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Now and then, we have these moments of reckoning, these brief windows where we're gifted perspective on ourselves and our circumstances, and given the opportunity to change them. When the last such moment visited me, I was wearing a Speedo and sitting in a giant plastic egg.
I had woken up early on a Monday in a Seattle hotel room after 12 hours of fasting, and dressed with the nylon swimsuit under my clothes, as I'd been instructed. At 7 a.m., I rode the elevator to the hotel's conference rooms, where the Orlando-based Human Performance Institute had hung out its shingle, offering a two-day training course in becoming a Corporate Athlete.
"When I call you a Corporate Athlete, I pay you the highest compliment," Dr. Jack Groppel would tell his trainees a few hours later. A renowned fitness and nutrition expert, Groppel founded the HPI almost 20 years ago with performance psychologist Dr. Jim Loehr. The two were coaching at tennis's elite levels when they met in the late '70s. Finding common ground in their approaches — unusual, says Groppel, because at the time physiology and psychology were "like oil and water" — they partnered and worked with some of the sport's biggest names, like Jim Courier and Monica Seles, offeringa holistic approach combining the physical with the emotional, mental and spiritual, and stressing their inter-reliance.
Through the HPI, founded in 1992, they've expanded their focus to include those who perform in boardrooms instead of stadiums, offering highly leveraged executives the tools to better handle the pressures of the corporate world, and to balance those pressures with a fulfilling home life. Along with professional athletes, they now work with companies like Cisco, AT&T and GlaxoSmithKline, and the open enrollment Corporate Athlete training courses they hold in Orlando and across the U.S. attract C-suite executives happy to pay up to $5,000 a head for two days of coaching from a team Procter & Gamble CEO A. G. Lafley credits with helping him stay "calm and cool under fire."
Though I'm in Seattle to write about the HPI, I'm happily going through the Corporate Athlete course as a full participant. My exercise habits aren't regular and my diet veers to the indulgent. The course literature promised the potential to improve energy, sleep and focus, all areas with which I sometimes struggle. Assignment aside, I'm looking forward to a tune-up.
That morning, I join a group of business people going through the course's basic health diagnostic tests. In one room, a doctor takes blood samples. In the next, we queue in front of a grey tent. When it's my turn to enter, Chris Jordan, the institute's director of fitness, zips shut the tent flaps for privacy, and I strip down to my Speedo and pull on a swim cap. He weighs me, then ushers me into a machine called the Bod Pod. Used to measure what percentage of your body is fat, it's a white capsule, like a spaceship escape pod for one. I sit in it, and Jordan closes the hatch. I hear a pumping noise as the machine works, altering the air pressure in the capsule and measuring displacement. Alone in the capsule, listening to the hiss of the air pump, I am ruefully aware of the flesh bulging over the elastic of the swimsuit, and I'm regretting ordering fries with yesterday's lunch.
More than once during the course, we'll be asked to confront some hard truths about ourselves. When I'm later handed a printout detailing my body composition, I find myself falling short of where I want to be. On the up side, among my cohort, which is teeming with over-achievers, I'm not alone.
You hear the phrase "time management" over and over again in the workplace, but Corporate Athlete training is focused on the concept of energy management. "If you can't manage your energy, you can't control your life," Groppel tells us after we eat. He, Jordan and Raquel Malo, HPI's director of nutrition, stand at the front of a makeshift classroom, introducing the course to the audience. Two dozen casually dressed executives, some in workout clothes, fill the room. Some are locals, representing some of the region's largest employers; others have come from Chicago, Pittsburgh and further afield. (One locally headquartered global titan has flown executives from Germany and Italy in for the course.) Their point is that time isn't everything. You can block off time to attend a meeting, to work on a project, to spend at home with your loved ones, but if you don't have energy to invest along with that time — if you're not really present or not fully engaged — you may as well not bother. "Very often, we take energy for granted," Groppel tells me later. "We either have it or we don't. But when people realize that you truly can manage your energy — be deliberate, be intentional, have boundaries — it becomes an incredible experience for them."
On a projection screen, Groppel calls up a diagram that's going to recur in the intensive sessions each trainer will lead over the next two days: a pyramid divided into four tiers. "Energy is four dimensional," we're told. The base of the pyramid represents the physical, the next tier the emotional, the penultimate tier the mental, and finally, on top, the spiritual. Full engagement with the task or the person at hand, he says, requires energy from each of those four dimensions. Bad energy management inevitably leeches from all of them. We all understand what happens when physical demand exceeds our available energy, but Groppel drives home what not having enough energy means in those other dimensions: we get frustrated and impatient; we lose focus and make bad decisions; we grow bored and apathetic.
He dismisses the truism that life, or a career, is a marathon. "It's a series of sprints," he says, and urges us to manage our energy accordingly. For every burst of effort, there needs to be a recovery break. Displaying a slide with a sine wave pattern, the peaks representing stress and the troughs representing recovery, he says, "The science of recovery has escaped us. We have the idea that recovery is a sign of weakness, and it's been perpetuated over time. We have created a linear monster."
The point of managing all this energy is the completion of our individual "ultimate mission," the goal that binds the spiritual with every subsidiary level of the pyramid. Prior to attending the course, we'd each been asked to write down a mission, our ultimate purpose in life ("To be a dedicated, caring person whose actions and words will have a lasting impact with my partner, friends, work and community" is one example we're given). I'd come up with something vague and hopeful and self-improving, but I wasn't sure I necessarily bought the idea. But Groppel makes it clear that the ultimate mission is the core of the course, and I wonder whether my distractibility, and the nascent spare tire exposed by my Speedo, will really offer enough motivation for me to make decisions in line with the monumental language the doctor is using.
My question hung around most of that first day, until the afternoon's last session. On the agenda, it is ominously listed as "Facing the Truth," and Groppel sets it up in kind. "We transition now into probably the toughest part of the course," he says.
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