HB

Are you the ultimate performing machine? Do you work hard, aim high, drive hard? If you want to be a high performer in business, not just in the short term but day after day you need the ultimate support team. Where many of us fail in maintaining a level of high performance on an ongoing basis is in the setup of supporting and restoring mechanisms.

Think about it. High performance race cars have a team of people preparing them for the race, checking the oil, tyres, petrol, cleaning, and on and on. Once the race is started the pit stops are critical to the success and the maintenance of performance. After the race the support team starts the maintenance process, restoring the vehicle.

High performing people, take the time to properly prepare themselves between races and during the race they take the pit stops. High performing people have established a team of people or organisations that are responsible for keeping them at their best. In an English ad agency I met a guy called Oscar. Oscar worked harder than anyone I have ever met. Not in real life but in his head. The reason why things were so difficult for Oscar, more so than others with the same problems, same workload and pressures, was because Oscar was too busy to nurture himself as a high performing machine. He didn’t take the pit stops, didn’t rest between races, eventually as he tried to keep pace with himself his performance started to decline.

Like a high performance athlete or a top performing race horse, their performance in their chosen profession is not determined by one single strength. Success is determined by a multitude of factors that combine to define the whole. The training, food, experience, mental and physical conditioning, coaches, nutritionists, discipline, companionship and more combined.

Stop for a second and take a look at your support team. How do you rest between the races? When the race is on, when and where do you take your pit stop. What factors do you combine to ready and maintain yourself for peak performance. Check your eating, your exercise, your relaxation, find the people who will support you to look after yourself while you drive for performance. If you have been pushing hard like so many of us do, isn’t it time you devoted just as much effort to your number one asset. That asset is you.

Distracted, preoccupied, and removed from ourselves. Our whole lives are dedicated to finding ourselves. Each one of us born with a single destiny. It seemed so easy as a child, we were shown a world of possibilities and we were told anything was possible.

Its not that we stop wanting, or stop dreaming. Its what happens to people when the roar of the positive voices slow. What happens to us when we stop being told we are special. In fact we learn that we are one of many. Every step takes us into a new environment that brings more challenge than nurture. Only we can say what will harm us or make us stronger.

What a world of possibility it is. It seems like a world of our own making. We have the power to follow the path of our destiny. You have the power to materialize the focus of your thoughts. Though many of us will not make it. We are too often and easily preoccupied. We are sitting ducks for the forces that await us. A system that will tempt us at every turn. It is proven and perfected. It starts at School with the best of intentions. Create routines, habits and conform to popular opinion.

Then work, earn, want more than you can afford. Live beyond your means, drown in debt and sell tomorrow for a fix today. Do you buy the hype, did you buy the latest gadget? Was it really necessary? Debt, more debt, advertising, more advertising. Want, need, what is the difference?

Too few moments left. The system will shake you up, poke you from your focus. Right now, try taking time for yourself. Distraction, carrots, chickens and sheep. Can you even begin to think about following through on what you really want from your life. Orange Monkey distraction. My guess is no and its not your fault, there is to much that will work against you. Tv so bright, so colorful. Computer so much knowledge, so many connections. Iphone applications that can do anything to fill a second of any spare moment. Sit still and focus.

You have been taught to dream but trained to conform, to compromise. You have been sold time and time again, the systems routines and an array of devices that will hold you in a state of confusion, a preoccupied state of distraction.

You are a creature of habit. You are you but a thousand stolen moments away from realizing who that really is.

Close your eyes, sleep, awake, start again. Its not to late, you must be the roar of positive voices. Its up to you now there is no one else that can take you on this journey. Anything is possible if you are willing to believe. Forget science, forget everything you know. Come to a place of peace with yourself. Turn in take a look, and with patience step forward with honesty. One true step, a pace out of time, a thousand eyes fall upon you, tempted no more, the path is clear.

Its easy to run before you walk when it comes to exercise, at least in your head it is. Good intentions often cloud good judgement and we tend to underestimate the power of our routines. A thought has very little effect until it is turned into an action. I decided that I am going to get fit again and think that going for a run would be a great option. The problem so far is that all I have done are a few thoughts. I have hardly raised a heart beat. Even after some really vigorous thinking. Every now and again in a spare moment I think about how I have the best intention to go for a run.

