The behavioral skills needed to create high performance at work are hard to teach, and hard to master. But what if we’ve been searching for the answer in all the wrong places? What if high-performance and exemplary leadership are less about “fixing” people by having them develop new skills and neural pathways, and more about “sparking” something within them by guiding them to tap into underutilized skills and neural pathways they already possess?

At RenaissanceRe (RenRe)’s event on The Inner Game of Breakthrough Performance, Hitendra Wadhwa offered powerful insights drawn from his findings at Columbia Business School and the Mentora Institute, on how professionals can accelerate their path to high performance by approaching these skills not as traits to be acquired but as states to be activated, and by shifting their focus from learning on the sidelines to leading in the flow of work.