Audiobook Part 4. High Performance Habits: Generate Energy

High performance Habit number two Generate energy. The world belongs to the energetic Ralph Waldo Emerson. Three practices of this Release tension, set intention, bring the joy, optimize health. If I keep up this pace, I'll eventually burn out. Or probably just die. Arun laughs and shifts uncomfortably in his chair. Then all this was for nothing. He looks as though he's barely slept in months. His face sags. His eyes are red, the sparkle inside gone. He doesn't have the vibrant charge like he did on the COVID of that business magazine last year. I feign a look of surprise. Die, huh? When do you think that eventually might happen? Are you. Are you talking next week? This year? Next year? I'm not sure. But don't tell anyone. It's brave of him to be telling me this. No one likes to admit they've been working themselves into the ground, especially here in Silicon Valley. It's a badge of honor to work non stop. There are a lot of young, smart workaholics here on this peninsula, pumped up on excessive caffeine and become a billionaire in a few years. Dreams 6 hours ago A friend called and asked me if he could conference in Arun to introduce us. We exchanged pleasantries and two hours later Arun's private jet arrived to pick me up. Now I'm sitting in a glass conference room in his office near San Francisco. It's 3am and we're the only ones in the building. Some achievers won't let their guard down until after midnight. I'm not entirely sure why he's flown me here on the phone. He just said it was urgent and and he thought I could help. I'd wanted to meet him someday anyway, so I agreed. So what's up? I say. I'm guessing you didn't fly me here to play mom and tell you to get more sleep. He laughs and pulls back in his chair. No, that's not it. I know I need more rest. And yet you don't get more rest. I will. I've heard this before, that someday I'll take better care of myself story. Right now I just have to hustle, they all say, to build, to take over the world. Well, that's not true, Arun, and that's okay. The truth is you won't flame out. You'll keep working hard at an insane pace, just as you've done for the past 15 years. You won't burn out. You'll just become utterly, tragically miserable. You'll wake up one day even richer and more accomplished than you are now, and life just won't feel the way you wanted it to. But you will make a bad and abrupt decision. You'll quit or you'll fail. You'll realize your mind and body didn't let you down. Your choices did. But I'm guessing you already know that. Yeah, he says, then rolls back his left shirt sleeve. He points to a needle mark. Don't freak out. It's not drugs. I'm doing that Myers cocktail thing. Bunch of B vitamins and stuff. It's probably not helping, you know. I don't show a reaction. I've seen them all by now, all the quick fixes and prescriptions and fads people use in a desperate grab to revitalize their lives. When people want the edge, often the first place they look is outside themselves. So what would help? Arun, you're a smart guy. You probably already know the answers. So with respect, I don't want to waste your time. It's three in the morning. Why am I here? I want to feel good again. I don't want the emotional roller coaster anymore. I don't want to be tired. There has to be a way to crush it and still be happy. People say it's possible, but in 40 years I haven't figured it out. That's for sure. But I know you can help. And how do you know that? Arun rolls up the sleeve on his other arm. He holds up his wrist and shows me a leather bracelet engraved with one of my quotes. He jabs at it with his finger. I want this again, man. Where'd you get that? My wife. It's embarrassing, but I'll tell you, we're having issues. She went to your event? She's a different person now. She said she bought this for me because I needed it. Because we needed it. Was she right? He sighs and joins me, standing, looking out into his offices. I can't take us. I can't take everyone here. Higher. When I feel so low, my energy is dipping. The team can sense it. I'm not happy, and I don't want to feel this way anymore. The engraving on the leather bracelet reads Bring the Joy Energy Basics Energy is Eternal Delight. William Blake as you might expect, it takes a lot of energy to succeed over the long haul. High performers have the magical trifecta of capital E energy, that holistic kind that includes positive and enduring mental, physical, and emotional vibrancy. It's the key force that helps them perform better in many areas of their life. It's why high performers have so much more passion, stamina, and motivation. If you can tap into the capital E Energy stored within the World is Yours in our high Performance research, we measure energy by asking people to rate themselves on a scale of 1 through 5 on statements such as I have the mental stamina to be present and focused throughout the day. I have the energy I need to achieve my goals every day. In general, I feel cheerful and optimistic. We also reverse score with statements like my mind feels slow and foggy. I am physically exhausted. Too often I feel a lot of negative energy and emotions. You'll notice that energy isn't just physical, which is how most people conceive of it. Mental alertness matters too. So does positive emotion. In fact, all three have been correlated with high performance. When I use the word energy in this audiobook, then keep in mind it means the full spectrum of mental, emotional and physical vibrancy. The headline from our research on this topic may seem obvious to you Low Energy correlates with Lower Overall High Performance scores. But the details of the findings should get your attention. The lower your ratings and energy, the lower your overall happiness, the lower your enthusiasm for taking on challenges, the lower your your perception of your own success versus your peers. The lower your confidence in the face of adversity, the lower the degree of influence you'll have with others, and the lower the likelihood that you'll eat well or exercise. So low energy not only hurts your ability to reach high performance overall, it pervades all aspects of your life. You feel less happy, you don't take on the big challenges. You feel as if everyone is passing you by. Your confidence tanks, you eat worse, you get fatter, you struggle to get people to believe in you, buy from you, follow you, support you. But of course, the flip side also applies. Increase your energy and you improve all those factors and there's more. Energy is also positively correlated to educational attainment, creativity and assertiveness. This tends to mean that the more energy someone has, the the more likely they are to pursue higher levels of education, to come up with creative ideas at work, and to speak up for themselves and take action toward their dreams. That's why organizations and academic institutions worldwide should get very serious about developing employee and student energy scores. Regarding job roles, CEOs and senior executives have the highest energy, so significantly higher than those in other roles we've measured, such as managers, entry level workers, students, interns and caregivers. This holds true even when we