The Stress Test - Andrew MacDonald, PQ

[00:00:05] Speaker A: Welcome to the next episode in our Work Healthy podcast series. I'm John Ryan and thanks for joining us. Quick question. Do you use a wearable? Either an Oura ring, an Apple watch, a Fitbit, or a whoop. Was it a present or maybe a hint from somebody? Or maybe you bought yourself one when you finally decided to get fit? And particularly as we head towards summer holidays and the beach strip gets closer. Well, on today's podcast we're talking wearables, but more particularly we're talking pq. We all know IQ as a narrow definition of intellect, especially if you listen to our podcast with Howard Gardner and you might know eq, the emotions where you manage your own emotions and have Alexa and understand others emotional state. Well, today we're discussing pq, our physiological quotient, a scientifically validated indicator of an individual's executive performance potential as defined by their essential body system. As a former MD of Merrill Lynch, Andrew McDonald knows all about the stresses and strains of the human body of somebody in the C suite. He's perfectly positioned to advise. So we chat about why people are ignoring one of the biggest drivers of performance, how they misunderstand the relationship between stress and recovery and how they can optimize their overall health with the use of digital tools. I started the interview by asking Andrew about wearables and the quantified self. Do they work and is it an essential aspect of achieving high performance even in your work role today? [00:01:53] Speaker B: I think we're pretty well there now, yes, and I'll explain that in a little bit, John. But the, where the, the measurable aspect of our physiology is not new. There's a, a legendary physiologist from Loughborough University who was part of the early sports science movement back in the late 70s, early 80s called Clyde Williams. And he, when I met him a couple of years ago, said the most useful tools for measurement are a tape measure and a set of scales to start with. So we've been using measurement very, very long term in understanding how to optimize our health. Clearly we've moved on from that. There are straps to measure your heart rate. I used to use a Polar strapped 20 years ago when I started running again to help me. But my passion now is that the digital measurement process has become so accurate and so accurate, particularly of the performance of our autonomic nervous system, which interacts our brain with our gut with our heart, that we can now really measure and manage our bodies alongside digital tools. Which is why I think we're at that point now. [00:03:11] Speaker C: Okay, you've Already you've said loads of those words and I, I'd love to dig into them individually. But I mean, essentially what you're talking about, the thing that we've been doing is if you go to most kind of doctors, they'll, they'll do a BMI test, won't they, and try and multiply your height by your, your girth, or they'll do some mathematical formula that, that'll tell you whether or not you're, you're overweight or underweight or the correct weight. But this is, this is different, isn't it? Because now we're we technology in ways. And I get a sense with some people that like, if they see somebody with an Apple Watch or a Fitbit or the like, they kind of go, oh, that person's probably into running or the like. And it's kind of, you know, tell me the distance and the like. But those things, those pieces of technology can do a lot more now than they used to be able to do. So talk to me a little bit about, okay, what can they actually tell us? [00:04:07] Speaker B: Okay, so what they tell us is not only our stress levels, our response to stimulation, the times that we're very intensely focused on our tasks in hand, be they work or physical exercise, they can now measure our recovery as well. So our parasympathetic response, now that is the breakthrough because up until now people have been over focused on stress and under focused on recovery, which is the necessary twin to performance. And what you'll notice is elite athletes after they've played a match at Roland Garros, they talk about their recovery before the next game. We don't have that lexicon in the executive world. People still go stress to stress without bookending it with proper recovery. And that's where digital measurement can allow us to begin to understand our own individual profile and response to stress and our own individual requirements for recovery. [00:05:12] Speaker C: So if I'm coaching a football team nowadays in the Premier League or wherever, and you can see that even people like Jose Mourinho, I think he's finally come around to saying, okay, I'm going to have to start employing analysts and statisticians to help me do my job, because that's where it's gone. I get a readout of all of the people on my team because they're all wearing packs and suddenly I can see the drop, the drop off in performance straight away from somebody who may be on 60 Minutes and I know I've got to take that person off. So is that the same kind of Thing that somebody who's managing an executive suite, I suppose a CEO could actually have access to that, or is this purely at the level that this is you, Andrew? Yeah, but I'm interested to know, is this where it's going? [00:06:04] Speaker B: And where does that say no? Because you own your