How to Get Better Results at Work, at Home, and in Life.

The more we purposefully set our intentions, the more we purposefully think through our own thoughts, the more we're aware of our thoughts and seek to shape positive ones. Suddenly, we seem to grasp greater control of life, almost seemingly by mere thought. Today's topic is on performance. Not performance. Like, you know, you getting up on stage and performing, or you being on social media and performing, but more in general about how we show up in the world, about how our performances at work or in the household as a mom, a caregiver, a teammate, somebody who is trying to show up and be our best every day. What's it take to get the best performance out of ourselves so that we can be our best selves, achieve our goals, move forward with momentum and confidence? As you know, I make my living as a certified high performance coach. So while I run growth Day here, my most passionate endeavor in my life is as a coach. So you always see me sign off my Instagram as an example, as you, your coach, Brendan. And that's because I've made a living for 15 years as a high performance coach and helped really pioneer a lot of the research and the field around high performance studies and coaching, to the point where I've had the blessing of heading up the High Performance Institute, and we certify high performance coaches all around the world in over 70 countries. And so I'm blessed to be completely and insanely immersed in this topic. And I'm always asked, you know, well, Brendan, how do you gauge people's performance? You know, you're working with these Olympians or these CEOs, or just a casual person across, you know, the dinner table who's just describing, you know, how they're showing up at work or struggling at work. What's a quick framework to try to understand someone's performance? Well, gosh, there's so many directions we could go with that, right? And today I'll give you five areas to think about that might help gauge somebody's performance. I would use these five areas to gauge an Olympian before they go out on the field or on the track. I would use these five areas to gauge a CEO's quarterly results. I would use these five areas casually with my buddies to talk about how they've been, you know, succeeding or failing. And I hope they'll serve you. Five areas, performance. First one, always first one. Mindset. The mindset that somebody has tends to very directly impact their intention, impact how they interpret things, impact how they react to things, impact whether they stay steady and confident and bold throughout the difficulties, or they Shrink impact whether or not they stay persistent impact whether or not they learn quickly or slowly impact almost every area of our lives. Our mindset is our internal frames of reference. It is our mental models of the world. It is our recurring thought patterns that help us determine how to think and how to approach or interpret a situation. Your mindset is not fixed. And though you've often heard the terms growth mindset versus fixed mindset, even that framework in itself, creating a false dichotomy between two things, because your mindset can shift on the hour ultimately in different contextual situations. And while some people, they would say I have a growth mindset, we of course know that in other areas they may not. And so I'm not somebody who tends to label a mindset, but rather help people become aware of what theirs are. You know, if you're working with an entrepreneur who just had a terrible month's, you know, result of revenue, before you ask what they did to earn or not earn, the revenue which we tactical, it would be more about, how did you think of this month? What was your mindset when you went into this month? They might say, well, I was discouraged. Or they might say, I felt distracted, or I felt disappointed, or I even felt really optimistic. I was confident. But then I started feeling like this and thinking about that. And it's pretty easy to uncover people's mental models and common thought patterns that lead to the results they experience. Someone keeps ruining relationships over and over and over and over again. Sure, you could say, well, it's because they always get in arguments with people. But what was the mindset that led to the arguments? As soon as we know where people are coming, what their headspace is at or in, or how they've been thinking about themselves, themselves, other people, the world, and the situations that they're in, soon we can start to explain behavior better. That's really why I think I fell in love with personal development. I did realize that you could change your thoughts, change your life, as they say. And that's a condition of mindset that the more we purposefully set our intentions, the more we purposefully think through our own thoughts, the more we're aware of our thoughts and seek to shape positive ones. Suddenly we seem to grasp greater control of life, almost seemingly by mere thought. I remember reading a book called As a Man Thinketh when I was in, gosh, was I in high school or early college? And it was just so hopeful to me. I thought, wow, how powerful it is that my thoughts shape my ultimate mindset and my life. I Remember reading a book called Happiness is a choice At a time I was deeply depressed, and I thought, wow, a choice. I never thought about happiness as a choice. It was just an outcome that landed on me or didn't. And simple mindset shifts tend to be the things that. That can really inspire people. I