Your Mental Performance Profile
From The Accountant - Warner Bros. Pictures
I was re-watching the 2016 film The Accountant, starring Ben Affleck, and once again enjoyed how the autistic lead character applied his human gifts, despite having traits that most would consider purely disabilities.
The screenshots above are from a scene of the lead’s job interview performance with a prospective client. He embodied a sense of calm that signalled power and earned confidence. His demeanour and reputation positioned him as the indispensable specialist that the client needed. Reflecting on the film’s depiction of the neurodivergent mind - both its challenges and strengths - I decided to write this article about cognitive performance from the point of view of the Practical Human Intelligence model.
We Are All Wired Differently
We talk a lot about focus. We talk about productivity, bandwidth, overwhelm, and burnout. What we talk about far less is how neurological diversity from person to person can actually benefit individuals and the organizations they work in.
Occasionally, I am asked how one should navigate work challenges when one has ADHD. The traits we associate with ADHD - distractibility, emotional intensity, difficulty with mundane tasks - exist across all human brains. What differs is the degree and the point at which those traits create friction in daily life. But these traits also bring along with them positive benefits that can be leveraged as strengths: deep focus, empathy, pattern recognition, and creative thinking.
As we are all wired differently - and as our own wiring shifts across contexts and conditions - we each have a personal Mental Performance Profile worth understanding.
What is a Mental Performance Profile?
Your Mental Performance Profile is the unique pattern of how your brain manages itself in pursuit of goals. At its heart is what neuroscience calls executive function - the cluster of capacities that govern attention, the ability to initiate tasks, emotional regulation, sustaining a task through to completion, and more.
These capacities vary across people. They also vary within a single person - across contexts, energy levels, and conditions. Understanding your own profile of optimal cognitive performance across these dimensions is one of the most practically useful things you can do for your performance and leadership effectiveness.
“ADHD” Can Mean High Performance
When a person receives an ADHD diagnosis, it means that executive function traits are divergent to a degree that significantly challenges certain performance domains. But here's what's important to understand: the diagnosis simply represents a threshold on a continuum, and not necessarily an inability to perform work skillfully.
Nobody has zero distractibility. Nobody has perfect executive function. Nobody is immune to overwhelm. The traits associated with ADHD exist in all human brains. What differs is degree, consistency, and the point at which they create functional impairment.
Self-awareness is key. People who understand their own mental performance characteristics - their peak windows, their friction points, their optimal conditions - consistently outperform others who are operating without that self-knowledge.
Being diagnosed with ADHD doesn’t mean a person cannot be a top performer.
It is therefore important for all of us to understand these traits in ourselves, wherever we may be on the continuum.
Strategies for Effective Performance
1. Get to know your Mental Performance Profile
Deliberately consider:
When am I at my best: what conditions, what type of challenge, what environment?
What energizes me beyond what seems rational?
What drains me disproportionately?
What conditions and levels of mental stimulation get me into flow most reliably?
Where do I consistently underperform relative to my own expectations - and what is actually happening in those moments?
What helps me get into my most creative state?
When, what workspaces, and what circumstances makes me unusually well-focused?
This is a kind of strategic self-knowledge. It is a foundation of sustainable high performance.
2. Design your environment and role toward your strengths
The professionals who navigate a challenging Mental Performance Profile most effectively are not those who have eliminated their difficulties. They are those who know their own brain well enough to put themselves in the conditions where their neurology becomes their advantage.
Protect your peak focus window. Batch your administrative demands. Build in transitions. Create urgency for tasks that need it. Remove friction.
This is the optimization strategy.
3. Build metacognitive skills
The highest-leverage skill for anyone with a demanding Mental Performance Profile is the ability to observe your own patterns in real time - to notice "I am starting to feel overwhelm" before you are fully in it, to catch the spiral early, to intervene while your executive function is still available.
This is a trainable skill. It builds through practice. And it compounds - each rep of noticing-and-choosing lays down the neural pathway a little more firmly. Over time, what required effortful awareness becomes a faster, more automatic response.
More on metacognition -> here
4. Build your nervous system's capacity, not just your habits
Habits and systems are important. But they run on the underlying nervous system. Practices that genuinely train regulatory capacity: consistent physical exercise, breathwork, good sleep, and the kind of applied mindfulness that isn't about sitting still but about learning to notice and let go in real time.
The threshold at which overwhelm hits is not fixed. It can be raised systematically - through deliberate training of the right kind.
5. Lead others with this understanding
If you lead people, the practical reality is this: you are almost certainly leading neurodivergent people right now, whether they have disclosed it or not. The professional who is brilliant in a crisis and struggles with repetitive tasks. The one who produces extraordinary work under real urgency and appears disengaged when the stakes seem low. The one who takes feedback harder than you'd expect, or whose emotional reactions seem out of proportion.
These are not difficult personalities. In many cases, they are powerful, capable people whose profile is mismatched to their environment or insufficiently understood - by their leaders or by themselves.
The most effective leaders I work with don't just manage people's outputs. They develop genuine understanding of how the people around them operate - and they create conditions where different kinds of brains can do their best work.
The Bottom Line
I've worked with leaders across many industries and organizational levels. One thing I've observed consistently: the most significant performance gaps are rarely about knowledge or technical skill. They are about self-knowledge - the degree to which a person understands how they actually operate and has learned to work with that rather than against it.
Your Mental Performance Profile is part of that. So is your emotional profile, your communication style, your relationship to uncertainty, your patterns under pressure. All of it is knowable. And all of it …more than most people realize - is trainable.
The science of human potential is still catching up to what I see people achieve when they approach themselves with genuine curiosity, honest self-assessment, and a commitment to growth that doesn't require them to become someone they're not.
You don't have to wait for the science to catch up. You can start now.