data, John. You can only give permission to someone else to access it in the way that you allow people access to your health data for a specific purpose. And it's arguable that your employer doesn't have a right to at any point to see that. However, if you believe it's going to support you in the progression of your professional ambitions, you may choose to share it with your organization. If they have resources that enhance your performance, we'll see how that goes. [00:06:38] Speaker C: Let's just go there for a minute. I know this GDPR and all of that. Let's just park that and let's pretend that, that I am on your C Suite and you're the CEO. Right. And I actually, all I care about is that we win as an organization. Right. And that we perform sustainably and the like. And I respect you and I trust you and I'm going to give you and all of us on the C suite have done that. Do you think as a CEO, your visibility of all of the data from it doesn't matter what technology we're wearing, but will that really help you as the leader of this team to drive exceptional performance? Yes. [00:07:23] Speaker B: And I think for a variety of reasons. One, it gives you a physiological, a PQ imprint of what your culture, your performance culture is. So is it a very high stress culture? Is it a more balanced culture? So that's the first thing, it gives you a Photostat of that. The second thing, it allows you to benchmark yourself against other organizations, similar organizations. And if you're an outlier, if your data suggests that your people are sleeping two hours less than your peer competitor, do you care about that? That gives you some geographical feel. We always talk about cultural differences. Well, let's work out what different cultures require to deliver performance physiologically as well. So yes, frankly, I think as a CEO, your human capital, I mean, I looked at some data recently. JP Morgan had their first quarter earnings report last a couple of months ago and they spent nearly $12 billion in paying people in one quarter of this year. Right. That was more than every other expense that they paid in that quarter. So that includes real estate, technology licenses and the rest. So people are your biggest investment. And if you are not caring about the workings of that, you ensure your buildings against fire. Why don't you insure your people to be their best selves? [00:08:53] Speaker C: So if I'm looking at that data and you see data from a lot of different executives across the globe, what are the things that I can. So you've mentioned sleep. So sleep is a very clear one. You can actually say how long, on average, your people are actually sleeping. But can you also tell about the quality of their sleep? Okay, talk to me about that. [00:09:19] Speaker B: Well, what you're aiming for in sleep is a state of recovery. So you want to be washing out the stress of the previous day. So you're awake for 16 hours on average. And most of that time, most people are stressed. The majority of the time, the average executive for us is 85% of the time they are stressed. The only way you get up the following morning refreshed and renewed is if when you're asleep, your body is fully in recovery. And the truth is that some people find it very difficult to move into recovery mode. They're still stressed when they're unconscious. So measuring the REM sleep, so the processing of our cognitive thoughts and functions, our deep sleep, the deep refreshment of our muscles and our core physicality matters. And we can measure that and we can benchmark it. And it's not an individual panacea, but it can start to give organizations an idea of tools that can help their executives replenish their energy. And there's a lot of conversation about resilience if you're only sleeping five or six hours a night. Most human beings will struggle to be resilient, particularly as the week progresses. And I was talking to a senior executive just two days ago, and she ends up going to sleep at 12 midnight every night because she gets home late, she eats late, she watches rubbish TV because she thinks it de stresses her. It doesn't. And then she flicks through TikTok for the final half hour before she drops to sleep. Now, the truth is that she needs to be in bed by 10 and she needs to work back from there to ensure that she is in bed by 10. And a lot of good things will happen from that. It's a simple mechanistic intervention. [00:11:14] Speaker C: So you can do a comparison nearly of, let's say there's 10 people on the C suite. We could actually have a look at them all and see who are the best sleepers. And if by any chance that relates to the performance of the organization and their own teams, that would be really interesting data to get. [00:11:30] Speaker B: Well, the truth is that a lot of people who've reached C suite have already worked this out for themselves. They don't go out for a big beary Sunday night if they have a busy week the following week. Alcohol consumption among senior executives is falling consistently. People are eating differently. Nutrition is a significant stress or if you're eating highly processed foods, your body has to deal with that like a punch in the stomach and it takes away from your other recovery. So yeah, there's some things that people are already doing, but how much better to do it scientifically with real guidance. And you talk about elite sport compared