Board rooms and C-suites rarely look like an Antarctica expedition but some of the underlying challenges can be familiar: You must make decisions under uncertainty, pressure might be high, the stakes are real and the easiest option is rarely the right one. In those moments, leadership is not a set of intentions. It is the quality of your decisions, your discipline and your ability to execute under pressure with a well-performing team.
The exceptional explorer Anja Blacha has built a life around precisely those conditions. In the early 2020s she became the first woman to ski solo and unsupported from the Antarctic coast to the South Pole; a feat recognized by Guinness World Records. The expedition covered 1381 km in just 58 days, starting at North Berkner Island and ending at the South Pole, with winds up to 100 km/h and temperatures down to -35°C while pulling a 100 kg sledge with everything the explorer Anja needed to survive.
Anja is also among the world’s top mountaineers. As of 2025, she has climbed twelve of the fourteen 8000meter peaks without supplemental oxygen; including a Mount Everest summit without bottled oxygen in May 2025.
In the Sparkr Podcast conversation with Anja, the goal was simple: Understand what kind of mindset and self‑leadership makes her achievements possible and what business leaders can borrow even if they don’t need to survive in the literal “death zones” of this planet.
So, no matter if you are climbing the corporate ladder, Mount Everest or if you’re already at the top where the air is thin, let’s shed some light on leadership lessons that help you succeed at the South Pole and in the boardroom.
leadership Anja Blacha
team performance
Resilience: a system, not a mood
Anja rejects the romantic framing of “adventure” as she cites polar explorer Roald Amundsen: “Adventure is just bad planning”. I appreciate this line because it challenges a common leadership trap: confusing boldness with improvisation. Doing things the “agile” way vs. mere cluelessness and laziness.
Resilience looks different: In environments where consequences can be fatal resilience must be achieved through a robust system.
On an 8000 meter peak like Mount Everest or K2 the “death zone” is not a metaphor. Anja describes it tangibly: “In the death zone you operate with about one third of the oxygen and you’re actually losing brain cells up there.” That is why she cannot rely on sharp thinking when it matters most. And improvising or being “agile” is not good enough in this situation. Instead, Anja relies on what has become second nature through training, routines and preparation. Safety actions must become automatic so she can execute them even when cognition is impaired. Resilience is not just “being tough” but engineering reliability systematically when your brain and body are compromised.
Sparkr’s resilience and self‑management toolkit for leaders points in the same direction: Resilience can be strengthened particularly through the meaningfulness of the pursuit, self‑efficacy and deliberate practices that reduce overwhelm. In Anja’s world just like in the community of open office space explorers, meaning is not just a motivational wallpaper over the coffee machine; it is fuel for greatness.
Leadership takeaways
- Resilience must be built before it is needed. Under pressure you fall to the level of your preparation. (I don’t remember who I stole this quote from).
- Avoid resilience theatre. If resilience is only a slogan, it collapses at the first true storm.
- Don’t confuse boldness with improvisation: Strong plans don’t have to be synonymous with rigidity; they are a platform for adapting from a level of preparation rather than cluelessness.
- Build resilience by treating uncertainty as a design constraint not as a surprise. Build routines and defaults that hold up when cognition declines.
The comfort zone is not a place. It’s a moving boundary.
In my opinion, the comfort zone debate in business is often framed one‑dimensionally with only one pseudo heroic mantra: “Leave it!”
Anja’s relationship with the comfort zone is more mature and more useful. Yes, she steps outside it repeatedly. But she explicitly rejects the idea of constantly operating at (or beyond) her limits: “When I step outside of my comfort zone, I don’t go to my limits. I always keep a buffer”, Anja elaborates in the Sparkr Podcast interview. I’ll refer to this repeatedly as Anja’s “buffer principle”.
Anja also describes something counterintuitive: Stepping into an expedition can feel harder and takes more courage than enduring the struggle: “Once I was out there in Antarctica and the plane left, I didn’t have a choice anymore.”, Anja explains. When the plane was still there with her - when Anja still had options - more courage was required from her to actually commit.
