Show Up as The Best Version of Yourself in an Always-On Culture.
How Do You Do that is Revealed in What Healthy, High-Achieving People Do to Thrive.
For a long time, personal and professional/professional development has been emphasized in the market, as the ways to show up as the best version of yourself, to be more successful and significant; and the reason is simple. High achievers wake up to be successful, so they focus on optimizing their performance so they can accomplish and achieve their goals…
There is though, considerable confusion between optimizing your performance the way so many people, particularly entrepreneurs and other driven business professionals, understand it and a “performance lifestyle.”
The difference could not be more influential when it comes to showing up as the best version of yourself.
Over the past 30 years, a new performance culture has emerged that is virtually always on and it’s evolving at a fantastic pace (some might say an alarmingly fast pace). Nothing new, because of PCs, the Internet, broadband, and handheld mobile technologies, the resulting creativity, and velocity of change, creation, and perceptible evolution that’s taking place are formidable.
Given that, it’s not hard to see why so many people are beginning to talk about 1. human energy, 2. health, and 3. performance. It’s because, as much as technology is helping us, the always-on performance culture all this tech has created is negatively affecting all three.
- We are indoors all the time.
- In the dark during the day and the night during the light.
- We eat and drink to stimulate ourselves versus true hunger and thirst.
- We are often too tired or don’t have enough time to be physically active outside of work,
- We get 6.5 hours of sleep on average…I could go on and on, but know the human toll of those patterns alone is immense.
One group is particularly impacted; it’s the entrepreneurs and other driven business professionals who have seemingly relentless demands on their time. They overspending their energy, under recuperating, and falling prey to lifestyle habits that are biased towards conserving their energy in certain ways that prevent them from taking correct actions (even getting enough sleep…) and both stimulating their energy and overexerting in other ways that tires, burns and wears them out prematurely.
Tiredness combined with lifestyle habits that enable you to cope with stress in ways that create more stress, not more energy, is an insidious combination. It’s why fatigue has become a national crisis, and health statistics continue to decline as disease rates (diseases of lifestyle) are on the rise across the board.
The typical response to this ever-increasing life velocity is becoming a “high-performing” person and attempting to keep pace all the time, which is where so many of us miss the boat.
We’ve become performance addicts and addicted to “performance” by too being always on, and it causes all kinds of problems that sell our energy, health performance, and quality of life, and our very longevity exasperatingly short; promoting the very opposite of you showing up as the best version of yourself.
It is a natural human desire to show up as the best version of you. Your personal, professional, and business results depend on it. But most of us do not understand much about human performance; and specifically, the lifestyle that optimizes it.
This is why the term performance is often tied to the results of your human performance, such as productivity, accomplishment, or achievement. I.e., “let’s assess your performance,” or “a 365 performance review,” which is defined as an assessment of outcomes achieved.
In reality, Human performance: Is a series of behaviors executed to accomplish specific results (performance = behavior + results). The behaviors are both the lifestyle behaviors, and the industry-specific behaviors that accomplish and achieve the results. All totalled and you have a true definition of “performance.”
Now in that definition, we discover a missing level of development. Its performance, as a lifestyle; the very foundation of The Development Hierarchy below. Most of us know full well the industry-specific tasks we need to perform to accomplish and achieve our goals. But what we don’t know is the lifestyle that sustains our capacity and capabilities to function at the levels achieving our goals at higher levels actually require.
I’m talking about The Core Essentials of Human Performance itself.
When you know them and take them from theory to practice to mastery, you develop a lifestyle that will take your performance around industry-specific outcomes to higher and higher levels of success. And now, without burning out and wearing out, and selling your longevity short because you now have a healthy, high-performance lifestyle.
When we skip the development of a performance lifestyle, at the foundation of our own development hierarchy, while we may be accomplishing a great deal and even achieving at a high level, it’s
likely we’re depleting our bodies and responding to stress in ways that are creating more stress, not more energy. And in that state, it’s really hard to show up as the best version of yourself.
Without that foundation, you’ll then continue to see “performance” as a result, and that unbalanced definition will force you to be “‘always on” accomplishing tasks so you can achieve your goals; meanwhile relegating the care of yourself, your body, and your life, as an afterthought. And that’s the way it is for most people. And it’s why they fizzle out and die at 76.1 to 81.1 a full 25+ years short of the finish line.
Don’t get me wrong; there is a time to refer to one’s performance, sort of how we might refer to a broadway star or athlete’s performance at an event. Still, we first have to know how to live a performance lifestyle so that health and high achievement are possible and sustainable.
Every healthy, high-achieving creative artist and athlete knows this. Think Tom Brady, 43 years of age, in the second year of his contract with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and he just sought a contract extension! It’s not happenstance, it’s well known he’s not even an athlete endowed with over-the-top talent, it’s his lifestyle and his practice that makes the difference.
