Prime (noun)
the state or time of greatest vigour or success in a person’s life.

Hi, I’m Jason. This is where I share openly about the challenges, insights and lessons from my own journey. My hope is that these thoughts spark reflections that help you navigate your own path to living better and leading better. 

Jason Leavy
Founder

Prime Perspective:
Personal Reflections on Leadership and Growth

New Research: Emotions Are Your Secret Superpower

A new piece of research into elite athletes may change how you think about your own performance.

Published in the International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance, the study set out to identify consistent predictors of elite performance in an age of hyper-quantified training and tech.

The surprising outcome? The most reliable performance predictor wasn’t VO2 max, HRV, or any biometric measure, it was the NASA Task Load Index.

But here’s the twist… this isn’t some cutting-edge high-tech tool, It’s a simple set of subjective questions about perceived mental demand, physical effort, frustration, and performance.

In a world where milliseconds matter and marginal gains can cost millions, subjective feeling turned out to be the strongest predictor of output.

In other words: your emotions are data.

Emotion Is Data

This finding validates something I learned years ago that felt revolutionary at the time. I joined INSEAD's first coaching cohort in 2018 and trained in the psychodynamic methodology, which has a strong focus on understanding and interpreting unconscious behaviors.

There were a number of important principles that have underpinned my approach since then, such as the importance of holding courageous conversations, but the one foundational element has been that emotions are critical data points.

At the time, it felt profound and since then I’ve seen time and time again how emotions are vital signals that can reveal unconscious dynamics, systemic issues, and hidden patterns influencing behavior and performance.

But this is the first time I’ve come across evidence-based research that supports this, while also once again proving that the mind-body connection is critical to performance and wellbeing. 

What This Means For You

Many leaders dismiss their gut feelings as unreliable compared to hard data. But if a relatively simple ‘how do you feel?’ questionnaire outperforms the latest sports science technology, maybe it's time to reconsider.

My take? The answer is hiding in plain sight. Think about how you describe your best performances versus your worst. You inevitably talk about how you FELT. 

Think of:

• That emotional surge when you were in the middle of a big pitch and could feel you were in a ‘flow state’, winning hearts and minds, even when the potential client wasn’t saying anything explicitly.

• That sense of being physically ‘flat’ even though all the data on your wearable looks fine.

• That 'gut instinct' that a relationship is starting to fall apart, even when everyone's still saying the right things.

You're already collecting this information - the question is whether you're paying attention to it or dismissing it as too subjective to matter.

Don’t go ‘outsourcing’ your body to a PT, your sleep to a wearable or your mind to an app. They all have value, but you have agency over your life and you ‘own’ the most sophisticated, accurate system for developing it. 

The leaders I work with who perform at the highest level all share one trait: they've learned to treat their emotional insights as seriously as the ones they get from their spreadsheets. Not instead of data, but as another critical source of it.

6 Key Measures

Every participant in the Prime Performance Program has a personalised dashboard and one of the features is a weekly self-report based on the NASA Task Load Index - this isn’t about reflection ‘fluff’, we view this as a critical part of the core performance data that we work from.

However, even if you’re not on the program, I still want to share a version of the index with you here in the hope it helps you live better and lead better. The index measures six key dimensions:

Mental Demand: how mentally challenging has your week been? 

Physical Demand: how physically demanding? 

Temporal Demand: how rushed or time-pressured?

Performance: how successful do you think you’ve been?

Effort: how hard did you have to work?

Frustration: how annoyed, discouraged, or stressed did you feel?

• Rate each one from 0-10

• Do this on a Wednesday evening (Friday brings weekend relief, which can distort how you assess the whole week)

• Then: pause, reflect, and ask yourself why the numbers are what they are.

• Make sure you switch off your ‘auto-pilot’ of default responses here and be curious about what’s really going on.

• If that makes you feel uncomfortable that’s an important signal - lean into that, rather than shy away.

• Start to notice patterns over time. 

The Benefit

The evidence now supports what I’ve long believed: your internal compass is ultimately more accurate than any external measurement if you tune into it properly.

The benefit isn't just awareness - it's prediction. Just like those elite athletes, you'll be able to recognize the emotional patterns that precede your best and worst performances and leverage those insights to recalibrate accordingly. 

You already own the most sophisticated performance monitoring system ever developed. Are you going to finally start truly listening to what it's telling you?