In this Olympic-caliber episode, Lee Povey, Founder of Lee Povey Coaching, shares how he helps leaders and high-achievers understand how best to motivate, lead, give feedback, and empower their teams to incredible growth and performance.
You will discover:
– How to recover effectively and quickly
– How you can use sport physiology to organize your week for optimal performance
– Why high-performers need an outside voice to help them slow down
Episode Transcript
Scott Ritzheimer
Hello, hello and welcome. Welcome once again to the secrets of the high demand coach podcast, and I am here with yet another unbelievably high demand high performance coach. It is the one and only Lee Povey, who is a high performance leadership coach specializing in working with founders and startups. As a former elite cycling athlete, athlete and Olympic Development Program coach for USA Cycling, Lee profoundly understands what it takes to lead at the highest levels. Through coaching hundreds of world national and Olympic champions, Lee has gained invaluable experience developing world class leadership and people. He breaks down the human experience in a relatable way, giving tips, skill sets and valuable mindset insights, allowing us all to perform like Olympians, while retaining a strong focus on happiness and longer term fulfillment. Well, Lee, I’m so excited to have you here. I let you know ahead of time. I’ve kind of been nerding out on Sport Science recently, and so when, when we saw, I saw that you were coming up, I got very excited about this conversation. So welcome to the show. Glad to have you here. I want to, before we jump into I want to hear a little bit from you. How did you make the leap from the world of sport to the world of founders.
Lee Povey
Yeah, thanks for the introduction, Scott. I hope I can live up to it. It sounded wonderful. How did I make the leap? Covid is a simple answer to that. So my program got halted during covid. The Velodrome I was working out of here in LA got closed, and I’m sitting there thinking, do I wait a year or two years, or however long it may be before everything’s open, or do I move to something else? And I’d already been my kind of us at the end of my coaching career, from the point of view that I was less interested in the physiology and much more interested in the psychology and the culture and how we create environments for people to excel. That was the stuff that was really exciting to me. I listened to a podcast from a leadership coach. I didn’t even know that existed. I knew consultancy existed, but I didn’t know a leadership coaching existed. Listened to a podcast from a leadership coach. My wife’s a psychotherapist. We’re watching a TV program billions. There’s a performance coach on that. She looked at me and said that that is what you should be doing. And I was obviously listening to this podcast exactly the same time, and I agreed. And while we went
Scott Ritzheimer
Fantastic, it was a fascinating show as well. All right, so one of the one of the things that’s really struck me about the sport science and kind of our world now, of founders and coaches, how many similarities there are, right? How many of the principles and patterns show up? They look different, but the same thing’s under the hood, near driving things, and one of them that has really fascinated is this idea of kind of distinct or quasi distinct phases of stimulus, right? Add a recovery and adaptation, and I will let you, because you’ll do this much better than I will. I’ll let you kind of describe what those three are, and then I’ve got a couple of follow up questions for you. So let’s start the world of sport. What is stimulus, recovery and adaptation?
