There are certain conversations that make a framework click so clearly, you can’t quite believe you hadn’t been using it all along. That’s how this conversation with Darren Barrett felt for me.
Darren is an executive coach, and he’s also deep in the world of sports psychology right now, studying what allows athletes to reach peak performance, what gets in the way, and what recovery actually makes possible. As we started talking, it became obvious almost immediately that the parallels between athletes and leaders are not just interesting. They’re incredibly useful.
Because what athletes understand, and what so many leaders forget, is that performance is only one part of the cycle. Athletes train, perform, and then they recover.
Leaders, on the other hand, are often expected to perform continuously. To be “on” all the time. To show up prepared, clear, energetic, resilient, emotionally regulated, and strategic, without much conversation about what it takes to sustain that over time.
And that, to me, is one of the core tensions of leadership right now: We ask people to operate at an elite level, but we don’t always design work in a way that supports elite performance.
The Problem With Living in Constant Performance Mode
One of the reasons I wanted Darren on the podcast is that I knew he was making a connection my listeners would immediately feel in their bodies. Why? Many leaders do not have a performance problem. They have a recovery problem.
They may also have a training problem, in the sense that they’re expected to show up in high-stakes moments without having intentionally built the mental, emotional, and physical conditions that allow them to do that well. But recovery, in particular, feels urgent.
Because if you look at the lives of many high-achieving leaders, there is an enormous amount of output and a startlingly small amount of replenishment. Think about it…
The board presentation happens. Then the all-hands. Then the reorg conversation. Then the investor meeting. Then the difficult feedback conversation. Then the email backlog. Then the strategic offsite. Then the family obligations. Then the next morning starts before the nervous system ever really came down from the day before.
It is no wonder so many leaders feel like they are constantly operating at half-capacity while also somehow giving everything they have. Darren’s framing helps us see the problem more clearly. It isn’t that leaders are weak or failing. It’s that many of them are skipping two-thirds of the cycle and expecting one-third to carry the entire load.
Training Isn’t Just for Athletes
When Darren talks about training in the context of leadership, he’s not talking about another certification, another workshop, or another concept to intellectually understand. He’s talking about the kind of readiness that comes from practicing before the moment that matters.
Athletes don’t arrive at a competition and decide to think about their form for the first time. They don’t discover their mindset under pressure by accident. They build routines, habits, and capacities that support them when the stakes rise. Leaders need to think about this, too.
Training might look like preparing intentionally for hard conversations instead of squeezing them in between meetings. It might mean building emotional awareness so you know what stress does to your decision-making before you’re inside a high-pressure moment. It might mean working on communication, presence, or focus in lower-stakes environments so those capacities are available when the stakes are high.
This is part of what struck me most in our conversation: so much of leadership is treated like live performance, when in reality, it requires practice. And yet many leaders move through their weeks with almost no protected time for reflection, rehearsal, or strategic thinking. They are asked to perform without having space to train.
Recovery is Not a Reward
I think this is where the conversation landed most deeply for me: Recovery is not something we earn after the work is done; it is part of the work. That’s such a different way of thinking about it, especially in cultures that still quietly glorify depletion.
Many leaders have absorbed the belief that recovery is optional, indulgent, or something that belongs at the edges of life if there happens to be time left over. But what Darren makes clear is that recovery is not a nice-to-have if you want sustained performance. It is the thing that allows performance to continue without collapse. Athletes understand this instinctively. Their recovery is part of their preparation for the next effort. It’s not disconnected from excellence, it supports it.
What would change if leaders thought about recovery that way?
What would change if the walk, the pause, the workout, the time away from stimulation, the moments of true mental release were understood not as stepping away from leadership, but as making leadership possible? I think a lot would change, not just in individual energy levels, but in how people think, relate, and decide.
Stress Narrows. Recovery Broadens.
One of the most useful parts of Darren’s sports psychology lens is how clearly it helps us understand stress. Stress, anxiety, and over-arousal don’t just make leadership feel unpleasant. They affect performance. They narrow perception. They shrink perspective. They make people more reactive, less creative, and less able to access complexity.
That landed immediately for me because it connects so directly to the broader research many of us already know from positive psychology and neuroscience. Under threat, our focus narrows. Under chronic stress, we become less flexible. We miss options. We over-index on danger, urgency, and control. And in leadership, that matters.
Because when people are leading from a constricted state, they often don’t realize it. They simply experience themselves as “busy,” “under pressure,” or “trying to keep up.” But the quality of their presence changes. Their listening changes. Their emotional availability changes. Their ability to see the broader system changes. Recovery doesn’t just help people feel better. It helps them think better. It restores choice. And to me, that is one of the strongest arguments for taking it seriously.
The Business Athlete
I loved Darren’s phrase “business athlete” because it gives leaders a different identity to step into aside from machine, martyr, or someone who is supposed to be endlessly available and somehow unaffected by that: A business athlete. That is someone whose role requires preparation, performance, and restoration. Someone who understands that the body and mind are not separate from the work. Someone who knows that consistency at a high level is built, not squeezed out through sheer force of will.
There’s something very liberating in that identity shift. It reframes discipline, too. Not as the ability to grind without stopping, but as the willingness to support the full cycle. That may mean training when no one sees it. It may mean recovering before you think you “deserve” it. It may mean being more intentional about where you want your best energy to go. And it may mean telling the truth about how unsustainable constant performance mode really is.
What Performance Looks Like in Practice
As Darren and I talked, I found myself thinking about how many leaders would benefit from simply mapping their current reality. For many people, the answer is lopsided. The performance slice takes up nearly everything, and the other two are expected to somehow happen around the edges. But once you can see that imbalance clearly, you can start to change it.
You can begin protecting time to think before high-stakes moments. You can stop scheduling every ounce of your energy into visible output. You can begin treating recovery as a strategic investment rather than an afterthought. And perhaps most importantly, you can notice what it costs you when you don’t.
If this conversation resonates, here are a few simple starting points to reflect on:
- Notice where your week is over-indexed on performance and where training or recovery may be missing entirely.
- Before a high-stakes moment, ask yourself not just “Am I prepared?” but “Am I physiologically and emotionally ready to show up well?”
- Treat recovery as part of the performance cycle, not something separate from it.
- Pay attention to what stress does to your thinking, your tone, and your presence.
- Experiment with the idea that more output is not always the path to better performance.
None of these are revolutionary on their own. But they begin to change the relationship leaders have with their own energy, and that changes a great deal.
The Leadership Shift Beneath the Framework
What I appreciate most about Darren’s work is that underneath the sports psychology, underneath the framework, underneath the practical insight, there is a very human invitation to stop treating yourself like a machine and assuming that leadership excellence means endless availability. It calls us to take seriously the reality that how you prepare and recover shapes how you perform, and perhaps even more than that, to recognize that you have more agency than you think.
That was one of Darren’s strongest points, and I agree with it deeply. So many leaders are living inside inherited models of success that they have never actually chosen. The moment they begin to question those models, something opens up.
And that is the conversation I want more leaders to be having. Not just, “How do I work harder?”
But, “How do I work in a way that allows me to be excellent and well?” To me, that is one of the most important leadership questions of our time, and it’s why I’m so grateful for this conversation with Darren Barrett. Because it reminds us that performance is not the whole story: train, perform, recover. The leaders who understand all three will not only last longer. They’ll lead better.
