5 tips on how to become a healthy high performer

With experience as both a doctor and entrepreneur, Dr. Imran Rashid from Aleris-Hamlet Hospitals has unique insight on how to perform on a high level while maintaining a healthy lifestyle.

As an entrepreneur, you need to perform at your very best in order to establish your business and make it a success. However, the process can be stressful and adversely affect your health.

Dr. Imran Rashid, Head of Primary Healthcare Services at Aleris-Hamlet Hospitals, is both an entrepreneur and physician. He has, among other things, conceptualized Videodoktor – a concept for video consultations which was acquired by Aleris-Hamlet in 2013.

Today he works as the Head of Innovation and Primary Healthcare Services and carries out the so called “high performance health examinations”, especially designed to help top executives perform at a consistently high level with respect to their health and well-being.

Currently, the largest Danish companies use the Healthcare Services of Aleris-Hamlet Hospitals regularly to ensure the performance levels of their employees while preventing healthcare risks.

We have reached out and asked Dr. Imran Rashid about his top 5 pieces of advice for how you, as an entrepreneur, can become a healthy high performer:

High Performance requires focus and training

Ambitious business people are high performers, but sometimes their business comes at the expense of their health. To overcome this, we tend to compare them with professional soccer players. These are also high performers, but spend the most of their time on the training field intensely preparing for game day. Business people may have their own “game days”, but how they spend the rest of their time remains rather random.

“There is a clear connection between what you do outside working hours and your performance level at work”.

Identify how to be the best version of yourself

Top business performance is typically based on individually suited strategies developed over time to “defuse” the stress and tension that top level business activities can cause. These strategies may differ a lot from one individual to another, but ultimately have the same goal: they enable the high performer to process the tension in a constructive manner, effectively preventing stress.

“Identify these specific out-of-office hours behavior patterns and then use this to proactively plan your future work effort to prevent the buildup of negative stress”

Make your resources last throughout the day

Many high performers often tend to forget their basic needs when their work load increases, such as forgetting breakfast, or not drinking enough water during the day. Being so focused on delivering results can mean ignoring how your body feels. There is nothing wrong in being focused – except for the fact that your body and brain need fuel to work properly. That’s why professional soccer players and other top athletes have a great focus on their diets, because they know it affects their performance level.

“Focus on keeping your fluid and blood sugar level constant throughout a whole day by eating little, but often. Avoid getting to hungry in the morning since this could lead larger lunch meals – which again might cause tiredness and laziness in the “second half” of your workday.”

Improve your self-efficacy

Research has shown that self-efficacy- an individual’s belief in his or her capacity to execute behaviors necessary to produce specific performance attainments– can be improved through some of these methods:

Experience: Learn from the past and figure out how you survived last time, when things got too hectic.

 Mentorship: Find a mentor who can help you find your way, if you are about to get lost in the work jungle.

Visualization: Mental preparation of the difficult tasks ahead can actually reduce perceived stress later on.

Constructive feedback: By establishing clear routines where you get constructive feedback on your work, you will be able to process, classify, and perform your job more effectively. If people don’t get feedback to their work, it stays unfinished mentally, and thereby build up unnecessary tension.

Physical exercise: At work people tend to use their left-brain to analyze, make conclusions, use logical arguments, etc. These processes can also build up, causing stress symptoms such as sleep disorders, concentration problems, or mood problems. When you perform physical activities, you trick your left-side brain into perform routine processes, thereby “defragmenting” and lowering the tension levels that could be building up.

Protect your mind

Through our smartphones, we now live in a limitless world demanding a higher sense of deliberate protection of ourselves and our minds against the biggest threat to our mental well being: information overload. Since this is happening in such large amounts and on such a massive scale, preventing it requires intense focus.

“Make clear rules about who should be allowed access to your mind when and through which channels. Social Media are an endless Information Stream, that should be carefully controlled to avoid drowning in it.”

If this advice make sense to you and you consider yourself a high performer that would like to get a 360-degree health examination, focusing on how to improve your performance level together with a thorough assessment of your current and future health risks, this following offer might be of interest:

Aleris-Hamlet Hospitals has decided to offer a discount of 10% for readers of Nordic Startup Bits on the regular price for Health Examinations, which includes a complete full body examination including lab tests and other relevant assessments.

Please read more about the product HERE

PLEASE NOTE:

The offer expires on the 15th of November 2015.

To take advantage of the offer, please send an email to ‪[email protected] with the subject line: HIGH PERFORMER to get further information.