The Hidden Cost of Being Capable and Why Sustainable Performance Is the Real Competitive Edge
Written by Dawn Sanders, Performance Coach
Dawn Sanders, Director of WinWell, is a trusted and respected Performance lifestyle, wellbeing, career, and transition coach. She brings over 20 years of experience working in elite sport, supporting individuals through performance, personal growth, and career transitions.
There is a pattern I have seen play out for over twenty years, firstly with inspiring and ambitious elite athletes who have represented their country at the peak of their performance, and now across boardrooms and leadership teams in business. The most capable people are always given the most, more responsibility, more problems to solve, more demands, more people relying on them in life and work. It happens because they have earned trust through what they can handle, the pressure they can absorb, and their dependability to perform. That trust in them and their abilities is a genuine strength worth recognising and embracing.
What rarely gets talked about is the other side of that pattern. Somewhere between taking on more and holding everything together, it becomes hard to notice the shift from stretched to overwhelmed, or from resilient to running on empty. In elite sport, this is a hidden performance friction, sometimes expressed through illness, injury, or time lost to training at the highest level. In business, it usually just gets called Tuesday.
What twenty years inside elite sport taught me about performance
When I first started out on this journey to support high performers, there was no framework or textbook to guide me. So, I've learnt from experience and often learnt the hard way, from coaching others to help create more sustainable performance or acknowledging that I need to do it for myself. I have been in an honoured position to be let into people's lives, to see what happens behind the lens of a camera, learning it while sitting across from athletes who had just been told their Olympic or Paralympic cycle, and in some cases their entire athletic identity, was ending. The thing that had defined them since childhood stops, and they had to work out who they were without it.
I've learnt it when things get tough and life impacts performance, and performance impacts life. I've seen it when VPs and leaders feel like they have nothing more to give or feel lost as a person beyond the noise of the organisation's key performance indicators (KPIs) or its transition to artificial intelligence driven practices. It's not always easy for people to sit in this space, but there is so much to learn from it about how, and how not, to create and maintain sustainable performance. The one thing all these people have in common? They wish they had done something sooner to seek support before something became a bigger issue.
When work bleeds into life, and life bleeds into work
One of the clearest patterns to come out of the work I do with senior leaders is how rarely performance friction stays where it starts. A punishing quarter at work does not stay neatly inside office hours. It shows up at home, in the parent who is technically present but mentally still in the meeting that overran, in the partner who has stopped being able to switch off, and in the low hum of guilt that follows someone even on the rare day they do leave on time.
The reverse is just as true and far less talked about. What is happening in someone's personal life doesn't stay there either. A difficult summer at home juggling kids during school holidays and work, a health scare, or a relationship under strain shows up the next morning as shorter fuses, slower decisions, and a version of someone's leadership that is a step below their best, however hard they try to compartmentalise it. Asking someone to leave their life at the door before they walk physically or metaphorically into work has never once actually worked. It just teaches people to hide the cost instead of managing it.
This is precisely why I am passionate about developing a sustainable performance tool to look at the whole person rather than a single measure of output. Presence at home, energy that is restored rather than just endured, and decision clarity under fatigue are not separate categories from performance. They are all performance related, whether in life or at work, and being able to see the impact one has on the other means people are far more likely to act.
Performance and longevity are not competing priorities
When I first started out in high performance, the narrative treated recovery, identity, and personal life as things to sacrifice in service of results. Push harder, sleep less, keep going, don't have any outside interests. It works for a while, which is exactly the problem. Short bursts of unsustainable output can look like success right up until the point they cost you the very capability that made you valuable in the first place.
But sports science and sports medicine have taught us many things that explain why and how this narrative had to change, ensuring days aren't lost to injury or illness.
The athletes and executives who sustain elite output over a career, not just a quarter, share a different pattern. They treat performance and longevity as the same project, not two competing ones. It is not about doing less or taking a holiday in the hope that it will fix the problem. It is about building the underlying architecture that meets the specific needs of that individual, allowing high output to continue without the person underneath it breaking down.
Beyond the outcome: Building goals, identity and values that let you enjoy the journey
Almost every high performer I have worked with can tell you their next performance target without pausing to think. A number, a title, a deadline, a medal, a milestone, a key performance indicator (KPI). Far fewer can tell you, with the same speed, who they are underneath that target, or what they actually value about themselves when nobody is measuring anything at all.
This matters more than it sounds. When your goals are entirely outcome focused, tied to a bigger role, a bigger number, or a result other people can see and applaud, the satisfaction they bring is often temporary and always followed by the need for a slightly bigger goalpost. For some, that outcome isn’t achieved, and they question their whole self-worth. For others, the outcome does come, but what did they gain as a person? The sense of fulfilment they expected to arrive with it doesn't always last.
The people who sustain both performance, a greater breadth of identity, and genuine wellbeing over the long run tend to hold a broader definition of success than the title or achievement offers. They know their process goals, the daily and weekly behaviours within their control, and the amazing things they bring to those process goals, not just the outcome sitting at the end of them. They have a sense of identity that exists independently of their job title or their last set of results, built from their own individual values and strengths that stay constant whether they win or lose, get promoted or don't. Critically, they have learned to find some genuine enjoyment in the process itself, not just relief when it's finally over, connecting to and valuing their individual human strengths that have enabled them to get to where they are at this stage in their own journey.