with. I know you're an Arsenal fan. So think of the Arsenal team in the early 80s which used to train and then go down the pub to the Arsenal team today and their whole lifestyle management process which is designed for them to peak not only on the day of their performance, but at the time of their performance. That's a very different mindset and it's a thing that you're asking people to buy into for the outcome, which is you're competing closely to win the Premiership. [00:12:42] Speaker C: I remember, I remember Arson Wenger coming in and trying to replace pints with broccoli like it was. People couldn't get their head around this. But now everybody's doing it, you know, so, so, so, okay, sleep is one. So can you then map me as I go through my day? And we did. Yeah, yeah, we'll get that. [00:13:06] Speaker B: You were wearing an aura ring and we measured you going to Dubai, stressful meetings, flying around the place and then you flew to a beautiful lakeside location. It's a tough life being John Ryan. It is, it is in Italy to meet some very smart and stimulating wellbeing gurus who were going to learn a lot from you. And what we discovered was that sure, flying around to Dubai, pitching, working hard with clients was stressful for you, but not half as stressful as being overstimulated intellectually at a conference. Even though it was in a beautiful location in Italy, you were already fatigued, you needed recovery. Instead you went into hyperdrive in this well being retreat where everybody was talking at everybody at a thousand miles an hour. And you're an intellectually stimulated individual. And that stressed you. And we measured that, it influenced your sleep. There was a lot of socializing. You're a social person, there was a consequence which meant by the time you got back home to Ireland, you needed proper recovery. And it wasn't necessarily the Dubai leg which had exhausted you. It was the fact that you had no period between Dubai and Italy which allowed you to prepare for the investment the physical investment that you were going to be making in that event. And I think, you know, what we saw is that your sleep was compressed. What we saw that your daytime recovery was negligible even though you were drinking espressos on the terrazzo. And you were always, you know, you were always stimulated. And what we're finding is that there are some people who are naturally prone to be stressed. They're right at the edge of stress all the time. And conversations, engagement, socialization, it's a stressor. So if you're going to a wedding on a Saturday and you've got a big week on the month starting on the Monday morning, if your Sunday has a lot of socializing too, you're going to be underperforming. It's just the nature of your engagement with your environment. An introvert. Maybe not. But for you that would be suboptimal if you had a big client meeting on a Monday. [00:15:27] Speaker C: And you're telling all of this from my Heart variability is this. [00:15:32] Speaker B: Heart rate variability is a big part of this. Heart rate variability is where we measure the gaps between heartbeats and that tells us whether we are increasing towards stress or whether we are moving into recovery mode. And that's measurable through heart rate variability. And we all have different profiles and we've all learned through a combination of genetics, lifestyle and fitness how to lift our heart rate and drop it down. And what we're measuring there is whether you're moving towards stress or moving towards recovery. On top of that, we measure heart rate, general activity levels. And within that picture, you get a very strong sense of an individual's individual profile. And this is the key point. You know, we've seen hundreds of profiles now. Everybody's different. That's the starting point. [00:16:26] Speaker C: Maybe everybody's different, but I'm sure there's some general trends that, I mean, like the exec who gets to work, I don't know, gets up at six commutes maybe if they're not working from at home and they, they hit the office maybe, I don't know, quarter to eight and then it's kind of full on because they're trying to pack in an awful lot in that day because they want to get home to their family, right? Maybe. And it's just like, go, go, go, go, go. I mean, like that's, that's. And you're from the banking world originally, so you know really what that's like. But you're sort of saying stop. You've got to sort of just stop. What you're doing because you're not going to be effective. Are you talking about the effectiveness on that day? Are you talking about the long term effect effects of that constant pattern of work on you as an individual that you're kind of going to get worn out? [00:17:26] Speaker B: This is crucial short term. We find that most executives do not manage to lift themselves to what we call their peak stress, their best selves often enough during the day because they are carrying such a volume of stress in back to back meetings that as you'd imagine, it's very difficult for you to be your very best self at three in the afternoon when you've had six back to back meetings and a grab sandwich for lunch. What we know about the human body is if we give it a bit of recovery, your ability to peak higher increases. What we're saying to executives is look at your diary, own it and inject periods of recovery during the day. This back to