Why The Best Leaders Must Train Like Elite Athletes

What if we treated CEOs like elite athletes—training for endurance, managing recovery, and leading with unshakable focus? This article makes a bold case for redefining leadership as a high-performance sport, where mental stamina and resilience are the real competitive edge. With powerful coaching insights and real-world stories, it challenges leaders to rethink how they prepare, perform, and rebound. It’s time to celebrate the business athlete—and learn how to become one.  

Key Takeaways:

• Business leadership demands athletic-level preparation—mental stamina, resilience, and discipline are essential for sustained success in the C-suite.
• Great leaders are “business athletes” who manage setbacks by staying mission-focused, engineering recovery, and strategically balancing their schedules.
• Mental toughness is a competitive advantage, marked by consistency, emotional steadiness, and the ability to lead effectively under pressure.
• We should celebrate exceptional business leadership with the same admiration we reserve for elite athletes, as it requires equally demanding performance and character.

I was pedaling hard through the dense trails of Florida’s Oleta River State Park, chasing after my friend Fausto—a former Cuban national water polo player turned rugged mountain man. As Fausto effortlessly outpaced me, he glanced back and quipped, “Koopman, don’t you think my office is better than yours?”

That jab stuck with me. Sure, the forest was beautiful. But I didn’t resent the corporate boardrooms, the red-eye flights from Tokyo, or the high-stakes meetings. In fact, I thrived in them. As I caught my breath among the trees that afternoon, an idea crystallized: Business is my sport. I approach it with the mindset of a competitor, and it demands stamina, discipline, and pride. Thriving in the C-suite calls for the preparation and resilience of elite athletes.

Yet, while we celebrate athletic champions with medals and multimillion-dollar contracts, society often hesitates to laud business leaders with the same enthusiasm. Leadership excellence requires grit, experience, and spirit no less demanding than an Olympic-level performance. And it’s time we started viewing it that way.

Business is a sport—and leaders are its unsung athletes   

Top athletes are celebrated for their achievements: the record-breaking sprinter, the star quarterback, the tennis legend who stages a comeback after injury. In contrast, high-performing executives often encounter skepticism, even disdain. Success in the boardroom may evoke criticism faster than admiration at times.

However, leading a business, especially at the C-level, requires the same ingredients that fuel elite performance in sports: preparation, resilience, ethical conduct, and a hunger to compete at the highest level. Like great athletes, great leaders win by playing hard, respecting the rules, elevating their teams, and achieving measurable results. And when they succeed, their “trophy” is different: It’s the growth they drive, the lives and careers they impact, and yes, the profits or salaries they earn.

Building the mental playbook of a business athlete 

Success at the top isn’t sustained by intellect or experience alone. It’s built by consistently exercising mental stamina. Through years of executive coaching, a core set of techniques has stood out as critical for success.

1. Reconnecting to the mission
   Setbacks are inevitable. Deals fall through. Competitors outpace you. A leader who fixates on every lost point burns out quickly. Instead, mental resilience starts with zooming out: remembering the larger mission. Perhaps you are the CEO of a medical device company with the mission to help more women live happier lives. Reconnect with that goal and make sure the team does. After a loss, the best leaders don’t ask, “How did I fail?” They ask, “What am I ultimately here to achieve, and how do I move toward that now?”

   I have seen great leaders refocus on their broader goals rather than obsessing over a bad quarter or a tough board meeting. Like athletes brushing off a bad play, executives must quickly learn and recalibrate, anchored in purpose – refocusing on the next “win,” not just for them but for all their “fans” and stakeholders.

2. Engineering mental recovery
   Contrary to popular mythology, toughness isn’t about never resting. Elite athletes schedule their recovery as meticulously as their workouts—and great leaders do, too.

   Micro-breaks throughout the day (even a walk to grab coffee) reset the mind. Bigger breaks—like working remotely from a quiet cabin—allow the mind to shift gears, repair, and regain creative energy. Personally, I carve out periods to work with my hands, doing something completely different from strategic thinking. Building a shed, chopping wood, or even watching a mindless TV show can act as a powerful mental reset for me.

   Leaders who push without pausing rarely stay at the top for long.

3. Training your calendar like a championship schedule
   Most people think endurance is about piling on more. It isn’t. It’s about managing effort strategically.

   The most effective leaders I coach don’t cram their calendars wall-to-wall with meetings. They blend client interactions with solo work, internal projects, and unscheduled “white space.” Mixing cognitive demands keeps the mind agile and prevents burnout. If an athlete alternates sprints with strength training, an executive must alternate high-stakes calls with strategic thinking time.

   Endurance at the highest levels comes from managing intensity, not maximizing minutes.

Warning signs of an undertrained mind   

Leadership behaviors have a direct and powerful impact: Gallup research shows that 70% of a team’s engagement is tied to their manager’s behavior, underscoring the importance of mental resilience and steadiness at the top. Yet even outwardly successful executives can be mentally undertrained. Some of the clearest indicators include:

• Chronic anxiety despite strong results.
• Confidence swings tied to every minor win or loss.
• Emotional volatility under pressure leads to disengaged teams.

I’ve seen leaders in billion-dollar organizations stall their careers—not for lack of intelligence or ambition, but because they lacked emotional steadiness. Predictability is the foundation of trust in leadership. Investors, teams, and customers all lean on it.

The best leaders don’t just perform well when times are good. They perform predictably well when pressure is up.

Rebounding from burnout: A story of mental conditioning  

One executive I coached at a $4 billion company faced an especially tough year. A serious departmental error (several levels below them) had a material impact on company earnings. Overnight, their once-untouchable reputation was shaken. Anxiety crept in. Their relationship with their boss and team, previously one of mutual trust, became strained.

Rather than crumbling, this leader chose a different path. They owned the mistake without defensiveness. They conducted a thorough analysis of the team, reworked internal processes, and, most importantly, recommitted themselves to personal development. They turned the setback into a blueprint for even stronger foundations.

Twelve months later, they were promoted to a C-suite role, not despite the adversity, but because they used it as fuel to develop deeper resilience, better foresight, and unshakable confidence.

Great business athletes distinguish themselves by adapting, rebuilding, and leading under pressure; they do not throw in the towel when they fail, they pick themselves and their team up and get back at it!

Mental toughness is no longer optional.   

Today’s C-suite environment demands more than vision and charisma. It demands mental stamina as a fundamental skill.

The highest-performing leaders I’ve worked with bring a calm certainty to every situation, even when the stakes are high. In my experience, when we use behavioral tools like DISC profiles, these leaders’ emotional patterns under stress often closely mirror them under normal conditions. They are predictable, reliable, and trusted to lead not only through victories, but also through turbulence. While great athletes are known to pull through when the going gets tough, their statistics tend to not only be remarkable, but fairly predictable as well.

In a marketplace where volatility is the norm, this consistency becomes an executive’s greatest competitive advantage.

Time to celebrate business athletes   

We readily applaud athletic greatness. It’s time to recognize that true business leadership—when done with integrity, resilience, and excellence—is equally deserving of admiration.

Leading like a business athlete means training the mind as rigorously as the body. It means playing with purpose, recovering with intention, and winning with character. Those who master these skills don’t just build successful companies. They build lasting legacies.

And they deserve to take pride in every hard-won trophy along the way.

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Written by  Michel Koopman.
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