As the demands on leaders in major projects and programmes continue to grow, so too does the pressure on their personal capacity. How can leaders sustain performance, maintain resilience, and create the conditions for their teams to succeed in increasingly complex environments?
At our recent November roundtable, Annastiina Hintsa, CEO of Hintsa Performance, joined us for a thought-provoking conversation about what high performance looks like, both on and off the track. Drawing on lessons from Formula 1, working with large organisations, and years of research into human wellbeing, she explored how the world’s best sustain excellence under intense pressure and what leaders can take from it.
Building on the themes from the MPA’s No More Heroes report, which highlights the leadership gap linked to burnout and low productivity, our roundtable explored practical ways to help leaders thrive. The evening was full of energy, discussion, and plenty of moments of “this really can apply to me”.
Sustaining High Performance
In Formula 1, milliseconds decide championships, yet performance is not only about engineering or pushing harder. As Annastiina explained, success at the pinnacle of motorsport is about managing paradoxes: profit and purpose, efficiency and innovation, stability and change, wellbeing and performance. The ability to hold these tensions is a hallmark of senior leaders too.
Hintsa Performance works from a simple belief: when people live better, they perform better. It is a philosophy that has shaped the routines of more than 3,000 executives and over 90 percent of Formula 1 race winners in the past decade. Lewis Hamilton reflected, “We’ll always be in each other’s lives”, a reminder that true performance coaching goes far beyond results.
The methodology behind Hintsa’s work focuses on your Core (inner motivation) and creating a Sustainable Performance Cycle that is personal to each individual, whether an F1 driver, Olympic athlete or business leader.
Their session opened with three fundamental questions:
- Do you know who you are?
- Do you know what you want?
- Are you in control of your life?
It echoed a question often put to young drivers by Dr Aki Hintsa: Do you want to be in the drivers seat of your life or the passenger seat?
Annastiina shared several practical frameworks that leaders and teams can use to maintain performance over the long term:
- Periodisation: Understanding your daily, weekly, and annual performance rhythm. Knowing when to push, when to make time to recover, and when to renew.
- Optimal Pressure: Identifying your stretch zone and recognising when healthy challenge begins to tip into strain.
- Recovery: Planning small recovery moments across your day, week, and year to protect wellbeing and fuel growth.
- Preparation: Creating capacity before peak periods so you can perform when it matters most.
- Team: Remembering that even the best driver cannot win without a world-class pit crew and support team.
One of the key messages was that resilience is a skill that can be learned. Balancing the comfort zone with the stretch zone underpins the optimal area for performance.
There was also a helpful distinction between healthy and unhealthy stress. Stress itself is not the enemy – we need it to perform, but problems arise when stress becomes chronic. Knowing your early warning signs and planning moments of recovery is vital.
Annastiina explored the four elements of mental recovery: Control, Relaxation, Mastery, and Detachment. Building these into everyday routines can make a significant difference. While embedding recovery within projects and programmes may need a cultural shift, it often begins with the small things – what you do, and what you enable others to do.
One Change That Cascades
Each of us was encouraged to consider one meaningful change that could have the biggest ripple effect. Sustainable change starts with awareness and grows through small, consistent actions. The WOOP framework (Wish, Objective, Obstacle, Plan) offers a simple and practical way to turn good intentions into tangible progress.
Resilience is not a fixed trait. It is a rhythm, a balance between pressure and recovery, competition and cooperation, performance and wellbeing. The conversation left us with a shared realisation: resilience is not about enduring difficult environments, but about designing conditions where people and teams can thrive.
For further insight into how the world’s best balance wellbeing and performance, explore the latest Hintsa F1 Insights Report.