back culture is the opposite of peak performance. It's high volume, high load, but you're behaving like a donkey, not like a racehorse. You know, you've got to think about, look at your diary and say, I've got three really important meetings, four meetings where I need to be present, but do I? A lot of senior people feel they have to be the head honcho at the table because of seniority. No, delegate that to a colleague and be an observer rather than over engaging. If you have a more important meeting an hour and a half later, people are just depleting resources by over engagement and we're measuring that consistently. The volume of stress in most executives is high, but the intensity of stress isn't optimal when they really need it. Because rather like a marathon runner asking a marathon runner after 26 miles to run a hundred meters, they're not going to run it very fast. And we're saying think a little bit more like a sprinter. Don't always look at your day as well. My, my achievement is attending every meeting and talking at every meeting and that's my contribution. Look at the output. You know, did you actually convince people to do something differently? Is that meeting, the final meeting and a decision has been made because of your contribution rather than, well, we've all talked around and we'll meet again next week and have another go at it. That's to me the grinding culture which we measure physiologically, it's, it's sort of, it's, it's, it's a culture of going, not going through the motions but doing what you've always done. [00:19:52] Speaker C: So, so doing that Slightly differently then you use the word moments of recovery and, and this idea, regular moments of recovery through your day. What do they look like? [00:20:02] Speaker B: Well, it can be anything from sitting quietly, reading a book, sitting quietly, listening to music, meal times, God, what a waste. Lunchtime is the perfect moment to refuel halfway through your day. But what do most people do? They sit at their desk tapping out emails whilst consuming a bit of pretty crap nutrition. Now what you should do is set yourself away from your normal environment, go and eat quietly or socially, but consciously eating something you know, which is good healthy fuel. Because by the way, if you are stressed, your body cannot digest your fuel. Right? The stress state means that you don't digest. Your body is saying no, you've got to focus on the saber toothed tiger or. [00:20:54] Speaker C: And what happens, what happens to your fuel and your food? [00:20:58] Speaker B: What do you think it does, it gets stored. What does it get stored as? [00:21:01] Speaker C: Fat. Okay, that explains a lot, doesn't it? [00:21:07] Speaker B: So you know, we've imported sadly from our cousins across the Atlantic a culture of, you know, utilizing every minute to word that actually doesn't lead to highest productivity from the individual. And if you are particularly in a knowledge based industry, but of any decision making role, you need to refuel. If you're going to be at your best at four or five in the afternoon and a lot of organizations have US arms, you're coming into conference calls maybe six, seven in the evening. How are you preparing for that? You're kidding yourself after a long day if you think you're going to be your best self unless you've done something actively to replenish. So that can be taking some exercise and then allowing yourself to recover afterwards. That can re energize a lot of people. [00:22:03] Speaker C: So you know, people sort of say oftentimes about C suite like that's why I'm paid the big bucks, you know, because they pay me and I recognize that I'm kind of sacrificing myself and my life. But you're saying long term you're crazy. And what effect is that, having that buildup of stress and a lack of recovery on you as a human being? Are you going to age faster? [00:22:28] Speaker B: Yeah, you're going to age faster. You're going to reach. Well the obsession with pharmaceutical support. People are taking far too many drugs to address issues which are actually just lifestyle issues. People are always too busy to buy healthy foods. I mean I think horrendously more than 50% of all food bought in the UK is now ultra processed. People are just arguing that they need to buy convenience food to fit into their busy lifestyles. Well, it's destroying their long term health. And if you're a valuable, rather like your Arsenal team of the 80s, lots of good players because of their lifestyle, not because of their skill. Look at the longevity of elite athletes. Now look at Djokovic, at Ronald Garros. At the moment, that's about lifestyle management. There are a lot of really talented executives who retire in their 50s or a simply because they haven't managed their lifestyle and their physiology, their pq, consciously and with awareness. So yeah, there's a real consequence there. Fatigue is a surplus of stress over recovery. All right? And eventually it plays on your emotion and your cognitive function. How do we know that? Because what did torturers do? They deprive people of sleep and they deprive them of good nutrition and they stress them. Right. That's what you do to torture people. Well, we're doing that, as you know from your measurement of healthy place to work. We're doing that, but we're doing it with in the frog in the, in the pan and we're just slowly turning the heat