High Performance: Mental Health & BiPolar
I’m going to focus on the advantages of BiPolar Disorder in terms of high performance as this is something I have an understanding of, having been diagnosed a few years ago. The goal is to demonstrate there is a better way of thinking about, and managing, mood disorders in a professional setting. In fact, It’s highly likely those with mood disorders hiding in plain sight are your smartest and highest performers.
Lets explore this now.
BiPolar Disorder
Previously known as manic depression, Bipolar Disorder is a mood disorder characterised by periods of abnormally-elevated happiness followed by periods of depression that each last from days to weeks. Below is a simplified version of sine waves and their associated mood disorder in relation to severity of mood over time.
I’m not going to go into detail on the various types mentioned in the model above as the purpose in this article is to highlight the four particular mood states associated with mood disorders. These lists are not definitive, but will provide some insight on what an individual can experience throughout their up’s and downs.
Mania: Abnormally energetic, happy or irritable, impulsive, disregard for consequence, severe insomnia, possible psychosis.
Hypomania: Overwhelming sense of wellbeing, mentally sharp, highly creative & productive, mild insomnia, anything is possible.
Minor Depression: Negative outlook, emotionally detached, increased need for sleep, simple tasks become taxing.
Major Depression: Diminished mental capacity, physically exhausted, noticeable lack of self care, potentially suicidal.
Let me give you a personal example of how it can all start with a snapshot of an up and down:
With some help from a psychiatrist I managed to work out that Bipolar, for me, stemmed from being curious and chatty while being shy, introverted and risk averse from a very young age, from as young as I can remember. In order to function in day to day life I had to overcome this, for example: nursery, school, kids parties, etc, all of which I couldn’t stand. I had no interest in any of these things.
I became impulsive and learned to leap before looking, which became a very successful coping mechanism for many many years. And so began the pendulum swing between highs and lows. The flip side to this meant I didn’t develop a sense of consequence or ability to plan beyond immediate gratification. For example, you can imagine where this took my spending habits once I started earning. This amongst many other hedonistic and thrill seeking habits I developed. I also developed an ability to remain calm and objective in high stress situations. To say I had over-corrected was an understatement. This all caught up with me decades later, hence speaking with a psychiatrist. But, that’s a story for another day as it’s not relevant to this article.
When I’m up I don’t experience a need to sleep, even though logically I know it’s something I should do. I can also forget to eat and drink. In terms of creativity and productivity these explode. Idea’s and connections with disparate data present like a tsunami of images faster than I can write or speak, but we’ll come back to this later under the section on high performance.
When I’m down I can become curt and dissociated. My joints become inflamed and stiff like the tin man from the Wizard of OZ, literally unfurling my toes and fingers, legs and arms to get out of bed. If I make it to the shower I can forget to wash, standing under the flow of water with no concept of time until it runs cold. I struggle to fully form thoughts and I sleep a lot while feeling continually tired and ready for bed.
I should stress I have great people around me, bits of technology, occasional medication and a routine built around physical activity, healthy food (mostly) and sleep that, more often than not, help keep me relatively balanced and moving in the right direction. To learn about the effects of mental health on physical health and coping strategies do read: High Performance: Mental & Physical Health.
Research
Below is the IQ scale, or Intelligence Quotient Scale, based on the original work of two Psychologists Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon, later updated by Dr Lewis Terman a Psychologist at Stanford University. A brief explanation of what IQ measures is: A persons ability to process information in terms of volume and complexity in any given moment. The greater the volume and complexity of information a person can process the greater their IQ score.
You can see the model demonstrates the distribution of IQ across the population and below is a list of IQ classifications and associated definitions:
140+ Genius
120–140 Very superior intelligence
110–120 Superior intelligence
90–110 Normal, or average, intelligence
80–90 Dullness, rarely classifiable as feeble-mindedness
70–80 Border-line deficiency, sometimes classifiable as dullness, often as feeble-mindedness
70– Definite feeble-mindedness
A study called the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) was published in the British Journal of Psychiatry from the University of Cambridge, which involved over 14,000 participants over three decades and counting.
One finding was individuals who scored in the top 10% of BiPolar traits had a mean IQ 10 points higher than their low trait scoring peers. The study suggests that “serious disorders of mood such as bipolar disorder may be the price that human beings have had to pay for more adaptive traits such as intelligence, creativity and verbal proficiency".
To be blunt: There appears to be a correlation between BiPolar Disorder and being smart as fuck.