control for age. In a stunning finding, CEOs and senior executives have energy equivalent to that of professional athletes. It turns out that to make it to CEO, you have to care about your energy as much as an NFL quarterback does because it takes about the same level of energy. Bottom line, the more energy someone has, the more likely they are to be happy and climb to the top of their primary field of interest. It turns out too that marriage is good for your energy just as it's good for your longevity. In our surveys, married people have more energy than their never married counterparts. So go ahead and tell any fearful friends that their belief that marriage makes you dull to tired or moody just doesn't hold up. Finally, energy is significantly related to productivity. If you ever want to get more done, you don't need to buy some new app or organize your papers better. It's less about doing email better and more about doing energy better. My personal experience coaching extraordinary people validates the data and then some. Often I see people forget to focus on their energy as they build their career and and then disaster strikes. I've seen low energy destroy marriages, turn kind people into stress monsters, and wipe out years of several companies financial gains in just months after its CEO burns out Almost all modern health research confirms the importance of our well being, which is the term often used to describe a more holistic sense of energy. Unfortunately, we don't do well at taking care of our well being. More than one third of Americans are obese, costing the United States over $147 billion per year in medical expenses. Only about 20% of Americans get even the minimum aerobic and muscle strengthening activity recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the CDC. Other studies reveal that 42% of American adults say they aren't doing enough to manage their stress, 20% say they never do any activities to relieve or manage their stress, and one in five say they have no one to rely on for emotional support. One in three working Americans is chronically stressed on the job, and fewer than half say their organization's support is employee well being. This even though companies that promote their employees well being are more productive, bear lower health care costs, retain their people longer, and see their people make better decisions. Stress is the ultimate energy and well being killer. It slows the production of new brain cells, reduces serotonin and dopamine, which are critical to your mood, and fires up your amygdala, which while simultaneously decreasing your hippocampus function, making you a frazzled person with decreased memory. We could devote several books to the subject of well being and hardly scratch the surface, but I want to zero in on energy measures as described at the beginning of this chapter and see just how they correlate with individual High Performance the good news is you can dramatically increase your energy and overall performance with just a few simple practices. Your energy is not a fixed mental, physical, or emotional state. Again, you don't have energy any more than a power plant does. A power plant transforms and transmits energy. In the same regard, you don't have happiness. Rather, you transform your thoughts into feelings that are or are not happy. You don't have to have sadness. You can transform it to something else. This means you don't have to wait for joy, motivation, love, excitement, or or any other positive emotion in life. You can choose to generate it on demand anytime you want through the power of habit. Like any other area of your life or any other set of skills, it can be improved. Here are the three big practices I've seen high performers leverage to maintain their edge and their energy. Practice 1. Release tension set Intention Human excellence is a state of mind. Socrates In a decade of coaching high performers, I found that the easiest, fastest, and most effective way to help them increase their energy is to teach them to master transitions. Every day, people lose tremendous amounts of focus, will, and emotional energy by managing transitions poorly. They also lose the benefit of greater mental and physical stamina throughout the day. What do I mean by transitions? Well, every morning when you wake up and start your day, you experience a transition from rest to activation. The start of your day is a transition. The time you drop off the kids and start your commute, That's a transition from family time to drive time. When you finish your commute to work, open your car door and walk into the office, that's a transition from solitary time to working with others at work. When you finish creating that presentation and now go to check email, that's a transition. You're going from creative mode to email mode. When a meeting ends and you walk back to your desk, sit down and jump on a conference call, that's a transition. The workday ends, you hop back into the car and head to the gym. Two more transitions pull up to your house after a long day and walk into your home and become mommy or Daddy. Transition. You get the idea. Our days comprise a series of transitions. These transitions are immensely valuable, a powerful space of freedom between activities. And it's in this space that you'll discover your greatest restorer and amplifier of energy. Think about all the transitions you experience during the day. Take a moment and just think about a few of them now. Now let me ask you a few questions about these transitions. Do you ever carry any negative energy from one activity to the next? Do you Ever feel depleted, but still plow into your next activity without a break, even though you know you should take a breather? Are you losing a sense of presence and appreciation for life and others the further you go in your day? Most people answer yes to all three questions. I'm convinced that if we can get you to change the way you shift from one activity to the next, we can revitalize your life. So are you ready for an experiment from now on, as you move from one major activity to another? Try 1. Close your eyes for the next minute or two. 2. Repeat the word release in your mind over and over. As you do, command your body to release all the tension in your shoulders, in your neck, in your face and jaw. Release the tension in your back and your legs. Release the tension in your mind and spirit. If this is hard, just focus on each part of your body, breathe deeply and repeat the word release in your mind. This doesn't have to take long, just a minute or two. Repeating the word release. When you feel you've released some tension and it doesn't have to be all the tension in your life, move to the next part. Set intention. This means think about what you want to feel and achieve in the next activity you're about to take on. When you open your eyes, ask, what energy do I want to bring into this next activity? How can I do this next activity with excellence? How can I enjoy the process? These don't have to be the exact questions you ask, but these are the kinds of question that will prompt your mind to be more present in in the next activity. This simple activity, practiced deliberately throughout the day, can help you better