Performance is usually judged by what we can see.

Targets are reached. Deadlines are met. More responsibility arrives and someone continues to deliver. In demanding careers, the ability to absorb pressure can easily become part of how we define high performance.

What is harder to see is the capacity underneath those results.

Someone can continue performing well while gradually relying on more effort, less recovery and fewer reserves to produce the same output. For quite a long time, there may be little externally to suggest that anything is wrong. The work still gets done, the career continues to progress and the next objective quickly replaces the last one.

That makes sustainable performance a more interesting subject than performance alone. It is not simply about how much someone can achieve, but about what allows them to keep achieving it over time.

Alvin Sicre spent eighteen years in financial services, most recently as head of compliance at a private equity firm, before changing direction and founding Effective Outcomes, where he now works with senior financial services professionals on fitness and performance.

Our paths first crossed during my own years in Luxembourg, when he was still firmly inside the industry.

What interested me in having this conversation was not only the career change. Alvin spent years working in the same kind of environment as many of the people he now helps: demanding calendars, periods of sustained pressure and careers where being able to absorb more can easily become part of the job.

That felt like a good place to start.

Why change course after 18 years?

Eighteen years is enough time to build not only a career, but an identity around it. Leaving that behind for a very different field is more than simply changing jobs.

So I asked Alvin whether there had been a particular moment that made the decision clear, or whether it had developed more gradually.

“It built up over a long time, and then a few things arrived close together that made it impossible to keep postponing.

The early signs were there years before I left. A few years into my career, at a Big Four firm just after the financial crisis, I was travelling constantly. I had a panic attack on the London Underground, stuck between two stations, and I slowly started to recognise the same feeling at work: a closed space, no visible exit, and somebody else holding the timeline. When I was asked to go to Oslo for a long assignment, I didn't say no. I asked when it would end.

Looking back, that question tells you how much choice I felt I had.

What kept me steady through that period was training. The project was at the central bank of Norway, and they had converted the old gold vaults in the basement into a gym. So the most claustrophobic person on the team went underground every evening, into a room built so that nobody could get out, and that was where I could breathe. I have thought about that irony a lot since.

I stayed in the industry for many more years and I did well in it. I ended up as head of compliance at a private equity firm. But the question of whether I was living the life I had actually chosen never fully went away.

Then my personal life changed significantly. I went through a divorce, and I lost my mother. When things like that happen, the time you thought you had stops feeling unlimited. The honest version is that I wanted to see if I had the guts to do this before I died.

So the decision grew slowly, and then a period of my life took away the option of ‘later’.”

What does sustainable performance really require?

Alvin stayed in the industry for many years after those first doubts appeared. He progressed, took on more responsibility and reached a senior position.

Financial services gave him years of experience operating in an environment where pressure, deadlines and responsibility are normal. His work today looks at many of the same professionals from another perspective: not only at what they can produce, but at what allows them to keep producing it.

I asked him what those eighteen years taught him about the difference between performing well under pressure and actually sustaining that performance over time.

“Mostly that you can perform well for a very long time while the foundations quietly get weaker, and nothing in the environment will tell you.

During those eleven months of travel, I never missed a training session. Forty minutes if that was all I had. On paper it looked like a perfect example of discipline under pressure.

Then my back went while I was moving flats. My first explanation was that I had lifted a box badly. The real explanation took me much longer to accept. I was sitting for ten or eleven hours a day and then loading my body hard for forty minutes. The training was one isolated event in an otherwise motionless day. I was performing and wearing down at the same time.

The other thing I noticed was how normal decline looked around me. Many of the senior people I worked with were heavier, stiffer and more tired every year, and everyone treated that as part of becoming senior. It was almost a sign that you had made it. I absorbed that belief for years without questioning it. I now think it is one of the most expensive assumptions in the industry, because once decline feels normal, people stop looking for the cause.

Performing under pressure is about output: can you deliver when it counts. Sustaining it is about what that output costs you, and whether you are paying from income or from capital.

Anyone in financial services understands that distinction immediately when it is their money. Very few apply it to their own body.”

Why isn’t discipline enough?

Many senior professionals are already highly disciplined. They meet deadlines, manage complex responsibilities and remain focused on objectives for years. Yet that discipline does not always translate into the same consistency around their own health, training or recovery.

If discipline is clearly present in one part of life, I wanted to understand what Alvin thinks is usually missing in the other.

“Usually what is missing is design. Most of the people I work with have more discipline than they need. What they lack is a system that works without constantly asking for it.

The clearest example is from my own life. During the years I trained most consistently, my system was one decision made in the morning. The gym bag came to the office with me, and I went straight from work to train. I never went home first.

At the time I thought it was simply practical, saving a trip. Later I compared it with a period when I was swimming in the evenings. I would get home around half past six, sit on the sofa, need a nap, and only then go to the pool.

Same person, same working day, same motivation. Going home created a decision point, and decision points at the end of a long day are exactly where training disappears.

So when someone tells me they lack discipline, I usually find an ordering problem. The session sits at the moment their energy is lowest, or it relies on a decision they have to make fresh every single day. Change the sequence and the same person suddenly looks very disciplined.

The second place it breaks down is the programme itself. A lot of the people I speak to stopped training, or keep training around something, because of pain. A shoulder, the lower back, a knee. At some point they followed a generic plan that didn't take their body into account, it hurt, and they concluded they were the problem. Two people with the same sore back can need very different programmes. When nobody has looked at that, calling the outcome a discipline problem is unfair to the person.”