up. People aren't noticing it, but actually if you measure their bodies, their bodies are telling us that there's an issue here. And I think crudely, organizations have just gone on a replacement strategy. I've always, I mean I've, I've always said I've done 20 years of executive coaching. I've always said executive coaching is the inverse of head hunting. Right? It's you get a talent and you make the most of it. But I think a lot of organizations spend much more money on headhunters. They just replace, they just think, well, it's too hard, it's too hard to get this person to the place they need to get to. So we'll just buy someone in and hope it's different. And that replacement culture is contrary, I think, to most organizations ethics. But they haven't found a way out of the loop. And I think a healthy place to work is exactly that. [00:25:01] Speaker C: And out of interest, I mean, is there a generational piece here? Are the younger cohort of people coming in more open to the measurement? Are they more or are they just as bad as the rest of us? They get pulled into the culture, they're. [00:25:20] Speaker B: More open to the technology. That's great, but it, but the technology is a route to that grinding, boring thing of change which is doing different things consistently over a long period of time. And I think the jury is out on the young generation getting bored when the app doesn't do the work for them. I mean, ultimately, if you're going to change your life, you've just got to use the data and the information to reset. But you've got to do the work. You've got to change your diary, you've got to change your nutrition patterns, you've got to make the commitment to go to bed earlier, got to turn down the extra beer in the evening. That's not, you know, do, do younger people show an aptitude for that? Well, they drink less alcohol but they consume more pharmaceutical products from what I can see. So I don't know, we'll see how this plays out. [00:26:13] Speaker C: And you, you haven't mentioned the gym. So for, for some, you know, they get up at 5 o'clock in the morning to fit it all in and they get to the gym and they do all that. Is that right? Is it wrong? Is it a personal choice? Is that a stressor in itself? [00:26:31] Speaker B: Fitness, cardiovascular, vascular fitness is good. Allowing your heart to be the most powerful organ it can be is a very good place to start if you're keen in performance. And running, swimming, going to the gym are all good things. However, extreme exercise is a stressor. Actually, all exercise is a stressor. So if you are stressed anyway and you have a busy week at work, adding exercise on top may not be the right strategy. We measured a very senior executive who was obsessed with his Strava. He said, I hate Thursdays because I chair three board meetings and I hate them because I'm never my best self. We measured him and he was having a killer session on the bike on the Wednesday night before. So he was loading up on stress. It was disrupting his sleep. He over metabolized and then on Thursday he was physically tired and that meant that he was cognitively slow. So yeah, he was making the wrong decision about when to exercise and the intensity of exercise. So it's generally good, but the intensity and timing of exercise has to fit in with your primary role. No one I know who's a senior executive is an Olympic athlete. So getting a bit crazy about your stats and your on exercise is missing the point. If you're a senior executive, you're being paying the big bucks. You're an Olympian in the workplace. May your exercise support your performance in the workplace. Be serious about recovery. Don't be obsessed with that extra pound of weight or that extra five kilos that you're going to push in the gym if that's the wrong time for you to be doing it out of Interest. [00:28:19] Speaker C: Is there any difference with female executives versus male executives? [00:28:23] Speaker B: Massive. Massive. And this is the unseen reality. Female biology is very different. Estrogen is a fantastic drug, by the way. It's a tremendous support to female hearts. But women by and large perform a role in us. Working women perform a different role in our society. They have excess responsibilities, they tend to be primary caregivers and so their day of stress tends to be longer. They start the morning, worry about kids and they may end the evening sorting out elderly parents and sort of preparing for the day ahead. So what we've measured, the highest loads of stress have been in women. We measured one female executive, highly high performing work for a top management consultancy, then in a big insurer, she had 23 hours of stress in a 24 hour period and she was asleep for eight of those hours. What does that tell us? She was hyper engaged with her life and she sort of found a way through it, but it was unhealthy and unsustainable in the long term. And she was a very talented lady. So one of the things that we're trying to tell organizations is that nearly every organization that we measure measuring has been built by men for men, down to the temperature in the office, which is typically a centigrade lower than women find comfortable. What we say is listen to women, if they say they were better working from home two days a week, it's probably physiological as much as anything else. They tend to be more aware of their physiology than