manage stress and gain more presence. It's remarkably powerful. Don't believe it. Try it right now. You know what to do. In a moment. Pause this audiobook for just 60 seconds. Breathe fully. During that time, release the tension in your body. Then ask yourself, what energy do I want to feel when I start listening again? How can I retain the information better? How can I enjoy listening to this even more? Who knows, you might feel more present listening. Write more notes and move to your favorite place and continue listening. Or grab a cup of coffee so you enjoy reading and listening even more. See how this works. Now that you know how this practice works, you can imagine dozens of transitions to apply it to. Imagine that you're about to finish replying to some emails. Your next activity is to start creating a presentation in the transition between the two. Push yourself back from your desk a bit, then close your eyes for a minute or two. Repeat the word release until you feel the tension lift and you find a moment of peace. Then set an intention for how you want to feel, creating your presentation and and for how you want it to turn out easy. I do this Release Tension Set Intention activity Before and after workouts Before I pick up the phone to call someone, Before I write an email to my team, Before I shoot a video, Before I get out of the car and go to lunch with friends, Before I walk out onto a stage in front of 20,000 people. It has saved me many times from anxiety and a poor performance. But before I walked into a room and got interviewed by Oprah, before I sat down to dinner with a US President, before I proposed to my wife, all I can say is thank God for this practice. You too can find and summon new energy in your life in the moments in between. Remember, just take a beat, close your eyes and release tension. Set intention. If you'd like to go to another level of mastery, try a 20 minute practice called the Release Meditation Technique or RMT for short. I've trained over 2 million people on RMT and all over the world. I meet students who consider it one of the most life changing habits they've ever adopted. Just close your eyes, sit up straight and breathing deeply, let the tension fall away from your body and keep repeating the word release to yourself. As thoughts inevitably come up in your mind, don't try to chase them away or ponder them, just let them go and return to the Release Mantra. The goal of the meditation is to release both physical and mental tension. It helps to have a voice guide you through it with some background music. So just visit YouTube and type in my name and Release Meditation Technique Regardless of how you choose to take a break, meditate or otherwise deal with stress, the idea is to form a habit and stick to it. Most meditation practices can lead to significantly less stress and anxiety, causing a bump in attention, presence, creativity and well being. Neuroscientists continue to find that people with more meditation experience show increased connectivity within the brain's attentional networks as well as between attentional regions and medial frontal regions that are critical to such cognitive skills as maintaining attention and disengaging from distraction. The positive effects of meditation don't happen just during meditation, but continue to be evident in daily life as well. One study saw the positive effects, such as decreased anxiety from just a few months of meditation last more than three years. Remember Arun the Hotshot tech founder? From the beginning of this chapter, he wanted to avoid burnout and experience more joy in his life. So that night Just before we finished our conversation at around 4.30am and his driver took me back to the airport, I taught him this practice. Just two days later I received this email from hey man, I want to thank you again for flying out. I appreciated our conversation and your time, especially under short notice. I look forward to working together. I also want to share a quick win with you tonight. When I pulled up to my house, I tried that release technique you taught me. I just sat in the car for a few minutes before going into the house. I closed my eyes and just repeated the word release to myself. I'm guessing I did this for five minutes tops. Then I asked myself, how do I go into my house free from the work and business? How would I greet my wife if I were the best husband in the world? How would I be with my daughter tonight if I realized how precious this time in her life is? How would I show up if I were as energized as my best self? I don't remember all my thoughts, but I set an intention to go into the house and love my wife and give her my full energy. I walked in like a new man as if I'd won the lottery of life. You should have prepared me for what happened next because my wife thought I was crazy for a moment, but then she realized it was just me again. My daughter noticed too. We just had the most wonderful night. I'm at a loss for how to describe it, but you gave me my family back. They're getting ready for bed now. I couldn't wait to zap you a note of thanks. For the first time in a long time, I want you to know that I felt like I was alive again. My wife said, you talk about people coming around to the power of intention. Count me as one more example. Thank you. Performance Prompts Number one the things that cause me the most amount of tension each day. Number two A way I could remind myself to release that tension throughout the day. Number three if I felt more energy each day, I would be more likely to Number four When I reset my energy each day with this practice, I I'd like to start the next activity feeling practice 2 bring the joy Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be. Abraham Lincoln Our research has shown that joy plays a huge part in what makes high performers successful. You might recall that joy is one of the three defining positive emotions of of the high performance experience. Confidence and full engagement in the moment. Often described as presence, flow, or mindfulness are the other two. That's why I Suggest that if you decide to set one intention that will raise your energy and change your life more than any other, make it to bring more joy into your daily life. Joy won't just make you a high performer. It will cue almost every other positive human emotion that we desire in life. I don't know of any more important emotion than love, though. I also believe that love without joy can feel hollow. Positive emotion in general is one of the greatest predictors of the good life high energy and high performance. People with more positive emotion have more satisfying marriages, make more money, and have better health. When positive emotion is present, students do better on tests, managers make better decisions and are more effective with their teams, physicians make better diagnoses, and people are kinder and more helpful to others. Neuroscientists have even found that positive emotions prompt new cell growth plasticity, whereas negative emotions cause decay. High Performance Indicator data shows that those who get better overall high performance scores and report being more successful over a longer period than their peers also report being more