Audiobook Part 2: High Performance Habits: The Science of High Performance

Beyond the quest for high performance, don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself. William Faulkner An Email that Changed my Life Brandon I am an INTJ on the Myers Briggs Type Indicator. This tells you absolutely nothing about me or my ability to succeed. Not now, not over the next few years. My top two strengths on the Strengths Finder are developer and Achiever. This also tells you absolutely nothing about my ability to get things done or attain any specific outcomes. On the Colby, I score highest. As a quick start, this means nothing because over time I've had to deal with real life and improve at the other modes I suck at, like Fact, Finder, Follow through, and Implementer. I prefer blue over green. I'm more like a lion than a chimp. I'm gritty but too often lazy. I identify more with a circle than a square. I eat mostly a Mediterranean diet, but like hamburgers. I like being around people for a while, but often I long to escape into solitude with a pot of tea and a thick book. I shop weekly at Whole Foods, but many of my lunch times are spent at a cheap Mexican place. Nothing about any of this can tell you anything at all about my capabilities, my my odds of success, or my future performance. So please man, stop trying to bucket me into a type or assume that my strengths or background give me any edge whatsoever. Labeling people sucks regardless of how it's done. I hear you that these assessments are for exploring and learning about myself, not labeling me or directing me per se. But look, we know my supposed strengths and they're still not helping me get ahead. My natural tendencies don't do the job. As a leader, I have to be honest. Sometimes it's just not about who I am, what I prefer, or what I'm naturally good at. It's about me rising to serve a mission. Not the mission. Bowing down to match my limited strengths. I know you like to ask about my background too. You know I'm from the Midwest but now live in California. My mom raised me and my sister by herself. She was a hairstylist in the mornings and a hostess at a buffet at night. Dad quit on her and us when I was 14. I got averaged grades. I was bullied once or twice. I loved to play golf in college. In about a five year period after college I went through two pretty bad relationships. I was fired once, but I found some good friends too, and I gradually acquired confidence. I sort of stumbled into the work I do now, but it's great. This background too tells you nothing about My potential. It gives no definitive clues or path to get ahead today. So I'm just being honest. Brendan, I know you like personality assessments and ask about my background, but if everyone has a past and a story, then certainly a person's past or story is not what gives them an edge. I guess I'm saying that I can do the navel gazing just fine on my own. I hired you to tell me what to do. To get to the next level, I need to know what to do. Brendan, what practices work regardless of personality? Don't say who high performers are. Tell me what they do at a granular level across projects that can be replicated. That level of detail, that's the gold. Find it for me and you have a client for life. Otherwise, it's time to part ways. I received this email from Tom, a coaching client, early in my career. To say the least. It took me by surprise. Tom was a kind person and a successful executive. He was collaborative and always willing to try new things. An email like this putting our working relationship on notice unless I found the gold, was unusual for him. The follow up conversation I had with him was even more direct. He was exasperated. Tom wanted results, but I wasn't sure how he could get them. This was a decade ago. Back then, when I was just a run of the mill life coach, it was common to do four things to figure out how to help someone improve their performance. It often began with asking the client questions about what he or she wanted and what limiting beliefs got in the way. You also interviewed them about the past, trying to spot any events that might be influencing current behaviors. Second, you used assessment tools to help determine personality styles, patterns or preferences. The goal was to help people better understand themselves and any behaviors that might help them succeed. Popular tools included Myers Briggs, the Clifton Strengths Finder, the Colby A Index, the DISC Test. Often, the life coach would hire experts or consultants certified in these tools to help administer them. Third, the coach would sift through performance reviews from work and talk to the people around the client using 360 degree assessments to figure out how others perceive them and what others wanted from them. You'd talk to the people they lived and worked with. Fourth, you'd evaluate their actual output. You look at their past results to see what stood out, what processes helped them create good work, how they most loved to make an impact. So in this tradition, I did all these things because Tom liked tangible data and reports. We spent a lot of time taking and then discussing the assessments. We worked with several high level consultants who were experts in the various tools. We had binders full of information. Then over a span of two years, despite knowing my clients traits, talents, scores and background, I watched him continually fail. I felt terrible. I couldn't figure out why he wasn't achieving the results he wanted. That was about the time he sent me the email the Lab Fast forward a decade from Tom's email and I'm now blessed to have one of the largest personal and professional development labs, which is how we think of my global audience and platforms in the world. As of this writing, that audience includes over 10 million followers across our Facebook pages, 2 million plus newsletter subscribers, one and a half million students who have completed my video series or online courses, thousands of attendees at our multi day live high performance seminars, millions of book and blog readers on the topics of motivation, psychology and life change, and over a half million YouTube subscribers. This audience has now helped my personal development videos exceed 100 million views on online, all without a single cat video. What's unique about the audience is that they come to us solely for