# Empowering Leadership through Performance Science with Carla Fowler

Performance and science are two words that may seem at odds, but there is in fact a science to performance.

That’s great news for you as a leader because it means there are clear ways to optimize you and your team’s performance for success. From quantitative to qualitative measures, performance science helps you maximize your productive behavior for positive outcomes.

When applied correctly, the foundations of performance science can help you combine the concrete and the abstract parts of your dreams and goals and translate them into a tangible plan of action that leads to success.

On this episode of Evolved Sales LIVE, host Jonathan Fischer sits down with [Carla Fowler](https://www.linkedin.com/in/carla-fowler/), MD PhD, who completed her internship in general surgery at Stanford University and founded [Thaxa](https://www.thaxa.com/), an executive coaching firm, to speak about how performance science can level up your leadership skills and business strategy.

## Meet Carla:

Carla Fowler, MD PhD, earned degrees from Brown University and the University of Washington before diving into the medical field as a surgical intern at Stanford University. Combining her interest in human behavior, data, and the medical field, Carla founded Thaxa, a performance science executive coaching firm that takes this science and applies it to helping business leaders reach their full potential.

**Check out the transcription of this webinar episode below!**

**Jonathan Fischer:** *Welcome back. Thanks for joining us. I'm Jonathan Fisher. Well, through all the thick and thin, up and down of this ever changing business environment that we're all enjoying right now, one thing does not change, and that's the need to continue to evolve our leadership skills and our ability to increase performance.*

*Well, today's guest is the perfect person to help us out with that very thing. Carla Fowler, MD PhD, graduated from Brown University, Magna cum laude, earned her degrees at the University of Washington and completed her internship in general surgery at Stanford University. She's also the founder of Thaxa, an executive coaching firm that leverages the best ideas from performance science to help leaders from around the globe achieve next level results. And in our conversation today, Dr. Fowler will be sharing insights from the latest scientific research that you can use to unlock next level performance for yourself and for your team.*

**Carla Fowler:** *Thank you, Jonathan. This is great to be here.*

**Jonathan Fischer:** *Well, I'll tell you what, we we're constantly talking about different ways to up our game. A lot of the conversation by necessity tends to be sort of on the tactical side of doing business, better strategic ways of leading our organizations. But we have comparatively few experts on performers.*

*We have just a couple. But your research interests me a lot. I think our listeners are sure to benefit in big ways. Would you mind, how does a medical surgeon—how does a trained medical doctor become such an expert on performance science? Tell us a little bit about your journey into this space, if you would.*

**Carla Fowler:** *Well, Jonathan, that's a really great question and it is not a typical path into this space, but as you pointed out prior to starting coaching, which I did about 10 years ago, I was on an academic medical path. And so what that looks like is I spent most of my twenties getting an MD and a PhD. Some people say I'm a glutton for punishment because I just thought that was the most awesome program in the world. So, you know, I liked math and science growing up. I also was really interested in people and the problems they face.*

*So thinking about how do we work on problems to actually benefit folks? And I've always been really interested in high performance and what are all the behaviors that go along with that. So you put me in this program, and basically I spent most of my twenties learning how to actually do cancer research as a bench scientist as well as learning how to operate on someone. During that time, I was also learning about thinking, unstructured problems, and figuring out what is going to be of most value. In addition, medicine is one of these really interesting fields where we let relatively young people make and participate in high stakes decisions.*

*Those were some of the things that I really took away from that time and also figured out that I was quite interested in them. As I was nearing the end of the program, I was really looking for my home. I ended up heading towards surgery, which is a field where you really have to see and own your choices. But the human component was a little less emphasized there...*