cheerful and optimistic than their peers. They also experience less negative energy and emotion. In interviews, it's obvious that high performers are joyful as they talk about their craft, career, and relationships. They don't always enjoy all the hard work that goes into becoming great, but they are grateful and giddy about their craft and their opportunities. Overall, it turns out that joy, more than anything else, is what gives them capital E energy. If you feel joy, your mind, body, and emotional reality all get a lift. You've heard it said that showing up is 80% of success. Well, if you want to be a high performer, show up and bring the joy. This all sounds wonderful, but what if you lack positive emotion? What happens when life isn't joyous? What if people around you are negative? Well, then you'd better change that. Positive emotion is a prerequisite for high performance, and only you are in charge of your enduring emotional experience. Remember the lesson from the last chapter. You can choose your feelings, the interpretations you have about the emotions that you sense. And the more you do that, the more you rewire how you experience emotions. You're in charge of how you feel. That's perhaps one of the greatest human gifts. This doesn't mean that high performers are always happy and perfect and awesome. Just like everyone else, they experience negative emotions. It's just that they cope with them better. And perhaps even more important, they consciously direct their thoughts and behaviors to to generating positive emotion. Again, high performers will themselves into positive states. Just as athletes do specific things to get themselves into the zone. High performers consciously cultivate joy. To understand how they do this, I asked a group of randomly selected people who had scored high on the HPI to describe how they generated positive emotions and feelings in general. What specifically brought joy into their lives and what didn't, and what habits, if any, did they deliberately make themselves practice in order to stay in joyful states for longer? What emerged from their responses is that high performers tend to follow similar habits every day. They tend to 1. Prime the emotions they want to experience in advance of key events or or of the day. In general, they think about how they want to feel and ask themselves questions or practice visualizations that generate those feelings. This aligns well with focus on the feeling from the previous chapter. 2. They anticipate positive outcomes from their actions. They're optimistic and clearly believe that their actions will be rewarded. 3. They imagine possible stressful situations and how their best self might gracefully handle them. As much as they anticipate positive outcomes, they're realistic about hitting snags, and they Prepare themselves for difficulties. 4. They seek to insert appreciation, surprise, wonder, and challenge into their day. 5. They steer social interactions toward positive emotions and experiences. They are what one respondent called conscious goodness spreaders. 6. They reflect regularly on all that they're grateful for. If you were to do these six things consciously and consistently, you'd feel pretty joyful too. I know because that's what happened for me getting my life back in 2011, while on a vacation in the desert with friends, I wrecked an ATV while speeding along the beach at about 40 mph. I broke my wrist, threw out my hip, cracked some ribs, and was later diagnosed with post concussive syndrome from the traumatic brain injury. I wrote about the experience in the opening of my book the Charge, so I won't go into much detail here. What I will share is that it was a terrible time in my life. The trauma hurt my concentration, emotional control, abstract reasoning abilities, memory, and physical balance. For weeks I fell victim to just going with the flow and letting my emotions get the best of me. I wasn't managing everyday frustrations well because, I have to be honest, I don't think I was trying hard enough to do so. I was so focused on recovering from my physical injuries that I neglected the need to recondition my own mind, which was also compromised from my brain injury. It left me being easily frustrated with my team, being short with my wife, failing to think about the future and generally feeling out of sorts. Then one day, after reading some of our findings about high performers, I realized I wasn't practicing my morning habits, I also knew that if I didn't set up some new mental triggers to help activate more positive emotions and experiences in my life, my brain trauma would take over and my default mode would be reaction and misery. With the research on the six things high performers did to bring joy to their lives, I began a new morning routine and triggers. Every morning in the shower, I ask myself three questions to prime my mind for a positive day. What can I be excited about today? What or who might trip me up or cause stress? And how can I respond in a positive way from from my highest self? Who can I surprise today with a thank you, a gift, or a moment of appreciation? I chose the first question specifically because so many high performers shared that they enjoyed the anticipation as much as the joyous event itself. Neuroscientists have found the same anticipation can be just as powerful in releasing hormones such as dopamine, which makes you happy, as the actual positive event. Of course, sometimes I'd stand in the shower and couldn't think of anything to get excited about. So I would ask, well, what could you make up or do today that you could get excited about? I chose the second question so I could follow the high performers practice of imagining possible stressful situations and how their best self might gracefully handle them. I tend to ask this question out loud from a second person standpoint and and then respond to it out loud. That means I stand there in the shower and say, brendan, what might stress you out today, buddy? And how would your best self handle it if it came up? Or Brendan, when X happens, think about Y, then do Z. I might even imagine myself dealing with the issue and describe how I might be feeling. There's Brendan in that meeting, feeling a little nervous. His heart is beating too fast because he's forgetting to breathe and he's focused only on himself. He needs to relax now, get present and focus on asking people questions and being of service. It might seem bizarre, me standing in the shower thinking of stressful situations every morning and talking to myself. But thinking through obstacles and talking to yourself in the second person can be much more powerful than speaking in the first person. It allows you some perspective. I call this practice self coaching, because you're basically distancing yourself and coaching yourself as you would coach a friend on how to deal with a difficult circumstance. A lot of high performers do this. This process is similar to what psychologists call cognitive diffusion, a practice of trying to externalize and diffuse difficult emotions or situations. For example, a person dealing with anxiety might be taught to give a name to their anxiety, say Downer Dave, so that rather than being the issue personally, the