How Consulting Business Owners Maximize Creative Performance

Did you know it’s difficult to create a long-term sustainable and successful business if you don’t take care of yourself? Today’s episode Michael Zipursky brings our guests to provide value on self-care to reach our full potential. Today’s guest is Vanessa Bennett, CEO of Next Evolution Performance, who shares her wisdom on how consulting business owners maximize creative performance. You should know when your most productive time is so you can manage your energy well. Self-awareness is the essential key in today’s discussion. Let’s squeeze more of Vanessa’s wisdom and learn more about how we can maximize our performance.

—

I am very excited to have Vanessa Bennett joining us. Vanessa, welcome.

Thank you so much, Michael. I’m excited to be here.

I’ve been looking forward to our conversation. For those that aren’t familiar with you, your work, and your company, you are the Cofounder and CEO of Next Evolution Performance where you help businesses build high–performance teams using neuroscience. We’re going to want to get into all that. You’ve worked with all types of clients in many different sectors.

You also have a very interesting model that you’re pursuing with your business partner Alex and the team of how you’re building out the business. There’s a lot that we want to cover here that you are going to find interesting and helpful in their businesses. Let’s go back in time a little bit and look at how you got started. Tangential to that, you were or maybe you still are a group fitness instructor.

Yes, I am. That was the little play job that I had while I was at university. I thought, “I want to be doing that while I get my grown-up job.” Sure enough, I was able to juggle both. To this day, I still teach a couple of classes a week.

We have worked together but I did not know that. I was like, “I‘m going to have to ask Vanessa about this.“ You’re very health–focused. From what I know of you, it seems to me like it’s a priority in terms of your health and well-being. In terms of fitness, how does that play into one’s performance in their career and business? How do you look at the connection between those two?

It plays a massive role. If people can show that they can take care of themselves and look after themselves physically and mentally, then surely that goes a long way to their leadership skills. I don’t think anyone wants to report to anyone looking tired and exhausted and looking like they can’t get their stuff together. I’ve always felt that and I’ve always had this idea even through my corporate career that I was able to be way more productive when I was physically healthier.

If I was exercising, I could keep my classes going, running, weights, and all of that kind of thing. If I could keep that going, then I was way more productive. I would get way more done in less time with less effort. I was a bit more delightful to be around as well. It’s a massive plus when you’ve got people that are working in high-performance roles.

My wife says that I’m more enjoyable to be around once I got my morning exercise in. I get that. Playing the devil’s advocate here or the person who’s joining us and going, “I know I should be exercising more, taking better care of myself, or eating better but it’s hard. I‘m busy. I have young kids or old parents. I‘m stretched.“ What do you think about that? We all have so much going on in our lives typically that health is often an area that tends to get put to the side. What has your approach been to make sure that it remains a priority and gets done?

I have the mindset that I can’t take care of others unless I take care of myself. I will always be my number one priority. Therefore, I can be the best that I can be for others around me. That’s for my family, clients, and friends. When you approach it like that, it becomes a priority. It goes in the diary first. It’s not something that I squeeze in around the edges. It’s in the diary first, and everything else needs to fit in around that. Sometimes it is harder. We need to go easy on ourselves.

Sometimes I do need to give a day. If I’m on planes traveling for work and things like that, that can be harder. I also factor in that where if I’m going away, I always take my exercise gear, or even to the point where I’ve had some days where I’m quiet. I might only have fifteen minutes between meetings if I’m working from home. That sounds crazy but I’ll be in active wear from the bottom. I’ll put a jacket on the top and I’ll get like, “You’re going to do 10 minutes of weights done between one meeting and then 20 minutes of weights done between another meeting.” Sometimes we have to break it up to get it done.

Exercise is great for all the neurotransmitters in the brain. It's great for the concept of neurogenesis, which is the production of new neurons. Click To Tweet

That mindset or that belief of taking care of yourself first so that you can take care of others reminds me of being on an airplane. They talk about the oxygen mask coming down and making sure that you put it on yourself before you put it on others. When did that develop for you that not only was that a belief that you had but a practice that you had in terms of living it? Is that something that has been with you from much earlier in your life? Is it something that you developed in more recent years?

