Audiobook Part 10. High Performance Habits: The #1 Thing

The number one thing they are able. Who think they are able. Virgil, are you always this on? Aurora asks. What do you mean? You know, this energized, happy. I think for a moment and laugh. Yes, I really am this annoying. Why? Aurora peers out at 15,000 people gathered in the arena. We're standing at the very top row looking down to the stage. Within the hour, we'll both have the blessing of speaking here. But aren't you nervous? She says. I feel like I'm going to be sick. I can't keep my thoughts in order. A production assistant interrupts and asks to escort us down to the green room beneath the arena. As we walk, Aurora continues. You look so relaxed. How do you get so confident? I'm surprised by her questions because I too feel the nerves and imagine they are showing. It's not only my first time speaking to this many people, but it's also my first time giving this specific presentation. I explain this to Aurora and say, honestly, I don't really have a gauge on how they'll react to my speech. Then why do you look so calm? I definitely wouldn't say I'm calm. I feel plenty of nerves too, but I'm not really thinking about it. I'll worry about the 15,000 when I get to them. I was just enjoying my conversation with you. That's nice of you to say, Brendan. I'm sorry. I just feel like I'm going to bomb. Why have you bombed in front of this many people before? She laughs. No. You know that Aurora has actually never addressed a large crowd before. As a world class gymnast, she has been in front of thousands of people. She just hasn't delivered a formal paid presentation. She got the speaking slot here because she's a hometown hero and recently medaled at at the Olympics. We arrive at the Green room and Aurora sits down in a makeup chair. She chit chats for a while with Lisa the makeup artist, then asks, so what should I be thinking? Brendan, this is your world, not mine. Well, what are you thinking now? That I'm going to bomb. But again, you've never bombed in front of this many people speaking before, right? Right. So why tell yourself that story? I don't know. It's just what I'm feeling. I hear you. But you already know that's not going to serve you. Let me ask a different question. Why do you even want to be here? I just want to share my story with them and maybe inspire someone beautiful. Well, you know your story, right? You've only told it during interviews, like a Million times. Right? Before she can answer, Lisa shares that she heard Aurora's story on espn. We all know your story, Aurora. I tell her, and so do you. You already know what to say. So now it's just about who you want to be out there and how you want to connect. When you're at your best on the gym mat, how would you describe yourself? Happy. Confident. I'm excited. When you were competing, did nerves accompany any of those emotions? Sure. I smile. Then you've been here before. You know what to do and how to be. I guess the only real question that matters is how you want to connect with this audience. I lean in and speak almost mockingly as the nervous little gymnast who feels as if she couldn't do a basic cartwheel, or as the woman who just showed the world her superpowers at the Olympics. My tone catches Aurora off guard, but it makes Lisa laugh. You have to be congruent with who you are, I say. You're not some little wide eyed girl lost on a stage. You. You're a champion. Now how does this champion sitting right here in front of me want to go connect with her? People today, I want to love on them. I want them to know I got a medal because of their support. Then go love on them. Let that be your emotion. Let that be your message. Does that feel true to you? Aura stands up and kisses me on the cheek. You're right, Brendan. I'm a hundred pounds of love. Let's go love up on these people. We've measured over a hundred variables in search of which habits matter most to high performance. We've asked high performers almost every conceivable question about how they got so extraordinary. We've also sought to find out what matters most in increasing overall HPI scores and scores in each habit area proven to correlate with high performance. And so far, nothing we found correlates with high performance scores across the board. More than Confidence Confidence is the secret ingredient that makes you rise to the challenge. You already know how important confidence is because I've shared that along with engaged and joyful. Confident is one of the three words high performers use most to describe their consistent emotional state. Their descriptions align with the data too, since high performers worldwide strongly agree with this statement more than their peers. I'm confident I can achieve my goals despite challenges or resistance. It turns out that this kind of confidence correlates strongly and meaningfully with overall high performance as well as with each of the six high performance habits individually. When someone is more confident, they consistently have greater Clarity and energy productivity influence necessity and courage. We've also found that individuals who have high confidence also tend to have higher life happiness overall, a love for taking on new challenges, and a feeling of making a difference in the world. Think about that for a moment. Confidence is a powerful gateway to so much of what we want in life. These findings also align with nearly 40 years of research stating that this kind of confidence, often called self efficacy, predicts exceptional performance and happiness, but it goes beyond excelling and feeling good. 1 Meta analysis across 57 cross cultural studies involving over 22,000 individuals suggests that the more confident you are, the less likely you are to feel burnout from work. In a world fraught with concerns about overwork, it turns out that working on our confidence might just be the save. Why would confidence help us avoid burnout? High performers tell me it's because when you