How Saga Performance Uses Firstbeat Life to Help High Performance Coaching Clients

Saga Performance specializes in helping corporates and individuals to reach top level performance using a systems based approach. The company’s founder, Satu Ahlman, uses Firstbeat Life as one of the important tools in her business to help companies build healthy corporate cultures and in assisting individuals to get the best out of themselves in a sustainable manner.

How Satu Adopted Firstbeat Life Into Her Business

Satu’s professional background has always been in people and people development, with much focus on developing leaders and leadership teams and corporate cultures. When she founded Saga Performance she started to focus more on wellbeing, and that’s when she first came across Firstbeat.

“I realized that there was the potential for me to work with similar clients but from a different angle, and actually combining learnings and key takeaways from “traditional” leadership and corporate culture development with more of a holistic and data driven, science-based concept.

So that’s why Saga Performance was founded, to cater for both individuals, private clients, and companies, to redesign the concept of high performance in certain fields where a lot of people struggle with the grinding atmosphere at work where you’re always on the go.”

Why Firstbeat Life?

When Satu learned more about Firstbeat, she realized it would be an easy to way to cater for her clients to make them take themselves and their performance more seriously and also understand the effects of it. She was also looking for a partner where she could trust the science behind the data.

“I wanted to have something that is science based, something reliable, and I knew that Firstbeat is really one of a kind because it is so close to the ECG hospital device and that kind of calibre.

Secondly it had to be easy to use, it had to be something that I could see all of an executive team using, so it’s not something that is really visible or that makes life uncomfortable or difficult.”

Handling Stress in Turbulent Times

Satu specializes in working with the tech, IT, and financial services sectors, particularly with executive teams and CEOs, CFOs, and entrepreneurs . There are common traits within these industries that she has identified, with many of these individuals working very long hours in high pressure environments  and believing that kind of behavior is sustainable.

Additionally, Satu identified the need to develop a program for leadership teams during turbulent times or periods of change, for example during a corporate buyout or a new investor coming onboard, which are typically very hectic times. Satu explained how she uses Firstbeat Life within this program to help her clients.

“We created a program called The Resilience Program. That is usually a four to six month program depending on the situation. We normally do two Firstbeat measurements, before and after, or sometimes three if clients want to have a midway measurement or if it’s a longer project.

The idea is to educate clients about what the data will show you, and what it means to lead yourself in a hectic time, and handle stress in a healthier way. And through workshops I’ve been educating, coaching and facilitating discussions around these topics for leadership teams. We have also built in one to one sessions along the road where we go through the personalized Firstbeat feedback but also take a deep dive into any other personal, sometimes sensitive topics when it comes to leading oneself, leading others, walking the talk and leading complexity.”

Firstbeat Life connects the dots between the body’s reactions and daily activities. It turns stress, recovery, sleep and exercise data into actionable insights. The service is available worldwide and the app can be used in English, German, Swedish, Italian, Spanish, French and Finnish.

Satu has received positive feedback and results from  this program and is very happy with the sustainable lifestyle changes that the participating executives have been able to make. She told us, “I just had lunch with an old client and he was telling me how he looked back at the  Firstbeat measurements and remembers how eye opening it was to see the data and start understanding how important it is to have healthy evening routines to ensure a good start for the next day.”

Leading By Example to Help Create Healthy Work Cultures

Within the industries that Satu specializes in, she has discovered the concept of self-leadership to be quite a hot topic and something that clients have struggled with because they feel that as leaders that everyone is responsible for themselves and they should just leave people to get on with things.

“That’s really not the point” Satu explains. “It’s about shifting that mindset and really educating my clients about what does it mean to be leading yourself and leading your stress. How can you as a manager, and as an executive, be a good example for your team members , and truly walk the talk.

When you have a leadership team coming from entrepreneurial backgrounds and everyone is always wanting to do literally everything  all the time, then others in the organization start mirroring that behavior and it may become very unhealthy in the long run.”

Firstbeat Life generates company and group-level reports based on anonymized data.

The Future of Firstbeat Life and Saga Performance

Satu believes in the future there is big potential to use Firstbeat Life to help not just executives but entire organizations to advise them on building healthy work cultures.

“Whilst my personal focus would be working with executives and executive teams, I think we will be helping the  entire organization if I’m advising the executives to build this healthy culture. We can easily utilize Firstbeat Life with the entire organization even though I may not personally be coaching every single employee. The Firstbeat app and our educational, engaging and empowering workshops enable that.”