Teemu Arina: to be a professional leader, you should approach yourself as a professional athlete

My guest in this special episode of the podcast “Leadership is the Competitive Advantage” is Teemu Arina, a leading expert in the field of Biohacking. He is a biohacker, entrepreneur and technology expert. Teemu is the co-author of the Biohacker's Handbook, organiser of the Biohacker Summit, and a founder of a network called Quantified Self & Biohacking Finland, which is a community of like-minded people interested in upgrading themselves. I am really glad that Teemu will join us at the Estonian Human Resource Management Association's annual conference this spring as one of the keynote speakers.

“If you are a leader and you want to run yourself optimally, you should approach yourself like a professional athlete. Being unaware of or ignorant to your health state or biological condition is an amateurish approach to management. As a first step towards becoming a better version of yourself, I would recommend to scrutinize the things you already have a problem with or where you would like to see some change. That is probably also the place where you would get the most benefit from. For many people, sleeping well is difficult. They do not sleep enough or there are other problems associated with sleeping. Then the obvious solution is to start tracking your sleeping patterns, stress responses, recovery and exercise levels. There are many gadgets on the market that do a good job at tracking your condition throughout the day. For busy leaders I would also recommend to get a personal trainer. If you are a CEO, you probably do not have a lot of time to get into these things on your own. Find someone who will help you to ‘listen to your body’ and all that, someone who goes a bit deeper into those topics and can look at and interpret your data. These kind of people can be really helpful in motivating you to get to the next level. I know some super-busy guys who are always accountable for what they deliver at work, but when it comes to self-accountability for taking care of themselves – that is where they are lacking. So if you decide that, yeah, I am gonna start going to gym, I am gonna go for this new diet or something similar, it is very easy to procrastinate and fool yourself. So more often than not the personal trainer is a good idea because then you are accountable to the personal trainer. Then you do these things in a more disciplined manner.” – Teemu Arina

Listen and enjoy!