About Ken – Ken Macleod

A highlight of my life undoubtedly was returning from my time in Japan to train as a pilot in Australia. Aerobatic training always seemed like a bridge too far until I bumped into an RAAF pilot who gave me a few lessons. I was hooked! My mother was none too impressed but the logic was sound – despite the extraordinary feeling of precision control, I wanted to manage aircraft in rarely-encountered-life-or-death-situations, at least as far as aerobatics trained me. After all most pilots will never be able to tell the tale if they experienced being upside down in a light aircraft. 52 hours on, my confidence was high and I took my flying to the next level, buying a plane and soloed circumnavigated it around Australia. Returning to Sydney with 3 times the hours that I left with. Safely. Just!

There is at least one place in the world where you cannot hide shortcomings in your mental and physical performance – the cockpit. By the time I was in my 40s and I was beginning to struggle with increasing symptoms of stress and exhaustion just to keep up with the flying and various quests I was dreaming up, never mind better them.

Eventually, after many attempts at “fixing” my problem, I collapsed from the cascading stress load, and I had no option but to draw a line in the sand and get to the root case of what was going on.

I was diagnosed with chronic inflammatory response syndrome. I recovered, but what I discovered was way in excess of simply a successful recovery. I found a whole new desirable way to live. It wasn’t rocket science, though it did lean on many new findings in the human potential arena. If only I knew what I know now in my 20s and 30s. What I found was …

“When I paid attention to the basic needs of what my body demanded – focusing on my brain function, and body energy – and doing it habitually, I accessed zones I hadn’t experienced before from which I ultimately I healed but my day to day performance rocketed off the scale. I was discovering a whole other level from which to perform”.

The key was to focus on the multi-facets of “stress” and how that impinged on my energy, and optimising recovery frameworks to super charge my energy quicker than I was in the past.

I credit my recovery to the training and mentorship I received from leaders in human performance science and functional health, assisted by cutting edge thinking and practice of bioenergetics. Despite my 52 years of age I feel the strongest, most resilient of my life.

I developed the PEAK Performance framework to support my own recovery and now offer it as means for others to access higher performance in my work.