It’s great to be chatting with you today, Pearce. Can you tell us a bit about how you got into coaching and personal development?
I think in terms of the coaching aspect its a part of me that has felt natural for a long time. I was not always the best player on the team back when I played sports in school but I always enjoyed the teaching element. During my military time I was truly challenged on my ability to coach, lead, and teach. Personal development has been an interest of mine for a long time. Through the years of interest, self experimentation, and learning I came to realize how critically important the idea of resilience is to the wellbeing and performance of any team. Whether that is in sports, business, or military. We all have similar DNA and structures that drive how we think, feel, and behave, and at the root of most of our inefficiencies is often the same basic fears or inabilities to feel in control.
How do you know if someone is leaving potential on the table?
Everyone is a bit different but what I look at is the person holistically. Most people track for example business goals (KPIs, OKRs) but when we look at finding performance in our team we don’t often look outside of that. We look at how the individual is balanced from a physical perspective, psychological perspective, what their relationships are like, how they utilize their time, how they typically feel, and how they interact with their teams. Each of these categories has many subsets within them but the idea is that we need to increase the level of balance between them. What the military gets right is its ability to make people extremely tough and able to perform under pressure. What it gets wrong is how we can keep those individuals performing that task over many years. This is because many of these other areas of life are severely neglected and they do not have an action plan to fix this issue. So if someone is feeling like areas outside of their work life are slipping away, then we can generally assume they are leaving potential on the table. I have never seen this not to be true, whether in myself or in others.
What can Leaders do in order to fix this? It seems that burnout is an increasing issue.
Burnout comes in many forms, and the way we measure our fitness to handle situations that may induce burnout is our level of resilience. This is why we create a way for leaders to understand the resilience of their teams. This directly affects things such as retention, sick days, mental and physical energy, constructive communication etc. In order to get to the real way that leaders can assist their teams in building resilience is to foster authentic communication and lead by example. Authentic communication means that we do not look at expressing something negative as a negative, we see this ability as a strength, because it allows us to bring awareness to an issue. We cannot fix anything that we cannot see, and this is the first step to helping others build balance. What I aim to do is help leaders build this culture, and in turn, their teams operate better for them.
Recently we’ve been hearing of issues with productivity within some notable organizations, how do you approach this idea?
The best way to think about productivity is our ability to get in flow. This is also referred to as “in the zone” by athletes. It is a state of presence that removes outside distractions and lets us focus on a task. This is something that needs to be trained, especially in our current world where the amount of distractions is infinite and readily available. Our brains remain moldable even as we age, and so we can often get addicted to this era of constant communication and notification. So how do we train flow? There are multiple practices that allow us to create presence, there are also ways that we can specifically block out our time and set up a good environment when it comes to distractions. Then comes the deeper psychological issues of being able to set boundaries and clear communication with others. The reality is, if we want to be more productive, we have to continue to spend more time in these flow states. This is where our bodies and brains work most optimally towards accomplishing a specific task. Once we are aware of any productivity inefficiencies we can start to solve for them. Luckily these are also things that we can train outside of our job. You can train flow while washing the dishes…
What you’re doing sounds very beneficial to organizations, where are you going with the company?
We will continue to provide executive coaching to company leadership as well as training programs and talks in the areas of holistic health, resilience, team dynamics, and leadership. We are currently creating a platform that would be able to bring this level of coaching to entire organizations, as well as allowing leaders and individuals a chance to track and treat personal development and wellbeing, the same way we track business performance. Our goal is to change the way we look at how our teams perform. We have seen massive savings on personnel, increases in revenues and productivity, very significant decreases in markers such as stress, inflammation, and addiction. Our belief is that we not only have to adapt to our modern world, but that we need to consciously evolve.
How can people get in touch with you and learn more?
Right now we are quite limited on the number of clients we can take on, but if there is interest, anyone who is serious may send an email to Pearce@builttoevolve.com with some ideas of what they are looking for and we can go from there. We often work with HR and C-suite Executives to assist them in accomplishing their missions.