With over 20 years of experience supporting top athletes, military personal and business leaders, John Stemmerman (Senior Vice President of Performance at Exos) knows that high-performance is much more than just running a faster mile.
John sits down with Ginevra Czech, FS Investments Director of Client Value Add Programs, to discuss practical strategies for reflection and regulation, and how these key skills can improve personal and professional performance.
“You’re having one of those nights where it’s more challenging, and something comes up where you have a conversation with your significant other and it’s a challenging topic. One route is really angry, frustrated, I’m going to snap. [But] if I’m aware that I’m stressed, if I feel what’s happening; taking a big breath, reframing what you’re going to say and going at it in a better way: that’s a more constructive conversation.”– John Stemmerman
Ginevra Czech: Welcome back to FS Thrive, a podcast by FS Investments. I am Ginevra Czech, the Director of Client Value Add Programs here at FS Investments and I am super, super excited to be joined by John Stemmerman. He is Senior Vice President of Performance at Exos, but many of you might know him because he’s one of our value add partners who delivers our sustainable high performance workshop at industry events and branch luncheons.
So we’re really excited to be here today. Today, we’re not talking about all of sustainable high performance. We’re talking specifically about regulation and reflection, which I think given current events is something that is probably super relevant and timely for many listeners and for me. I don’t know if I’m still a new parent. My baby’s over a year now, but probably any parent, we can also understand that there’s always a good time to, to regulate and reflect. And then of course it’s, it’s year end. So as we think about planning for our next year and then reflecting on the year that we’ve just had, super, super timely topic.
So before we dive into things, John, would love to have you introduce yourself in your own words. Just tell us what it is that you do and excited to get started.
John Stemmerman: Yeah, very excited to be here. Thank you for having us. And I’m going to try to, if anybody listened to Stefan’s podcast, I’m going to try to emulate Stefan the best that I can because he’s one of the people that I use as a role model around these types of things and we first said you might know him I was like, how would anybody know me and then you reminded me that I’m actually out supporting a lot of the events. So, that might be true.
Yeah, so I have been a coach for 20-plus years, of which in January, 19 of those will be with Exos, formerly known as Athletes Performance. And when I came to the organization, we had two facilities and we’ve grown significantly since then into a pretty extensive footprint around sport, which is our heritage of where we come from, into military, both special operations and conventional, and then into the corporate space. And especially with kind of a merger or acquisition of another group called MediFit… grew pretty heavily into the corporate space of which that’s the biggest group we work with, of which financial institutions are a very huge part of it. But, I came in mostly actually to work with youth athletes, to get our youth program together, long term athlete developments, kind of the passion of our organization. And then also worked with Major League Baseball, hockey, a lot of our military groups that would come in and depending on what time of year it was, worked with different groups, usually in their off season as they prepared for the preseason and in season transition. Progressed throughout the course of my years there and probably like any organization wore many hats at many times, often simultaneously, through different management roles.
