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, 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 workplace challenges when one has ADHD. The traits we associate with ADHD - distractibility, emotional intensity, difficulty with mundane tasks - exist across all human brains. Nobody has zero distractibility. Nobody is immune to overwhelm. 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, emotional attunement, pattern recognition, and creative thinking. The more neurodivergent, the more pronounced the positive benefits can be - if leveraged well.
Being neurodivergent doesn’t mean one can’t be a top performer, just as being neurotypical doesn’t automatically result in top performance. What’s important isn’t where we are on the continuum. Self-awareness and purposeful action is key. People who understand and work intelligently with their own mental performance characteristics (peak windows, friction points, optimal conditions) consistently outperform others who are operating without that self-knowledge.
As we are all wired differently, 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.
Flow - An Optimal State of Consciousness
There is a state of performance that most high achievers have experienced but few can reliably access on demand. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called it flow - complete absorption in a challenging, meaningful task where performance feels effortless, time disappears, and output reaches its highest quality.
Steven Kotler, in The Rise of Superman, took this concept further - documenting how elite performers across domains deliberately engineer the conditions that reliably produce flow states. His research identified specific triggers that invite flow: high consequences, deep embodiment, rich environment, clear goals, immediate feedback, and the right challenge-to-skill ratio.
For most people, flow is a happy accident. For high performers who understand their own Mental Performance Profile, it becomes something more intentional.
Strategies for Peak Performance
1. Know your Mental Performance Profile. Design and execute accordingly.
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 environmental conditions (noise level, time of day, social context, etc.) surface your flow state easily and reliably?
Where do I consistently underperform relative to my own expectations - and what is actually happening in those moments?
When, what workspaces, and what circumstances allow me to be unusually creative?
This is a kind of strategic self-knowledge. Understanding your flow triggers and what inhibit your abilities is crucial to success. It transforms peak performance from something that happens to you into something you intentionally architect.
Design your highest-priority work into the windows and conditions that are most useful for you. This type of methodical design and execution is a way to achieve sustainable peak performance.
2. Build metacognitive skills
One of the highest-leverage skills 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
3. 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.
4. 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, but can also detect nuanced emotions in others with a high degree of accuracy.
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.