Whats going on here! Why cant I take action! Its difficult to break free from our existing lifestyle and go after our goals when we are prisoners in our own routines. The routines are such that they require little thought to action. Just like driving a car really it becomes second nature and instinctual to live our lives on a day to day basis. Its kind of comfortable isn’t it. The problem is this doesn’t help us go after what we really want. Which in this case is a fit trim healthy body that can help me enjoy active living and last till a ripe old age.

Well if I cannot add to the routine or modify the routine lets work within the routine. Lets walk first before we run. Baby steps here we come! So here is my secret to sneaking exercise into your lifestyle without the requirement of any internal arguments or thought.

Every time you go to bathroom complete an exercise. Thats right in the hallway before you enter or after get physical. For me its press-ups and sit-ups. Start off small but make this a must do! Every time you go perform the task. Soon you will be completing 4-5 sets of physical activity each day or start avoiding the bathroom altogether!

Now what I like about this is that there is no lead up to the activity. For example, you don’t need to go through a rountine of behaviors before you even get to the exercise. So no getting dressed, or driving and its free. The chance of avoiding exercise is greatly diminished. You simply must go to the bathroom eventually and therefore do exercise.

Now if you psychologists out there are worried about associative conditioning, as I am sure you are, then lets mix this up a bit for fun. You don’t need to do the bathroom, next week it could be when you do the washing or get out of bed. You can even do other activities like squats or star jumps whatever takes your fancy.  Soon their will be a gym in your head and a gym waiting around every corner of your house. Soon you will be walking towards you goal and really soon you will be able to start adding new actions into your routine like going for that run. Until then ring your own bell like a really smart Pavlov’s dog.

New tracking technology has enabled an array of geographically based web applications to spring into the consumers internet space. If we so desire we can track the locality of our significant others on the off chance of a catch-up meeting. We can walk down a street and our mobile device can tell us what products are available in our immediate vicinity. The tourism industry are reveling, with new opportunities to present information and assist travelers as they move. Tweets can be tracked and mapped to analyse trends of thought according to location. What else is to come? Certainly geographically based web apps are a growing industry, for us as consumers our movements mean a lot more than simply finding our way around town.

If you have ever watched Cricket on television you must have seen the shot analysis graphic. The one that shows the pitch and where, using different colors for different points, the batter has hit the ball. If you pay particular attention to this graphic you will see that the batter prefers certain kinds of locations to hit the ball. Ultimately the batter will probably have an ongoing shot profile in terms of his/her game that brings some consistency to how they move the ball around the ground during a game.

I think that the majority of the population have a similar movement profile. In that the majority of the people walk beaten tracks the majority of the time. If we took a step up and looked down from a great height we would see that our movements on a day to day basis over a year are very consistent. For example, in the working week the rhythm could be a definitive home, drop off, work, home with an occasional variant such as an evening activity. But even the evening activity would be predictable according to the day.

Now, in our travels we prefer certain roads, certain eating establishments and social places. Depending on your position and circumstance there are many places you simply cannot go. You can walk into most retail establishments, but few commercial premises and fewer industrial locations. When you travel you can travel on the roads but the great degree of land is off limits. Depending on financial positions your movement could be more restricted. For some the rising price of petrol has effected the number and distance of trips by road. On the cricket score graphic these longer trips would be considered as hitting a 6, the movement between work and home as 1’s and the extra variants to random occurrences around town as 2’s.

During a recession the price of goods and services have increased over the rate of income. So to the cost of owning and maintaining payments for our houses or dwellings. To compensate we simply move less. We sit at home, buy ourselves a big tv and satellite television and experience the world from our couch and what a world it is. It is a world full of surprises and most of all drama. As we retract financially, we retract physically and mentally.

Try something, grab a map of your town and pencil in the pathways that you travel on a frequent basis. Mark the ones most traveled in a thicker line to indicate their usage. You will soon see your scorecard and what it means to be living your life in terms of freedom of movement and probably freedom of mind. With common pathways and common environments come consistent thoughts, some good and some not so good. Sometimes these thoughts are repeated so much they feel as though they are decaying, they are exhausting, rusty thoughts that are pooling in our minds and soiling our free time.