was recently certifying a bunch of coaches, and I was doing this Q and A, and one person was struggling with. They were always in this place where they just wanted to feel more hunger, that drive, that will to make changes in life. And just hearing a few minutes, I knew a simple mindset shift. They didn't feel the hunger to change because they were focused on their internal. And so what I did is I flipped it to social and asked about what was a driver that could be a family member. In that particular example, one of their family members had walked by, and I said, well, how would you like to change for that person? And that mindset shift from individual to social could make a spark go off in someone's mind. And so simple shifts in our mindset from pessimistic to optimistic, from, you know, believing we can't change to knowing that we can, from focusing on self to service, from having a local view to a global view, these mindset shifts can truly dramatically change our lives and spark different areas, different levels of thought. And so when I'm gauging someone's performance, I'm just like, what's their mindset like? That's first and foremost. Second, someone's performance is almost always directly connected to their goals and payoffs. Well, lots of people have goals, but they don't seek them. Why? Because they don't see the payoff being enough to pursue the goals. You know, almost everything you do in your life is because some way or another, there's a payoff for it. You know, if even if in bad behaviors, we do them because there's a payoff, you know, we might, you know, get in a big argument with somebody, but the payoff is we get attention finally from them. There's always a payoff to human behavior. And once we can learn to understand what someone thought that payoff was and what their goal was in that situation, sometimes we can learn a lot about their performance. And so when you're at work understanding people's goals but also their rewards, right. Their payoffs will help you understand what goals they have and why they go after them or don't go after them, a lot of people, their performance sucks because they just don't have any goals. They haven't Set any personal or any professional goals. They haven't looked at any personal or professional goals since January 1st of last year, New Year's. And so they're just struggling, they're waffling, they're undirected at work or at home. If we don't have goals and rewards or payoffs that we're conscious of, we tend to meander in life. Third, habits, habits, habits, habits. Yes, I know, I'm the high performance habits guy. I have to tell you, it's your habits that really dictate how you ultimately achieve long term success with well being and good relationships or not. It's so critical. And it is your recurring deliberate habits that shape outcomes over the long term more than anything else. What does that mean? It means you deliberately chose to do recurring routines and disciplines. Even if they're difficult, even if they're not automatic, even if they're not atomic or small. But they're things that you do that might even challenge you. But you do them over and over to get better and better. That leads to great performance. And what we found is those who seek clarity. So they're asking lots of the tough questions, generate energy. They're taking care of themselves, raise necessity. They're aware of their psychology and what they want and why, and raise the hunger level to achieve it. They are increasing productivity consciously, diligently, consistently. They are working to develop influence honestly on purpose. And they're ultimately demonstrating courage by willing to face the hard days and take the risks, despite judgment or failure or uncomfortable emotions. To keep going ahead and doing those things over and over and over again explains a lot. If I had the quickest rubric in the world to gauge someone's performance, I just open up high forms, habits and, and look at the summary and be like, yep, that's where they're at. And in certain contexts we can break down the habits even more. At work. What are your habits in your home life, in your partnership, your spouse, the person you love the most? What are your habits with them? It's going to tell us about the performance of that relationship, how good the quality of that relationship is or not. Fourth way I think about performance is competency. Competency is basically one's knowledge, skills, abilities, talents that enable them to do the job or do the thing or succeed at the thing. And so competency, their know how, their education, their experience with it, their skill level with it. Lots of people have a great mindset. I bet you've known so many people with an amazing mindset. You know, they had great goals they were even hard working and had decent habits. But if they just didn't know how to do the thing, if they had no skill, ability or knowledge in that area, you got a really happy, positive, cool person to be around who's going to completely fail. Competency, skill still matters. Developing skill set and mastery is still a fundamental to all personal and professional goals. Unfortunately, we don't talk about it because, you know, being generalists is fun and it's popular and it's a whole lot more, you know, I think dopamine producing because of the variety in it. And yet we have so many people who do have good mindsets, goals and habits. But the truth is they don't know how to do anything and they're not skilling up to learn how to do things. And so what