If you think about it, this matches the archetypal design of the hero story in movies: The hero – no matter if it’s Frodo, Luke Skywalker or any other protagonist – never leaves his home just because he feels like it. The hero embarks on the journey because he has no other choice anymore or because somebody else has given the hero the explicit mission to leave the comfort zone.
In business (and also in private life for that matter), many people struggle more with committing to the hard strategy than with executing it. Commitment removes comforting options for escape. The uncomfortable board decision, the strategic pivot, the “no” to a tempting but distracting opportunity: These are the moments where the comfort zone is still within reach and where opting out of the mission feels harmless.
But commitment is also a catalyst. Once you remove your escape routes, focus must shift to execution. That said, Anja’s buffer principle is a reminder that sustainable growth and sustainable leadership must alternate between stretching your own or your organization’s capabilities outside the comfort zone and stabilizing the expanded capabilities within the less demanding compounds of your comfort zone where you can recharge and debrief.
Leadership takeaways
- Don’t treat the comfort zone as the enemy. Treat it as a training environment with deliberate exits and returns. Just like you are alternating between building muscle in the gym and off-days to rest.
- Stress is not inherently bad; the goal is optimal stress with guardrails. To learn more about this, check out the Yerkes-Dotson-Law in my self-management tookit.
- Balance matters: Sustainable leadership alternates between stretching and stabilizing; constant pushing is not a long-term strategy.
- The comfort zone is adaptable: repetition, preparation and exposure turn “extreme” into “normal”.
- Commitment removes escape routes and increases focus; but keep a buffer so you can respond when circumstances change. Stubbornly pushing something trough when the risk landscape has changed can be dangerous. Sometimes, temporarily returning to the comfort zone is the best way forward to achieve the long-term goal. Just like it’s better to return to base camp when a storm builds rather than pushing for the summit no matter what.
team performance
leadership Anja Blacha
Energy management: your most scarce resource isn’t time
A detail from Anja’s Antarctica world record makes the energy point visceral: Her sledge weighed 100 kg and she skied for nearly 58 days without resupply. That’s not a weekend trip. It is sustained performance under monotony, discomfort and isolation – the very conditions that quietly destroy leaders and teams during demanding multi‑year transformations.
Many organizations and leaders take energy management too lightly and burn their people with “summit fever” logic: Pushing everything to the limit for a milestone, then wondering why decision quality drops, mistakes rise and the culture becomes fragile.
Anja’s buffer principle explains why: Buffers and good energy management create capacity for unpredictable moments like a sudden weather shift, a wrong turn or an equipment issue. In corporate life, it’s the surprise resignation, the cybersecurity incident or the competitor move. If executives “optimize” themselves to 100% utilization they remove the very capacity they’ll need when reality deviates from plan. Just like we all learnt in the past years that overly “optimized” global supply chains can easily be disrupted by world events. An executive’s most scarce resource isn’t time, it’s energy and usable capacity.
It’s striking how explicitly Anja thinks in calibration. She prepares with detailed excel sheets and when asked how she learned to sense her limits, she argues against outsourcing self‑awareness to wearables: “If I need my watch to tell me if I slept enough, I’m probably out of tune with my body. There’s no shortcut to learning to listen to ourselves again and being honest with ourselves.”
In extreme environments, energy isn’t a wellness topic. It’s part of your survival strategy. The same is true in leadership – luckily with less severe consequences. Nevertheless, performance without recovery becomes self‑sabotage and leadership without self‑reflection loses effectiveness. That’s why I always advocate for self-reflection in my leadership coachings.
Leadership takeaways
- Think of leadership like an expedition and maintain a buffer. If you operate at 100% capacity, you’re one surprise away from bad decisions.
- Energy management and self-reflection is leadership hygiene: Protect deep-work blocks for judgment-heavy decisions and reduce cognitive overhead with routines. The self-management toolkit by Sparkr offers some very simple first steps to get there.