I’ve always been active. I’ve always known it intuitively but now, we have so much more research that shows that exercise is great for all the neurotransmitters in the brain. It’s great for the concept of neurogenesis, which is the production of new neurons. We know now that we can think more strategically and creatively when we move. If you look at the MRI of the brain of someone that has been sitting still for two hours versus someone that has been up and moving, one looks dead and the other is creating new connections and all of this thing. We have it intuitively but now we’ve got a lot of research to prove it. That’s consolidated. I believe in that.

I do promise that we will get into more consulting and business stuff in a moment here. That mindset of fitness and health is such a critical part of being able to create a successful business. In many cases, it does get put to the side. It doesn’t get the attention that it deserves but it’s very hard to create a long-term sustainable and successful business if you’re not taking care of yourself, which is why I wanted to spend a bit of time with you on this subject. I know that it’s one that not only do you ingrain into the work that you do but you also live it in your life.

You mentioned a tip in terms of making sure that you prioritize putting time to exercise or take care of yourself into your calendar. That’s also an important step that I take. If something is not on my calendar, it doesn’t get done. Make sure that you keep that as a priority. What other tips are there? Is there anything else that you do from a productivity perspective or a health perspective that you think, “This is something that I do. It works well. More people could benefit from this.“ Is there anything that comes up for you?

Create a routine. The more that you have to think about it and the more that you overthink it, the less likely it is to happen. I’ve got things, even when I’m teaching my classes. I teach on Thursday at lunchtime and Monday night. I don’t even think about it. It has to get done because it’s on the timetable. There’s a lot of energy that goes into the actual logistics of getting it done. You can take out that as much as possible and make a routine out of the non-routine. When I travel, I’ll stay at the same hotels so I know how the gym works, and I don’t have to give energy to that when I’m trying to work that out. That saves as much of what we call cognitive energy. That’s a big part of our process with our clients as well. Save as much cognitive energy as you can, and make it as easy as possible.

That’s such a great point because it’s so true. If I transfer that concept over to consultants doing their marketing to build their business, people spend so much time thinking about how to market, what to say, and what might go wrong instead of reaching out to somebody or picking up the phone. So much time is spent thinking. That time could be spent in taking action.

In the work that you do with clients, I know you have a lot of understanding of the time versus thinking concept or time to think versus action. What else is going on inside people’s minds? What else is happening there that you think is important for people to recognize or that they might benefit from if they better understood some of the mechanics of that concept?

There are a few things. There’s how you structure your days to make things easier for you, and then there’s also the mindset side of things. Interestingly, on the physical side of things, when you are physically healthy, chances are your brain is thinking more helpfully as well. It builds psychological capital. It’s more inclined to be able to think about what’s the best that can happen out of reaching out to this potential client versus what’s the worst that can happen.

If I start with the structure first, one of the things that we talk about with our clients is that we only have four hours a day of heavy cognitive energy available to us. Do the math. We’re working a lot more hours than that. I’m the last person to say we should be working fewer hours. I love working, so I’m not going to say that. A lot of our clients love working. A lot of our clients are lawyers and people like that. If you went in there and said, “Work fewer hours,” they laugh you out of it. We don’t do that

It’s not the time that we work. It’s the way that we spend our cognitive energy while we’re working. If you’re not spending it correctly, you could take 6 hours to do something that could only take you 4 hours if you were using it correctly. That automatically frees up time. We do what we can to help people understand that if you’ve got 4 hours of heavy cognitive energy, that’s a time when you do your heavy cognitive work.

If you feel that reaching out to clients or potential clients is quite heavy for you, then that would be the time that you would do that. Don’t waste that heavy cognitive energy time doing something that’s light to you. Make sure that you’re doing the light stuff during your light time. If you maximize those four hours and get the heavy cognitive work done, you can get a lot more done in less time with less effort.

 

That’s a structure-of-the-day situation. You’ve got the mindset side of things. This is a whole different conversation but we have so many limiting beliefs. Our brain is wired for defense. It’s not wired to do anything amazing. That’s why it’s quite easy to hack, which is good when you understand it. If we can understand where these limiting beliefs come from, why we have them, what even they are for us, and they’re different for everybody, they generally come down to a “will I look stupid” psychological fear.

