Go With The Flow - Your Leadership Superpower
A 6-minute investment to make you a better leader - In role. In life.
Hi, I’m Jason. I'm here to help you thrive mentally, physically, and emotionally through a powerful combination of science-based advice and coaching guidance.
Think of this as your weekly ‘cheat sheet’ to help you lead better and live better.
What’s coming up:
Prime Performance: This Week’s Best News, Views & Life-Hacks
The Prime Perspective: Go With The Flow - Your Leadership Superpower
Lessons from the Arena: From Plan to Pivot: The Art of Improvisation
Be a Prime Mover: 1 Quote to Spark Change
Prime Performance: this week’s news, views and life hacks
🎞️ WATCH 58 Seconds on Controlling Negative Emotions
‘Mastery’ author Robert Greene shares a self-observation exercise that can really help you keep negative emotions in check. He also stresses the importance of the mind-body connection, which further validates our integrated program at The Prime Movement.
📖 READ The Breathwork Hack That Can Transform You in Minutes
Having attended Rob Brea's breathwork classes in London, I can say with conviction that he's the best coach I've experienced in this field. In this simple guide he shares how mastering the ‘Physiological Sigh’ can shift the body from stress to calm in just a few breaths. This is the ideal kind of evidence-based tool for any leader in the midst of a stressful situation.
📻 LISTEN What Makes a Good Life: The Harvard Study That May Surprise You
What if nearly everything we've been taught about professional success is wrong? In this eye-opening podcast, Dr. Robert Waldinger, Director of Harvard's unprecedented 80-year study on human development, reveals the surprising factor that most accurately predicts both leadership performance and personal wellbeing. His findings offer powerful insights for leaders seeking to enhance their decision-making, resilience, and overall effectiveness in both professional and personal domains.
The Prime Perspective: Thoughts on Leadership and Growth
Go With The Flow - Your Leadership Superpower
I've always been fascinated by surfing. That wonderful blend of art and science. That quest for mastery in the most volatile of elements and the way that for me, it seems to be one of the purest embodiments of flow state - when you see that surfer as one with their board and the ocean. It's a wonderful metaphor for life and leadership.
There's a reality where great surfers put in the hours, developing techniques and building up skills. However, they equally embrace the fact this can't all be preprogrammed. The height of performance is when you reach flow state and improvise intuitively, leveraging acquired knowledge while embracing the unknown.
This blend—technical foundation and improvisational flow—creates an unbeatable combination in leadership and life. The most respected leaders aren't simply technical experts, nor are they purely intuitive. They're both.
I experienced this dynamic firsthand in my journey with boxing. I had to learn the fundamentals of footwork and the jab, how to defend myself—hours of repetitive practice drilling the basics into muscle memory. But ultimately, I performed best when I wasn’t even thinking about it. I was just flowing, responding instinctively.
The magic happens when your conscious mind steps back and allows your trained instincts to take over.
The Science
When neuroscientist Dr. Charles Limb studied jazz musicians' brains during improvisation, he discovered a fascinating pattern: regions responsible for self-monitoring showed decreased activity, while areas associated with self-expression became more active. The brain was quieting its inner critic to allow spontaneous creativity to emerge.
But those musicians had spent thousands of hours mastering their instruments. Their improvisation wasn't random—it was built upon deep technical mastery that had become automatic.
This explains why leaders who have both technical expertise and improvisational ability create exceptional results:
Technical mastery provides the foundation.
Improvisational ability enables adaptation.
Together, they create responsive expertise neither could achieve alone.
You Can Learn This
This unbeatable combination isn't something you're born with - you can develop it intentionally through:
Deliberate practice: Mastering technical fundamentals.
Experiential learning: Embracing varied, real-world scenarios.
Reflective analysis: Understanding what works in different contexts.
Flow cultivation: Learning to access states of focused performance.
The mistake many leadership development approaches make is focusing exclusively on either technical skills or mindset techniques, rather than integrating both.
The Invitation
The next time you watch a surfer effortlessly riding a wave or your favourite tennis player pull off a seemingly impossible shot to win a point, remember what you're really seeing: the perfect integration of technical mastery and improvisational flow. Then ask yourself: How can I cultivate that same powerful combination in my leadership?
This blend of science and art is at the heart of what we’re building at The Prime Movement. We believe the traditional siloed approach to leadership development is outdated and doesn’t reflect what science and tech are telling us.
Our approach is based on neuroscientific methods combined with executive coaching expertise to deliver measurable results. So if you want to lead better and live better, join the waitlist now.
THE PRIME PERFORMANCE PROGRAM
Building Better Leaders. In Role. In Life.
Lessons from the Arena: Real Life Leadership Challenges
Every week, I'll share real challenges from coaching experiences, offering practical insights you can apply to your own leadership journey.
CHALLENGE:
“I've always relied on careful planning and preparation in my leadership roles, but I’m increasingly finding this approach harder to stick to as things just feel more turbulent, whether that’s stakeholder pressure, AI coming down the tracks like a steam train or just the broader economic landscape. I’m finding myself stuck between trying to maintain my structured approach while having to improvise in the face of rapidly changing circumstances and it feels really destabilizing.”
MY GUIDANCE:
This situation perfectly illustrates why leadership at its best requires both disciplined preparation and skilled improvisation.
1.Draw strength from your preparation
While your specific plan may be obsolete, the deep understanding you gained through the planning process isn't. Your familiarity with the goals, context, and team capabilities provides a great foundation for improvisation - jazz musicians don't forget their scales when improvising, they use that foundation to create something new. Similarly, your planning has equipped you with the knowledge base needed to adapt effectively. Don’t lose sight of that.
2. Create a rapid adaptation framework
Improvisation doesn’t have to equal chaos. Adopting a rapid adaptation framework or similar can not only give you a process to help you focus on adapting, the structure can be liberating as it creates space for evolving, but with defined parameters. Here’s an example of what you could do with your team in 90 minutes:
Assess what elements of the original plan remain valid (15 mins)
Identify the 1-3 critical adaptations required (20 mins)
Generate multiple approaches to each adaptation (25 mins)
Develop an actionable sprint with clear individual responsibilities (30 mins)
3. Embrace bounded experimentation
Rather than attempting a comprehensive new plan immediately, adopt what design thinking practitioners call ‘low-resolution prototyping’:
Break the challenge into smaller experiments
Set clear testing parameters and success metrics
Implement rapid learning cycles
Amplify what works, abandon what doesn't
This approach transforms overwhelming uncertainty into manageable tests, allowing you to move forward without needing all the answers immediately.
Communicate throughout with transparency and confidence
Your team needs to understand both the situation and your approach. Be clear that:
The plan is changing because circumstances changed (not because the original work was flawed)
You're shifting from a static plan to an adaptive approach
Success now depends on collective intelligence and rapid learning
You have confidence in the team's capability to adapt (even amid uncertainty)
The bottom line
There are always going to be circumstances beyond your control that derail the best laid plans - when this happens, improvisation is a critical leadership skill, so always see it as an opportunity to develop, rather than as a failure of your plans.
Be A Prime Mover: 1 Quote to Spark Change
“Improvising is live inspiration, something happening at that very moment. Do not fear mistakes. There are none.”
— Miles Davis
Forward this to a fellow leader - they'll thank you for it.
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