Can a good night’s rest impact your coaching performance? We discovered that sleep has an astounding impact on your performance and cover the effects on your coaching performance in this article.
When you work with coaching clients, it’s more important that you are being your best, not just doing your best. This is particularly true for coach entrepreneurs or solopreneurs. With so much to do when building a business, you wear many hats and barely find enough time to catch up on all the things that need your attention. That is why it matters greatly for the sake of your health, productivity, and business to get enough sleep so you can be your best. You owe it to your clients, your family and yourself.
But all too often, rest is viewed as an obstacle, rather than a pit stop to refuel and maintain. Especially in entrepreneur and executive circles, this unhealthy paradigm has created a badge of honor for sleep deprivation. Well, not exactly for the deprivation, but for every behavior that causes it, from sleeping less than six hours, to working 80+ hours a week, and so forth.
Instead of viewing resting as an obstacle, consider it a pit stop needed to refuel and maintain high performance. Click To TweetYour mind and body need enough rest to recharge fully. If you don’t rest enough, you risk reaching the point of diminishing returns and even irreversible damage.
In other words, when you are tired, the more work you put in, the lower the return on your effort will be. At that point, pushing more may even create damage to your work. That is because you impact the quality of your work when you are not your best self, your well-rested self.
What’s interesting is that lack of sleep typically results in longer hours at work to accomplish the same outputs. That’s a poor return on effort, reminding one of the law of diminishing returns. The chart also illustrates conceptually how various studies have shown that lack of sleep not only affects the length of our workdays or inefficiencies but also the quality of our output. The chart does not reach 100% because several factors influence top performance as mentioned earlier.
How Rest Resets Your Mind
Recent studies have revealed what happens when you sleep at night. Just like restarting a computer, your mind uses the time to clear away the buildup so you can think clearly the next day. On the flip side, those deprived of sleep did significantly worse on tests than those who received the required amount of sleep.
In other words, your cognitive function depends on your brain performing at full capacity. Getting the proper amount of sleep clears away distractions. It also processes the business of the previous day, so you can entirely focus your mind on the tasks at hand. And while not every task is affected by sleep deprivation, tasks requiring precision, focus, and creativity are affected. For instance, the higher the level of creativity and attention needed to accomplish a task, the higher the effect of sleep deprivation on your brain.
How Exactly Does Sleep Improve Your Productivity?
Research has shown that not getting enough sleep affects your brain, similar to alcohol. Imagine going to work under the influence of alcohol and trying to get the same amount and quality of work accomplished as being sober.
You can see how impaired brain function affects your ability to focus. This ability is essential in working with clients, creating projects, and moving your business forward. It also affects your judgment, creativity and even puts you in danger when performing tasks such as driving. A momentary loss of concentration may have a devastating impact on your life and business.
Furthermore, there are long-term effects from not getting enough sleep that affect your brain as well. This includes making you more vulnerable to Alzheimer’s disease and dementia later in life. In other words, set aside enough time to get quality sleep every night.
The good news is that you can reverse the effects of sleep deprivation when you change your sleeping habits. This will affect you both in the short term through better productivity and in the long-term for improved overall health.
Get Some Sleep To Boost Your Performance.
To serve your clients in the best way possible, you need to be at your best. So, to be your best means more than just getting a coach education, watching your mindset, and staying alert during your coaching session. These are all important parts of your performance, but if you are sleep-deprived, none of them will help you to be at your best. They may help you to raise the bar, but a coach without rest can hardly contribute to their best ability.
Think about athletes for a minute. They have many levers to pull to influence their overall performance: training, technique, technology or equipment, mindset, nutrition, etc. But without proper rest before their performances or games or competitions, They will not be able to maximize these levers to deliver their best performance. It is the same for us coaches.
You need to get enough sleep to have proper balance and improve your health and productivity. Your ability to balance your life and rest effectively and regularly will impact the quality of your work performance and the business you build. This is enabled by your ability to serve your clients with your whole self, at full capacity. In summary, take the time to get enough rest so you can be your best.