We can get people to understand that and then flip this mindset, especially when it comes to building a business. When I first started in the business, I remember leaving my corporate job going, “I’m 95% sure I’m onto something here and I’m 5% completely wetting myself. I’ll take those odds and we will give it a go.” There are so many of these fears and limiting beliefs that can kick in. Know that they’re there but we can’t give energy to them. We need to make sure that we’re focusing on what’s the best that can happen. Have this mindset of adding value.

One of the big reasons I do what I do is that when I worked in corporate, I saw so many people working in a way that was very busy but not necessarily productive. Not only that, there were a lot of people getting sick and suffering burnout. There were a lot of sicknesses that didn’t need to happen. I’m OCD about helping people be more successful but also without burnout, mental health problems, sickness, and all of these things. When you think about it, burnout is overspending cognitive energy.

People think, “I’ll do something on the weekend that will stop me from getting burnt out during the week.” That’s part of it but if you spend your whole weekend recovering from feeling exhausted from the week, you’re not doing the week right. We need to systemically change the way that we operate during the week while we are at work to make life easier for us. That’s how we structure it. There’s a mindset around it. How do we make sure that we’re coming from this idea of adding value to people?

I find that fills my cup when I’m reaching out to other prospective clients or clients that are already in my network to re-engage. It adds value. I want people to have information that they wouldn’t have had if it wasn’t for us. I want them to ideally implement something that they wouldn’t have implemented if it wasn’t for us. If they end up deciding to engage with us, that’s great. If they don’t, that’s great too.

You mentioned a whole bunch of things that are extremely valuable for people to double–click into and spend a bit more time thinking about or at least observing how it overlays on top of their schedule and activities. You talk about the difference or distinction between heavy cognitive load or times for heavy work and times for lighter work.

I know that the people joining us are probably thinking, “On a typical day, when is the heavy time? When is the light time?“ Is it more like an AM or PM type of thing? Does it depend on the person? What are you seeing across the research and the work that you’ve done with clients so that people can start to think, “When should I be doing the stuff that is a bit heavier or harder for me as opposed to the easier stuff?“

Everyone is different on this one. The world is a bit more skewed toward morning people because there typically are a few more of those. In the research, depending on what you see, about 60% roughly of people are morning people. About 20% that are the neutrals is a bit behind that. You’ve got 20% of people who are your classic night owls who should work on a different continent from where they are. The world is skewed to that but then some people will have four hours in the morning, and then they’re fairly useless in the afternoons. Some people will have two hours.

My most productive time is probably from 9:00 AM until 11:00 AM, and then I get another burst after lunch. That’s why I tend to exercise at lunch when I can because I’m not cognitively great at that time, so I may as well go and move. That turbocharges my brain for the afternoon so that I get a lot more done with those hours of power as we call them. That’s just me. We can help people to keep a log over a few week periods. It’s like, “How did you feel at the end of that hour? Would you say that you felt more productive? Were you like, ‘My mind is wandering a little bit.'”

We’ve got this perception that we should be working evenly throughout the day, and that’s not neuroscientifically how it works. Let’s not beat ourselves up for not being as productive at certain times as others. Once you can tap into those particular hours, then you can start to think about what work you should be doing during that time. You might have clients that are cognitively harder than others.

Is there a way that you can try to be playing your diary so that you’re seeing them at certain times versus other times? Knowing what work is cognitively lighter for you so that whenever you go, “I’m a little bit spent but I can still probably do that,” then you can still get productive by getting stuff done that’s not taking a lot of energy from you. If you start to implement that, you can probably get somewhere along the lines of an extra 2 to 3 hours of effective time per day. It’s not managing our time that’s the issue. We need to manage our energy.

When you are physically healthy, it builds psychological capital. Click To Tweet

I love that. Much of that is at least beginning with being self-aware, noticing how your body, your mind, or your energy is going, and then not fighting it but leaning into it and making the most of it. Let’s now go to around 2016. I believe that’s when you started your company.

We rebranded in 2016. We started in 2012. In 2016, we were rebranding and started to work on our messages and all that stuff. We’re in business now. We need to try to behave like grownups.