Winning and losing doesn't define you, and neither does your KPI or your bonus. There is more to you than the external validation of your success, and building a clear sense of what that "more to me" actually consists of, your values, your strengths, your identity beyond the role, your self-care plan, your passions and interests, and your continual learning and development is not a soft add-on to performance. It is what allows someone to enjoy the climb, rather than only ever feeling relief at the summit before immediately looking for the next mountain.
The four places potential friction hides
Through the diagnostic work I have developed for executives, one truth keeps surfacing. When someone is struggling to sustain their performance, the friction is rarely just about workload. It tends to concentrate in four areas.
Performance edge. Being able to have real clarity under fatigue, the ability to protect real deep work time, and the ability to motivate, care for, and lead others effectively.
Life goals and vision. High performers often have absolute clarity on what their organisation needs next quarter, and very little clarity on where they personally want to be in three to five years. That gap can quietly drain motivation over time.
Identity beyond the role. The more senior someone becomes, the more their sense of self can fuse with their job title. Losing the ability to define personal strengths or say "I don't know" or "I'm struggling" to anyone, because the mask must stay on, are some of the clearest early warning signs I see.
Recovery integration. Time off that is technically taken but not actually restorative, because the mind never leaves the job, does not function as recovery. It functions as unpaid overtime with worse lighting.
Most people can name which of these four areas is quietly costing them the most the moment they see the pattern laid out. That is usually the first useful coaching conversation, long before any conversation about workload or time management.
Trust is the multiplier, not a soft add-on
None of this happens in isolation. The teams and leaders that sustain performance well are almost always operating inside a high-trust environment. When a leader creates the conditions where someone can say there are challenges in life or at work without it being read as weakness, friction gets caught early. When they cannot, it gets buried until it becomes seen as a lack of motivation, a resignation, a health issue, or a very expensive mistake.
Trust is not a wellbeing nicety sitting alongside performance. It is one of the load-bearing walls underneath it. I saw this play out constantly in elite sport, where the difference between a coaching environment athletes thrived in and one they quietly fell apart in rarely came down to the training programme. It came down to whether the athlete believed they could tell the truth about how they were really doing and wholeheartedly trust the people who were going to help them build their dreams.
Leaders who notice, care for, and listen to the whole person, and who want to support their broader life and career goals, are the ones who will keep their top talent and enable them to thrive for years to come.
What conversations on the Win Well Podcast keep revealing
I started the Win Well Podcast because I want high performing people to share stories of how they win well and how they have created sustainable performance. Guests have ranged from athletes who have competed on the biggest stages in their sport to business leaders carrying enormous organisational responsibility, and the conversations keep circling back to the same handful of truths.
The people who talk most openly about winning well, rather than just winning, are rarely the ones who describe an easy path. They tend to describe a specific turning point, a moment where continuing to perform the way they always had, for themselves or their team, stopped being sustainable, and they had to consciously redesign how they worked rather than simply trying harder with the same approach.
It is rarely framed as a dramatic collapse. More often, it is described as a slow, quiet erosion they only recognised in hindsight, which is exactly why the four areas of friction above matter. They are early signals, not late stage diagnoses.
What this looks like in practice
I have built this sustainable performance thinking into a free diagnostic tool for senior leaders, one that deliberately avoids reducing someone's results to a single score out of a hundred. Instead, it maps where a person's strengths and friction points might sit across the four areas above, because a single number tells you almost nothing about where to act next, while a clearer picture does.
The same thinking underpins a programme I am currently developing, built for people who do not want to choose between performing at the highest level and having a life that can sustain it for the next twenty years, not just the next twenty months. It draws directly on the lifestyle and transition frameworks I built for Olympic and Paralympic athletes, adapted for people whose arena is a boardroom rather than a stadium, but whose underlying need to sustain themselves and their performance is exactly the same.
If you're a leader or manager and would like a copy of the free sustainable performance tool, for yourself or for your team, please email me here, and I'll send it straight over.
The real question to ask
If you are someone other people rely on precisely because you are capable, the question worth sitting with is not whether you can keep doing what you are doing. It's the questions underneath that. If you have or can sustain that performance, what strengths enable you to do this? How can you acknowledge, celebrate, and draw upon these strengths when you need them most, in life and in your career? And if the way you're working isn't sustainable, how long can it really last? What is it quietly costing you to keep doing it the way you are doing it now, and is that a cost you are willing to keep paying? And what do you want to do about it?
The people who last longest at the top, whether in elite sport or in business, are rarely the ones who pushed hardest. They are the ones who built something sustainable underneath the push, who kept enough of themselves outside the role to enjoy the climb and not just the summit, and who had someone in their corner willing to tell them the truth, coaching and supporting them to train smarter, embrace their personal strengths and values, and connect with what they've learned about themselves along the journey.
Which is always something you can do too.
Read more from Dawn Sanders
Dawn Sanders, Performance Coach
Dawn Sanders is a leader in coaching the lifestyle, wellbeing, career development, and transition needs of elite performers, having supported Great Britain's Olympic and Paralympic athletes for over 20 years. She is passionate about developing the person behind the performer to enable them to thrive in high-pressure, high-risk, high-reward environments.
