Be Your Best: Now it’s about to get serious

Friday afternoons are not well known for peak concentration levels so it was perhaps a little ambitious of The Irish Times/Potentialife team to schedule their end of cycle 1 session for the Be Your Best Group at 3pm on Friday 10th.

And when social entrepreneur Caroline Casey, one of the participants on the program, was asked how she was finding it 10 weeks in, it seemed like weekend cheer was going to be in short supply. “I hate self help, I hate online learning, I hate apps,” Ms Casey began, but then continued “and yet to my surprise I really like Potentialife, it somehow brings it all together and makes it work”.

False alarm.

Ms Casey is one of the The Be Your Best group – a diverse group spanning different occupations – who are now a third of the way through Potentialife’s nine month leadership program, created by former Harvard lecturer Tal Ben-Sharar and ex-McKinsey partner Angus Ridgway.

The programme, divided up into three cycles, begins with an “unfreeze” cycle - during which participants receive short, sharp video lectures combined with lots of personal data about themselves and how they’re living their lives.

The programme structures this diagnostic assessment across five key behavioural areas which Mr Ben-Shahar’s and Mr Ridgway’s research indicates are those that really matter when it comes to distinguishing peak performance. The idea of cycle 1, explained Potentialife’s head of Europe Daniel Philbin-Bowman, who ran Friday’s session, is to “allow ourselves the time to step back from the hectic lives we all lead and reflect on ‘what should I focus on, where am I on that, and where do I want to go?’

Evelyn Carroll, a senior HR manager in Bank of Ireland, found the experience very helpful. "I had never fully realised how often I was operating on 'auto-pilot' – the LifeMap app [a part of the Potentialife programme involving a smartphone app which asks participants to log what they do and how they feel afterwards] was great. For that first seven days it forced me to have a daily check in with myself about how I was organising my day and how I could do better. I've become much more conscious of what I do – and as a result much more productive.".

Laura Gaynor, a radio presenter with RTÉ 2XM agrees “I’ve cut way down on what I called miscellaneous Internet browsing’ of news articles and social media as a result of the programme, I never realised I was doing so much until I had to account for it. And it wasn’t achieving anything’.

For David Duffy, who runs the consultancy practice Prospectus the 'aha moment' was another of Potentialife's five key areas, namely; the focus on how important it is to be your authentic self – inside and outside of work.

“I’ve really begun realizing that what it is I value in colleagues and peers is how authentic they’re being with me – and as a result I’ve made more of an effort to be authentic with others, even when it’s not the most comfortable thing to do. It’s had a profound effect”.

For Sheena Eaton, a portfolio manager at A&L Goodbody Stockbrokers – the program has been a real wake up call on how to best manage energy. “Potentialife is not all rocket science – but it has reinforced that to be my best at work actually requires putting some specific time aside for breaks and particularly for me, exercise. I’m exercising more now and as a result I come into work with more energy”.

From joining the gym to higher self confidence to focusing more on being present with colleagues and loved ones alike, everyone had their own story on what they had got out of Cycle 1.

As Mr Philbin-Bowman explained, the shift now, as the group starts cycle 2, will be to take these initial changes and make cognitive choices around how they will form part of daily life; with a particular focus on how they interact with and lead others around them.

This shift to team leadership is something that is of particular interest to those participants who find themselves playing leadership roles in team environments on a daily basis, from Rob Kearney, a key part of the Irish rugby team's back-to-back Six Nations winning team to his predecessor at full back, Hugo MacNeill – who now heads Goldman Sach's operations in Ireland.

This cycle is where “things get serious” according to the founders.