In the graphic above we illustrate where you want to put the emphasis on your life if you want to stay both energetic and healthy and be more successful; it’s your “performance.” To give you some perspective on that, at the end of this article, I’m going to reveal the dominant paradigms when it comes to taking care ourselves, our bodies and our lives, and why living performance lifestyle is the key to healing the painful disconnect between your energy, health, and performance.
Human function and performance, which includes both how you function biologically, but also how you function in the world in terms of what you have the capacity to accomplish and achieve, is best predicted by your lifestyle and your lifestyle is the best predictor of your performance.
They go hand in hand. Performance is a lifestyle, nothing less.
It’s that fact that makes it a given that the way you live is “healthy.” Just think about you seeking higher performance in life, but living out of balance (a definition I’m sure you don’t understand yet) with limited skills to manage your energy, for starters. Now, think about how resulting fatigue will negatively affect your eating and exercise habits for example). And on that poor, weak foundation, how well will you function and perform and for how long? Not very. Miss one night of enough quantity and quality of sleep for example, and you render even the most skilled performers relatively useless.
Now we say that with a caveat; human beings have the capacity to reach deep, generate energy, and perform at again relatively high levels even when tired, fueled improperly, and deconditioned, but that is analogous to a heavy wind blowing on a structurally defective building. It will break down. It’s just a matter of time. We see this all the time with increase weight, acute, and chronic health issues that develop in human beings with hidden lifestyle challenges, that cause performance issues over time.
Like a building, a series of storms pound away and eventually take the building out. And if not in today’s storm it’s coming as dysfunction accumulates; from the lack of sleep or regeneration to poor eating, to the lack exercise to a whole lot more.
It might be enough to say, “your lifestyle,” is the centralized, or master mechanism of all mechanisms that determine your energy levels, health, performance, and ultimately your success. Not all life mechanisms, of course, are lifestyle-centric, as you have to factor in natural talents and timing amongst other situational factors that will also affect your success. Though it goes without saying that your quality of life as a whole is determined by your lifestyle.
Your “lifestyle” in terms of what and where you can afford, to wear, live, travel, etc, is the result of your success in life, your career or business, the success of your creative pursuits or even sports if you are a professional athlete. But when we refer to your lifestyle here at PLI (Performance Lifestyle Inc) we are not primarily talking about the results of your success; we are, at the core, talking about how you spend, manage and recuperate your energy, including the quality of the food you eat and your activities to achieve that success.
Essentially, we are talking about what, how and why you do what you do, the way you do it, at the level and with what consistency you do it, so that you have the energy to stay healthy, function and perform well.
We are also talking a much bigger, wider and more fundamental definition of lifestyle, and it’s always affecting your results. As it stands, most people achieve their goals to live a better lifestyle and what we are saying is that we must live a better lifestyle to achieve our goals.
Now if human performance is a lifestyle, then you would agree that your lifestyle is not limited to nutrition and fitness, and sleep alone, which, though a popular topic in the media today is rarely fully understood in the context of lifestyle.
Your Lifestyle is made up of a variety of human performance skills, of which how you eat, exercise and sleep, albeit essential at the core, are about 10% of the lifestyle equation. It’s why in Performance Lifestyle training, we don’t start or stop, by teaching eating and exercising.
In the orange circle above you see what may be a new term for you. It’s Performance Lifestyle. It represents your lifestyle optimized for human function and performance, resulting in health and greater success. The emphasis on performance is what bridges that gap between these two life qualities. Think “athlete” for a second. They optimize all aspects of the way they live so that they can achieve their goals without being distracted or held back by the hidden challenges caused by an unhealthy, out-of-balance lifestyle.
A performance lifestyle is “balanced,” by it’s definition and comprehensive skill sets. It’s why this new term emerged. a “healthy” lifestyle as it is traditionally defined is not complete.
For example, can you imagine how an athlete would perform if they slept less than 6 hours (the average amount of sleep for professionals, working parents, executives and managers, small business owners and entrepreneurs? They would publically fall flat, lose contracts and the like. It’s why, athletes are the only subset of the population that directly links their lifestyle routines, all or most of them 🙂 with their performance, their results and their success.
You need to do the same and the skills required include and go beyond eating heathy, exercising and getting more sleep,
The Next Level: Getting the Second Tier.
When you focus on personal and professional performance, and you make it a lifestyle, you effectively live life at that “next level,” so many people are talking about but so few actually understand. And believe us when we say, life is challenging, but better and easier at this level because you are now competent in both lifestyle mindset and skillset. This “next level” is where your life is supported, more fluid, and more graceful. It’s life working for you, it’s where you experience momentum not struggle because you are not coping with stress in ways that create more stress anymore.
Our whole culture is rigged to keep you at the first level or what’s called “Tier 1,” where you are a rat on a treadmill, stressed, and responding in ways that do create more stress. A simple example is having a tough day and needing junk food or alcohol to deal with it.
The next level is called Tier 2, the second tier, or what has recently been referred to as Tier X because you are living at a whole new level. You are living a life that is upleveled, by the fact that you are living with all the essential lifestyle skills in play, at a higher level than you used to.
There is not one essential skill that you will learn in Performance Lifestyle training, that you are not already practicing to some degree right now. That’s what makes them essential, these are THE fundamental lifestyle skills, without which you would deplete, breakdown, and function horribly as a human. And that is what happens to many, many otherwise smart people.
The point isn’t whether the essentials skills are at play, it a question of at what level?
The thing is, what’s affecting how well you live and the skills you seek to master?
It’s your paradigm. Think of this as a blueprint. We’ve been trained on these blueprints our whole lives in very subtle ways and they are ever-present. Discovering this is the primary reason why I and a team of professionals chose to create a new one.