Lee Povey
Yeah, so to get better at something, we have to provide a stimulus. Typically, that is an overload principle. So you have to do more of something. You have to, you have to do, you know? So let’s put it in weightlifting terms, because that’s the easiest way to think of it. So you either have to lift more weight, or you lift the same weight for more reps, or you do more sets of the same weight, and that’s the overload principle. So you are providing a stimulus to your body for adaptation. Then the adaptation doesn’t actually take place while we’re training. It takes place while we’re resting. So there has to be a rest period for your body to adapt to that stimulus that you’ve given to it. And then that’s where you have that recovery. And then you come back, and then you do it again. And each time you have to, you have to add a bit more overload if you want to increase so more weight, more reps, more sets. So I think that relates very well to the world of founders, which is where we have these intense, high volume work periods. Most of the people that I work with are capable of working 80 hours a week, and having a high output for that I work with, typically the most capable or smartest person in the room. And just like athletes, we face the same problem, which is their desire to train, or in this case, work overloads their own systems capacity to cope with that work. So if they don’t have a period of rest and recharge, they will eventually break down. So in athletic terms, if you just kept doing more work, so longer bike rides, more weight, eventually your body breaks down because you cannot recover quick enough. To do the next training session, and it’s exactly the same in work. Our brains just can’t recover quick enough. Our energy systems can’t recover quick enough. And that’s basically what we call burnout. And I think the days here, especially in America, of thinking that, you know, the Gordon Gekko model of our sleep when I’m dead, we know that that just is is rubbish. You know, sleep is the single most important thing I look at with anybody that I’m working with. If you maximize your sleep, you can maximize your health. So I think that’s a really good topic to bring up at a great starting question Scott.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, and this is exactly where I wanted to go with it as well. Because I think particularly for founders, many, if not all, the vast majority of them, were type A, super driven, maybe not so prone to listening to wisdom all the time, right? It’s not the wisest thing to go start something from nothing, you know. And so not, not, not wise, but capable of, of ignoring, you know, standard wisdom to do something that they really believe in. And many of them I see fall into the very similar trap of, you know, it’s not working. I’m not getting better. I must have to work harder and and I don’t want to, I don’t want to gloss over this at some point, that’s true, right? There are a lot of folks, if you’re listening to this and you’re into, like, the four hour, you know, work week, not what it’s actually written, but like, what you think that means of only working four hours, then you might just have to work harder. But for a lot of folks, working harder is not actually the answer. I’m interested to hear from you. What are some signs that that may be the case? What are some signs that we might not that, not that we’re not over, under doing stimulus, but we are underdoing recovery.
Lee Povey
Yeah, you make a really good point in the best athletes, founders that I’ve worked with, CEOs that I work with, they all have the same thing. They need an outside support to slow them down. Yes, they are so driven and motivated, and they have such a high capacity for work that they can take on more work than their system can handle, and they’ll just ignore it. I mean, I’ve got a broken ankle right now. I’ll still just ignore that and go for a bike ride like it’s just I’ll put that to one side, because I have something I want to do, and that’s the people that I typically work with. However, eventually it will catch up with you. It doesn’t matter how strong your willpower is. Eventually you’ll just start performing suboptimally. So you’ll see things like you just make more mistakes than you would usually make. Your energy levels just keep deteriorating. You find yourself, you know, most of the people I work with will do some kind of physical training as well, and they then they suddenly find they just can’t do that. They don’t have the enthusiasm to do that, the energy. They’re having more arguments with people. They’re finding it harder to concentrate. So when you start feeling these things, these are the clues that you need to take a break or you just need to restructure your week. So Simon Sinek has, which I think is a really healthy way of looking at this, is everybody should have some free time structured in their week where they just go and do something for them. And the purpose of that is it’s also a creative period, so you can’t put a block in, and that says creative. There and you look at your computer and think, right, I’m going to create something. Now our brains typically don’t work like that. What we need is free space to switch off and do something else, and then that allows some room for creation. So it might be a couple of hours a week where you think, right, I’m just going to go to a museum, or I’m going to wander along the beach, or, you know, for me, it might be going go kart, race it, and it’s doing something that requires some effort and some thought, but isn’t completely taxing your mental system, yeah, and it’s fun and it feels like a release for you. And I think that’s a really important thing that a lot of founders miss, because they think, Oh, I’m not doing work right now. Yet you are. You’re creating space for creativity, which is what’s going to fast track you getting where you want to go. So as you said, there’s this belief, especially in Western culture, that we have to grind. And I hate the word grind, because it’s not, it’s yes, we have to put the work in. And what I prefer is consistency. If you keep doing things well consistently over a period of time, it’s incredible what you can achieve. You know, we underestimate what we can do with consistency, and we overestimate what we can do with brilliant.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, I love that. It’s not about grinding, it’s about consistency. That’s so, so good. Here’s the other thing I love about the response that you just made there the couple of examples that you threw out on things that we can do for you. I have a tendency, and I see this in a lot of my clients. I can, I can. I have two modes, zero and 100 right, and and I have to really, really active. Work on 30 Right? Like, what is 30 look like? And or maybe 60, if I’m really pushing it, you know. But that that space in between right? And quite literally, for me, it’s walking right and going to a museum, walking on the beach, were both examples that you got. And there’s something about that, even if you were to look at like a heart rate zone, right? It’s not resting, it’s not full on, there’s just something about that space in between. Why is it so hard for high performers to get there and stay there?