Talk to me about that. What was the difference between starting in 2012 and then four years later in 2016 deciding, “Let’s step up our game.” Give me a bit of a before and an after. What were the main changes or things that caused you to have that mindset of, “Let’s level things up.”

I’m a corporate girl. I didn’t know whether I was even going to like consulting life. It was a big thing to leave that big cushy corporate job. I knew I wanted to coach and help people in this space but when you think about it, high-performance coaching ten years ago was still fairly embryonic, and it wasn’t as much of a thing. I was up against that as well. I was quite lucky I met my now business partner, Alex. At that time, she was working in the UK. We were very much aligned with what we were doing, so we teamed up.

The more that you do it and the more that you get success, the more you realize, “We’re in business. I’m doing it.” Whether that was part of me that was a little bit more like, “Let’s see how it goes first,” I don’t know but then it was like, “We’re in business. People are loving this.” We changed our name to Next Evolution Performance because when one of our large corporate clients was selling us internally, they already had some mainstream global leadership work that they were doing. They were selling us internally as the next evolution of leadership coaching. We went, “We like that.”

We did more on the research side of things. We were like, “That fits in nicely with us.” That was when we rebranded. You go, “Things are going pretty well.” It was probably around the pandemic when things exploded for our business. Everyone was worried about mental health, leading teams through hybrid, and all of this stuff that happened. We were ridiculously busy but we didn’t want to start putting on salaried coaches and all of that kind of thing.

We needed to take the business to the next level so that we could get it out there further but we suck in terms of systems and processes. I’m not at one with technology either. I had to go against that. We knew that we needed to scale, get better at what we were doing, and get better systems and processes. We are good with humans and human performance, but we’re not so great with business and business performance. That was when we had more questions than we had answers. We were like, “We need to step this up.”

When you left the corporate world, and you and Alex co-founded the company, how did you go about getting the first few clients for the business?

From my existing network. It was by design and a lot of hard work. I was in sales. I was Head of Sales for a global mutual fund company based down here in Australia and New Zealand. From that, I had so many contacts. I’ve always been in sales. I knew all of the salespeople from a whole other bunch of mutual funds, a lot of investment banks, and a lot of insurance companies. I’m very lucky to have had a wide network to start with. I tapped into my existing network because a lot of my contacts had grown up, and they were all now heads of sales. I tapped into that existing network and started there. That got the ball rolling. I never looked back from there.

For those who might be in a similar position who may have already been consulting for a while but never leveraged their network, or they have forgotten it over time and not paid much attention to it, what’s the approach that worked best for you? Was this as simple as sending an email to somebody and saying, “How are you doing? What’s going on? Here’s what I’m doing now. I would love to reconnect,” or do you do something different?

It was a lot of catching up with people as well like it was ten years ago. That was what people did back then. We got together face-to-face and did it old school. It was generally emails. I would reach out to people and say, “This is what I’m doing now.” I also put a question there, “I would love to pick your brains on X.” I was blown away by how people were willing to support me. I didn’t get anyone going, “I’m too busy to give you half an hour of my time to help you.” That wasn’t a thing.

 

I filled the diary. I was lucky because sales were not something that worried me because that was my background. I knew the process. I knew how to do that, so that didn’t bother me. I went, “You have to get out there, meet people, and see where these conversations go.” They would either go, “That sounds pretty great. Let’s do something for our team,” or it was like, “We don’t need anything like this but maybe for later. Have you spoken to so-and-so?” You talk to one person and end up getting another five people to speak with. That was powerful back then. That was all of the chaos because I didn’t have any great systems, processes, follow-ups, and all that stuff. I did make sure that I leverage my existing network quite well because that was all I knew and it worked.

With a background in sales and spending so many years in sales, you have no problem reaching out to people and having conversations. You are confident on that side. What do you tend to see in others around you or those that you know who don’t have that same level of experience and track record in sales? Where do you think the big opportunity is for people? What are they not doing that they should be doing? Where are they making mistakes?