patient has an external bad guy. It allows the patient to divorce from the issue. Now they can see that external issue come knocking at their door and they can choose to answer or not. I included the third question because I wanted to ensure that that every day I could anticipate positive outcomes from my actions. I knew that thinking of how I could surprise others with appreciation would actually give me a double shot of goodness. I'd get a jolt of gratitude just by thinking of someone to appreciate, and I'd get another jolt when I shared my gratitude with them. Asking this question also helps me seek to insert appreciation, surprise, wonderful, or challenge into my day. By being mindful of these three questions at the start of the morning, I entered the day enthusiastic, ready to meet the challenges as my best self, and excited to engage others with appreciation. This simple morning practice can create anticipation, hopefulness, curiosity, and optimism, all positive emotions proven to lead to happiness and to positive health outcomes such as low lower cortisol, less stress, and a longer lifespan. New Mental Triggers Every high performer I've ever interviewed speaks about how they take control of their thoughts and bend them toward positive states of mind. They don't wait for joy to land on them, they bring it. So as I was recovering from my brain injury, I decided to develop a series of triggers that would remind me to steer social interactions toward positive emotions and experiences. 1. The first trigger was what I call a notification trigger. I put the phrase bring the joy into my phone as an alarm label. I set the alarm for three different times throughout the day, and I set the text for the label of the alarm to read Bring the joy. I could be in a meeting, on a call or writing an email, and all of a sudden my phone would vibrate as the alarm went off and display those words as you learned in the chapter on clarity. I also put other words and phrases in my phone to remind myself of who I want to be and how I want to interact with others. When your phone vibrates, you look at it, right? So there I was in the middle of my day, sometimes just going through the motions, trying to recover from my accident, and bam. My phone goes off. It reminded me to bring the joy to the moment. For years now, that reminder has conditioned my conscious and unconscious mind to bring positive feelings into my everyday life. 2. The second trigger I set was what I call a door frame trigger. Every time I walk through a doorway, I say to myself, I will find the good in this room. I'M entering this space a happy man ready to serve. This practice helps me get present with, look for the good in others and prepare my mind to help people. What positive phrase or sentence could you say to yourself every time you walk through a doorway? 3. The third trigger I set up was a waiting trigger. Whenever I'm waiting in line to buy something, I ask myself, what level of presence and vibrancy do I feel right now on a scale of 1 through 10? By asking myself this question, I'm checking in on my emotional state, scoring it, and choosing whether it's sufficient to how I want to feel and how I want to live my life. Often when I feel at a level 5 or below, my mind snaps to attention and says, hey man, you're lucky to be alive. Raise your energy and enjoy life. Sometimes the guilt of knowing you're not feeling as vibrant as you should can be a good motivating force to up your game. 4. The fourth trigger I set up was a touch trigger. Whenever I'm introduced to someone, they get a hug. Not because I'm a natural hugger. I'm not. I started this trigger because I read so much research about how touch is vital to well being and happiness. 5. Whenever something positive happens around me, I say, what a gift. I did this because so many high performers talked about how they felt a sense of reverence or sacredness in everyday life. Sometimes this comes from a spiritual place. They feel joy because they feel blessed by God. Sometimes it comes from a place of awe and wonder about how beautiful the world can be. Other times they speak about the gifts in their life as a grateful guilt. They feel they've been given too much, too many opportunities, and so they deeply feel a responsibility to earn those blessings by giving back. Either way, they see their lives and blessings as a gift. Some scientists have even called our ability to invest a sense of sacredness into our daily activities and interactions another form of human intelligence, specifically a spiritual intelligence. So if a deal goes through or someone gets good news about a loved one, or anything positive and unexpected happens, you'll hear me say, What a gift. 6. The sixth trigger was a stress trigger. My brain injury was causing me to always feel hurried, almost panicked. And then one day I decided that hurry and stress were no longer going to be part of my life. Stress is self created, so I decided to stop manufacturing it. I always believe that we can choose an internal calm and joy even amid the chaos. So I decided to do just that. Whenever things felt like they were getting out of hand, I'd stand up, take 10 deep breaths and ask, what's the positive thing I can focus on? And the next right action of integrity I should take now. Over time, this practice took the power away from the stressful and hurried feelings caused by my injury. To complement the triggers, I began an evening journaling activity in which I wrote down three things that that made me feel good during the day. Then I took just a few moments to close my eyes and actually relive them. I put myself right back into the situation I experienced. I see what I saw, hear what I heard, feel what I felt, often in reflection. I appreciate the moment with even more care and focus than when it happened. I laugh harder, I feel my heart beat faster, I cry more. I feel an ever greater sense of wonder, contentment, thankfulness, meaning, or appreciation for life. I also began doing the same thing every Sunday morning. I look back at my previous week's gratitude entries and relive them again with just as much emotional connection. If I can close my eyes for five minutes and for that full duration, easily think of a growing list of things to be grateful for, then I know I was paying attention during the week. Of course, gratitude is the granddaddy of all positive emotion. It's also been the focus of much of the positive psychology movement. Because it works, there's perhaps no better way to increase ongoing happiness than to start a gratitude practice. Gratitude is the golden frame through which we see the meaning of of life together. All these things helped me keep joy at the forefront of my mind and life. As I was recovering from my brain injury, I met a lot of high performers who began similar routines and triggers to bring them back from poor health. When I shared this with Arun the Tech Titan from the beginning of this chapter, we discovered that he had never created any conscious triggers in his life that activated positive emotions. He was, in his words, generally even keeled and good at just reacting to life with a cool presence. But he found that just reacting well to life still amounted to a limited