to ensure there is clarity and preparation for how you will use it when that day comes?

Are you collaborating with external practitioners?

Arguably the most common response from the group when it came to current challenges. Such is the nature of modern day elite sport, performance support networks around our athletes are growing, including independent specialists who are not employed by the organisation. The crux of the conversation was, if we are to work with them, how do we do it best? Or do we not look to collaborate with them at all?

Balancing long-term planning and short-term delivery

This is a constant battle for performance support teams, such is the nature of the work that takes place in this field. The group brought to the table the question of how others are finding the balance to ensure they are moving at the ‘pace of performance’ in the day-to-day environment, but a nod to the future exists when it comes longer-term programme planning. We also discussed how to keep senior and experienced staff growing as it can be very easy to slip back into the short-term mindset, thus stifling longer-term development opportunities.

A Human Performance article brought you by our Main Partners

By John Portch

“I think burnout is a runaway cousin of wellbeing,” said Dr Meg Popovic.

Last week, she hosted the second session of her three-part Performance Support Series for Leaders Performance Institute members entitled ‘Wellbeing – What’s Having the Most Impact?’ The focus for session two – by popular demand – was burnout: what it is and how one can prevent and manage it in sport.

The session began with a straw poll where Popovic asked attendees: what are the main sources of stress in your workplace? The results, which were collated in real time, were illustrative. The most common answer was work-life balance; second was workload; third was people and the workplace culture; and fourth was a lack of job security.

The results allude to a range of problems, and yet these stresses – which can lead to burnout – have been rarely discussed in elite sporting contexts.

“There is very little to nothing written about staff burnout in high performance sport, Olympic and professional sport,” added Popovic, who is the Senior Professional Sports Manager for North America at EPIC Global Solutions, the world’s leading independent gambling harm minimisation consultancy and a valued Partner of the Leaders Performance Institute.

“In sport, I think burnout is sometimes quite hidden or it just looks different in every person and you don’t know what to do to help.”

Over the course of an hour, she led a discussion on understanding burnout and its early warning signs before turning to stress management and the importance of supportive environments.

The five phases of burnout

Burnout is, as Popovic said, “a state where the employee feels exhausted emotionally and physically”. It is “often the outcome of feeling stress or frustration for a prolonged time” and “burnout can cause significant physical, emotional, psychological and spiritual damage to people”.

While sport is distinct from traditional workplaces, with unique time-sensitivity and performance pressures, Popovic distilled the stages of employee burnout into five phases that resonated with those members in attendance. They were:

1. The honeymoon phase: characterised by enthusiasm, high productivity, feeling invincible, and an individual being hyper-focused on tasks.
2. The onset of stress: there are early signs of fatigue and reduced performance.
3. Chronic stress: the individual is struggling to cope, suffers from persistent anxiety and detachment.
4. Burnout: an individual experiences emotional and physical exhaustion, reduced efficacy and disengagement.
5. Habitual burnout: left untreated, burnout can lead to chronic health issues and emotional numbness.

The early warning signs of burnout

Popovic explained that phases two and three of employee burnout – the onset of stress and chronic stress – are preceded by a series of early warnings signs that we can all become attuned to recognising. They are:

Higher sensitivity – an individual feels or seems more sensitive than usual.

Reduced job performance – there may be signs that they are not able to perform tasks effectively.

Extreme thinking – an individual may become reliant on food, drugs, alcohol or gambling to cope.

Popovic conducted a second straw poll and, troublingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, attendees indicated that anywhere between 15% and 80% of the colleagues with whom they interact are currently experiencing burnout, in their view.

Preventing burnout strategy #1: navigating the stress cycle

Popovic presented two perspectives on preventing burnout. Firstly, that of Drs Emily and Amelia Nagoski as posited in their 2019 book Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle. They argue that we should recognise stress as a natural response to challenging situations. There are inevitable stressors and people will experience both physiological and emotional responses.

In Burnout, they suggest that individuals must go through the full cycle of experiencing and articulating stress in their bodies to effectively manage it. By acknowledging and addressing stress, one can navigate through the cycle and emerge on the other side with improved resilience and wellbeing.

As Popovic explained, the Nagoskis recommend:

1. Physical activity: regular exercise helps release stress from the body. Engage in activities like walking, jogging, or yoga.
2. Laughter: create moments of genuine laughter. As Popovic said, belly laughs can be therapeutic.
3. Crying: allow yourself to express emotions through crying. It’s a healthy release.
4. Physical affection: seek and give physical affection. Hugs, handshakes, or even petting a dog can help. The Nagoskis encourage people to build themselves a “bubble of love”.
5. Deep breathing: practise deep, intentional breaths to calm the nervous system. The Nagoskis see the practice of mindfulness as an important component of building emotional resilience. They also advocate for journalling.

In making their case, the Nagoskis highlight the distinction between ‘stressors’ – external situations or circumstances that trigger stress – and ‘stress’ itself, which they refer to as the internalisation of stress within your body. This process encompasses how your body responds to stressors and is a manifestation of the physiological and emotional impact of stress on an individual’s wellbeing.

All in all, the Nagoskis’ perspective is underpinned by a sense of compassion. They encourage people to understand the societal pressures and obstacles that contribute to burnout.

Preventing burnout strategy #2: the demand-control-support model

The second view posited by Popovic was organisational psychologist Dr Adam Grant’s ‘demand-control-support’ model. Grant said:

‘Demand’ involves making structural changes, which includes lightening a person’s load or redistributing tasks. He also feels that an organisation should address overtime and expectations of a person’s availability.

‘Control’ includes empowering people to set their own goals, equipping them with the skills needed to handle difficult situations, and giving them the freedom to work flexibly.

‘Support’ operates at a more systemic level. Leaders should foster an environment where requesting and receiving help is easy and it is, in fact, normal to seek assistance and discuss challenges.

Additionally, Grant emphasises the importance of celebrating small wins and tracking daily progress to help address burnout. He also advocates for redesigning job roles as part of an effort to foster supportive cultures.

Further reading:

Four Ways to Better Balance Winning and Wellbeing

If you are interested in joining the third session of this Performance Support Series with Dr Meg Popovic on Tuesday 30 April, sign up here.