are more confident, you are more willing to say no and more sure of what to focus on, which makes you more efficient and less prone to distraction. Another study with results across 173 studies spanning over 33,000 individuals suggests that self efficacy correlates strongly with positive health related behaviors. The more you believe in your ability to perform well, the more likely you are to do things that protect, restore and improve your health. You've probably sensed this truth in your own life. When you feel good about yourself, you are more likely to work out. These findings all lead to a dramatic conclusion. In human performance, becoming more confident is good for your health. It decreases burnout and it makes you feel happy, willing to take on new challenges and more fulfilled. For these reasons, I like to say that nothing correlates like confidence. But this doesn't mean confidence alone causes high performance. You can have all the confidence in the world, but if you don't practice the high performance habits, the odds of long term success are so good. It's clear from our research that to become extraordinary, you need strong confidence and high performing habits. But where does the kind of confidence that improves performance come from? What specifically do high performers do to gain and maintain confidence as they deal with life's challenges and take on ever greater goals? The three Cs of confidence self confidence is the first requisite to to great undertakings. Samuel Johnson Once we found that confidence was so critical to high performance, I sought out 30 people with the highest overall HPI scores out of over 20,000 surveyed who also strongly agreed with the statement, I'm confident I can achieve my goals despite challenges or resistance. I'd already studied much of the academic literature on confidence and we had loads of data from the surveys, so I wanted to hear how the top high performers actually talked about it. I wondered whether they felt somehow superhuman, as if they had an inborn and unstoppable kind of confidence that we mere mortals lack. As you can probably guess, the answer was no. High performers do have more confidence than most people, but not by birthright luck or superhuman skill. What I found was that high performers simply thought about things that gave them more confidence than others, more often did things that gave them more confidence than others, and avoided things that drained confidence more often than others did. They almost universally reported that their confidence came from purposeful thinking and action. No one in the interviews nor any other high performer I have ever trained or worked with ever said I was just born confident enough to handle the enormous challenges and responsibilities I face in my life now. So what did high performers think, do and avoid to develop such strong confidence? I can bucket my findings in three areas. Competence, congruence, and connection. Because these are such important topics for developing high performance confidence, I'll treat them as practices as we did in earlier chapters. Practice number Develop Competence as is our confidence, so is our capacity. William Hazlitt While most people think of confidence as a general belief in oneself, the kind of confidence that is most tied to performance improvement comes from a belief in in one's abilities in a specific task. This means that the more knowledge, skill, ability, or talent that is competence you have at a given task, the more likely you are to be confident and perform well. I've been teaching about this confidence competence loop since 1997, and I'm continually surprised at how much it comes up in conversations with high performers. The idea here is that the more competence you get at any given task, the more confident you'll become in trying it more often, and the more you'll stretch yourself. That repetition and stretching leads to more learning, which gives you more competence. More competence then begets more confidence, and round and round it goes. You can see how this plays out. If you've ever gone to the gym, the first time you're there, you don't really know what to do with all the weights and machines, so you're uncertain and perhaps even awkward in your workout. But the more you go, the more you know. Soon you're confident in your ability to use the weights and machines, and the more you know how to use them, the more you start pushing yourself. You weren't born confident in the gym, you got confident. Confidence is not a fixed personality trait. It's a muscle you build through Exertion in one way or another. All the top 30 high performers spoke about being the competence confidence loop. They credited their current level of confidence to their years of focus, learning, practice and skill development. In fact, 23 of the 30 referenced these types of things first when discussing confidence, and not one mentioned hitting the lottery at birth with tons of confidence. They didn't talk about general self esteem, as in I like myself or I feel good about me. They talked about how they had run the miles and and earn the confidence to do well in life. They think I know what to do and how to add value here. To my surprise, high performers attributed their confidence to this sort of competence even before mentioning character traits. I thought they would speak first to traits that give them self trust, then to those that fostered skill. I was wrong, which is why I say that the loop never fails to turn out more AHAs. In the chapter on productivity, I covered how to get super competent at any skill through practicing progressive mastery. So let me move on to another distinction in this area. High performers have confidence not only because of past skill acquired in a specific area, but equally from trust in their ability to gain future competence. That is, they reported that their confidence was not tied to one specific competency, but rather to a belief that they could adequately handle