Lee Povey
Yeah, so I’m a sprint athlete, so my world was maximum 45 second effort, and then 20 minutes rest and then go again. So I’m very much like you. It’s a difficult world for me to do things at a steady pace. However, there’s something interesting that happens to our brains when we do, say, menial tasks or low level tasks at a steady pace. It opens up our cognitive center. So this is going back to that, giving yourself room to think so simple things like putting laundry away or going for a walk and listening to a podcast. If I go for a walk and listen to a podcast, I’ll absorb it a lot more. And I’ll typically have to have my phone out, and I’ll be taking lots of notes, because I have lots of ideas. If I just lie down and listen to a podcast, I don’t have the same response, yeah. So I think there is something really important about walking in itself. Walking is also a great way of processing stress. So, you know, one of the things that we haven’t mentioned a part of this, is that stimulus is, how do you process what comes up from it? So there’s two very good ways of doing it. One is talking so venting. So the psychology of venting is when we are activated, we’re activated in our emotional center of our brain, so our amygdala. Think of it like the childlike, animalistic part of our brain, and things can seem very overwhelming to that part of our brain when we repeat them to somebody else, the cognitive, executive functioning part of our brain hears us talk about it and goes, No, that isn’t really as bad as I thought it was. Oh, now I can see some solutions here, which is why talk therapy, working with a coach is so important and so powerful, because you’re doing a lot of the work yourself by actually hearing yourself, and you can journal just the same. So that’s one way of processing this stress. The other way is physical movement, low level physical movement, jumping on a row, machine, cross trainer, walking. And walking particularly really helps you just exercise those stress centers. So when you’re talking about steady, there’s a component of your world that just needs to be steady, steady exercise, steady work, because we cannot work 100% the whole time.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, yeah. It’s so true. It’s so true. So kind of last question on this, and then I’ve got another question that I asked on my guest but when we’re looking at, in principle, adaptation. So it’s what you kind of open this door here with the approach to stress, when we’re looking at, you know, things to do, ways to rest, that not only help us to recover, but to adapt, to become stronger. Is what are the what are the differences between those two? What are the differences in the rest that we do simply to recover, versus that which might be more advantageous to adaptation?
Lee Povey
Yeah, I mean, sleep is still the biggest one, and good quality sleep. So it’s not just, was I lying in bed for seven hours? It’s like, was I able to get seven hours or eight hours of sleep, whatever you particularly need. And you know, one of the important things about sleep is we’re all different. We all need different amounts of sleep. So we don’t all need eight hours, but what we do need is a certain amount of REM sleep. So when we’re learning a new skill, when we are teaching our brain something new, that process actually happens during our REM sleep. So we do it. You know, it’s like, you go and play tennis. You play tennis. You don’t really improve a huge amount during that individual lesson. You go home, you sleep. Your brain rewires the learning pathways. You wake up the next day and you’re suddenly a little bit better than you were the day before. And anyone who’s ever done anything like snowboarding, you go on a snowboarding trip, you come back, you go back the next year or six months later, and you’re better than you were last time. Is because those pathways have been rewired. So getting really good, actual REM sleep is super important for any kind of learning. If we don’t do that, then we don’t actually improve. We just stay where we are. And then then there’s the physical recovery of we just have so much physical ability to do something, be that look at a screen, be that play a sport, and we need physical rest. You know? I think it’s why Netflix is so popular, because people put something on that’s very low level for them to just escape from their current world. And that’s important. Be it reading a book, be it reading, you know, watching TV, there’s this belief that you have to be on the whole time, and the best people in the world are on the whole time. And that’s not my experience from working with the best people in the world, right? I would say the best people in the world are also world class recoverers, and what they do is they outsource as much of the stuff that they don’t need to do as possible. And that is something I really like working on. Founders with my typical client is a scale up founder, 20 to 30 to 40 people in their business. Their job is to let go of as much as possible, empower other people to take it up.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah. I love that. Couldn’t agree more. As you’ve been talking throughout several times, I’ve been reminded of the saying you can make from Formula One. You can make a fast driver safe, but you can’t make a safe driver fast. I love that. I love that. It gives us all hope. I think absolutely brilliant conversation. I’ve got one more question for you here, and then I know folks are going to want to know how they can get in touch with you. So we’ll hit that in just a second. But before we get there, I want to know so question I ask all my guests, and it is this, what is the biggest secret that you wish wasn’t a secret at all? What’s that one thing you wish everybody watching or listening today knew?
