Achieving healthy high performance at work
I was invited to write an article for PWC . It became the second most viewed LEAP blog in the period February 2019 to February 2020. It features in the top 50 pages of their London website. You can find it here
“The only constant in life is change”. Have you ever heard that saying? Apparently, it was a chap of the Greek philosophy type, called Heraclitus, who said it in around 500 BC. Can you imagine how little change there was then compared to now?
As we hurtle towards January, many of us are starting to get hungry for change, promising ourselves that next year will be different etc. Yet how many of us succeed in making that change? After all, we know it’s inevitable (thanks Heraclitus) and we can want it, crave it even, yet it can cause us so much anxiety.
In today’s world, change is a key feature of high performance. And high performance is the route to both personal and organisational survival. So our firms need to change to maintain its high performance and survive. And our firms need us to be the high performers and change with it.
And to be that high performer we need to be dealing with change with vigor and resolution. Embracing it as a new challenge, confident and capable of doing what is required.
It sounds like a lot of pressure, doesn’t it? And so it should, because it is.
However, being a high performer doesn’t mean we should cope with this change alone (I know as professionals we often think we are invincible, but we aren’t!). If our firms vision the change, they can buttress us with support to cope with the change that we are bombarded with. But this doesn’t always happen and can leave some of us (me included) burnt out.
I’d probably identify the biggest change in my life came when I left the law firm I had set up within a top 30 accountancy practice (the first in the UK to do so!). Not only did I leave the law firm and the accountancy practice, I also left my specialism in employment law and I left the legal profession. Why? So I can create the change I wanted to see by retraining as a coach, speaker and trainer to work with professionals, like you.
And how did I do it?
By putting one step in front of the other and trying and failing – many times. But from that my seven top tips to achieving healthy high performance in professional practice was born:
Prioritise sleep; don’t leave it to be the balancing feature of each day
Eat well; and by that I don’t mean volume
Move more; just a stretch at your desk every 25 minutes can work wonders
Maintain your mental fitness; brains (apparently) burn calories too and need nourishment so find what works for you (colouring with your kids/niece/nephew can work wonders!)
Know your vision; if you don’t know where you are going, how will you know when you’re there?
Control your workload; being responsible for your workload can seem impossible but it’s achievable and key to being a high performer
Balance high challenge with high support; being surrounded with nice colleagues is great but not the type of support I mean here. The support needs to be commensurate with the challenge you’re facing, and in these times of change can be immense, so sometimes you may need to engage experts outside your firm for this.
We can be the change we want to see in our environment but we needn’t go it alone.
If you’d like to find out more ask Vikki at Vikki@skylark.life
Vikki Pratley, StressLess Coach
About Vikki
After many years as a practicing employment lawyer and a founding partner of a successful law firm, Vikki suffered from burnout; recognised in 2019 by the World Health Organisation as being caused by chronic workplace stress that is not successfully managed.
Vikki was inspired to help others to be high performers without risking burnout so retrained as an ILM certified coach, ABNLP certified NLP practitioner, licenced practitioner of Liberating Leadership® and Pioneering Professional® and is the business owner of Skylark.
Vikki now works with professionals, through Skylark’s StressLess Clinic and with Clara Rose Consultancy as a career management specialist. From speaking or facilitating events or on a one-to-one or group basis, Vikki works with individuals and professional firms to help them successfully manage workplace stress, create sustainably high performing environments and excel through key recruitment choices.
Vikki has a wholistic approach to her work, always starting with the individual before equipping them with a tool-kit for success, including a mindset, key skills and, for leaders, a process.