What is high-performance leadership, and could optimizing your recovery be the key to achieving it?
To shed light on this topic, Senior Executive Coach Connor Drake is joined by serial entrepreneur, advisor, and investor, Paul Meinshausen.
Paul co-founded PaySense, a mobile credit company that was acquired by PayU in 2019 for $185M. Today, he is the CEO and co-founder of Aampe, a B2B SaaS startup helping organizations optimize their messaging through AI-driven personalization.
Beyond his startups, Paul brings a fascinating background, having worked with military special forces, data science, and elite team dynamics.
Read their conversation below to learn Paul’s greatest lessons on strategic recovery, energy optimization, and high-performance leadership to sustain long-term success without burnout.
High-Performance Leadership in a Remote World
Connor: We are a fully remote team here at Mindmaven. I’m curious if you built Aampe that way because you think that is the right way to build a company in the modern day?
Paul: I think it’s much more important to be responsive to your situation.
When we started Aampe, it was 2020. It’s right before the pandemic. So the pandemic wasn’t actually that central to the decision.
I have always believed that you start companies around people.
The two people that I wanted to co-found the company with, and was sure that we were the right people to build this particular technology and business, one of them happened to be in Paris, the other happened to be in North Carolina.
We had worked together in different contexts, in office and remote, so we had very deep relationships. In fact, one of them officiated my wedding back in 2014.
We started working together straight out of grad school in the US for the Department of Defense in 2008. So, we had strong relationships and we just knew we were going to do this together.
I’d worked at remote companies and believed that it was totally possible for us to do the job necessary, and then we continue to grow.
But what it meant was we just had to be intentional about how we worked over time and built the company that we’ve built, and responsive to the challenges.
Every format has challenges. Every format has pros and cons. There are trade-offs and you have to make the trade-offs that are right in the context of your objectives and constraints.
High-Performance Leadership: Lessons from Special Forces Teams
Connor: You made a comment about deploying and being a part of smaller elite teams in the military while you were out there.
Is there anything you can share any leadership takeaways specifically that came from some of those interactions?
Paul: I come from a military family. Two of my brothers went to the military academy in the U.S. My father went to military academy in the U.S. So I’m very familiar with the way of being and the way of working in the military.
When I was deciding to go to university, the academy was one of the choices. I didn’t do that.
I ended up going to a public university. And then in that public university, I still considered it because it was such a strong way of thinking and a strong influence on my upbringing.
I remember just even trying at ROTC for a day and finding myself in a line and being told to stand at attention in a way that I just somehow in my gut rejected.
I didn’t like that hierarchy. I had the perception that was the way it was.
What is the Meaning of High-Performance Leadership?
Paul: When I joined the Department of Defense after grad school, doing a master’s in Turkey, where I’d done my research, I was exposed to it again. But when I ended up working with special forces rank almost dissipated into the background.
I worked with these teams called Operational Detachment Alphas, ODAs, and they were 12-person teams. Every person has a specialty.
It might be like really good at being a medic and knowing how to deal with battlefield injuries, or you might be a weapons expert or you could be a logistics supply expert.
There’s established ways of breaking those expertizes up, but everyone was really good at that. And everyone was extremely motivated and had a lot of agency.
It was their job to be the best that they could be, independent of a lot of the physical appearance sort of things that the bigger military ascribed to, and leadership was sort of embedded within the team and the dynamics of people.
Later on, when I was doing research, I left the Department of Defense and went to research in cognitive science and psychology.
I was working quite a bit with a researcher and professor called Richard Hackman who did mostly small-group dynamic psychology. He would work with airplane pilot teams, surgery teams, or military teams.
It was really cool to sort of see some of those things that I’d seen with special forces and see the theory and see the research behind how that mattered. I realized that I wanted to spend a lot of my life in that context.
Powerful big companies still end up having a similar dynamic in terms of their ability to operationalize these smaller teams that can then operate within a broader team.
To me, leadership is as much about the dynamics within people that are working together as it is embedded or embodied in one person who is the leader.
What Business Leaders Can Learn from Elite Athletes
Connor: Before we, started this here today, this topic of performance psychology came up. You were sharing some stories in the past about sports psychology and the lessons you learned there that haven’t always translated to business.
Do you mind sharing a little bit of your views on that?
Paul: It’s quite fantastic to just think about the way Babe Ruth played baseball versus how baseball is played today.
Or even how Michael Jordan played basketball versus how basketball is played by the best today.
There’s a clear progression to where oftentimes the main question would be, could that person even play today?
The fastest people in the world in 1960 couldn’t compete in the Olympics today. They’re just not fast enough. The bar has been reset.
And how has it been reset?
What’s led it to improve? It’s a bundle of things. It’s nutrition, it’s physical fitness, but it’s also practice, the intentionality of practice.
There’s deliberateness to the practice all around it. Particular training regimen again, your nutrition, your psychology, the confidence that you have.