Now if you seek to expand your geography and/or create new patterns of movement, you can live a truly free and interesting lifestyle. You can expand your experience and expand your mind at the same time. When you travel to new environments, and when you place yourself amongst new people your mind clears, cleans and begins to expand. A little bit of unpredictability and uncertainty disestablishes and shakes common beliefs, how we see the world changes and when the dust settles, we awake a little bit smarter and a little bit wiser than before.

It takes a massive commitment to design, live and secure your fulfilling lifestyle on an ongoing basis. The activity of life roars past our consciousness. As we get older our passions and commitments grow with us. If not kept in check many of the items that make up our day to day life can consume more of our time than we ever intended. We need a way to make space for everything that we value.

A fulfilling lifestyle includes living according to the values we believe in both our personal and working lives. We often here lifestyle experts talk about balance but the word balance leads us to believe that everything needs to have the same amount of attention and all at once. This can create an enormous amount of anxiety because we can’t balance everything all at once and we probably don’t want to. The truth is our values demand more from us at different times and we simply judge the importance of our values differently. Our priminister John Key doesn’t balance productivity and the environment equally 100% of the time, he cant, and if he did or even wanted to the adjustment process or weighting attached to each value as it changed would need to be made gradually over time or else the shock would destroy one or the other. Your values are the same. You cant neglect work all together, you cant neglect family but you can choose what is more important and what deserves more attention and gradually, you can consistently move towards a weighting of importance that is consistent with how you want your life to be.

When your a one value junky the fix starts to become sour. Your lifestyle becomes numb, your day to day the mundane. For example, if you are an career obsessed workaholic that is neglecting your family under the guise of creating them a better life then you are a fool. They would rather have your time and attention than a better life. Ask them and then ask yourself. Wouldn’t you rather experience more life more often with your family than over dose on work for the next 20 years. Of course you would but why don’t you? You don’t because you lost touch with your values, you don’t have a plan. You have got into the habit and a frequency of behavour that overdoses on one value. Now your not to blame. Your probably wired this way or at least have been raised to work hard and provide for your family.

The challenge is in re-prioritizing our values when some activities shout louder for our attention than others. Isn’t that the way. Anything thats really important takes a reasonable degree of effort and creating a blue print or a living plan is one way of securing a framework of planned behavior that can be referred to regardless of mood, or external influences. But you have to have some idea of what you want and thats easier said than done. Start small, 1 month, 3 months, 6 months it doesn’t matter really. Lets just get back to what really matters to you and lets get it down on paper.

Once you work out what you value it easier to create a blueprint of what you want your life to look like on a day to day basis. For example, your blueprint could include working 8 am to 5:30 pm Monday to Friday in your preferred profession, one out of town trip per month, and two overseas holidays per year. It could include Yoga once a week, weekend sport with the kids, or to read a book every day. Now we could call these items goals, or you could call them whatever you like.

Now we are not setting limits here with this, I think its better to set this blueprint ideal as a minimum standard that you hope to achieve and lets keep it realistic. Essentially for the blue print to work it needs to fit within our budget and be achievable in terms of commitments. Now I am sure that there are a few people reading this thinking, how ridiculous, I don’t need a life style blue print to live my life, I don’t need a plan. Well if thats you and your living it 100% day after day, fitting it all in without compromise then good for you, stick with it because its probably working whatever your approach is to lifestyle management.

For others, the demands on their attentions are to such a degree that securing and living their values becomes increasingly difficult. When we are saving for a large purchase most of us are required to save money or pay it off over a period of time. To achieve a large goal we must work at it as a habit over and over again. Every time investing a little bit more in the attainment of what will ultimately become a great achievement. For example, to experience a loving, fulfilling and intimate relationship takes planning and attention. Its the little things and the big things that matter most. Yes guys if you plan a weekend away you will still have to put out the rubbish that week. To get everything you want in your life you need to plan for it. You need to make space.

Now its likely that from time to time your activities will challenge you away from your plan. Your work will get busy or family commitments may increase. Your sport or hobby may demand more and more time to reach a higher level. When this happens, stop, check your plan, check that your behavior is consistent with your values and if needed, when the time is right get back on track.

We all get pushed and pulled by life, sometimes by the things that we value, sometimes by things that make no sense to us at all. Remember, you get to choose the standards that you live by, you get to choose who you are right now.