Having a system is a starting point. You have to reach out to people. You need to do that. You can’t overthink that. You need to reach out to people. Have the mindset of you’re not selling. You are adding value. People are fine when you’re adding value to them. What’s the worst that can happen? It’s a numbers game. If someone doesn’t find that what you have to say is valuable, then someone else will. Have the confidence to think of it as a numbers game but adding value. If you can think of it that way, then you’re not overthinking the phone call, the email, and everything. The more that we overthink, that’s when things start to go awry. Don’t spend cognitive energy on overthinking. Get out there, add value, and get that done.

You start to allude to this a little bit but I would love to go a bit deeper into the chapters of the business and the evolution of your company. You and Alex co-founded it. I‘m wondering about the progression of the team. What you’re exploring more is around licensing and so forth. Walk us through it. If it’s the two of you from day one, what does that look like as you move forward in the months and years ahead? What changes were made? Take us to where you are now.

Structurally, it was just us. I found that I was needing an assistant. We have to practice what we preach. I kept a log of everything that I found heavy that I had to do. When you first start, you’re doing everything. I kept a log of it. That was probably the first thing that I went to. I need someone to take care of all my admin, logistics, travel bookings, and all of this stuff. I did hire someone for that quite early. I probably should have done it even earlier.

My advice to people is when you are not sure if you can do it, do it anyway. Probably if you think you can’t do it, do it anyway. The quicker that you can get all of that admin stuff off your table, it’s so much easier. That was probably the first thing. We started to toy with the idea of having other coaches. We did have some coaches that came and joined us but the model wasn’t right. They were also new in the scheme of things. We spent more time trying to help them on the business coaching side. That’s what we wanted to help them with.

Since finding Consulting Success, now we make it so that if people are joining us, they have to do your momentum program as a condition of joining us because it’s such a great and succinct way to be able to get them up to speed on that side of things. We help them with the coaching and all that stuff. Everything is very specific to us. We had some coaches that started working with us that did not go well. It sucked the energy from me. I found that hard. We have to practice what we preach. This is not working. We needed to pull it back.

It was Alex and me again. We now have someone up in Singapore who’s amazing. We met her. She runs her business and then she does a lot of our overflow work up there, which is fantastic. It’s great to have a resource up in Asia. That helps us manage time zones a little bit better as well. We have had another coach start with us in New Zealand but we now think we’ve got the model right. If it’s a new coach, we have a model for them. They need to go through your program first.

We’re now in a position because of all the streamlining that we did in terms of productizing our business. We productized our workshop. We grappled with this whole idea of how we wanted to still be tailored but we needed more processes. There’s a real tension there. We had to make sure that we got that tension between still staying tailored for people but having the bases of everything that was much easier to piece together off the shelf. We did a lot of work productizing in all of our workshops.

To be fair, Alex and I didn’t think that we would ever have coaches working with us again. It wasn’t until we went through all of these systems and processes to get our scale working in a way that we put our fees up significantly. We’re now better at managing our pipeline. We got our CRM functioning well and all of this stuff. We can still stay tailored but our proposal templates and business development process have been shortened, which has been fantastic. It freed up so much capacity.

It wasn’t until we went through that and particularly the productization process that we found that we’ve got way more capacity for ourselves now. In addition to that, that then put us in a framework where we went, “We could probably license this to other coaches who are already running great coaching businesses but are interested in adding neuroscience and less interested in reading 3,000 academic papers on neuroscience.”

You need to reach out to people. Have the mindset of not selling. People are fine when you're adding value to them. Click To Tweet

We can package that and make that available for other coaches to pay us a monthly fee, which is lovely because we want to build this great coach community where we can all leverage from each other and learn from each other. They’re already running a successful business. That way, we’re going to retract other successful coaches. That’s the model that we went to. We would never have thought to take on any more coaches after we have been burned so badly previously to the license.

In every mistake, learning experience, or blowup, there’s a lesson inside of that. When you say that things didn’t go well when you first brought on these coaches, it sounds like it was at a time when you had not yet fully productized some of your systems or offerings. There wasn’t as much structure. It certainly was not as streamlined as it is now after everything that you’ve gone through.

If you could add a little bit more color and detail, when you say it didn’t go well, what didn’t go well? Looking back with the benefit of hindsight, what do you think the cause of that was? For somebody who might be entering that phase where they’re thinking about building up or adding to their team of those who not only will work inside of the business in terms of admin, design, or content but somebody who’s delivering, help us to see what was going on there. What were the lessons that you learned from that?

