Ben MortonLeadership Trainer, Coach and Speaker

The secret to elite performance revealed

27 Jun 2026 · 1 min

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1:18

In this excerpt from his talk, Ben Morton explains that sustained elite performance hinges not on relentless hard work but on intentionally built recovery periods. He credits Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz’s article “The Making of a Corporate Athlete,” which shows that elite athletes achieve success by alternating high-demand phases with genuine recovery, creating a stress‑recovery rhythm that builds capacity and enables peak performance when needed. Morton argues that many leaders neglect this planned recovery, leaving them vulnerable to burnout and reduced effectiveness.

Chapters

But I've learned by getting it wrong that pushing hard only works if you deliberately build recovery around it. And that idea comes from two people who I want to credit: Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz. In their brilliant article, The Making of a Corporate Athlete, they make a compelling argument that the real enemy of high performance isn't hard work. It's the absence of recovery. Loehr and Schwartz studied elite athletes and discovered something that changed how they think about high performance in our world. You see, elite athletes don't just train harder than everyone else, they recover better. They work in deliberate cycles, periods of high demand followed by genuine recovery. And it's that rhythm— stress, recovery, stress, recovery— that builds capacity over time and more importantly allows them to perform when they really need to. And in my experience, in many cases, often maybe, for leaders, there's no planned recovery.