Paulo Beckert: "For a high performance leadership it is essential to maintain satisfaction and balance"

- How do personal, physical, emotional and cognitive conditions affect the exercise of high performance leadership?

For high performance leadership it is essential that the leader is able to obtain and maintain a level of satisfaction and balance between personal, physical, emotional and cognitive conditions. Any factor that affects their physical or psychological condition will certainly affect their capacity and availability in the leadership process, especially when it comes to high performance leadership. 

- These are important questions for athletes, but also for coaches. How do these points intersect with the business world?

For top competition athletes and their coaches, excellence in results is only possible with adequate planning of training in its different physical, technical and tactical components, associated with adequate management of post-effort recovery, nutrition, injury prevention, sleep and emotional balance, among others. 

In the business world, and as more sophisticated and competitive management and planning processes are developed, there is an increasing emphasis on the adoption of healthy lifestyle habits where nutrition, physical exercise and sleep are of primary importance.

It is in the presence and recognition that the conditions referred to above must exist in a balanced way, to optimise performance (specific to each activity, whether sporting or business) these points intersect with the business world.

- The pandemic has led many people to worsen their sedentary state. How, in these circumstances, does one ensure that one's physical and mental state is maintained?

In fact, the pandemic highlighted or worsened the sedentary state of a large section of the population. The confinements and restrictions imposed made regular physical exercise difficult, which for many was essential to ensure the maintenance of an adequate physical and mental state. In these particular circumstances of the phase in which we find ourselves, and in which, fortunately, we are witnessing a relaxation of restrictions, it is fundamental that each one of us includes time in our already congested schedules (work, family life) for physical activity, whether it is a simple walk, jog, bike ride, a trip to the gym, to the swimming pool or a football match between friends.

- How do we balance performance and fatigue?

It is undoubtedly a complex issue to which the sports-related sciences are increasingly searching for solutions and more effective answers. I would say, in a very simplistic way, that only by adapting the training loads and recovery times in order to avoid chronic fatigue. Or to put it another way, we should invest in all the processes that allow an effective post-exercise recovery after the administration of optimal training loads. Nutrition, hydration, sleep, recovery exercise, cryotherapy, hydrotherapy, among others, are all used in recovery processes.

- You gave medical support to the National Football Team in various competitions, including Euro 2016, and to athletes who participated in several editions of the Olympic Games. Is this support the secret to a winning team?

The secret to a winning team, in my opinion, is to have talent, someone to guide this talent towards a collective talent, making a winning team out of this group of talents, and to have several teams behind it to accompany the athletes and respond to their multiple needs, contributing to their individual and collective performance, thus making all its participants stand out as a true Team of teams. The Health and Performance team is one of the Winning Team teams that you mention (whether it is a team in team sports or a team in individual sports).