things in the future even if they had no experience. Their confidence came from belief in their power of learning. In general, high performers are learners, and their belief that they can learn what is necessary to win in the future gives them as much confidence as their current skill sets. Having learned so many things in the past, they trust that they can do it again. In this way, it became clear that the internal voice of a high performer is saying, I believe in my ability to figure things out. It's a bit circular, but no less true. The key competency that gives high performers confidence is the ability to quickly gain understanding or skill in new situations. In other words, the competency that matters is the ability to become competent. That's why I knew that reminding Aurora of her superpowers would help her find a little more confidence before her speech. She had figured out a lot of things in her life, and simply acknowledging that could give her a small boost of confidence to handle the situation too, even though she'd never done it before. This idea is particularly important in sports. Every day on the field or in the arena, you're going to meet someone who has more experience and perhaps more more talent and successes. You'll often feel as though you can't measure up, and often enough that will be true. But just because you can't keep up doesn't mean you can't show up. Only by showing up consistently, even when you're the greenest novice, will you ever get that experience and confidence. Besides a sometimes untethered trust in their ability to figure things out in the moment, high performers also gain more confidence by ruminating on past successes and learning more from them than others do. High performers ponder the lessons from their wins. They give credit to themselves, and they allow those wins to integrate into their psyche and give them greater strength. This is a vitally important distinction. Underperformers rarely reflect on their lessons learned, and if they do, they are too hard on themselves. And even when they win, they they rarely integrate that win into their identity. They do well, yet don't feel any stronger because of it. They just don't let themselves feel the win they didn't get. What gamers would call a power up. In conversations with them, it's obvious that they don't recognize how much they've learned, how far they've come, what they are capable of doing now or in the future. They lowball themselves even when they've put in the miles, and so they lack confidence. That's why, as you strive, it's important you begin a practice of reflecting on your progress and your new learning. Don't wait until New Year's Eve to think about all the great things you did and learned this year. I recommend you spend at least 30 minutes every Sunday reflecting on the previous week. What did you learn? What did you handle well? What do you deserve to give yourself a pat on the back for? As simplistic as this may sound, it can have a profound effect in helping you gain more confidence. Performance prompts on page 333 of High Performance, the book number one the competencies, knowledge, skills, abilities, or talents that I have worked hard to cultivate in my life include Number two if I gave myself credit for learning all those things, I would start to feel more Number three, Something I've learned to do in the past few years that I have not yet given myself credit for is 4. I feel that I can handle a big challenge in my life right now because I'm good at learning how to Number five. A practice I'll begin doing every week to help me start feeling more confident. Practice 2 Be congruent self trust is the first secret of success. Ralph Waldo Emerson Living in congruence with the best of who we are is one of the primary motivations of humankind. I wrote an entire chapter about this topic in my book the Charge, and we'll use an excerpt here to begin the conversation. At the core of congruence are questions about how we are really living our life, not just imagining it. The drive for congruence forces you to ask yourself, am I being honest with who I am? Am I trustworthy, true to myself and others? Do I practice what I preach? Do I follow through on what I know of myself? Do I make a stand when the world challenges who I can become? These questions and our answers to them define us and largely determine our destiny. It's hard to be congruent. Naturally, different parts of us are engaged at different times. Our identity, personality states, and standards may vary from one context to the next. We might be a rock star at work, but a janitor at home. We may be fun, exciting, and playful with our best friends, but shy and reserved in bed. We can be aggressive in one situation but then fail to be assertive when it counts. Variance in who we are in any given context is natural. And despite what some would have you believe, healthy life would be terribly unhealthy, not to mention boring, if we were exactly the same all the time. To feel congruent, though, we will have to be more conscious about who we are and what kind of life we want to live. We will have to be conscious in crafting and maintaining our identity. All this requires conscious choice and work. Maybe someone didn't light the candle of love for you when you were younger, so you've always had the identity of someone who isn't or could not be loved. Now, as an adult, you can consciously choose to light that candle for yourself. Perhaps you were never given the attention or respect you desired. Now is the time to give it to yourself. Maybe no one ever instilled in you the confidence that made you feel you could shape or shake the world with your power. Give that confidence to yourself. This is the path to constructing your own identity. From my interviews, it's clear that the last paragraph is how high performers have approached their life. They didn't wait for others to define who they ought to be at some point, often a major moment in their lives. They took