life. If you don't put intention and set up reminders to generate joy in your life, then you're not experiencing the full range of life's zest. With just three or four new triggers in his life, Arun completely changed, changed. He had two favorite triggers. His first was that whenever he felt stress and he was alone, he'd stand up, take 10 deep breaths, and then ask, how would my best self handle this situation? His other favorite was a trigger he set so that whenever his wife called his name, he would say to himself, you're on this planet for this woman bring joy to her life. His intention to elevate his energy for those around him is something I hope you will model. If you are always in a state of hurry, anxiety, stress and busyness, then what energy are you teaching others to adopt? If you won't bring more mindfulness and joy into your life for the sheer personal improvement, then do it for those around you who might otherwise be harmed by unchecked emotional contagion. High performers cultivate joy by how they think, what they focus on, and how they engage in and reflect on their days. It's a choice. They bend their will and behaviors to generate joy. This enlivens them, but also serves others. And so it is now time to awaken and re emerge into the world with a youthful spirit. Performance Prompts Number one Three questions I could ask myself every morning to prompt positive emotions for the rest of the day could Number two Some new triggers I could set for myself include. You might remember my examples of notification triggers, doorway triggers, and waiting in line triggers. Number three A new routine I could begin for replaying the positive moments of my days is practice. 3. Optimize health. You may not feel outstandingly robust, but if you are an average sized adult, you will contain within your modest frame no less than seven times ten to the 18th power joules of potential energy enough to explode with the force of 30 very large hydrogen bombs, assuming you knew how to liberate it and really wished to make a point. Bill Bryson Before I began writing this chapter, I stood up from my computer, walked to the kitchen, drank a glass of water, went downstairs, rode my stationary bike for a very challenging three minute sprint and stretched out for two minutes doing some Vinyasa flow yoga. Then I I came back up to my office, sat down, closed my eyes, and did my practice of release tension set intention. If you could see me backstage at my seminars, you'd see me performing a similar routine, energizing my body and preparing my mind to serve. I learned this discipline from high performers who I noticed were always improving their energy with physical movements and breathing patterns. I noticed they ate healthier and worked out more than the general public. So I began doing the same things. It wasn't always that way. In my late 20s I was in pretty lousy physical health. I was working 12 to 16 hour days as a consultant. Most of my work was sitting in front of a computer and creating presentations and curriculum. All that sitting triggered back pain from old injuries and and the pain prevented me from working out as much as I wanted to. Soon I fell into the trap so many of us do. I stopped taking care of myself. I slept poorly, ate bad food, and rarely worked out. I noticed that my performance at work and my life in general were suffering because of it. Because it was hard to break the cycle. Because I was telling myself stupid stories about how hard it must be to get healthy. When people are unhealthy, it's not because they don't know how to be healthy. We all know what to do to increase our physical energy. Because by now it's common sense. Exercise, work out more nutrition, eat healthier food, sleep, aim for seven to eight hours. Nothing to argue about there, right? Unfortunately, plenty of people do argue. They say a lot of nonsensical things that justify poor behavior. And in these areas, too often achievers blame their low physical energy on how I'm built or on the time demands of their industry, company culture, or personal obligations. I did the same. I said well meaning but poorly thought out things such as these. Everyone in my industry works this hard, so I have to cut out something somewhere. And the thing I cut out care for my health. Of course, when I said my industry, I was confusing industry norms with the five crazy die hards I was working with who were also neglecting their health and families. Luckily, at that point in my life, I worked for a global company and I noticed that plenty of people at my level were healthy. Clearly some people had figured out how to be physically healthy doing the same job I did. In fact, I noticed plenty of people at and above my level taking better care of themselves, enjoying life more, and getting even better results than I was. Well, I become successful sleeping only 5 hours, so sleep isn't a factor for me. I said this oblivious to the logical next Imagine how much more successful I would be with just two more hours of sleep. Lack of sleep wasn't the correlate to my success. That was not what was giving me the edge. But I was young and dumb. I started researching ways to hack my sleep in order to get less of it. Fortunately, I couldn't deny the 50 years of sleep research I kept coming across that said that proper duration of sleep around seven to eight hours for almost all adults leads to higher cognitive scores, less stress, higher life satisfaction, better health, more productivity, more profitability, and less conflict. The literature was clear that poor sleep is associated with psychiatric disorders, obesity, coronary heart disease, stroke, and the list goes on. I'll focus on my health and happiness again in 90 days. I'm just busy now. The person saying this tends to be on a perpetual fatigue cycle. They say 90 days, but it's really been and will continue to be years before they rest and feel human again. That was me at one point too. I learned that what we do in daily life, yes, even during those sprint days, tends to gather into habits that are difficult to break. I'm just built this way. I used to make biological or genetic arguments for how I felt physically because of a spinal birth defect I had and because of my previous accidents, but this rationale didn't hold up very well either. There is no doubt that family history or specific genetic factors cause or can cause human disease. Family histories of cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, autoimmune disorders, and psychiatric illnesses are particularly influential. But you don't have to spend very long looking at before and after pictures on Instagram to get the reality that we can alter our health dramatically. We have an extraordinary degree of personal control over our general and long term health. Our daily habits and environment can activate genetic predispositions or not. And no matter the area of study, physical inactivity proves again and again to be one of the leading culprits of all negative health outcomes. I don't have the time for X in this excuse. X generally refers to working out, healthy eating or healthy shopping or meditation. But I learned that none of these things necessarily cost you time. In fact, they often buy back time