men, but they've been ignored. That aspect has been ignored. And I think again, organizations need to be thinking about that when they build diverse workforces. Women need to be heard and they need to take responsibility for managing their health and understanding it. And the data is different. [00:30:24] Speaker C: Andrew, if you have sort of, you're an executive and you're listening to this podcast and you're kind of going, okay, I hear this, I get it, it makes sense. But now I've got to go and convince the people, my colleagues at the C suite, my CEO, that actually, you know something, don't look at me weirdly. If I'm going out for a five minute walk at 11 o'clock in the morning, okay. Or if I'm sitting in my chair doing breathing exercises for three min because I have to talk to these people about this need to recover and this leads to high performance. You've been there in these really busy organizations, how do you change the culture? [00:31:09] Speaker B: You switch the conversation from inputs to outputs. So you put the pressure on your manager. What do you need me to do today, this week, this month, then trust me to work out how to deliver that the best I can. So the pressure is on me to deliver. But a lot of, I mean, there's an element of the Henry Ford legacy that the belief that manager's job is to tell us how to do our job. And what I'm saying is that the physiology suggests that the manager's job is actually to give us the resources to make the right decisions about how to deliver outcomes. So the manager should be focusing on outcomes. Are you delivering what I asked you to do? Is that presentation ready at the time you said it was going to be ready? And is it in the quality? Because that's what matters. Whether I go for a walk for 20 minutes at 11am is none of your business. Your business, your genuinely your business, is delivering that report. That's what we agreed. And I think the narrative of the workplace, a healthy place to work, has an acceptance that individuals have different physiological needs. Those play into different emotional and cognitive needs, and it's best for those individuals to work it out and deliver it as performance. I think you'd be surprised. Most people know how to deliver at their best performance. A lot of people, however, are forced by consensus to do things that aren't best for them, you know. [00:32:45] Speaker C: And in terms of an overall organization, do you have examples of organizations who've managed to kind of rethink this whole area of performance? [00:32:56] Speaker B: We've been working with one organization for more than two years now, and we measured their senior cohort, some of their most senior people, and we discovered that they averaged about 90 hours of stress a week. That's seven days a week, which is quite a large load, as you. As you'd imagine. So that's what was required to deliver very high performance. We then measured a cohort three layers below. But the cohort of people who had been put through a development program preparing them for higher, higher office. Those executives were showing about an hour and a half less stress per day than their senior colleagues. So they were just not used to that volume of stress. Quite a lot of stress. They're high performers, but not that level. And then we look deeper, and two characteristics stood out. One, that the senior executives were fitter than their junior colleagues, that they made time to manage their fitness so that their cardiovascular fitness was higher. The second thing is their recovery time was much more efficient. They generated far more efficient use of their time. So when they had time off, they generated recovery, and that included at weekends. These are learned skills. So the truth is this organization is now rolling out a program, a physiological self awareness at more junior levels to prepare people for the inevitable stress load that comes with promotion. And I think that's a very exciting development. It's integrated into a traditional leadership program. That's where it should sit. Well being should sit with performance. It shouldn't just sit as a nice to have. And we're talking with another international global organization that's looking to do exactly the same thing. With a little bit of a tweak with individual diaries where people are self reporting around what matters most to their performance as identified by their psychometric profile. This is where we're going. [00:35:02] Speaker C: I was just about to ask that very question because one of the things you do is not just the measurement by oura ring, but it's actually asking people to write down, well, what were you doing on Wednesday at 3:00 or 5:00 or whatever? Because you're trying to pick up patterns and routines that people and individuals are doing that then affects their performance. So just talk a little bit more about that. [00:35:27] Speaker B: Okay, so journaling is a well established form of building self awareness. If you're forced to answer a question every day on an app, it'll prompt you to think, actually, did I engage with key stakeholders today or did I manage my temper? Or whatever the personality profile that you're looking to address, what we're discovering is that there is a link with your physiological capacity. So for instance, we measured a very senior banker once and he self reported his creativity as being 80% of optimal