Optimizing for a Better Life

[Music]

my journey

began with that question

how can i maximize my performance

while living this healthy

happy balanced life

i discovered i was asking the wrong

question

at hintsa performance our mission is to

help people live better lives and

consequently

perform better the company was actually

originally founded by my father dr

akinsa

about 20 years ago

my father was an orthopedic surgeon

fascinated by the capacity and the

adaptability

of the human mind and body

he was also a little bit crazy

about sports

he originally developed the hensa

philosophy in ethiopia

where our family lived in the 1990s

my father worked there as a missionary

doctor

but during our time there he also got to

work with

elite athletes long distance runners

for those of you who didn’t guess that

he worked with some of the best runners

in the world including hilah gabriel

celestia

he got to watch these runners train

he actually went training with them once

apparently he didn’t last that long

he watched him prepare for races win a

lot of races

but also face some setbacks

around the athens olympics hylo was

having issues with his

achilles tendon and it turned out he had

to be operated

so he flew to finland with my father

now my father was rarely nervous

but that was a pretty

high-stakes achilles tendon

what haila told him that day

stayed with my father for a really

really long time

he said doctor don’t worry

it’s just running

host her for a second one of the best

long distance runners of all time

about to get into an operation tells the

surgeon

doctor chill out it’s just running

running was hailey’s passion but his

identity

and his life was much much more than

that

based on his experiences in africa my

father developed a model that he would

then adapt to other sports

most notably formula one

to date hinsa drivers have won

a total of 14 driver championships

and 96 of the podium places in the past

five seasons

in finland we call that an okay result

we’ve learned something in sports

but today most of our clients

come from very very different

backgrounds

musicians politicians entrepreneurs

business professionals thousands of them

they come to us with that same question

how can i maximize my performance

while you know not sacrificing

everything

else

my father would tell them

optimize don’t maximize

many of us live unconsciously or

consciously in a way where we try and

maximize

every single area of our lives

we have demanding jobs and

it’s getting harder and harder

our work is more fragmented and more

fast paced than ever

an average office worker is interrupted

every 11 minutes

we check our smartphones every 6 minutes

and then after a long day at work we

come back home

and we want to be the parents or the

partners

or like the people that

our families and loved ones deserve

in our free time we run marathons

or do triathlons or crossfit

we climb mountains we play in a band

we study japanese or chinese or

python

we build our professional brand on

linkedin and

then we do these ted talks that’s by the

way

all stuff i’ve done

it doesn’t take you an expert to tell

that this

is unsustainable

when november morning about seven years

ago

my world went black i was

running down the stairs when i fainted

i rolled down the staircase woke up at

the bottom of it

with my head bleeding my first reaction

oh my god where’s my laptop

i realized i needed help

i was working for a global management

consultancy at the time and

you know what i actually loved my job it

was exciting

it was fun it took me to crazy places i

got to work with really cool people and

solve

super complex problems

the downside was that i was sleeping on

average

four to six hours per night on work days

and you know desperate to recover it

over the weekend

i would you know run marathons before

now my exercise consisted from you know

running from one airport terminal to the

other with my luggage

my diet was the contents of a minibar

i did a thorough benchmarking study and

found out snickers bars was the best

there was

that’s not an ad by the way nothing paid

there

i wasn’t feeling super well

in fact i wasn’t really feeling much at

all

this is me nine months after my burnout

i’m running in the desert i have

12 kilos in my back and 250 kilometers

to go

it was my first ultramarathon

i finished but

more incredibly i was back at work

with the same employer working full-time

and i was really really happy

so what changed i wasn’t aware of using

any hints

methodologies but i did call my father

and we had a chat

he introduced me to the model

that he called circle of better life

it’s a holistic model of human health

and well-being

consisting of six elements in the outer

circle

physical activity which is more than

just

exercise it’s your daily activity

nutrition which is

well always individual but

there are certain basic rules which if

we

all of eight would probably be feeling

much much better

sleep and recovery is as much about the

nighttime

recovery as it is about the daytime

recovery

and i think i’m not wrong to say that

there seems to be a little bit of an

epidemic

around that element

biomechanics is a guy that looks like

he’s doing yoga

it’s actually linked to one of the

leading causes of absenteeism

lower back pains musculoskeletal issues

incredibly important for athletes as

well

mental energy is the element that i

find really interesting it’s

basically our capacity to deal with our

daily life and environment

mental energy is about identifying what