by making you more energized and productive. If you're sharper, more on the ball, and better able to output things that matter because you took the time to work out and eat healthier, then the workout or the healthy diet wasn't a deficit. I share these things because I know I'm not the only one who falls prey to bad thinking such as this. Have you ever said things like that to yourself? What other stories do you tell yourself that allow your poor health choices to continue? Tough question, I know, but it's worth considering. In fact, let's gauge your physical health. Now. How physically healthy would you rate yourself on a scale of 1 to 10? Think of 1 as you're practically dead, whereas 10 means you almost always feel physically energized and strong. What's your number? If you don't feel that you're a seven or above, then perhaps this is the most important section of this book. You can get immediate and extraordinary gains in mental and emotional energy just by taking better care of your physical body. And you need to. What you see in the world is dependent upon your state of mind and physical energy. Thus, things appear their worst when you are feeling your worst and the best. When you're at the best, we want you at your best. Get fit now. If you're being honest, you know that the research is conclusive. You need to exercise a lot, especially if you care about your mental performance. Exercise increases production of brain derived neurotropic factor bdnf. BDNF causes new neurons to grow in your hippocampus and other areas in the brain, creating increased plasticity and the ability to learn faster, remember more, and improve overall brain function. This is a huge point that too many people miss. Exercise improves learning. Exercise also decreases stress, which is a killer of mental performance. Stress actually lowers BDNF and overall cognitive function. And exercise is your best bet for throwing off much of that stress because it increases your energy. Exercise also enables you to perform general tasks faster and more efficiently. It boosts your working memory, elevates your mood, increases your attention span and makes you more alert, all of which increase your performance. So if the demands of your job or life require you to learn fast, deal with stress, be alert, pay attention, remember important things, and keep a positive mood, then you must take exercise more seriously. If you care about your contributions to the world, you'll care for yourself. This doesn't mean you have to kill yourself on a treadmill. Almost all these positive effects were found with just moderate exercise. This means working out just a few times per week. It means getting back on a good workout plan. Just six weeks of exercise has been proven to enhance dopamine production and receptivity in the brain, which elevates your mood and mental performance. It also increases production of norepinephrine, which helps you make fewer errors in mentally challenging tasks. Remember, energy is physical, emotional and mental. And and exercise improves each category. One stunning finding from our research on over 20,000 high performers is that the top 5% of all high performers are 40% more likely to exercise at least three days per week than the 95% below them. Clearly, if you want to join the top ranks of success in life, it's time to take exercise seriously. If you have kids, you should take this doubly seriously. It's essential that you inspire your children to be healthy. Fit kids can pay better attention than unfit kids, and exercise makes a tangible difference in their IQ and long term academic achievement. And if you aren't a kid anymore, you're in an older demographic, then exercise is everything. It's been shown to be as effective for depression as medications, though it should not be perceived as a replacement. People who exercise more have less depression, likely because of Its effects on increasing dopamine in the brain. Exercise also helps boost serotonin production and improves sleep, which in turn produces more serotonin. If you didn't know it, most antidepressants are formulated by to target the release and reuptake of serotonin, which is why so many researchers recommend that depressive patients exercise whether or not they're taking medication. Exercise also decreases pain, almost equaling the effect of THC cannabis and reduces anxiety, both major issues for aging adults. I'm sure that we can all admit that there's a growing sense of stress these days. It's in the air. The best way to deal with that threat is to experience more positive emotions by intentionally bringing more joy into our lives and by releasing tension through exercise. I promise you that if you make exercise a vitally important part of your life, a lot of other things will magically fall into place. Once you get your workout routines in order, start improving your diet. In the United States, 60% of adults are currently overweight or obese. And and we can't blame it all on the decrease in physical activity. Much of it has to do with over consumption of food. People simply eat too much and it leads to terrible health outcomes and performance. Researchers have found that overeating is a lot like an addiction and can be a result of how some people's brains operate. Still, researchers also conclude that overeating is just a result of poor decision making, consciously choosing short term gratification over long term health. If health practitioners consistently repeat any rule above all others, it's that you should be aware of when you're eating, not for nourishment, but just to satiate yourself. When you're in a bad mood, beware of using meals as a way to push down negative emotions. If you feel bad, move, go for a walk and change your emotional state before eating. It's not always easy, I know, but it's worth the effort because if you can change how you feel before you eat, then you'll likely choose healthier meals. And that is key. It turns out that what you eat can be just as predictive of good health and productivity as exercise. Eat well, feel well, perform well is a truism, and not just for us as individuals. Access to good nutrition has major positive effects on the macroeconomic performance of entire countries. For children especially, cognitive achievement and success in school have been tied directly to proper nutrition. You probably already know you need to eat healthier, and so I say to you, begin. I also recommend that you see a nutritionist who can help you test for food allergies, a common and energy drain, and formulate the best diet to suit your performance needs. Where to Start after personally coaching many people trying to improve their energy, I've learned that if you're going to start anywhere to improve your health, you should start with a regular workout schedule, especially if you're in generally good health. When people work out, they tend to start caring more about their diet and sleep. On the flip side, I found that for those who were in poor health, starting them with good eating habits helped get them into exercise. This is because losing weight is often easier to accomplish by changes in diet than by hitting the gym three times a week. Going to the gym is a new thing. Eating is not. Changing what