and it correlated perfectly with when he had 8 hours sleep, when he only had 4 hours sleep 3 days before, he self reported his creativity at 20%. So he knew that he wasn't going to be delivering great solutions to his clients on a day he'd had bad sleep, but he'd never put the two together. Now the risk is that if he's not monitoring his volume of sleep, he's not monitoring his creativity. And getting that ownership of those choices that we have in our days, in our weeks is part of the discipline of building self awareness. You know, if you stop elite athletes in a world champion and ask them what their heart rate is at any point in the day, they'll be accurate to about 5 bips. They just know their body. Now we're not asking executives to be that, but asking executive, you know, are you, you know, is your, is your heart rate elevated at the moment? Are you in a stressed mode? Is this the best time for you to be delivering that message to your colleagues? Do you think you should better? Do you have to deliver that message now? These are, these are the sorts of self regulatory aspects that are going to start coming into the executive world. I know my best self. I'm not that person right now. I'm going to postpone that conversation or I have to be by best self in an hour's time. I'm canceling that meeting so that I can refresh because I've had a very busy morning. And we're going to get used to that. We're going to get used to that because it's going to become the norm. Just like footballers were surprised that top, you know, Dennis Berkham used to room with Ian Rice at Arsenal and in right was surprised when Dennis Burke had turned the light out at 9:30 when they're at a training camp, you know what's going on. I can't sleep at 9:30 and phone count said learn to. And that's sort of what's going to happen because that's the norm now. [00:38:05] Speaker C: Technology also gives us nudges now. Are you a fan of the nudges? [00:38:09] Speaker B: Not so much, no. I'm more about the longer term. I like to understand where people's parameters are. People tend to oscillate between two boundaries and I like to know where people are sitting within that. Are you particularly highly stressed? Are you at a phase when you're not sleeping so much? The nudge. Take some activity now. Well, that can actually create an unnecessary anxiety for people. I've actually had people who wear OURA rings who've ended up taking them off because it's hyperstimulated them to too much activity. It's a generic product. Don't do that. Use it. Work out how to use it yourself to your best advantage. Take some professional advice. That's what BQ is about. So that you understand what the data is telling you and then customize. Use the data as your tool rather than your lifestyle manager. No app is going to be a good lifestyle manager. [00:39:08] Speaker C: And for people working from at home though, do you find that they're actually starting to like by right? It should because you don't have to maybe do as much commute. There should be more opportunity for fitness by going out for a walk. [00:39:22] Speaker B: But I find people get lost spot on. The truth is the commute is a very good source of exercise for most people and by not doing it you have to replace it. Otherwise those calories are not burned. I think a lot of people, we've been quite shocked measuring some organizations we measured A senior leadership group recently. And the spread of active calories and steps was quite shocking. Some people were averaging as little as 2,000 3,000 steps a day. And they were shocked to see a colleague was averaging 20,000. And neither is right or wrong in a moral sense. But the truth is if you're averaging two or three thousand steps a day for 10 years, the probability is your heart is not getting the workout it needs to be the tool you need it to be as you age. And that's the other factor we haven't talked about age, you know, sadly, testosterone, estrogen, all these wonderful drugs that are given us to young people when we have full heads of hair and that, you know, we can go out till three in the morning and still perform the day after those are gone, you know, what you're left with is your heart and your musculature and your basic physical health. And that is a product of the previous 20 years. So the sooner you can start training your body to support you when the drug, that the locally degenerated drugs start to wear off, the better that when. [00:40:52] Speaker C: The drugs don't work anymore, you're just. [00:40:55] Speaker B: Left with to step in and it does. And you can look at a lot of people who look great, who are sharp and focused, they're engaged with life, but they tend to have taken responsibility for their physical health in a range of ways much earlier in their life. [00:41:10] Speaker C: As my dad used to say, if I knew I was going to live this long, I would have looked after myself better. But so I'm interested in that age thing because I mean, you know, if you listen to people like Linda Grattan and others, they tell us the hundred year life is here. So yes, maybe God willing, we'll live that long. But the question is, what state will we be for those last, I don't know, 15 years of our life? Can this, I was going to say obsession, but that would be probably wrong. But this awareness of the importance of the physical part of our nature, can this actually help to push