About this episode
How can you achieve sustainable high performance in your work? Stefan Underwood, Senior Vice President of Methodology at Exos, has supported the performance goals of pro athletes, elite military operators and leaders at Fortune 100 organizations.
Stefan Underwood sits down with Ginevra Czech, FS Investments Director of Client Value Add Programs, to discuss how to attract top talent by cultivating performance, the current revolution in women’s performance and how his team understands and achieves flow state.
“The analogy that I give is, does water running over stone make a change? No. But when it consistently does for a long time, it carves canyons. And so, to be a trickle of water, I used to tell athletes that, intensity is king, but consistency rules.”–Stefan Underwood
Transcript excerpt
Ginevra Czech: All right. Welcome back to FS Thrive, a podcast by FS Investments. I am your host, Ginevra Czech, and I am very excited to be joined by Stephan Underwood. He is The Senior Vice President of Methodology at Exos. You might know Exos as one of our value add partners. We do a sustainable high performance workshop, as well as a couple of other sessions and seminars really focused on this idea of sustainable high performance and whole person performance.
So I’m really excited today for our conversation. We’re going to be trying to point out some insights for individuals as well as organizations really looking to improve their performance and overall wellbeing. So before we jump in, Stefan, I’d love for you to just introduce yourself. In your own words.
Stefan Underwood: Yeah, Ginevra, thank you so much for having me on. I appreciate it. It is great to be here. Introduce myself in my own words. Gosh I always like to start with non work stuff first. First and foremost, my wife and I have been married You know, 17 years, we’ve got two wonderful children. so my son is 11 years old.
My daughter is eight years old and, the Olympics are going on right now. I don’t know when this is going to actually post, but while we’re recording, we’re right in the middle of Olympics, I’m up in Canada, but my wife is American. So we’ve got a fun little rivalry going on in the house. And, I just absolutely love seeing humans performing at their peak, which I guess brings me to what I do professionally.
I started off my, my degree was in exercise science. I started off as a strength and conditioning coach working with elite athletes. That was where my career started about 20 years ago. That led me to the U S and I moved all over the U S and I ended up actually working pretty heavily with elite athletes, Olympians, professional athletes, the likes running NFL combine prep.
And I really worked heavily for about a decade with our, with the U S special operations community. But I’d say about, oh gosh, six years ago, there was a little bit of a pivot for me. And nowadays you find me working almost exclusively with corporate populations, corporate executives. I’ve actually gone back to school and I’m one class away from finishing my master’s in organizational psychology, just to put a different perspective on things.
And because I do believe in lifelong learning. And so it leads me to where I am today. I’ve been with XO’s for 14 years. and have started out as a coach, like I said, with Exos and progressed through the years. And, I now oversee what is called our methodology team, which is a transdisciplinary team of various different subject matter experts, where we all have different perspectives on human performance.
And we get to look at all things, human performance for every population Exos serves and work to sort of inform our stance.