He lives a performance lifestyle.
So it’s vital to make the distinction between lifestyle behaviors and industry-specific tasks that enable you to accomplish and achieve your goals. Lifestyle is the new level of performance development that I’m helping people see. It’s the one that is overlooked and almost an afterthought for many driven, high-achieving people, because they are so focused only on industry-specific behaviors, they crowd out what makes it all possible—their performance lifestyle.
Missing it can lead to addictive ways of life that can keep you so caught up (now sped up by technology) you might find yourself having so much going on; you’re barely hanging on as your energy, health, and human performance crumble prematurely under stress you are not resilient enough to withstand.
If you maintain performance as an outcome, looking only at your results as your “performance,” you might be a high achiever. But you’re likely not a healthy, high achiever—one who has a whole (balanced) performance lifestyle in support of you and what you are up to in the world.
So how do you show up as the best version of yourself, so that you can be a healthy high achieving pro, who thrives?
All healthy, high-achieving people have high-performance lifestyles. But to dial that in further, they do something most achievers who want to stay energetic and healthy amidst that relentless demand on their time and energy, don’t do. They manage their energy “like a pro.” There is nothing more potent to maintaining optimal human performance than having genuine, generous reserves of energy. It’s the byproduct of managing your energy like a pro, which is the crux of a “performance lifestyle.”
I say “like a pro” because there are two ways of approaching the achievement of your goals.
- Like an amateur, in the addictive ways, so many of us have been taught for far too long that give us a boost in the short term but sell us short in the longer term.
- Like a pro, in ways aligned with the core essentials of human performance that set us up for higher levels of success, now and long term.
Healthy high achieving people who thrive are living, their life, like a pro; operating at a whole new level (often called the “second tier”) which the majority of people know nothing about. And the truth is, everyone else needs to learn how they live if they want to have any chance at being both healthy and successful—thriving.
To get you on the path to showing up as the best version of yourself, it starts with one mindset shift.
One of the key differences between healthy, high-achieving people who thrive and all other achiever types is that healthy high achieving pros see their success as a byproduct of their lifestyle, including their work style. They aren’t just trying to achieve their goals to live a better lifestyle; they live a better lifestyle and that enables them to acheive their goals.
They are not addicted to performance and manage their energy in everything they do. They live performance lifestyles; a balanced lifestyle, that’s health-promoting up to 90% of the time or more; even though they’re fully engaged entrepreneurs… who often work many hours.
They don’t buy into ANY philosophy that changes that mentality, the way so many achievers do, who don’t manage their energy well and aren’t aligned with the core essentials of human performance.
Most of us not only don’t manage our energy, conscious and proactively, but we also don’t know what energy is, besides getting more sleep and taking in food calories. We will do whatever, whenever to stimulate and will ourselves forward to achieve our goals. And while there might be a time and place for that, there is; contrary to the advice so many personal development gurus dispense; being a performance addict and addicted to peak performance is never as a status quo.
So here’s the ironic twist.
I, for one, like you I imagine, am one of those people; I will do “whatever it takes to realize the dream.” Only now, unlike years past when I too did not know much about human performance and the lifestyle can take anyone to the second tier of success; I will still do whatever it takes to achieve my goals and that of my organization. As long, as it’s in alignment with The Core Essentials of Human Performance, and set’s me up for that higher level of success, instead of debiting my future, by helping me manage my energy, and stay healthy. And that’s why I live a high performance lifestyle.
It never ceases to amaze me how we’ve been trained to become performance addicts and addicted to non-stop performance all in the name of success, but never learned how to live the high-performance lifestyle that sustains our capacities to achieve at a high level.
If you want to show up as the best version of yourself, you need to learn the core essentials, aka The 5 Lifestyle Strategies Healthy High Achieving People Know and Live by to Thrive.
You are one of the entrepreneurs (start-up, growth, and scale), coaches, consultants, and professionals who are naturally regarded as highly motivated people. That’s me, and it’s likely like you if you are reading this far. So get ready, you’re about to turn pro and show up as the best version of yourself!
JAM (John Allen Mollenhauer) is a leading Performance Lifestyle Coach and authority on living the High–Performance Lifestyle® with an online training academy and community that teaches people how to manage their energy like the pros. He helps you get free of the hidden lifestyle challenges that distract and hold you back from living your full potential as you optimize the way you live for the energy, health, and high-performance you need to achieve your goals and flourish. Performance Lifestyle Inc is based in Florham Park, NJ, where he and his team run RegenUS Center to help you restore your energy for life. For a complimentary strategy session with JAM or a Member of the Lifestyle Coach team, click here.
