In this episode of the Danish-language podcast Den Nye Standard, my guest is Rasmus Bagger, a mental trainer and performance coach. We talk about focusing on your strengths rather than your weaknesses, and how you can use high performance and peak performance when leading a company.
Rasmus describes himself as a man who doesn’t like limits, which is why he isn’t fond of rules. He has more than 20 years of experience in mental training and performance coaching, and his main job is helping people and organisations win more and develop their personal strengths. In 2018, Rasmus started the Master of Mental Training programme, which trains people to create success and results so they can help others reach a higher level.
Know your strengths and weaknesses
In the episode, Rasmus takes us from his childhood, when he discovered mental training through sport, to today, when he uses psychology to help people succeed. When Rasmus coaches business leaders and athletes, they often have one thing in common: they don’t know their own strengths and skills, and focus on their limitations and weaknesses instead. A big part of Rasmus’s work is getting leaders to motivate themselves before they can motivate their employees. He doesn’t believe you can motivate and engage your people as a leader if you aren’t motivated and passionate about a project yourself. Rasmus uses a tool called firstmind to help people discover their strengths and talents. His advice to everyone is to work with people who have strengths and skills you don’t have yourself, so that together you achieve the most success.
High performance and peak performance
Rasmus works a lot with the concepts of high performance and peak performance. When he works with high performance, it’s mainly in business. According to Rasmus, a team can create high performance by focusing on its strengths, and in that way raise the baseline of the culture. When he works with peak performance, it’s usually in the world of sport. Peak performance is about delivering the extraordinary performance that sits well above high performance. But according to Rasmus, you can’t perform at that level all the time without burning out. So he recommends combining high performance and peak performance. That opens up huge opportunities, because you make the best possible use of your employees’ strengths and skills, while also giving them the chance to put in an extra effort for short periods.