Looking back, we take full responsibility for that because we probably weren’t as organized as we could have been in terms of being able to therefore say, “Here’s the clarity in what we’re offering and how we go about that.” We didn’t have as much clarity for ourselves, which meant it was very hard to provide that clarity to other people starting as well. The kind of coaches that we want and what characteristics we need them to have, we probably weren’t as clear about that as probably we are now.

There was a whole lack of clarity on our part in the systems and the productization, which wasn’t there. There were a lot of things that we didn’t have in place before we went, “We want more capacity now. We want to take on more coaches.” We should have freed up more capacity with ourselves first by getting all of our systems, processes, and productizing in a far better position to be able to have a great offering for other people.

I’ll try and summarize this or add some clarification. Is it correct in saying that at that time of version one, you were bringing people in who you wanted to help with delivery and other aspects of the business but the materials weren’t necessarily created for them at that time? You had some stuff in place. You’re bringing people in. You need to train them but you’re trying to train them as materials are still being created.

As opposed to version two, when you did this the next time, you already had the systems, the documents, and the structure. You’re able to bring people in. The whole onboarding, experience, and training are so much easier because you’re putting them into saying, “Here’s what we’re going to take you through.“ It’s all organized. Your attention can be on supporting them through that as opposed to trying to create and manage all these different plates at one time.

There are still changes that we make that we still tweak along the way. Things feel okay for now. Instead of feeling like we’re spinning a million plates at the same time, we now feel like we’ve got some things that we are more in control of when we make things better or tweak a process or something like that. We’re not making holus-bolus changes anymore.

You have the core team, the four of you. Walk me through the thought process of adding a bunch of new people. As you’re continuing to grow, it sounds like the decision is not to bring on more full-time people into the mix but rather potentially look at licensing. For those who are thinking through that as well, why is that the path that you’re more interested in taking in terms of licensing this content, the knowledge, and expertise that you have as opposed to adding on more full-time people or even part-time people to grow the team internally?

Alex and I grappled with that. We had to think about the role that we wanted to do as well. I didn’t leave corporate to then just run a business. There are a lot of people whose goal is to make themselves redundant so the business runs on its own. They sell it and off they go. That sounds great in theory but it didn’t stick well with us because we love delivery. We love presenting. We love facilitating workshops. We love seeing people implement and get great change. We love one-to-one coaching. We love team coaching. Those are all the ways that we love to do what we do.

If we were to bring on other people that would do the work for us, then that would mean that we have to bring on people who sell, or we do the selling ourselves. While I don’t mind doing enough selling to get my book of clients full, I don’t want to be just doing that so that then I feed other coaches. That whole salaried model of bringing people on that way was never going to work for us based on the fact that Alex and I love coaching, presenting, facilitating, and all of that.

 

The only way for us to bring on capacity was to say, “Here’s a productized version of what we’re doing. Here are all the tools that you will need. If you’re already running a great business and you want to add this on, then this is an effective way to do it.” Other people are still getting their clients, running their businesses, and being successful at that. That’s allowing us to also be with other great successful coaches. We agreed that we can do this because we didn’t even know in terms of how we were going to scale. We thought it was going to be by bringing on a bucket load of coaches who would be salaried. We would have to go out and feed them. That didn’t excite us.

We were like, “How do we scale?” We were looking for different ways that other people had done this previously as to how you get the message out there to more people because we think that what we’re doing is very important work. It is an important message that we do want to get out there wider. We can’t do it alone but we still want to do it. We were stuck in that little conundrum there but we feel like we’ve got a lot more clarity around that now, which is great.

This is such a powerful example but there is no one way to do something. I love that for you guys. You’ve both identified that you enjoy doing the work. You want to continue delivering, being a part of that, and not removing yourself as so many business owners talk about. You’re finding a way that you can still accomplish that but still continue to make and have a greater impact beyond what you’re able to do yourselves. That’s exciting. I hope it’s a good example and demonstration for others to know. As creative as you are, you can find a model that’s going to work for you. Often it’s going to be a hybrid or a blend of a more standardized model. This is a great example.

