Being a great leader requires more than intelligence, the ability to work long work hours or great people skills.
Those things are important, but true success requires what James Schor, an executive consultant and life coach who works with top athletes and CEOs, calls “leading from the inside out.”
At the 2025 ATN CEO Summit, Schor gave some of the biggest names in fitness and wellness a sneak peek into one of his sessions, sharing three lessons that anyone can implement to achieve business and personal success.
Kaizen: Become 1% Better Every Day
Schor is a big proponent of Kaizen, the Japanese business philosophy that encourages continuous, small improvements involving employees at all levels of a company.
“Kaizen involves everybody in the company,” Schor explained. “It’s a philosophy of continuous improvement, becoming 1% better every day.”
To illustrate the power of Kaizen in action, Schor gave the example of the Great Britain Cycling Team, which went from an afterthought to a global powerhouse under performance director Sir David Brailsford by implementing what Brailsford termed the “marginal gains” approach.
Under Brailsford, Great Britain Cycling focused on making small, continuous improvements not just in physical performance, but in every aspect, including removing dust from bikes, implementing better hand-washing techniques to reduce the probability of riders falling ill and washing uniforms in skin-friendly detergent to minimize discomfort on race day.
These things may sound trivial, but taken together and compounded over months and years, they can lead to incredible results, Schor pointed out.
“Think about what you can do in your company that will make your business 1% better,” Schor told the fitness and wellness executives in the room at the CEO Summit. “Now, let’s find a few of those things, and let’s implement them and let’s start getting better and better.”
The Thing Isn’t the Thing
Schor’s second message for executives: perception is everything.
“The thing isn’t the thing,” he said. “How I am relating to the thing, that’s the thing.”
To take this idea out of the abstract, Schor cited research suggesting that how we perceive stress has a bigger impact on our health than experiencing stress itself. Put another way, people who believe stress is good for them are more likely to experience positive health effects from stress; people who view stress in a negative light are more likely to experience deleterious health effects.
“The research is unequivocal,” Schor said. “How we relate to stress is the thing that affects us; it’s not the actual stress.”
Run Your Stories – Don’t Let Them Run You
Schor also pointed to the role internal storytelling plays in helping us identify and remove harmful unconscious thought patterns.
To illustrate this point, Schor cited the Pot Roast Principle, a parable that tells the story of a little girl who questioned why her mother always cut off the ends from put roast before baking it in the oven.
Schor explained it like this:
“There’s a little five-year-old girl … and she sees her mom cut off the ends of the roast before she puts the roast into the oven. She says, ‘Mommy, how come you cut off the ends of the roast?’ ‘Well, that’s how grandma always did it. Let’s go ask her,’ (the mother responded).
So they go to grandma: ‘Grandma, how come you always cut the ends off the roast?’ (The grandmother responded as follows): ‘I don’t know, that’s how great grandma always did it.’ And they go to great grandma, who’s still with us, and she says: ‘Well, back when I was cooking, the pan wasn’t big enough to fit in the oven with the full roast, so we had to cut the roast.”
The Pot Roast Principle serves as a rather harmless example of a powerful idea: we shouldn’t blindly respect tradition for tradition’s sake. Instead, we should always investigate and seek to understand reality for what it is. The girl’s family had wasted a lot of pot roast over the years by observing what they thought was a venerated family tradition but turned out to be just a practical consideration of her great-grandmother’s lack of kitchen space.
“How we deal and work with those unconscious patterns and blocks is how we move forward in the world without letting our stories run us,” Schor said. “We get to run our stories.”
Be on the lookout for more information on the ATN Innovation Summit, a can’t-miss two-day event to be held on June 17th and 18th in New York City featuring the biggest names, brands, and ideas across fitness, health, and wellness.