- Treat recovery as an operating requirement, not an optional reward. Decision quality depends on it.
- Use tools and metrics but don’t outsource self-awareness; stay in tune with your own signals and invest in finding your inner voice.
leadership Anja Blacha
Leadership Framework Download
Modern leaders must manoeuvre seven dimensions of tensions. Effective leadership is fluid and adjusts to the goal and circumstances at hand along those seven dimensions.
Anja is describing one of the seven tensions. The tension between following intuition or going for data-driven decisions. For different tasks Anja chooses to be on different points on this spectrum to make her best decisions.
This leadership framework (available in German) helps you become a more effective leader and you can access a free PDF download.
leadership Anja Blacha
Executive Coach Christian Lundsgaard
Mental strength: train your will like a muscle
Anja says something many leaders want to be true: “Willpower actually can be trained.”
This claim isn’t just unsubstantiated life coach speak. Research in neuroscience suggests that the anterior mid‑cingulate cortex (aMCC) plays a central role in persistence and goal pursuit. The leadership translation is not “be harder on yourself”; it’s to adopt a training mindset when it comes to your mental state: Build discipline through small, repeatable exposures to discomfort just like you’d go to the gym to train your muscles.
In practice, that looks less like dramatic self‑punishment and more like consistent micro training: Doing a difficult conversation today, choosing an early hours deep‑work block or rehearsing a high‑stakes moment like a summit push by defining triggers and risk mitigation tactics before you need them.
The thread connecting mountaineering and management is simple: Your mind learns what you repeatedly expose it to.
Leadership takeaways
- Treat will power like strength training: small reps compound into reliable discipline.
- Reduce decision fatigue with defaults and routines (e.g. email time windows, meeting rules, recovery rituals). Check out Sparkr’s self-management toolkit for more details.
- Use mental rehearsal and visualizing, define likely stress triggers and your responses before the high-stakes moment arrives.
- Consistency beats intensity: Avoid turning self-management into one-off heroic efforts. Small, consistent steps matter.
Risk: decision quality matters more than bravery
Extreme exploration is often misread as thrill‑seeking. Anja’s risk framing is sober while she doesn’t claim fearlessness for herself. She chooses high goals and she’s disciplined about their costs. She insists on personal accountability. In leadership terms, that aligns with the concept of “extreme ownership” – the refusal to outsource responsibility to circumstances or other people. I appreciate this concept a lot and I respect people who apply it.
For business leaders, this offers a useful lens on risk taking. A leader’s job is not to eliminate all risk before embarking on a mission; it is to make risk transparent, debate it, take conscious decisions and come up with systems to govern it so that teams can act decisively without gambling.
Leadership takeaways
- In high-stakes environments, the leader’s job is not to eliminate risk all together. It’s to make risk explicit, understood and owned.
- Define which risks you accept upfront (e.g. capital exposure, reputational exposure etc.) and which ones you don’t.
- Create “stop rules” and escalation triggers so teams can abort or adjust without politics.
team performance
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Nothing helps more in dealing with today's VUCA world than a well-trained inner compass. The host of the Sparkr Podcast, Christian Lundsgaard, is happy to collaborate with you in calibrating your compass.
Leadership Anja Blacha
Team performance: align, define, verify
As the Sparkr Podcast interview turns to teamwork, Anja’s language becomes more operational. Her core point: Don’t wait for stress to “invent” your collaboration model. “You need to define the rules by which you operate in advance, before stress hits”, Anja emphasizes.
Then she adds a nuance that many organizations miss: Clear authority is essential but it must not turn team members with less authority into passive followers. Anja stresses that when pushing for the summit “everybody has to take responsibility even if nobody wants to be the first person to stands out with concerns and saying: hang on, we need to reassess”. Silence becomes a hidden risk.