I want to also ask you. When somebody goes to your website, you have what’s called the Energy Credit System. You developed this framework that has three parts to it. The whole goal at the center of it is optimal performance. Can you talk for a moment about the three parts that create this system? How have you found having this framework or this diagram to be helpful for you in business?

Our whole framework is around neuroscience, even more specifically around this idea of cognitive energy. A big part of relieving burnout is understanding how to manage cognitive energy much better. We put this three-pronged process together, which means that to have optimal energy and optimal performance, there are three aspects to it.

There’s the physical side of things. What can we do physically to be able to promote our brain function? I’m not focused on how everyone should become an Olympian or look a certain way. What can we do physically so that we can promote brain function? That’s not just fitness and nutrition. It’s natural light and your environment. Are you working in an office that’s too cold? Do you have to commute in rush hour? Is there anything that affects your physical being?

We got the mental side of things. We need to have the foundations of a performance mindset in place. We talk a lot about psychological safety and accountability. Often we see that in businesses, large and small, accountability is low. You get the whole, “I would have done my bit but I didn’t get my bit done because so-and-so didn’t get their bit done.”

The next thing you know, we’ve got all this last-minute dumping on people. People get stressed because they have to do things on short notice. That’s frustrating. A big reason that people are spending what we call these energy credits is frustration. We have the mental and emotional side of things as to how we bleed energy credits and don’t even realize it.

We’ve got the neural side of things, which is how we hack into our brains and how we structure our days, weeks, months, and years better. That’s taking holidays over the longer term but it’s also how we structure those days for those four hours of cognitive work and all of that thing. When you put all these together, people are always like, “How do we get more energy?”

The first thing is you need to stop spending it unnecessarily. Imagine that we have 100 energy credits in a day. We can replenish them but most people overspend. The first thing is to stop spending unnecessarily by structuring your days well, having the right mindset, and having psychological safety and accountability in your businesses. You can then start to go to a more advanced performance mindset. That’s when we love working with people on this. Targets have gone up 20%. How do we get excited by that rather than freaking out by it?

That’s that opportunistic can-do mindset. You’re creating new neural pathways and all this stuff. We do a lot of that but to be fair, over the pandemic, we have had to go back to basics from accountability, psychological safety, and all of that kind of thing. When you use all of those together and understand each of those for both individuals and also teams, then you can start to optimize energy. When you optimize energy, that is your currency.

When you are unsure if you can do it, do it anyway. Probably if you think you can't do it, do it anyway. Click To Tweet

Many people say, “I need more staff.” You don’t. If your existing staff is coming to work every day with energy being about 6 out of 10 on a scale of 1 to 10, the last thing you need is more tired staff. You need existing people that you have to get the energy levels up much higher. They’re getting more done in less time. They’re more delightful to be around. They’re more accountable. They’ve got more of a can-do attitude. That’s when you lift the high-performance culture. When we understand the Energy Credit System and how to maximize that, that is how we optimize performance for people.

How does the graphic or the visual or the framework itself manifest? How are you using it inside of the business? Is this something that you’re actively giving presentations on or talking to clients about the three different parts? I‘m wondering. Oftentimes people see a graphic like this or hear about the importance of developing a framework or a visual. I’m wondering how are you applying it to your business and where you find it to be most effective.

It’s on the website. They have generally seen it by the time that we have a conversation with them. We have a 45-minute performance call, which is when people are interested, we discover a little bit more about them and their needs and ask questions about all of that, which is great. We use it as part of that. We would say toward the end of this, “This is our approach. We can help you. Is that something that you would like to hear more of?”

We only touch on it. We would probably bring that up and share that slide in that performance call. It would be two minutes and no more. It’s enough to give them confidence that we have a system around this, “Here’s our system. We apply it differently for everybody because we want to make sure that it’s focused and tailored to your needs. We are good at this. This has taken us a lot of research to look at. It has taken a lot of practice and putting it into practice with clients. This is our system. We might apply it differently but we have a system.” That gives them confidence.

Before we wrap up, I want to shift into a little bit of a lightning round. It will be short questions here. I‘m wondering, over the last 6 to 12 months, what is one challenge or big learning that you’ve had or that you’ve experienced that has made the business stronger? Looking back, what’s something that you’ve gone through that was a challenge but you’ve now overcome it? It was a learning or an experience but looking back on it, it’s like, “We’re ahead because we went through this.“ Does anything stand out for you?