gives you energy and what drains your

energy

and coming up with strategies to manage

your energy throughout the day

finally there’s general health which is

basically the outcome of your decisions

of the choices that you make

in all of those other elements it’s

interconnected

if one of the parts is of balance the

system breaks down

it doesn’t function optimally

in the middle you have the core

the core is what drives you

it’s what you’re really optimizing for

it also had the biggest impact on my

recovery

my father broke down a core into three

questions

do you know who you are do you know what

you want

and are you in control of your life

really hard questions

what are the things that you value in

life

who are the people that you value

are you living your life spending your

time and your energy according to those

values

what are your long-term goals i mean

you’re

working really hard climbing up that

ladder but

was that even the latter that you meant

to climb

maybe you wanted to build your own

and then finally who controls your life

what are the things in your life that

you can and on the other hand

cannot impact

i returned to work with a different

agenda

i was reminded of the reasons i joined

that company in the first place

and i was more aware of the things i was

no longer willing to compromise

i also had a key realization

better life leads to better performance

it’s not something you try and maintain

or achieve on the side

it’s the foundation for sustainable high

performance

now the science behind this is actually

really really interesting

for decades we’ve known that athlete

performance

is closely linked to their training load

to their recovery

nowadays we’re actually able to measure

the impact

of your work style and your lifestyle on

your cognitive performance

we can see the impact of your sleep of

your physical activity

of how you structure your day how you

switch off

on your creativity on your ability to

solve complex problems

on critical thinking on collaboration

connecting with other people emotional

intelligence empathy

all of these are unique human skills and

those unique human skills are becoming

increasingly important

as our lives and our work changes

optimizing for a better life begins by

identifying

the gaps that you have across those

elements identifying the biggest levers

for a change

setting yourself some goals identifying

your boundaries

but ultimately it is about small things

done consistently well

it’s about your daily habits

and optimizing an environment to support

those habits

we all know that one person who seems to

have everything under control

in reality the people who seem to have

the best self-control

actually deployed the least

instead they modify their environment to

avoid having to make self-control

decisions in the first place

can be small things like you know having

that water bottle next to you

or getting your gym gear ready for the

morning

for me personally it was about sleep i

mentioned earlier i was sleeping on

average four to six hours per night

now i would of course like you to think

that that was because i was working so

hard

the truth is i was stuck on social media

all my friends were asleep when i got

home from work so i would you know

stalk them on facebook nowadays

it’s netflix i get back home from work

and i’d like to watch an episode or show

to relax and detach i watch the show

and you know by the end of it in the

bottom right hand corner

there is that little thing that says

next episode starts

in three two one

and suddenly you lost two hours of sleep

and there’s also that you know skip

intro to make it even easier

i’m gonna let you in a little secret it

is

possible to turn off

autoplay

and if you’re like me you delete the app

and you encrypt your passwords

sustainable change is about modifying

your environment

creating an environment to support

change making the

good decisions a little bit easier to do

and the bad decisions a little bit

harder to do

that being said progress is never linear

eight percent of the people actually

achieve their new year’s resolutions

why life happens

and hence that we talk about four modes

in the normal mode

we try and make the right decision most

of the time

however sometimes we’re on mission

it can be a tight deadline or a project

for the parents of young children it can

be a baby

in mission mode what we do is we define

the minimum we’re not willing to

compromise

and we implement hacks to stay afloat

if you can’t get eight hours of sleep

take a power nap

if you can’t get to the gym get off the

bus a few steps earlier

and walk to rest

the important thing to remember is that

your mission mode

should not become your normal mode

and it should be always followed by

recovery

our brains and our bodies need daily

recovery it’s when our muscles grow

but it’s also when our brains

consolidate memories

create connections come up with new

ideas

idle time is not waste of time

finally there is renewal

renewal is moments like these it’s when

you step back

it’s when you reflect on those harder

questions

what are you really optimizing for and

are you headed in the right direction

better life leads to better performance

it’s not something you maintain on the

side it’s the foundation

for sustainable high performance

it’s the outcome of the small things

done consistently well

and that being said none of us is

perfect

but like my father used to say we can

all try to be

a little bit better one day at a time

thank you