control, defined who they wanted to be, and started living in accordance with that self image. They shaped their identity by conscious will and have aligned their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors to support that identity. The more days they live in congruence with who they have chosen to become, the more they feel a sense of general confidence in life. I heard it over and over again in interviews. I decided to break free from my parents or my job or my old relationships and do what I really wanted to do. I finally chose to seek work that was more me. I started living with greater intention. It's also clear that high performers no longer feel as if they were faking it to make it. Though six of the 30 people I interviewed mentioned that phrase as something they did earlier in their lives or careers, none agreed that they were still faking it. Instead, high performers seem to wake up each day and have a clear intention of who they really want to be. And then they go out into the world and give that intention real focus and energy. A sense of authenticity, pride, self trust and confidence comes from those congruent actions. When I spoke with Aurora in the Green Room, I made sure to remind her she was a champion so that her thoughts and actions would realign toward that truth. Sometimes a simple challenge to how powerful we really are can give just the boost of confidence or we need. If you can understand the power of congruence, then you can understand why the habit of seeking clarity is so important to confidence. You can't be congruent with something you've never defined. No clarity, no congruence, no confidence. It's that simple. That's why I encourage you to revisit the chapter on clarity and remember to fill out the Clarity Chart each week. Remember, you can download the clarity chart@highperformancehabits.com Tools enter each week with intention for who you want to be. Then align your actions with that self image and you'll gain greater confidence. Finally, I'll share something that a majority of high performers shared with me. Confidence comes from being truthful with yourself and others. You have to avoid the little lies that that can easily tear at the fabric of your character. If you lie about the small things, you will cause a catastrophe. When faced with the big things your heart and soul want to know, you've lived an honest life. If you break that trust, you risk feeling incongruent and ruining your performance. Stand in your truth and tell the truth and you'll feel congruent. Performance prompts on page 336 of High Performance Habits number one the person I really want to be in life could be described as two. Three things I could do each week to live more congruently with that vision for myself. Include three Three things I should definitely stop doing in my life so I can live in greater congruence with my ideal image of myself. Practice three Enjoy connecting. You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you. Dale Carnegie as you know, high performers love to develop influence with others. They enjoy connecting with people and learning how they think, what challenges they face, and what they are trying to stand for in this world. They they also like sharing those things with others. As a reminder, this doesn't mean all high performers are extroverts. An introvert is just as likely as an extrovert to be a high performer. A recent study of over 900 CEOs found that just over half of the highest performing were introverts, with near 5050 odds. It's not personality that's giving an edge, since high performance does not correlate strongly with personality. What exactly makes high performers so interested in other people? Why are they so curious about others? What gives them the confidence to talk with others, ask questions, engage? Simply put, high performers have learned the tremendous value in relating with others. They've discovered that it is by connecting with others that they learn more about themselves and the world. It's their connection with others that inspires greater congruence and and competence. You know this too. The more you work with people, the more you learn about yourself. And the more you work with others, the more you learn new ways of thinking, new skills, new ways of serving. That hit of learning is what high performers told me gives them so much drive to engage. This is an important distinction, especially if you don't consider yourself a people person. It doesn't matter whether you are natural with others or what matters is, do you want to learn from others? Will you take the time to do it? Will you genuinely try to engage someone and learn about how they think, what they need and what they stand for? If you can summon that curiosity and talk to enough people with that intention, you will gain confidence. At least that's what high performers have shared with us high performers. Confidence, then, comes from a mindset that says, I know I'll do well with others because I'll be genuinely interested in them because I want to learn. In my interviews, no one said the opposite. I know I'll do well with others because I'll make them genuinely interested in me because I want to teach them who I am. They are not thinking about their elevator pitch or what they have to tell everyone as much as about what they might learn or how they can serve. Confidence comes less from projection than from connection. Performance prompts on page 338 of High Performance Habits. Number one, the main reason I want to become better with people is I know I'll become more confident with people. When I Number three to gain more confidence with people. From now on when I talk with them, I'll think to myself. A formula and farewell for now. As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live. Johann von Goethe as you reflect on these three confidence builders, competence, congruence and connection. Perhaps you've noticed an underlying theme. What drove the development for high