Entrepreneurs, investment bank, consultancy and stock market executives: subjected to very high levels of stress, strong emotional impacts and decidedly frenetic rhythms. The constant struggle against time and the pressure of having to make important decisions pay off running, cycling, triathlon and extreme sports (climbing, mountaineering and ski mountaineering, skyrunning, kitesurfing and paragliding, diving…) the best physical activity for these profiles.
In fact, these sports allow you to train outdoors and free your mind, increase your physical and mental resistance to fatigue and willpower. It is for this reason that it is not uncommon to see CEOs of large companies on the starting grid of a marathon, who get excited not only when they "give the numbers" of turnover but also for stellar sporting performances, preferably personal.
And there are more and more top managers who prefer getting up early to running twenty kilometers dreaming of the Ironman instead of afternoons on the golf course.
Extreme sports are the new passion of top managers. Whether they are adrenaline-pumping, specialties where failure can cost you your life, such as paragliding, diving, kitesurfing, climbing, freeriding or endurance (primarily, marathons and triathlons) it doesn't matter: what matters is that the activities require commitment and effort and above all push to the limit. After all, "exercise furiously" is in second place (after the obvious "wake up before the rooster crows") among the "14 activities that successful people do before breakfast" according to the World Economic Forum .
Why have these sports, which demand the maximum from the mind but above all from the body, have made inroads into the "Board room"? The most obvious answer is that competition and a taste for risk lead those in positions of responsibility to get involved and challenge each other even in the (little) free time. But according to experts there are more complex factors at play. For Giuseppe Vercelli (performance psychologist, three Olympics behind him, head of the psychological area of the Italian Winter Sports and Canoe Kayak Federation, as well as Juventus consultant) this type of activity is often a pretext for training managerial behavioral mechanisms, above all emotional control and use of emotions.
In mountaineering, for example, creativity, risk calculation and the ability to make decisions at high speed are key factors, as in running a business.
Among other things, it emerged that only 10% of winning is important. For others, competitions and training are opportunities to meet people with whom they have at least two things in common: a stressful job and a passion for outdoor sports. In fact, those who start training after the age of 45 are more interested in competing with themselves and against the clock than with others.
Extreme sports are the choice of a lifestyle: active, outdoors, healthy, elitist but authentic. That you choose to feel and be different, to rediscover a link with nature and like-minded people: it is no coincidence that the explosion of this phenomenon took place with social networks.
Finally, outdoor performance activities teach courage and above all humility, or the awareness of one's smallness as human beings. If this isn't a life lesson for those who manage people's assets and professional destinies, what else can be?
° A valuable source of this post was Laura Traldi's blog Design@Large.
