Connor Beaton argues that managing stress is the key to peak performance. When cortisol and adrenaline flood your brain, they shut down deliberate thinking. Elite performers regulate their nervous system through simple practices: deep breathing, speaking at half speed, pausing before decisions, and sleeping on big choices.
Today, we're gonna be talking about the key to peak performance. So whether you're looking to perform in the boardroom, or the bedroom, or in conflict, or in your artistry, whatever it is that you are looking to perform better in, I'm gonna be talking about one of the main keys to peak performance. But one of the main keys to peak performance is how you as a man deal with stress. And there's a certain— Process that you can deploy to actually produce better results. What happens when you get stressed? I think this is a very important part for us to start with. Your brain obviously floods with a whole bunch of stress chemicals. And honestly, you just start to lose the ability to think straight. Think about any type of conflict that you've had with your significant other or past or present. And what you'll notice is guys usually say something like, I just lost it, or I froze up or some version of that. Well, that's those stress chemicals moving through the brain, jacking up your nervous system, moving you into a sympathetic dominant state or a stress response state within your nervous system. And these stress chemicals like cortisol and adrenaline will flood your brain and activate the part of your brain that kind of takes the main part of your critical thinking and your deliberate thought more offline. So that's your prefrontal cortex. So you can think of it as like this inverse correlation where the more The more stress that you have, the more stress and duress that you're under, the more that you have these stress chemicals flowing through your body, like cortisol and adrenaline. There's a tipping point where they can be productive for a period of time, but then they reach a tipping point where all of a sudden they are counterproductive. There is something that separates people who are good and great from those who are excellent. And the people that are elite and excellence in terms of performance, regardless of what it is, are the people who are able to regulate their nervous system under stress and duress. So it's not that they don't have fear, they don't get scared, or they don't have worry or anxiousness, or, you know, they don't get thrown off their game once in a while, but it is that they are able to, at the times that matter most and the times where the most stress and duress seem to be forcing itself onto them, that they're able to still regulate and ground. So regulating your emotions leads to peak performance. That's number one, regulating your emotions. They were able to get on stage and perform. They were able to go into the boardroom and have the meeting. They were able to make the really high-stakes decision. Yeah. From a grounded and emotionally regulated place. This is essential. And the reason why so many men, maybe some of you watching this, are struggling in your performance in some parts of your life is because you are not emotionally regulated. There's a deep level of presence and a deep level of groundedness and a deep connection to your inner knowing or your gut, however you want to frame that. So, How do you slow things down? This can be as simple as taking a very deep breath before you respond to something. I've actually given men the assignment, if you feel like you resonate with what I'm talking about here, and you have a very fast internal state, your inner voice is quite quick, then I've given a simple exercise to a lot of men, which is speak at half pace. You know, for a week or two, speak at half pace, Walk at half pace, engage with people at 50% your norm, breathe slower, take less breaths per minute. All of these things, what you're doing is you are conditioning your body and your brain to operate in a new way. And when you do that, you give yourself more space. So that's one thing you can do. You can also start to inject a pause before making a major decision or, you know, You know, having a sort of rule that you don't make any big decisions without sleeping on it. There's some good research around that. So slow is smooth and smooth is fast. And as Viktor Frankl said, there is a pause between stimulus and response, or between stimulus and response, there is a pause. And the more that you can execute that pause and you can condition yourself over and over and over and over and over again to have a pause in the way that you speak, in the way that you think, think, in the way that you breathe, in the way that you walk, to have a spaciousness to your experience, the more you are going to be able to access peak performance. It is almost counter to what most people think, but that pause and that slowing down allows us to access that not only unconscious competence that I was talking about before, but it allows you to access unconscious mastery. Because there's a certain level of knowing that comes along with unconscious mastery. And yes, it has to be backed up with a tremendous amount of practice and effort that has gone into the past, but these are the pieces that are necessary. So leave your thoughts below. I hope this has supported you. And if you take anything away from this video, it is slow down and start to pause. See you next time.
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