What survives a bad week?

If design matters, the obvious test is what happens when the plan meets real life.

Travel appears, a deadline moves, work runs late, family needs attention or several pressures arrive at the same time. Almost any routine can work when the calendar behaves. The more useful question is what remains when it does not.

So I asked Alvin what a sustainable system should preserve when the week someone planned for simply disappears.

“Something small enough that it still happens on the worst day.

In compliance, a control that only works when everything goes to plan isn't worth much. Routines are the same. Most people design theirs for their best week, a quiet calendar and a good night's sleep, and then treat every week that doesn't look like that as a failure.

I would rather people build two versions. A full version for normal weeks, and a minimum version agreed in advance, before the difficult week arrives.

For many people that minimum might be twenty minutes of strength work two or three times a week, a daily walk, and protecting sleep wherever they can. In a hotel room it might be a few exercises with bodyweight or a band. The important part is that it is decided ahead of time, because on a Thursday night in a hotel after a twelve hour day, nobody makes a good decision from scratch.

The minimum keeps the habit alive and keeps the body used to moving. When the week settles, you are continuing rather than restarting. Restarting is where people lose months, because every restart comes with the feeling of being back at zero, and that feeling is discouraging enough that many never get past it.

I would add one thing. In a bad week, the movement across the day matters even more than the session. If you are sitting for ten hours, a few short walks and standing up between calls do a lot of the protective work. I learned that one through my back.”

When should you push, and when should you recover?

A system that survives disruption does not mean avoiding intensity.

There are moments in ambitious careers when pushing harder is entirely reasonable. A transaction closes, a regulatory deadline approaches or an important project needs more attention for a period of time.

The harder judgement is knowing when that extra effort is still useful and when it starts working against what comes next.

I asked Alvin how he distinguishes between the two.

“I look at two things: whether the push has an end date, and what the body is saying.

A hard push with a clear end is usually fine. A deal closing, a regulatory deadline, a quarter end. People can absorb a few heavy weeks very well if they know when it finishes and they genuinely recover afterwards.

The problem starts when the push has no end, or when the next one begins before the last one has been paid back. At that point it has quietly become the new normal, at a higher cost.

The body usually tells you before your performance does. Sleep gets lighter or shorter. You need caffeine to get going and a glass of wine or a screen to switch off. Your jaw is tight, your digestion changes, small aches take longer to settle, and you get short with people you actually like. Those are early signals. The drop in performance comes later, and by then you have been running on reserves for a while.

Pain is the signal I would pay most attention to, because high performers are very good at working around it. They swap the exercise, take a painkiller, push through. That works for a while. But pain that keeps coming back in the same place is information about how you are moving and loading your body, and it rarely improves by being ignored.

In practice, during a genuine push I would keep training but reduce the volume and intensity, protect sleep above almost everything else, and keep walking. Then plan the recovery week as deliberately as the push itself. Most people plan the sprint carefully and leave the recovery to chance.”

When does the environment become the problem?

There is, however, a limit to what a well designed personal system can absorb.

Better habits can make someone more resilient in a demanding environment, but they cannot make every environment sustainable. At some point the question moves from how somebody manages themselves to what they are being asked to manage.

I asked Alvin where he sees that boundary between personal responsibility and structural pressure.

“I have been on both sides of that question, so I can answer it from experience.

At that Big Four firm after the financial crisis, refusing travel wasn't really an option. If you said no, you ended up on the bench with no project, and in that environment everyone could see who was unassigned. Promotion would have been off the table.

I managed myself as well as I could. Training and breathwork helped enormously. But I was compensating for a structure that was never going to change for me, and after two years I left. It was the right decision.

My view is that your habits are your responsibility, and good ones will make you more resilient in almost any environment. That is the side I work on every day. But if you are doing the basics reasonably well, moving, training, eating properly, sleeping when you can, and you are still declining year after year, at some point the honest conclusion is that the problem sits outside you.

There are a few signs I would look at. When the only way to meet expectations is to permanently give up sleep, health or time with your family. When saying no to anything carries a career penalty. When the people a few levels above you, the ones who have supposedly made it, look like a future you don't want.

That last one deserves to be taken seriously, because it is a fairly accurate preview.

At that point the conversation changes. Sometimes it is a conversation with your firm about workload and expectations, and firms should welcome it, because they are paying for the decline too, through sick leave, turnover and people working at seventy percent of what they could deliver.

Sometimes it is a bigger decision about whether that environment is right for you at all. Better habits buy you time and give you the energy to make that decision clearly. They can't fix a structure that depends on people quietly absorbing the cost.”

Where does that leave us?

Sustainable performance can easily sound like an argument for doing less. Alvin’s own story makes that difficult to sustain.

The more I think about his journey, the less I see finance and fitness as two completely separate parts of it. There is actually a similar way of thinking running through both: understand the system, know what it can handle and recognise when something needs to change.

We do this quite naturally with businesses, teams and processes. We review them, question what is no longer working and accept that what made sense a few years ago may not make sense today. We are not always as deliberate when it comes to ourselves.

That is what makes Alvin’s approach even more interesting. It is not about creating an easier life. It is about having enough capacity and perspective to make choices before circumstances make them for you.

For me, that may be the most useful way to think about sustainable performance over a long career. Not as one routine you eventually get right, but as the ability to keep making conscious choices about how you want to work and live as both continue to change.