“If you’re harvesting the whole time, you’re at the Olympics every day — that’s not sustainable,” said Jeff Christie.
Christie, a former Olympian and now chief revenue officer at ArianneJones.com, used this farming metaphor to illustrate a key insight from high-performance sport: constant output without recovery leads to burnout.
Athletes train in cycles, building toward peak events. Leaders chasing growth, he suggested, need similar discipline in how they manage energy and expectations.
The comment came during a ScaleUP Week session titled “The High Performance Edge,” where athletes and a mental performance consultant explored what elite sport can offer business leaders navigating scale.
The discussion, moderated by Judy Riege, moved through themes of performance, mindset, and adaptation, with each speaker drawing on very different paths into and beyond sport.
Structuring goals beyond the day-to-day
Success as an athlete is built through periodization — strategically cycling training to peak at the right time — and that same discipline of timing, recovery, and progression is just as applicable when building a business. Christie spoke about the importance of setting long-term objectives and then breaking them into milestones.
“When we approach sport, you’re usually in a four-year cycle. How do I get to the Olympics?” he said. “If you get too myopic on the day-to-day, you’re never going to be able to get to the goal.”
For Crystal Phillips, structure became essential under extraordinary pressure.
As a speed skater diagnosed with multiple sclerosis at the peak of her career, she was told she might never skate again.
She eventually returned to competition, which was an experience she said shaped both her performance habits and her expectations of others. That experience also sparked a deeper commitment to health innovation.
After retiring from sport, she co-founded the Branch Out Neurological Foundation to fund alternative and tech-driven approaches to neurological research, then later joined Thin Air Labs to help scale ventures with impact.
Throughout these transitions, goal-setting remained central. But in business, it didn’t always land the same way.
“In sport it was natural,” she said. “But in business, I had to learn a new language to make goal-setting resonate.”
Managing energy, not just time
That shift helped with aligning objectives, but it was also about protecting the energy required to meet them. Phillips reflected on how differently energy is managed in business compared to sport.
“In elite-level sport, performance is here, and health is most of the time in parallel with that performance,” she said. “In business, performance is here, and health is like here.”
Maintaining that alignment became harder as she navigated a new set of demands (long hours, networking, late nights) that often came at the expense of well-being.
Christie offered a complementary view from his time as a luge athlete. His days were built around short, high-intensity bursts, a 60-second run down the track, or a focused hour in the gym. That kind of energy spike, he explained, didn’t translate well to an eight-hour workday.
“You can’t be in fight or flight for eight hours,” he said.
Adapting to the business world meant learning how to pace himself differently, trading intensity for sustainability.
Kyle Shewfelt, who won Olympic gold in gymnastics and now runs Kyle Shewfelt Gymnastics, had to make similar adjustments.
After retiring, he swore off early morning workouts, partly in rebellion against the rigid routines of competition. But, over time, he found that a consistent morning routine gave him structure and energy, and allowed him to be present with his family.
“At 7 p.m., guess what I don’t want to do? I don’t want to work out,” he said. “But if I get up in the morning, I have my clothes set out, I have my alarm set. I have a buddy that I know is going to meet me there. I’ve got my food plan, like I literally have to take out every friction point.”
That early start, he added, means he’s home in time for breakfast with his daughter.
While Shewfelt structured his day to protect energy, Alayne Hing focused on the rhythms that protect focus.
As a mental performance consultant with the Canadian Sport Institute Alberta, she works with Olympians, surgeons, and executives, and says she sees parallels in how people manage high-stakes moments.
“Nothing in nature really blooms all year round,” she said. “And I don’t think that we should either.”
Her work encourages individuals to design their own off-seasons. To recognize that rest is part of performance, not a break from it.
Relearning roles and responsibilities
Shewfelt described the shift from being the centre of a high-performance support team to becoming the one responsible for others. In gymnastics, structure and feedback are constant. In business, structure must be built.
“I didn’t sign up to be a firefighter,” he said. “I want to work on the business, not just in it.”
Learning to delegate and to step back from the urge to solve everything was key to his transition as a business owner.
That redefinition of responsibility showed up in different ways.
Christie recalled how his instincts as an athlete initially made him reactive — checking emails constantly, jumping into tasks as if they were sprints.
“An email comes in, and as an athlete, like, I’m gonna answer this… did you really win?” he joked.
Over time, he established clearer boundaries with his team. If something was urgent, they could call. If not, they could expect a response within a reasonable timeframe, not an immediate one.
He also started using email tools more intentionally.
“Send later — that’s your favourite friend,” he said, describing how scheduling a 9 a.m. delivery could set a better tone. It was a shift in expectations as much as in behaviour.
Building your own answer
Feedback is built into sport. But outside of it, that loop becomes quieter, more diffused. Christie described learning as a process of collecting insight rather than expecting clarity from a single source.
“You fail as the person being coached when you expect the coach to give you the answer,” he said. “You have to take pieces from different sources and build your own answer.”
He pointed to Shewfelt’s approach as an athlete, observing other gymnasts, noticing small technical details, and integrating what worked.
That habit of drawing from multiple inputs continued into Shewfelt’s business life, though not without hesitation.
Early on, an investor urged him to form an advisory board.
“I was like, this is a private business,” he said. “I don’t want a board. I don’t want people telling me what to do.” But he followed through, and the discipline of quarterly reporting created structure and accountability.
“I think it’s one of the reasons the business succeeded.”
Phillips has long worked across disciplines, first through the Branch Out Neurological Foundation she co-founded after her diagnosis, and later with Thin Air Labs and the Opportunity Calgary Investment Fund. Her perspective echoed the same theme, noting that effective decision-making rarely comes from a single source.
“We need a lot more unlike minds,” she said.
Leading through uncertainty
When the conversation turned to uncertainty and risk, the speakers approached it from different angles, all with an awareness that mindset shapes outcomes.
“If we have this problem… and we see it as a threat… we shy away,” said Hing. “If we can shift our perspective to it being a challenge to overcome… we’re much more creative and stick with it longer.”
Phillips spoke candidly about what it takes to stay optimistic while navigating ambiguity and high expectations, saying, “You have to purposefully put your rose-coloured glasses on.”
For Shewfelt, that mindset shows up in how he creates space to reflect, saying how reflection and patience support better decisions, both in business and in life.
“It’s about taking that quiet space to listen,” he said. “I do a lot of writing and just sorting it all out… I let things marinate.”
Scaling a business isn’t only a matter of strategy or execution. It requires the same discipline, self-awareness, and adaptability that these athletes once brought to sport, and now bring to the unpredictable, high-stakes terrain of growth.
Moderator Judy Riege closed the session by paraphrasing Harvard researcher Shawn Achor, “small potential is believing that could be great alone. Big potential is knowing that we’re better and stronger together.”
Digital Journal is the official media partner of ScaleUP Week 2025.
This coverage is supported by the Calgary Innovation Coalition (CIC), a network of 95+ organizations working to accelerate innovation and entrepreneurship across the Calgary region.
This article was created with the assistance of AI. Learn more about our AI ethics policy here.
