As many of you already know, I am fascinated with what causes high performance individuals, teams, and leaders. AND, why there are so few able to sustain it. My reading, research, and practice have led me to conclude that high performance, for individuals, comes down to three concepts in concert.
Head. Heart. Hands.
Actually the hands piece is simply the result of getting the first two aligned, engaged, and energized. Lets start with the heart.
The heart is the place to start. High performance cannot be built and sustained without the individual having their whole heart in the pursuit. The work required to perform, at a high level, simply will not be sustained if the individual is motivated by money, peers, parents, pride, position, prestige, challenge, competition, or any other fear based response. Motivation is mostly fear based and eventually loses it’s push or pull on the person. Doesn’t it?
Whole – hearted effort comes from within and like a breath of fresh air, sustains and fills the lungs, fuels the capillaries, and brightens the face. This soul is on fire and the fuel is LOVE. Very cool.
Now for the hard part, literally. The head.
The heart must be whole and the fuel must be pure. Got it. That is the first piece to performance, but not the last. If one wants to build themselves into a high performance individual, and their team into a high performance team this next piece to the puzzle is paramount. I’m re-reading another book about unlocking the head, the brain in particular, and continue to read and experience the same melody line.
The power of practice.
Hard practice. Domain Specific practice. Focused practice. Exhausting practice. Soft skill practice. Deep practice. Falling and failing practice. Self led practice. Team practice. Other led practice. Scary kinda practice. Conflict resolving practice. Technical skill kinda practice. High performance is achieved NO other way. Period. According to Daniel Coyle in his freakin’ awesome book, The Talent Code, there is a very specific process that talent “hotbeds” all seem to follow. He calls this the deep practice struggle. I call it FM, baby…
1. Pick a target.
2. Reach for it.
3. Evaluate the gap between the target and the reach.
4. Rinse and repeat. (OK that’s our language) He said simply return to step one.
Do not expect to improve your performance as a leader, as a spouse, as a individual performer, as an engineer, as a lawyer, a listener, or a doctor without committing to a routine form of practice to develop a specific skill. Period. You will not experience a “burst” in your performance by simply honing your current set of habits. It just won’t happen. What will is that slowly the small, iterative gains will cease. The only way forward will not be to “break” those old habits, but instead, to build better ones.
Think about it…
The only way to build new habits, is to create new circuits. AND, slowly, over time your head will not be so hard. The soft tissue inside that cranium will produce a better, quicker firing circuit, if you practice, practice, practice. If you practice slowly and deliberately. If you practice outside your comfort zone well into your challenge zone and just this side of what feels like your PANIC zone. If you develop the habit of practicing with others better than you. If you practice specific skills you and your builder identify as the “lynch pins” to your performance gains and gaps. If you keep showing up to practice ready to pick a target, reach, fail and rinse & repeat until your hand grabs the target. Rinse and repeat until, like sloLO, suddenly your hand not only grabs the target- your hand punches right on past 🙂
Suddenly, your performance will burst.
You will know why. And, you will know why “suddenly” comes so sloLOly. And, you will keep showing up. Just showing up ready to pick, reach, and rinse & repeat until your hand punches through.
Keep showing up sloLO. Keep showing up. Another burst is sloLoly coming into my focus. I can see you, someday, burpin’ like the Churp, hanging from the bitch like Stud, and eating up the pulls like FM. And, I can already see your strength extrapolating into your work and life.
Keep showing up, sloLO…
BUILT TO LEAD 
Thanks, this explains it all!