the sort of, you know, the limit so that we're living well into our 90s in good physical health? [00:41:59] Speaker B: I think it's unquestionable that if you adjust your lifestyle, particularly in the workplace, to be more supportive of your physical well being, there will be a long term benefit to that and that will be an extension of your career, possibly, if you want that. Or it can be an extension of your healthy life. And good habits don't disappear. If you have good habits at work, they'll continue in retirement and It's. I'm not, I'm not. This is not a get out there and on the treadmill message. It's just take responsibility. The truth is we live in a highly consumerized society which is selling products which are not good for you, but are good for their profit, their bottom line. And that doesn't matter whether it's pharmaceutical companies, food manufacturing companies, or lifestyle and technology companies. This latest Apple release where you can you. There's a screen, you know, you put a pair of glasses on and you can play with your. You can play football with your daughter while you're still watching a film. Well, you know, in truth, it's just a way of selling you more product. We need to step back, look inside your body is an extraordinary mechanism. If you just give it a chance to tell you what's best for it and then feed that back to your company and say, help me live that life. The productivity benefits are going to be enormous. [00:43:32] Speaker C: The overstimulation that we're asking our bodies to take I think is too much, and we need to pull back on that and simplify things. So in terms of the corporates, then finally, just two kind of questions. One about kind of trying to change the structure of how corporates operate so that they make work healthier for people. But also then, you know, what you find is the real important kind of thing that wakes the CEO up to this sustainability argument for the people and the performance of the organization of the link between the two, what really seems to land and wake them up when. [00:44:17] Speaker B: Their CFO tells them how much they're spending on their people, how much it costs to get people. And we're going through a slight squeeze in the economy at the moment. And what's happening, jobs are going because they're the most expensive asset we have. So chief executives want their people to be as productive as possible. So when we show them. There's a recent McKinsey report showing that the most organizationally healthy companies are three times, generate three times the shareholder returns than the median or organizationally healthy companies. So even before you get into the least healthy companies. So it's becoming demonstrably the case that companies with healthy workforces have a productive edge. So that sells to the CEO. However, the bigger message, and this is what I think I'm most interested about, is that we spend a lot of money trying to improve our productivity through technologies and through emotional intelligence and working as teams. And people have away days and all the rest of it. Why not work on the thing that's least addressed in the workforce, which is the pq, we've worked a lot on IQ and eq. Everyone's educated to the nines. They're all got lots of teamwork, team building exercises, but no one's measuring a measurable aspect of their performance. Why? Because it's the least important in an executive worker's life. Sure. And it's the most in an athlete's by comparison. But it's probably 20% of your performance capacity and people are doing so little to manage it systematically and we now have the tools to do it. Why wouldn't you? [00:46:06] Speaker C: And honestly, the data that's coming back from healthy place to work all over the world is the pillar that is the lowest performing in people's lives is the physical health. So I really do think there's an opportunity here to make a difference. Honestly, I've enjoyed the data that's come through the OURA ring and your analysis of it has been brilliant. So it's woken me up to a few patterns in my life that aren't particularly good. And just one funny one for you, actually. I told my kids because they're, they're obviously interested in, in watching this and seeing how it goes and I told them I was interviewing you today and they said, oh, are you going to do an interview with the Lord of the Rings? I said, I certainly am. So listen, thank you so much, Andrew, for that really, really insightful information and hopefully people will use it and will build their capacity and their ability to manage load in the workplace because it is a stressful place to be, but it doesn't have to cause you to get sick and ill. You can hopefully build a less stressful workplace that can actually help to make work healthy as an activity. Thanks so much. [00:47:26] Speaker B: Thank you very much, John. A pleasure. Thank you very much. [00:47:30] Speaker C: So there you have it. [00:47:31] Speaker A: The key to living well in old age is good habits that start early and learning how to build moments of recovery into our daily routines. My thanks to Andrew MacDonald from PQ for sharing his extensive knowledge in the field. Now, if you have ideas on what topic you'd like us to feature next, do please get in touch. You can follow and connect with me on LinkedIn. I'd really love to hear from you. Until next time, remember to work healthy.