We’re working with you. Consulting Success has been fantastic. We have had that community there, which has been great. It’s going through the process of getting your message first. It’s going back to basics. One of the biggest things we have taken from you is this idea of imperfect action. It’s like, “Just start.” I say this with my clients as well. I probably have to practice what I preach as well on that one. We call it the ta-da list versus the to-do list. Many people spend cognitive energy going, “What’s next on the list?”

I had this exact conversation with a client. He has made good progress. He’s probably about 75% of the way there on a few things that we have been working with together. In his mind, it’s binary. Either it’s 100% done or it’s 0% done. We would need to focus on where we are making lots of progress along the way because that then gives us a sense of accomplishment and momentum to keep going.

I got this idea of being perfect action. We are by no means done. It’s something that has never been done because you would need to keep tweaking. At least now, we’re at the stage where we are tweaking, which is great, and being mindful and open to that. Getting the systems and processes in place to scale and free up capacity has made a massive difference to our business.

That’s fantastic. I appreciate you sharing that. I wonder about books. I know that when you’re not reading research papers and things of that nature, you’re probably reading or listening to some books here or there. In the last year or even six months, is there a book? It can be fiction or non-fiction. Is there anything that you’ve enjoyed reading or listening to that you might want to suggest that others take a look at?

I would love to say that I read a lot of fiction but I don’t. Even on holidays, I’m still probably reading some neuroscience, research, or something. I love it. I do the odd fiction here and there, which I do enjoy. I do enjoy Liane Moriarty‘s books from the fiction side of things. She’s a great Australian author. I probably don’t read as many business books as I used to.

People like Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep. That’s a pretty well-known book. There’s another book now called Life Time. It’s all about circadian rhythms by Russell Foster. That goes to show that we do need to make sure that we’re working with our circadian rhythm because of our whole health physically and mentally. It’s almost like our body is a carefully orchestrated symphony. If we do anything like not sleeping right or something like that, then a lot of the systems and processes in our bodies don’t function as well as they could. They thought that was leading to a lot of health issues. That’s cool.

 

I’ve also finished reading Love + Work by Marcus Buckingham. He’s a great presenter. He does a lot of research on high performance as well. He does focus on that. We have to do things that we love. It doesn’t even have to be 100% of the time. It just needs to be at least 20% of the time. If we can get to that and focus on these things that we love, and that goes to what we preached as well, then that takes a lot less cognitive energy because your neural pathways are already set up for that. That’s a good book as well. I highly recommend that for a read.

The final thing that I want to make sure that we can put in front of everybody is how they can learn more about you, Vanessa, and more about Alex and what you both are doing over at your company. Where’s the best place for people to learn more about everything you have going on?

Our website is a good place to start. That’s NextEvolutionPerformance.com. From there, you can also go to our online training platform. We also have an online course, especially about our foundational work on energy credits, structuring your days better, and all that kind of thing. That’s on NextEvolutionEnergy.com. We are also very easy to stalk on LinkedIn, Vanessa Bennett and Alex Davids. We would love to see you on LinkedIn. We pump out a lot of free information. We want to add value. Hopefully, those posts are super interesting as well. Feel free to stalk us there.

Vanessa, thank you so much for coming on here and sharing powerful ideas and insights. Much of what you said resonates with me in terms of the energy, auditing that, and being self-aware. People not only will be able to increase their overall productivity but more importantly, in my mind, it’s you’re going to do more of the work that you enjoy or that you love and feel like, “I‘m making a lot more progress than I expected because now, I’m aligning myself in a way that is going to be better for me as a person and for what I want to accomplish.“ I hope everyone enjoyed this conversation as much as I did. Vanessa, I look forward to talking with you soon.

Thanks so much, Michael.

 

Important Links

• Next Evolution Performance
• Liane Moriarty
• Why We Sleep
• Life Time
• Love + Work
• NextEvolutionEnergy.com
• Vanessa Bennett – LinkedIn
• Alex Davids – LinkedIn

 

Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share!https://www.consultingsuccess.com/podcast