This was particularly interesting to me having been told by my teachers I’d be lucky to secure an O Grade in Arithmetic, to be fair I was probably more distracted than I remember. Formal education was a bewildering experience I never saw the point of, an endless mind numbing memory retention test of meaningless force fed data with no demonstrable relevance or context. I was also outspokenly argumentative when I disagreed with something, which I got in to trouble for a lot.
There was only one teacher I could ever relate to in high school, Dr Gorton. A very clever man incredibly well read in the sciences, to the degree even the other teachers openly admitted they thought he was odd and eccentric. I could easily converse with him on a level others couldn’t and he worked tirelessly with any student who expressed genuine interest in his favourite subjects. Why I connected with him is about to become abundantly clear, though I didn’t figure this out until I was in my late 30’s.
Overall my experience of formal education is a stark contrast to the discovery of possessing a genius IQ. A real shock given that most of my life I thought I wasn’t particularly bright as I didn’t really connect with, or relate to, my peers. My academic results supported my original self-perception.
High Performance
Below is a representation of an ideal development scenario using a simplified version of Prof. Mihály Csikszentmihályi Flow model, which he originally discovered in 1975 after identifying the components of high performance. I have updated this to demonstrate the relationship between Strategy, Operations and High Performance, which can be applied to any individual, team or organisation. By looking at the relationship between Challenge, defined as: Degree of difficulty to be overcome, and Support, defined as: Available resources. Four states emerge:
These four states correlate with specific behaviours that can be measured in any individual, team or organisation.
Anxiety: Missed deadlines, avoidance of interaction, likely negatively impacting employee sickness absence.
Apathy: Absence of enthusiasm or presence of indifference, likely negatively impacting employee retention.
Comfort: Lack of activity and accountability, likely negatively impacting employee productivity.
Flow: Pro-active, self-directed, emphasis on personal responsibility, likely positively impacting all above.
From my experience the rate of solution generation for complex problems during Flow is extraordinary due to an ability to join the dots with seemingly disparate data very quickly while the rest of the world appears to move in slow motion, think of the character Carrie Mathieson in the series Homeland, without psychosis and less rambling.
Projects that typically take weeks take only days and projects that typically take days only hours, e.g. An entire marketing strategy for a startup bike manufacturer took 90mins and an entire operations strategy for a life sciences company took 8hrs. For a large enterprise CFO I was able to investigate, solution generate and begin to implement in 8 days what an entire HR Department failed to diagnose and resolve over 2 years. During coaching sessions I typically pin down with precision what someone is struggling with in roughly 20mins no matter the scale of the problem. We can immediately start to form and test an implementable solution.
This has created challenges around how to price myself in the market given I can deliver meaningful outcomes so quickly with results often met with disbelief, which is based on direct feedback from clients. As this is my version of normal I tend to significantly undervalue what I think is obvious when it’s actually deeply profound for the recipient, which I repeatedly find surprising. So, I take my clients words for it.
The value of my coaching is in the scale of impact, speed of resolution and outcomes realised, for example an SME leadership team had plateaued with a turnover of £750k per annum. They invested £30k in coaching over 18 months resulting in £250k of additional revenue year on year for 3 years taking their turnover to £1.5million, doubling their revenue. At the same time we reduced their overheads by 60%.
In terms of consulting the benefits realisation of large enterprise transformation project examples I mentioned earlier were in the £millions.
Conclusion
Since 1.3million people in the UK live with BiPolar, which is 1 in 50 with an almost 50/50 male female split, my take is to find ways of working that allows this intelligence and creativity to flourish rather than bash it like a square peg in to a round hole to satisfy arbitrary business processes.
I think leaders that take the time to understand the opportunities that accompany people with mood disorders and embrace them will be astonished at not only the scale and impact of solutions, efficiencies and products generated, but the pace at which they will be realised.
Hilary Spence, Jos van der Burg and Nick Cohen are three people in particular that have given me such playgrounds, even though at the time I was living with something I didn't have a name for. I thought my up's & downs were normal and just got on with it.
If you encounter someone like myself it's unlikely they seek sympathy of any kind, it's more likely they seek a place they can exercise their mind to its' fullest while managing their ups and downs, which they alone are responsible for. It's certainly the greatest gift anyone has ever given me.
You have very very clever people to leverage in your ranks. My call to action is to figure out how to set them free in your organisation with purpose and autonomy. They will take care of the rest themselves.
If you want to learn how to take advantage of the models in this article you can check out my resources below to find something that suits your needs, even sign up for my newsletter. Alternatively, if you want to get straight in to it, you can put 60mins in my diary to chat over an eCoffee.
Best Wishes
Kenny