I was on YouTube the other day and I think I saw something and it was like LeBron James spends a couple of million a year on his physical fitness regimen.
Every elite athlete has a series of coaches and assistants and nutritionist specialists that are working around them to allow them to perform and to learn and to grow in their skill set.
In most of business, that hasn’t translated as well.
I think we’re basically lagging in our understanding that in a business context, it’s still a human trying to achieve a particular end, trying to solve a particular set of problems.
At the center of it is still a person and their mind and their physical body, which is determining a lot of their ability to solve the problem, their creativity, their ability to learn and grow.
High-Performance Leadership Tuning: Moving Beyond Maintenance
I see more of it in the Valley when I’m in SF. More people thinking about doing ice baths or meditation as techniques and tools. But I think we could see so much more of it.
I think there’s a lot of work to tune what the concept really even means, but that to kind of help people perform at a higher level.
I think there’s so much room for that practice and element to be pursued and that the ROI of that would be and is really huge.
I can actively use this to become a better person, to become better at what I’m doing.
I think it’s a lot more than maintenance. I think the point is it’s high-performance tuning.
Your car, if you think of it as maintenance, maybe you get it checked up once a year or once every two years or something. I think that’s actually a slightly older model.
An F1 driver is tuning their vehicle all the time. They do research on it, they’re optimizing the airflow and the drag and resistance, everything about it.
It’s a much more ever-present, continuous process. I think there’s room for performance, tuning, calibration, not just, let me fix something when it breaks.
The Art of Recovery: Why It’s Essential for High-Performance Leadership
Connor: Let’s talk optimization. What’s something that you’ve optimized for yourself, for your self-care?
Paul: I think one useful framework that I’ve learned to think about is this sort of cycle between exertion and recovery. You kind of exert energy and then you recover.
In physical fitness, you can go for a run and you run hard and then you know you need to stop running. You don’t just keep running forever, right? You stop and you recover.
You don’t take a nap and then go for another run. You maybe wait a day. There’s some regimen, some cycle there.
I think in most applications of work, you can find a similar cycle.
What am I doing in terms of where am I accelerating my effort? Where am I exerting energy? And then where am I recovering? How am I actively recovering?
Recovery is not a passive thing. It’s an active thing that you can do really well and you can work on that cycle.
You can work rhythms across the course of a day. What your rhythm is in the morning versus an afternoon and how does that correspond to when you’re with your children, or when you need to make dinner in the evening?
You can build these rhythms in these cycles that help you tune those cycles and then improve.
Time vs Energy: The Mindset Shift of High-Performance Leadership
Connor: Would you be willing to give a little look inside what rest looks like for you? What one of your recharge tactics is?
Paul: There’s this book called The Power of Full Engagement.
They set up a performance center, I think in Florida, and they wrote this book based on their work with lots of athletes and different leaders and executives and things like that.
The main point of the book, if you kind of look through all the marketing speak and the business language is that the fundamental unit that’s important to calibrate is not time.
We often think of time as the scarce constraint we work against and they posit that it’s actually energy.
There’s intellectual or mental energy. There’s emotional energy. There’s spiritual energy. There’s physical energy.
It’s useful to break that up because you start to realize when I’m working in these cycles of exertion and recovery, they’re kind of independent or interdependent with each other.
When you’re working, you’re mostly at a desk. You’re sending emails, you’re doing kinds of work that are not physically taxing.
We’re not like lifting heavy loads, but they’re mentally taxing, you’re concentrating, you’re focusing.
When your arms get tired, you feel the pain in the arms. You can see the sweat, you know it’s tired. But the brain doesn’t have that capacity to sweat or have pain in the brain, like in the muscle.
But here’s the important point.
You haven’t physically exerted yourself, so you don’t need to physically recover. You need to mentally recover.
How Do You Mentally Recover?
Paul: There’s a distinction that’s really important. When you sit on the couch, you’re physically recovering, but your mind again is not. It’s still on a treadmill.
It won’t be spinning about work because you’ll find a show that you’re interested in. But it’s still spinning because it’s simulating the show and you’re imagining a scenario.
The last thing you want to do is go work out. You’re like, I’m exhausted. I don’t want to do that. It’s really a trick because you’re not physically exhausted.
You didn’t work hard all day. You didn’t sweat. Your muscles aren’t sore. If anything, what happens is if you don’t exert energy, your ability to exert energy deteriorates.
For me, running is one really important way to do it. I do what are called meditation naps. It’s 15-minute increments where I lay flat in a very particular pose and go into it with the intent to meditate but with the acceptance of sleep.
My recovery in that 15-minute increment is really high. 15 minutes and I come back really charged and full of energy.
You can find these things, these swings, and then you can put them into your daily life, and it’s really powerful.
You give yourself that mental break, you come back, you get that mental rest, and you can tackle the rest of the day recharged.
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