The secret to a high-performance mindset
Mindset coach and psychologist Dr Jodie Lowinger shares tricks on how to reach your personal peak.
We can’t all be Ash Barty. Or Emma McKeon. Or Beyoncé, more’s the pity. But we are all equipped with our own version of the very same engine powering their incredible achievements: the human brain.
“Whether you’re a corporate CEO or any human being on this planet, we are equipped with the same neuroscience,” says Sydney-based author and psychologist Dr Jodie Lowinger, founder of The Anxiety Clinic. So if we all have the same hardware, does that mean we all have the potential to program our own software – in other words, coach our own minds – to allow us to become high performers in our own lives?
Well, yes, according to Lowinger, who has worked as a mindset coach for leaders within organisations including Atlassian, Google and Amazon, coached high achieving CEOs and shared her method with founders including Laura Henshaw of Australian health and fitness app Keep It Cleaner.
But it might take some work. And let’s be clear: this is not another irritating pep talk about having the same number of hours a day as Beyoncé, or just needing to “get up and work” (thanks, Kim Kardashian).
Exhortations to work harder or longer, parent more perfectly, exercise more frequently and #girlboss our way to the top are part of the problem. The worry that follows from comparing ourselves to others and driving ourselves to be “perfect” will certainly stop us from living what Lowinger describes as a “confident, fulfilled life” in which we can flourish and thrive.
The constancy of curated and perfected images on social media is just one source of stress; Lowinger also points to climate anxiety, global political instability and, of course, the pandemic as common external sources of worry.
“We are biological beings living in a chaotic, technology-driven, fast-paced world with an overwhelm of uncertainty,” she explains. It’s that uncertainty, and more particularly our innate discomfort with it, that leads us to behave in ways that are inconsistent with achieving our personal or professional goals, to put it nicely. Avoidance. Procrastination. People-pleasing. Anger. Defensiveness. Blame. Self-destructive drinking. Perfectionism. Just a few of the enemies of high performance, and the behaviours we often unconsciously default to when faced with our own internal worries.
Our brain triggers our fight-or-flight response when faced with any kind of fear, whether real or imagined. But Lowinger is at pains to point out how important it is to be kind to ourselves, and to understand that these feelings are due to the instincts that are part of our humanity. Our fight-or-flight response developed for the ultimate reason – on one view, we are all descended from the most neurotic chimps, who worried enough to survive – but those same prehistoric survival instincts may not serve us well on a day-to-day basis in 2023.
Getting to know your own particular set of worries is helpful: Lowinger suggests giving them names, like books: the I’m Not Good Enough story; the I Will Fail story; the I’m an Impostor story. These worries are common, but they hold us back. Lowinger’s Mind Strength Method – also the title of her book – involves looking inwards to understand our primitive fight-or-flight response and acknowledge the way it shapes our own behaviours, then developing a tolerance to the discomfort that worry or stress engenders in order to avoid those instinctive negative behaviours and, instead, create a space to choose a response which is aligned with our values.
It sounds simple and logical, but it involves being honest with ourselves and developing what Lowinger calls “the magnificence of mindful self-awareness”.
Lowinger has experienced the challenges of anxiety herself, growing up with a mother who was highly anxious for her whole life, after being born into the trauma and terror of World War II, and separated from her parents at the age of three while escaping from a Nazi labour camp. It wasn’t until her father died when she was in her mid-30s that Lowinger decided to leave behind her corporate career and focus on fulfilling her life’s purpose. Aligning with what gave her a sense of meaning led her to further study and to founding a practice with a mission of helping people to leave behind anxiety and find success.
“Any elite performer has a value of continual improvement. If they make a mistake they think ‘How can I learn from this?’ rather than ‘I have to be perfect to be good enough’”
Understanding high performance includes realising that anxiety is sometimes its twin. A high performer may be driven to work so hard by the fear of not being “good enough”, or the fear of making a mistake, or the fear of being “found out” as an impostor. Lowinger points out that this is not sustainable high performance, and that while this kind of self-flagellation might drive you, it can also lead to burnout.
In order to achieve true high performance, you must “master your mindset”.
“Any elite performer has a value of continual improvement. If they make a mistake they think ‘How can I learn from this?’ rather than ‘I have to be perfect to be good enough,’” she explains.
After identifying your own worries and the resulting behaviours, Lowinger counsels thinking deeply about your life values, and about the alternative actions that might better align with those values. The trick is being driven towards something positive, rather than pulling away from something negative.
“Clarity on the alternative pathway is empowering to us,” says Lowinger. “Understanding what gives you a sense of meaning makes it easier to stand up to the fight-or-flight instinct and realign your response. High performance is built around clarity on your values, clarity on your mission, your purpose, your strategic goals, and focusing on effort around those, and alignment to those,” she says.
Once you have this level of self-awareness, it’s about moving consciously out of struggle, your worry state, and into problem-solving mode for the things you can control. If you’re a sportsperson, that might mean forgetting about a losing match and competing in your next race or match in alignment with your values, which might be, for example, determination and grit. In a corporate setting, it might be realising you are saying no to an opportunity (publics peaking, anyone?) because of fear you won’t be good enough and deciding to say yes, to align with your value of seeking new opportunities and experiences.
This kind of resilience can be built, with practice. And with practice, it will become habitual. Lowinger herself still moves through the same thought process.
“How do I take myself out of fight or flight? How do I stop being driven by the ‘I should be more’ and ‘I should do more’ and bring myself back to the heart-driven pull and live with kindness and compassion? Also, it’s human to experience this, and so how can I make sure I practice acknowledging the emotions, too?”
Elizabeth Trotman, CEO of StudioCanal in Australia and New Zealand, worked with Lowinger along with her senior team.
“I think over the past few years there has been a significant awakening to the issues around staff wellbeing and the impact of stress and anxiety,” she says. “Whilst we’ve heard a hundred times before that we have to live in the moment, Dr Jodie worked with our senior team to identify anxiety as ‘worrying into the future’ and become more conscious observers of our thoughts. Self-awareness is key to change, and identifying habitual unconstructive thought patterns was a key step in recognising the futility of worry and developing healthier thinking patterns.”
Trotman was struck by a new understanding of the physical effects of stress and worry on our bodies.
“Once we recognise worry and anxiety as the causes, we can take healthy steps forward in our daily lives to minimise the impact,” she says.
Training your brain to overcome its own instincts using mindfulness is at the heart of Lowinger’s method. So should your New Year’s resolutions include meditation? Yoga? If you enjoy those practices and find them rewarding, then probably. But Lowinger is realistic.
“Sometimes New Year’s resolutions feel like you’re whipping yourself with your ‘not good enough’ thoughts. I think intentions of kindness and compassion to yourself and others is a nice way to start a new year. Maybe setting that intention in itself will boost your mood,” she says. “What does kindness mean to you? Maybe it means treating your body more kindly. Maybe it means connecting with your friends more. Maybe it means moving out of a toxic work environment and thinking about doing something that gives you more satisfaction in life. To find your voice and move into empowered action to give you more joy and fulfilment in your life is your right. What does that look like?”
Or as Beyoncé might put it: “Okay ladies, now let’s get in formation …”
This article appears in the January issue of Vogue Australia, on sale now.
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