happens is they might have happiness even. They might have, you know, moments of happiness, as I should say. They might really seem like successful. But then when you talk to them and they recognize they're not learning and growing, their competency is not keeping up with the times. They feel, over the long term, out of touch, frustrated. And I don't mean that philosophically. I grew up in an economically depressed old Irish mining town where it's one of those towns where it just hadn't kept with the times and the skill sets of the local community had not been modernized. So there was a lot of depression. Economically, it was tough. And because when your competency is low in an area, it's easy to get discouraged and it's easy to check out. And so one of my hopes with Growth Day is that we're just always perpetuating this message of continual learning, my friends. We all got to get better. We all got to skill up. I mean, I'm always trying to get better and at every area of my life in my business and always learning, reading books, listening to the podcast, just doing everything I can to keep skilling up. And it's benefited me through every economic upturn, downturn, through every possible scenario that I faced in the last two years. Especially that by learning through it, having that ability and that desire to learn through it, it's allowed me to maintain my performance in a hard time. I bet it's seen you through too. When you look back at the most difficult times of your life, if you stayed open to learning and you kept developing skill sets, man, that helped you power right through that next difficulty or downturn competency. Please fall in love with learning. Please develop skills. What's the next five skills you need to learn in your life or your career and why, and make a plan for each of those skills and how you're going to improve them. Last idea, Performance almost always driven by relationships. You know, if I've met people, great mindset, awesome goals, good habits, amazing competency, but the people around them pulled them down. I've worked with an Olympian who was a gold medalist and just had two terrible world championship performances. And it was all because they had gotten a relationship with the wrong person. And this literally a gold medal level Olympian all of a sudden was barely performing at a semi pro level because got in a wrong relationship and their mindset was diminished. And I can share with you that our relationships truly do shape us. But the good news is we all know from sociology, the flip side is also true. You get around more supportive, positive, optimistic, confident, high achieving people and they lift up all the boats. You know what I mean? They lift you up. It's like, you know, it's profound. I remember reading Booker T. Washington's quote once of there's two ways to exert strength. One is pushing down, the other is pulling up. And I think that applies in so many contexts, but I also think it applies to culture, to your immediate context, your immediate environment. The five people you hang out with the most is a true thing when you think about the outcomes in your life. And so getting around the right mentors, coaches, people, masterminds, groups where other people are continually helping you level up. I remember early in my life I had the blessing of working at a global consulting and technology services company called Accenture. And. And Accenture was man for a kid like me from Montana who got this job in San Francisco, California. I couldn't believe when I got there, I was surrounded by so many smart people and so many encouraging partners and senior managers who just cheered on everybody's climb. They were supportive of everyone learning, developing competency, of everyone developing professional habits, of everybody having goals, of everybody keeping an awesome mindset around one another and all of our clients. It was like the relationships I developed there taught me about not just professionalism, but about how to will myself to show up and perform well. And I think it's truly a vital thing that we have in our career arc people who lift us up. I think about my industry today and I'm super blessed to be a linchpin in the industry and someone who works really hard to bring together my industry, the top people in all of personal development and wellness. I bring together consistently in small groups and friendship circles and challenge them to lead. And they challenge me to lead. And we are constantly cheering each other on and texts and supporting one another just over and over and over. It's like even during the hard times, even during the last two years when so many struggles happened, oh, it was having that supportive peer set that kept me going. And so I share with you. Please find that amazing circle of friends or cheerleaders or get a coach or join a mastermind or group that will help you increase your performance. It pays off more than anything you could imagine. So that quick framework if I got to gauge someone's performance at home or work, it's pretty simple. Check their mindset, their goals, rewards, their habits, their competency and their relationships. Do that quick check and I can usually understand where they're at and also identify the best ways to quickly identify how to improve. I hope you enjoyed this one. Always trying to drop some frameworks on you. I appreciate you and I just love doing this work every day for you. And I hope that today you felt like, you know, every day truly is a great day to grow.