Meet Jon Pitts, Performance Specialist at Revelesco

John, welcome to the team at Revalesco. It's really exciting to have you on the call today. We're just going to get to know you a little bit better and talk to you a little bit more about what your superpower is and how you actually work with our CEO and founder clients at Revalesco. Um, can you start by introducing yourself and tell us about what you think your superpower is?

Yeah, sure. Um, so John Pitts, uh, I am a human performance consultant, performance coach. I'm very privileged to have spent the best part of 30 years working in many different high-performance and elite sports environments. Very fortunate. I've done 5 Olympic Games with 3 different countries, worked in Formula 1 and across a whole host of different sports. So it's been a very exciting time. And now I'm keen to bring that to Revallesco and see how we can help there. A superpower? Horrible question. I think for me, it's about— I have an ability, I believe, to be able to understand people in a very simplistic way. When we're trying to understand people, it's important to be able to take a helicopter view of what's going on. So not just the individual, but the factors, the situational psychology around them. Having been in lots of environments as a psychologist where you're placed in between the needs of a team and the individual, you have to balance and tiptoe along a line where you want to obviously maintain everybody's trust. And so the ability to take a helicopter view and examine all the factors that are influencing things, behaviors and performance are really quite critical.

That's super interesting. And you mentioned Formula 1 Red Bull, and I also happen to know you were Roger Federer's coach as well. Could you tell us a little bit more about the kind of work you did with Formula 1 Red Bull Racing team and also Roger Federer? So the problem that they had, how you solved it, and the kind of impact it had with them.

With Formula 1 in particular, what people perhaps don't necessarily know is that yes, you have the drivers, you have the car, but behind that you have a traveling management team of about 56 people all going to the racetrack 25 times a year next year. So that's a significant continual drain on human resources. And then behind them you have 1,000 people in the factory. So Looking at the technology on the car, the car has about 250 sensors which provide data in real time as to what's going on. And I thought to myself, well, if you can, if you can get that kind of information about the car, you know, what can you get about the people as well? And my original conversation with Christian Horner actually sort of centered around how they'd spent 20 years making the car go as fast as possible, but now the human holds the car back. So how can we understand the integration between the human and the technology. And we got to look at all different aspects such as the pit crew, for example. And at the time we had the most successful pit crew as well. So it was an overall perspective of all the different people factors contributing to Formula 1 performance.

And what do you think was one of the most interesting data points that you were collecting on the humans that were having the biggest impact on their performance?

I think it's, it's this misconception we have around stress. We're designed to be stressed. We, you know, it actually helps us to some degree. to improve our resilience, you know, and our performance. You know, we stress athletes to train them. So I think what was interesting was the factors that were the problem were when you look at things like stress or poor sleep, when it becomes cumulative. And that was critical. You know, it was understanding when individuals were moving from sort of a normal period of rest, then a period of stress. You know, we have these peaks and troughs, but it was when people were moving to a state where They really couldn't recover. They couldn't break the cycle of poor sleep or, or stress. So, and fatigue. So that was really quite an enlightening moment. And that's the area we focused on to try and help people. And so, for example, with the pit crew, we were the first pit crew to actually interchange members of the team depending on their readiness to perform on the race day.

Okay. What do you mean?

Well, so typically these guys are mechanics, right? They're not, they're not performance athletes or weren't. They certainly are a lot more now. And so we were looking at their sleep and their recovery during the week. So typically the pit crew arrive on a Tuesday, so they build the garage, they put together all the marketing suites and everything else out the back, they build the car, and by Sunday, which is race day, they've gone through at least 6 days of significant hours of work, significant hours of stress, especially if the car at some point has gone off the track, so they've had to rebuild it. So it was understanding, you know, which of them were recovering well enough during the week to the point where We would choose the, the right members to be involved with the pit stop because obviously it's quite a critical cognitive moment.

And were you choosing them based on the data that you were collecting, let's say on their wearable watch, or was it also a conversation that you had from like a psychological?

It's a mixture of both. So within the garage, there's the race managers as well. You're getting a feel for what's going on. So there's definitely those kind of human instincts and those conversations. But we were also using wearable devices, yes, to track their sleep and Bearing in mind, you know, a lot of these races are in different time zones, so they've often flown. So understanding the impact of jet lag and travel on those key moments. And really the shift is in the culture in terms of understanding that, you know, we need the best for the team, the outcome for the team.

And just while we're on this point, now as you're working with CEOs, is it, do you advise that CEOs are measuring what their high performance zone is looking at? But do you also look at their entire teams? Is it just their Do you recommend that everybody in the whole business should be looking at this? What do you think?