It’s called Performance Lifestyle, an emerging concept that was originally born in elite athletics that has now crossed offer to the general populace. What makes a performance lifestyle so unique is the following:
- You resolve all hidden lifestyle challenges that are distracting you and holding you back from living life naturally healthily, and now more successfully.
- You evolve with a “healthy” lifestyle being the given not the goal. And that becomes your new normal so you can function and perform to achieve your real life, business or career, creative and sporting goals.
- You achieve those goals at higher levels because you’re now living in balance with vibrant health and peace of mind because you are proficient in the full array of fundamental lifestyle skills required for performance. It’s next level living at it’s finest.
What’s your lifestyle paradigm?
The value of the graphic in this post is that it emphasizes where to put the emphasis in your life to stay healthy and be more successful. It’s on your performance, and as you’ve just learned, performance is a lifestyle, yet most of us do not know what that means. And because we don’t have a performance lifestyle that is fully supporting us, we end up getting caught up in other paradigms that are only addressing if only a few of our needs to actually thrive or achieve wellbeing.
Juxtapose the insights above with the following to determine where you are putting your emphasis.
- Death and Disability: No one likes to emphasize this, and no one lives to die, but it is the only paradigm that is guaranteed to everyone. It’s important to acknowledge this because in our lives we want to do anything and everything required to stave off death, live a long and healthy life, with full function and focus, free of injury and disease, accomplish and achieve our goals and dreams. Unfortunately, there is a lot of vested interest in death, believe it or not; and as negative as this may sound, our culture promotes death far earlier than it should come. The reason is simple, we don’t understand energy, health, and performance very well and come up short.In this paradigm, you just keep up getting as little sleep as possible, eat the standard American diet and stay sedentary indoors, while working hard, and watching TV until you pass out at night, and then start the day all over again to repeat and you are guaranteed this outcome sooner than later. You are also guaranteed a lot of time, needing paradigm #2.
- Traditional Medicine: Great for emergencies, and disease management, not very good for health and performance. Very good to have access to, but you’ve got to start focusing on your lifestyle as drugs and surgery are not health promoting. How many times have you heard that doctors get very little lifestyle training, with only a few “hours” of nutrition training in total during a doctor’s full medical training? And that’s just nutrition.If you think you are going to eat whatever, exercise whenever, and sleep if ever, while dealing with heaps of unresolved / stress and your doctor will take-care-of-your-every-ill, you have bought into the wrong paradigm.
- Alternative Health: It’s Not much different than traditional medicine, often less scientific, more “herbal” but often does break some good ground on living holistically, and focusing on your lifestyle. The intention for this industry is to provide an alternative to drugs and surgery, but often times works on the same premise as traditional medicine, and at times, on wishful claims to sell more “vitamins.”For example, adrenal fatigue as a way of explaining fatigue. It’s not accurate even one bit, but it’s a widespread idea promoted by alternative health practitioners who are not all operating on an evidence-based approach, as reported by Performance Lifestyle advisor Ari Whitten.
- Health and Wellness: Is focused mainly on nutrition, fitness and now sleep; less than 10% of the performance lifestyle equation if you don’t factor in psychological services, which is not really seen as part of the health and wellness industry, even though they are. It’s very fragmented, and if you are not careful, as positively influential as this paradigm of self, body and even life care is, you’ll soon be making goals out of eating healthy and getting fit.Let me say, that is not a bad thing, it’s just an inaccurate, out-of-context paradigm that affects people below their level of consciousness and for many is the reason why they don’t take care of their body the way they do. To have “getting healthy” as a goal you have to not be living healthy now, and getting healthy isn’t even a natural goal.So until you “get” that your lifestyle is married to your success in life, business, creative pursuits and or sports; you’ll make goals out of things that are not really goals and miss out on understanding human performance.
- Performance Lifestyle: Bridges the gap between health and success training so that you can live in balance with vibrant health and peace of mind while achieving even your most ambitious goals. In a Performance Lifestyle, you master all the fundamentals of health and wellness, only now in a performance context, directly linked to your success, with the express purpose of achieving and maintaining well-being. And that is the motive you will need to stay healthy and be successful.This is the paradigm all balanced and healthy, high achieving people know and live by and it’s THE paradigm, we suggest you buy into. It will save you years of energy, time, effort and a lot of money. It will also keep your focus on your real goals in life without all the distractions that hold us back due to fatigue, poor health, and human performance, and will move you forward from where you are on the right footing; or what we call a “position of strength.”
- Success Training and Coaching: People wake up be successful every day, not balanced or healthy; so the effective reason why someone will learn to “live in balance,” like you learn in performance lifestyle training, with vibrant health and peace of mind (which does not mean the world around you might not still be a little bit or even a lot-a-bit crazy, and only means that you can still have peace of mind) while achieving even your most ambitious goals; is that they want to be more successful.Traditional success training and coaching are about mindset, it’s about motivation and application of skill to be more successful, such as in business or one’s career; but very rarely talks about your lifestyle. The traditional performance and success training industries like to talk about your lifestyle as a result of your success, not as the primary cause of it, and this is probably because too many “successful” people are not very healthy themselves and are confirmed performance addicts.
Sure they through in a little about sleep, healthy eating, and exercise, largely because they have to, but unlike the highest performing people in the world—athletes—most business people don’t have lifestyle’s that support their performance and they trade their health for success anyway. As stated earlier, what’s the point of optimizing your mindset if the energy powering its function is depleted and the health that enables you to function and perform at high levels is compromised?
So where do you want to put the emphasis on, in your life to stay both healthy and successful? The only effective answer is on your lifestyle. At the end of the day, it all comes back to the way you live.