people eat is easier than getting them to adopt an entirely new habit of regular exercise. As always, consult your doctor before making any changes to your physical fitness or other health routines. Just know that if you're dealing with a good doctor, they'll always recommend good sleep, nutrition and exercise routines. If you're dealing with a healthcare provider who doesn't ask detailed questions about health routines and fails to recommend specific diet, exercise and sleep patterns related to your current and future health goals, then I suggest you seek other opinions. I also recommend that you look outside yourself and set up a good environment around you where people care about health. If you're working at a company that isn't promoting exercise and all forms of well being, your safety, health, happiness, a sense of fulfillment, be wary. Companies that don't care about their employees well being don't perform as well as their competitors. Still, less than half of working Americans say their organizations support employee well being, and one in three people say they are chronically stressed on the job. Only 41% say their employer helps workers develop and maintain a healthy lifestyle. Clearly, it's on each of us as individuals to take control of our own well being and health because no one else is going to do it for us. When I work with executives, I draw a hard line. If the organization you spend your week serving doesn't promote well being, then either you start an internal initiative that gets well being on the map or you start looking for a new place to work. That is, if you care about working with high performers and becoming one yourself. At my seminars, I challenge people to use the next 12 months to to get in the best shape of their lives. It's astounding how many people have never truly committed to doing that. If you're willing, here are a few things you can do to begin. 1. Start doing what you already know you should be doing to optimize your health. You already know whether you should start exercising more, eating more plant based foods or getting more sleep. If you're honest, you probably know exactly what to do and now it's just a matter of commitment and habit. 2. You should know every possible health measure about your body available. Visit your primary care doctor and request a complete health diagnostic. Tell them you want to get in the best health of your life during the next 12 months and that you want every reasonable screening she or he has that will help you assess your health. They'll help you figure out how to your body mass index, cholesterol, triglycerides and risk factors via various tests. Don't just get a routine physical. Ask for the most comprehensive health diagnostic they provide. If you're going to splurge on anything this year, make it your health. I recommend you go beyond the usual physical checkup and also find a place that does full lab work, chest X rays, vaccination reviews, cancer screenings and brain scans. 3. In addition to a full assessment by your primary care doctor, I suggest you seek out the best sports medicine doctor in your hometown. Find someone who works with the pro athletes. Sports med doctors often have an entirely different approach to optimizing health. 4. If you don't know what to do for nutrition, find the best nutritionist in town to help you put together a customized meal plan. Make sure you test for food allergies and leave with a clear understanding of what you should eat, how much and when. One visit to a great nutritionist can change your life forever. 5 Start training yourself to sleep 8 hours a night. I say training because most people can't sleep a full night, not because of biology but from lack of conditioning for sleep. Try don't look at any screens an hour before bed. Drop the temperature in your home to 68 degrees at night. Black out the room from all light and sound. If you wake up in the middle of the night, don't get up and don't check your phone. Condition your body to just lie there. Start teaching your body that it has to lie in bed for eight hours no matter what. For other sleep tricks, read the Sleep Revolution by my good friend Arianna Huffington. 6. Get a personal trainer if you made optimal fitness a primary goal in your life. Under no circumstances should you try to optimize your physical health without a trainer. Yes, you can watch workout videos at home, but accountability to a trainer will make you better. If you simply can't afford a trainer, then find a friend who's in phenomenal shape and and ask them if you can start working out with them. Don't let your ego get in the way. Just because you can't keep up doesn't mean you can't show up. Get on a regular workout routine and make it social. 7 if you want a simple starter plan and your doctor approves, I recommend you start doing two by twos. That's two 20 minute weightlifting based workouts per week and two 20 minute cardio based workout routines per week. In all the sessions, give about 75% of your full effort, meaning be more intense than casual during your workouts. That's just four sessions of intense exercise per week. On the other three days you can walk briskly outside for 20 to 45 minutes. Again, consult your doctor to see if this is a routine that is optimal for you and work up to it. Don't jump in at 75% effort if you're coming off the couch. Otherwise you may hurt yourself or get so sore you decide that exercise just isn't for you and that would be a terrible outcome. Finally, stretch way, way more. Just 5 to 10 minutes of light stretching or yoga every morning and night will help you gain greater flexibility and mobility. It will loosen up your body so so you're not carrying so much tension. Performance prompts 1. I want to get as physically healthy as I can at this stage of my life because. 2. If I was going to get in the best shape of my life, the first three things I would stop doing would be. 3. The things I would start doing. 4. A weekly schedule that I could use to get healthier and actually stick to would be make the commitment. Great effort is required to arrest decay and restore vigor. Horus energy is critical to high performance. You can have all the other habits up and running in your life, but without mastering this one, you won't feel good. No one wants to feel mentally foggy, drowned in negative emotion, or physically exhausted. Happily, though, these states are usually the results of bad decisions, not bad genetics. You can optimize your overall energy quotient in life if you choose to. And perhaps that is our ultimate duty, since our vibrancy ultimately dictates how we work, love, move, worship, relate and lead. Make improving your energy a commitment. Start taking more moments during the day to release the tension in your body and mind. Choose to bring joy to your everyday life experience and decide right now that over the next 12 months you're going to get in the best shape of your life. I know that's a high bar to set, but if that were the only decision you ever made from a book like this. The effort alone would change your life. If I got an email from you a year from now that said, brendan, I did nothing you recommended except get in better health, well, that would bring me tremendous joy.