There's 2 factors to that. You've got your high-performing executive teams. There's plenty of research out there at the moment that fundamentally says that, you know, one of the most important parts of leadership is to demonstrate well-being and performance. So what you do as a leader is important. And then by extension, as a leadership team, if we're talking about collaboration, team effectiveness, and cohesion, And the wider workforce element is really important because human capital costs are a massive blind spot to organizations. Things like sickness absence, presenteeism, retention, and stress and burnout— they're significant impacts on the bottom line. So, you know, it's directly making this a business case to the bottom line rather than it just being about some sort of welfare support mechanism.

You mentioned absenteeism and presenteeism, and this is a term that's been coming up a fair bit. Can you explain what they mean, absenteeism to presenteeism?

Yeah, so absenteeism is days off work, and we're never going to eradicate everybody having the occasional day off work. And it's in part, part of rest and recovery that people do have that. However, people's desire and motivation to be at work and to want to do the job is critical as well. And there's so much evidence around a positive mindset improving our ability to manage immunity to bugs. I've seen that across so many different sports. Freediving is an example where the mind control is what helps them to be able to spend so much time underwater. Presenteeism though is when people are at work but they are not at 100% and they are in this cumulative state of sleep debt or stress. And so they're not functioning effectively. So it's not good for them, but it's also not good for the organization in terms of productivity as well. This is the blind spot because up until recently, how do you measure presenteeism? But again, through wearable devices now, we can, we can understand when people are not performing in their kind of ideal performance zone and potentially, you know, need some sort of help to be able to get them back to where they need to be. We know people are working longer. We know that technology is having an influence on how we sleep, how we think, how stressed we are. So we need to do something about that. And organizations, I believe, have a huge role to play in how society tackles this. Technology is part of our lives. We need to understand how it influences us and how we can work better with it. What the organization gets— can we keep your talent? You know, can we, can we minimize stress and burnout by understanding what's going on?

So that's how you would look at it across the business. What we've got coming up, especially before Christmas, is 5 slots for CEOs to work with you on a specific high-performance coaching program. And so can we go back to looking at what you would do one-on-one with someone? And can we start by— I'm sure everybody wants to hear about Roger Federer.

Yeah.

Do you not want to talk about him?

No, no, no, no, it's all right. No, no, it's all right.

Go on. Oh, okay. Okay. I was gonna say, yeah, Roger Federer is obviously one of the most world-renowned tennis players, and he's a really interesting case study to look at from a performance under pressure point of view. Can you tell us a little bit more about the work that you did with him? So what were some of maybe the challenges and the work you did and the outcome?

Yeah. So tennis is a game of massive swings of momentum. So I need to recognize, and, and this is where I guess you'd put this in the resilience category, is that I need to recognize quickly when my opponent is on top and I need to adjust my approach. So it's very simple. It's all about keeping the ball in the court, but obviously from a tennis perspective, you're trying to keep that ball as deep as possible towards the baseline, which prevents your opponent from scoring a winner.

Mm-hmm.

So we were talking about this and he said, look, you know, from a mindset point of view, I need to shift from Plan A to Plan B. And so it really resonated with me because we can't always perform at our best. You know, no athlete trains 100% every day. And yet in the business world, we ask ourselves to get up every morning and be 100%. You know, the majority of an athlete's time is spent training and practicing with the odd event, you know, factored in. In the workplace, we're performing every day with very little training. So as a mindset model, it's, it's really quite good to understand and be able to understand yourself better. It's self-awareness. It's, it's situational awareness that, do you know what, I'm not at my best today, but how do I, how do I still achieve good enough?

Okay. So from having worked with CEOs and founders before, what's the biggest light bulb moment for them? When they start working with you, why should they act now? And what's the biggest benefit they're going to get after doing a 6-week program with you?

Yeah. Okay. Well, I think first of all, this is, this is a very saturated marketplace. There's a lot of executive coaches out there. And I find this really interesting. You know, high performance is used as this massive term, and yet there's a lot of people out there talking about it who've never actually really been in a high-performance environment. I bring a significant exposure and experience in high-performance environments, which are Not for everybody, frankly, but from a CEO perspective, what we've got to really do is build that kind of, that self-awareness. We need to do— left to their own devices, teams will become dysfunctional quite naturally. That's what happens in high-performance environments. Equally, you won't find many top performers who aren't surrounded by a support system of people continually there to keep them where they need to be.

Right.

Where chief executives are at is they need someone to keep them on the track. And if they start to come off the track, we nudge them back on the track. So to do that, what we have to do is build a platform of self-awareness, of knowledge to keep you in place. And then if you start to come off it, that's then when we intervene. But it's a continual process. Constantly pushing for more isn't going to happen at a one-off team day every year.

Yeah, that's so interesting. John, thank you so much. That was really interesting. And yeah, we'll talk to you soon.

Brilliant. Thank you.