Lee Povey
Oh, thanks, Scott, let’s just fix the world in the next 60 seconds. It’s not a secret. We just ignore it, and that it’s the failing isn’t actually an issue. What what’s more important isn’t failing or thinking we need to be perfect, and that’s probably the better way to frame it. People think I have to be perfect. What’s more important is that we get things done, and if we do mess up, that we trust that we can repair it, especially when it comes to relationships. So in companies, I’ll often see people not having the conversations that they need to have because they’re concerned about the damage the conversation might do, instead of trust in if the conversation doesn’t go as well as they want it to, that they will be able to repair it. And it’s the same with getting work done. There’s this belief it needs to be perfect instead of it needs to be good enough. And I think that concept holds more people back than probably anything that I come across, especially early stage founders. I’ve got to get my concept perfect. I’ve got to get my website perfect. The name needs to be perfect. You look at anybody that succeeded, nothing they did was perfect. The first iterations didn’t work, or the first iterations weren’t popular, or nobody knew about them to begin with, and then they just kept going back and tinker with it and make it a little bit better, and then they would release something, and then the audience would give them feedback, and it’s having that courage to say, right? This is good enough for now. What can I move on to next? And that’s how we move quickly.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I love that. It’s, it’s one of those things. Those things is it’s easy to say, surprisingly difficult to do in the moment, right? And again, I think one of the things that has been an underlying theme through all this, we’ve not really hit the nail on the head yet, is the idea that oftentimes you need somebody to mirror that back to you, right? Some, many times, even for founders who are out there doing their own thing, creating their own way, many times we need permission to just ship it right, like just go and a great coach can do that. On that note, how can folks find out more about the coaching that you do, the services that you offer? Where can they learn more about you?
Lee Povey
Yeah, so I made it really simple. Scott, the website’s leepovey.com if you Google Lee Povey, you’ll find me on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. I’m out there. We also have our own podcast, the founders catalyst, which I do with another British coach living in America. Weird how we got together like that. And we have a LinkedIn group for founders, free group. We know what it’s like to be lonely. We’re both founders. I’ve found three different companies, so we know what it’s like to be in that position of being a founder, and not necessarily anyone else, understanding what your world’s like and how driven you are and how lonely it feels to be making all of these decisions without a lot of support. So we have a community for you to come to meet other founders. We have a monthly zoom call that you can come and join. It’s completely free. We do that as our community offering to support people who are changing the world, because we think that’s important.
Scott Ritzheimer
So good. So good. Lee, fantastic. Just absolutely loved having you on just privilege and honor, having you here. Thank you so much. And for those of you watching and listening today, you know your time and attention mean the world to us, I hope you got as much out of this conversation as I know I did, and I cannot wait to see you next time. Take care.
Contact Lee Povey
Lee Povey is a high-performance leadership coach specializing in working with founders and start-ups. As a former elite cycling athlete and Olympic Development Program Coach for USA Cycling, Lee profoundly understands what it takes to lead at the highest levels. Through coaching hundreds of World, National, and Olympic champions, Lee has gained invaluable experience developing World-Class leadership and people. He breaks down the human experience in a relatable way, giving tips, skill sets, and valuable mindset insights, allowing us all to perform like Olympians while retaining a strong focus on happiness and longer-term fulfillment.
Want to learn more about Lee Povey’s work at Lee Povey Coaching? Check out his website at https://www.leepovey.com/
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