performers in each of these areas was curiosity. It was curiosity that developed their knowledge, skills and abilities. Curiosity drove their self examination. You have to ask a lot of questions of yourself to see whether you're living a congruent life. Curiosity made them want to seek out others. Perhaps then there is a formula at play. Curiosity multiplied by the sum of competence, congruence and connection equals confidence. The promise of this equation is that you don't have to pretend to be superhuman. You just have to care enough to learn new things, to live in alignment with who you want to become, to take interest in others, you'll feel better about yourself. And research shows that curiosity itself can improve your well being. Curiosity is the electric arc for a life bright with joy and vibrancy. To get there, you just have to start conditioning the internal dialogue that says I know what to do and how to add value here. Or at least I believe in my ability to figure things out and I'm willing to go for it. I know I'm living in alignment with the person I want to become. I know I'll do well with others because I'm genuinely interested in learning about them and serving them. If these become your recurring thoughts and reality for life, the odds are you'll be confidently on your way to higher performance. I don't pretend that becoming more confident or reaching high performance will be easy. Throughout this book I've shared that the journey to becoming more extraordinary in life will always be fraught with struggle. But as I've also shared, ease is not the objective in personal development. Growth is so anticipate and and honor the fact that it's going to be difficult to implement the habits and practices in this book. While the journey will challenge you, at least you now have a map. You know the six habits required for high performance and you know the practices to develop each. With the lessons in this chapter, you also know how to become even more confident on that path to higher performance. Get curious about your performance again and and seek to improve it through practicing the HP6. Number one. Seek clarity on who you want to be, how you want to interact with others, and what will bring meaning into your life. Number two Generate energy so you can sustain focus, effort and well being. To stay on your A game, you need to care actively for your mental stamina, physical energy and positive emotions. Number three Raise the necessity of your level of performance. This means actively tapping into the reasons you must perform well based on a mix of your internal standards, for example Your identity, beliefs, values or expectations for excellence and external demands, for example Social obligations, competition, public commitments. Number four Increased productivity. Increase your primary field of interest. Specifically, you'll need to focus on prolific quality output in the area in which you want to be known and to drive impact. You'll also have to minimize distractions or opportunities that steal your attention from creating. PQO5 develop influence with those around you so you can get them to believe in and support your efforts and ambitions. Without a positive support network, major achievements over the long haul are all but impossible. 6 Demonstrate courage by expressing your ideas, taking bold action and standing up for yourself and others, even in the face of fear, uncertainty or changing conditions. Seek clarity. Generate energy. Raise necessity. Increase productivity. Develop influence. Demonstrate courage. These are the six habits that you need to adopt to reach high performance and stay there. These are the habits that will make you more confident in life and even more extraordinary. So what now? Keep the Checklist of the 6 habits by you at all times. You can find the summary guide at the end of this book in audio and you can also get a separate daily planner@highperformancehabits.com from now on. Before every meeting you go into, before every phone call, before you start any new project or pursue any new goal, revisit the six habits. Then every 60 days, retake the High Performance Indicator to track your progress and identify the habits you need to continue focusing on. If you've already taken the HPI, you'll get a reminder to take it again in 60 days. If you haven't or if you missed the reminder, just take the basic assessment anytime for free@highperformanceindicator.com if you'd like to continue your research and learning in this area, consider attending one of my events or joining our High Performance Master's program. When you're ready, just visit highperformanceinstitute.com 20 odd years ago, I stood bloodied and in shock atop the crumpled hood of of a car. After my accident, I learned that at the end of our lives we will all ask questions to evaluate whether we were happy with our journey. I learned that my questions were to be Did I live? Did I love? Did I matter? I didn't particularly like my answers to those questions. So I sought to change my life and look for the best ways to go about it. I felt that striving to become my best self was a way to earn the great blessing of the second chance I was given. That striving led to a life of learning and ultimately to the discovery of these high performance habits. I hope that as we finish this audiobook, you decide to live with similar intention and reverence for your life. I hope you wake each day and decide to practice the habits that will make you proud of your life. I hope that as you endeavor to live an extraordinary life, you. You bring the joy and honor the struggle as you seek to serve others. I hope that as you look back one day, having reached a level of performance you could never have dreamed of, you can say that you wanted it, you worked for it, you willed it to happen. That you never gave up and you never will. You became extraordinary because you chose to. That reality, I believe, is something available to each of us. Now go earn it.