Most people in the accountancy sector expect themselves to perform at the highest level all year round, notes Leanne Spencer, Co-founder of wellbeing consultancy Bodyshot Performance.

The drivers, she says, range from corporate to personal factors. Management expectations – or the perception thereof – organisational culture, childhood origins and personality type all play major roles in fuelling the zeal to perform. The resulting adrenalin spurs professionals into a constant state of digging deep.

However, Spencer points out: “In the medium-to-long term, it’s just not sustainable. In the short term, yes – we can all push ourselves pretty hard. But in the medium-to-long term, that’s when we start tiptoeing into chronic stress and burnout.”

With clients including investment management gurus Brooks Macdonald Group and accounting and business advisory firm Anderson Anderson & Brown, Bodyshot has seen close up the self-management challenges that finance professionals routinely face. To help resolve them, Spencer takes inspiration from athletes. That’s because they apply a discipline called ‘cadence’ – the subject of a keynote that Spencer will deliver at this year’s ICAEW Annual Conference.

In the run up to the event, Spencer provided Insights with a preview of the points she plans to explore in her speech.

Endurance sport

“An athlete thinks about when they will need to perform,” Spencer says. “They’ll prepare by making small changes to their training regime – whether around hydration, nutrition or recovery – that will have a big impact on their ability to deliver. So, once they’ve concluded the massive tournament or bout that’s been looming on their schedule, they’ll get a little bit of respite before they go again. There’s a lot we can learn from that.”

Spencer likes to describe the business world in general as an endurance sport with occasional sprints, and accountancy in particular as one with frequent sprints. In her view, the end of the financial year, the end of the calendar year and deadlines for self-assessment and VAT returns – among other annual commitments – all make for a reasonably predictable pattern of events. That pattern provides accountants with a gauge for how and when to burn or conserve energy.

“Wouldn’t it be great if we saw ourselves as a sort of ‘business athlete’, where we plan and pace our energy accordingly?” she asks. “That’s what I call cadence. And it has a four-step approach: predict, prepare, perform and pecover.”

1. Predict A big question that Spencer asks professionals to ponder is: “When are your Wimbledons?” Thinking in those terms from a business perspective, she says, is highly useful for looking ahead at forthcoming demands on your energy. But it also works from a personal perspective – for example: is there a baby coming into the family, is a child set to go to a new or specialist school or is there a big house move on the horizon?

2. Prepare For Spencer, this step is all about “building your bulletproof” – in other words, making small changes and developing little habits that could have a significant impact on your ability to perform. “Perhaps we will have one, two or three daily non-negotiables that will help us stay in a basic state of readiness, to insure ourselves against the things we don’t see coming,” she says.

3. Perform “Respect your red flags,” Spencer urges. In other words, make sure you are not simply hurtling towards your goal while closing yourself off to distress signals that the body is sending – but which the mind has unfortunately become quite good at ignoring.

4. Recover For Spencer, this is perhaps the most important phase. One of its cornerstones is ‘slivers’ of recovery – taking little moments throughout the day to look out of the window, daydream and watch the clouds go by before you come back to the next bit of the challenge at hand. “That can be really powerful when it’s done consistently over time,” she notes.

Deadlines are deadlines

If it sounds as though the self-management challenges of athletes and accountants – or any other knowledge workers – would be quite different, Spencer has news for you. “The body doesn’t distinguish between the physiological stress of spending eight agonising hours in a spreadsheet, or that of an arduous run or training session,” she says. “It just recognises physiological stress. So, we could map across a lot of how an athlete would approach a demanding period to a knowledge worker’s perspective.”

In Spencer’s assessment, the predictable nature of the accountant’s calendar is both a blessing and a curse. Workloads are often bunched into tight knots in the run up to specific dates. Amid those bursts of activity, interacting with clients and other individuals who may be quite demanding is a renowned source of stress. And accountants routinely find that they have less autonomy over how they approach their tasks – after all, deadlines are deadlines. Plus, while some accountants may think that they are coping with whatever is landing in their in-trays, even those hardy souls would be to some extent ‘under-recovered’.

All of which makes a strong case for getting to grips with cadence.

Asked whether she can provide any teasers for how she plans to introduce the topic in her keynote, Spencer says cryptically: “It’s not going to start the way you think. I would advise going on to the Riverford website and having a good look – because the question I plan to open with is: ‘What vegetable is this?’”

Now, whatever could that mean? See you on 4 October to find out.