Because misunderstandings in extreme environments can be catastrophic, Anja emphasizes closed‑loop communication: Sending a message and verifying it was received as intended. In business teams, this is the difference between “I told him xyz” and “I’ve verified that we are aligned.” One-way communication is lazy and prone to errors, verifying is professional and effective.
Taken together, the expedition lessons serve as leadership principles: Reduce ambiguity before it becomes expensive. Teams don’t fail in the storm because they lack talent. They fail because they didn’t define how they operate before the storm.
Leadership takeaways
- Before the stressful situation, define goals and intentions (not just “what we do” but “why this matters now” or what “done” or “success” means), rules of engagement (e.g. how we decide, how we escalate, how we disagree), decision rights, roles, and escalation paths. Clarify this before pressure hits; ambiguity slows action, increases the likelihood of blame games and risks.
- Use closed-loop communication: send, repeat back, confirm. Alignment must be verified and cannot be assumed.
- Authority must not create passivity: Distributed responsibility means everyone gathers data and speaks up when needed. The authority of one person doesn’t remove the principle of “extreme ownership” from the others.
Leadership Anja Blacha
Workshop Moderator Christian Lundsgaard
Hiring for high-performing teams
Anja’s heuristics for assembling the right team translate well into business: In high‑stakes environments, competence is foundational but not sufficient. Mission‑critical qualities include integrity, self‑management capabilities and situational awareness.
In other words: Do people do what they say – also under stress? Can they care for themselves and for others under load? Do they notice weak signals in their environment and speak up if needed?
Expeditions reveal quickly what organizations sometimes discover too late: People without reliability can easily become a liability.
Leadership takeaways
- Competence is the foundation; reliability is the differentiator.
- Look for integrity: Do words and actions align; especially under pressure?
- Assess self-management: energy, focus, recovery, and ability to regulate emotions.
- Prioritize situational awareness and “extreme ownership”: Noticing weak signals and speaking up early prevents avoidable crises.
Why leaders should care beyond performance
It’s easy to reduce Anja’s insights from her extreme expeditions to mental and physical toughness. But on a deeper layer it is also about meaning. Our urge to explore is also a quest for meaning.
In another Sparkr Podcast episode with neuroscientist and stress researcher Prof. Gregor Hasler, we learn that resilience increases when people can create meaning and maintain close relationships. Those factors provide the “why” behind endurance. As philosopher Nietzsche put it: If there’s a why, no how becomes too hard.
For business leaders, the point isn’t to romanticize suffering. It’s to recognize that ambition without meaning turns brittle under pressure.
Leadership takeaways
- Meaning is not a “soft factor”; it’s fuel for endurance and a stabilizer under stress.
Leadership Anja Blacha
Leadership Anja Blacha
Conclusion: 8 leadership lessons
If I had to summarize the learnings from my conversation with Anja in a few lines, it would sound something like this: Think big. Plan well. Train your will. Manage your energy. Assess and own the risks. Define the goals and intentions, rules of engagement and exit strategies before the storm. Translated into a set of eight takeaways for business leaders:
- Resilience is a system, not a mood.
- Commitment is a leadership act. The first step out of the comfort zone is often the hardest.
- Comfort zones are elastic. Expand them by deliberately stretching yourself.
- Energy is a strategic resource and preserving it keeps decision quality intact when sh*t hits the fan. Maintain a buffer and acknowledge the importance of recovery to upkeep high performance capability over the long run.
- Willpower is a muscle that can be trained; small reps beat occasional heroic feats.
- Risk requires ownership and decision clarity. If you accept it, accept it consciously and without excuses.
- Team performance is designed before the mission: values, rules, roles and communication protocols.
- Meaning is the quiet engine of endurance.
To close, I’ll go back to the phrase I used earlier. Antarctica, Mount Everest and an executive office share one truth: Under pressure, we don’t rise to our ambitions. We fall to the level of our training.
Leadership Anja Blacha
Sparkr Podcast
Workshop Moderator Leadership Coach Christian Lundsgaard
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