personal development, advice and training which gives us an illuminating view into what people are struggling with, what they say they want in life, and what helps them change. At the High Performance Institute we use this large public following to take surveys, conduct interviews, mine data from student behavior and comments and and study before and after results from online training courses and one to one performance based coaching sessions. Every time we want to understand something about human behavior and high performance, we go to our lab for insights. Much of what we've learned from these large audiences and data sets sounds like common sense in becoming successful. Hard work, passion, practice, resilience and people skills are often more important than then iq, raw talent, or where you're from. Nothing here should be surprising since this knowledge dovetails with contemporary research on success and world class performance. Read any of the latest social science and I've provided plenty of endnotes in the actual book in case you want to read the studies for yourself. And you'll see that success in general in almost any endeavor is made possible by malleable factors. Things you can change and improve with effort. For example, the mindset you choose to adopt, the focus you give to your passions and the persistence you pursue them with. The amount of practice you dedicate yourself to, the way you understand and treat others, the discipline and constancy with which you strive for your goals, the way you bounce back from losses, the amount of physical exercise you do to keep your brain and body fit, and your overall overall well being cared for. What has emerged in our work and in the scientific and academic literature is that success is achieved not by a specific type of person, but rather by people from all walks of life who enact a specific set of practices. The question that inspired this book was what exactly are the most effective practices? Finding what Matters Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going. Jim Rohn over the past several years, we've zeroed in on what moves the needle most in helping people achieve long term success and we found what Tom knew intuitively. High performers do things differently from the way others do and their practices can be replicated across projects and and almost any situation regardless of your personality, past or preferences. In fact, we found that there are six deliberate habits that made most of the difference in performance outcomes across domains. Even your greatest strengths or natural abilities are moot without these habits to support them. To uncover which habits mattered most, we used relevant concepts from the academic literature, data from our global lab, and insights from over 3,000 high performance coaching sessions. We then marshaled all these inputs to create structured interview questions that we could ask high performers. We identified high performers through standard social science practices such as survey identification and objective performance measures, e.g. academic performance, athletic performance, objective business and financial outcomes, etc. For example, we asked people how strongly they agreed with statements such as the following Most of my peers would consider me a high performer. Over the past few years, I've generally maintained a high level of success. If high performance is defined as succeeding at what you do over the long term compared to most people I identify as a high performer in my primary field of interest, I've had success for a longer time than most of my peers. For those who strongly identified with these statements, we then conducted one on one interviews with them and often their peers. We also took additional surveys asking the self reported high performers questions such as when you start a new project, what do you consciously and consistently do to set yourself up to win? What personal and professional routines help you stay focused, energized, creative, productive, and effective? We asked about each trait in turn. What habits have you started and discarded, and what habits have you kept that always seem to work? What recurring thoughts or affirmations do you purposely say to yourself to perform your best when you go into new situations, respond to adversity or disappointment, and help others? If you had to discern three things that make you successful and you knew you could deploy only those three things again in your next major project, what would those three things be? When you prepare for a meeting or match, performance, scene or conversation that really matters? How? How do you go about a your preparation and b your practices. If you took on a major new team project tomorrow, what exactly would you say and do to set your team up for success? Which habits get you quick wins and which are long term practices that make you stand out when you're under the pressure of a near term deadline? How do you maintain or protect your well being? What do you habitually tell yourself when you experience self doubt or disappointment or feel that you're failing? What makes you confident and how do you turn on confidence when you need it? How do you approach dealing with other people in your life who a support you, b don't support you and c you want to support you but who don't? What practices keep you happy and healthy as you strive for bigger goals? These questions and dozens more like them helped us begin narrowing down the factors and habits that high performers reported as making the greatest difference in their success. Clear themes emerged and an initial list of almost two dozen high performance habits was created. Next, we rolled out surveys to the general public with questions similar to those we asked the self reported high performers. After studying which habits best differentiated high performers from those in our general surveys, we narrowed the list even more. Finally, we pared it down to the habits that were deliberate, observable, malleable, trainable, and most important, effective across domains. That is, we wanted habits that would help someone become successful not just in one domain of expertise, but across multiple topic areas and activities and industries. We wanted habits that anyone, anywhere in any field of endeavor could apply over and over again to measurably improve performance. Ultimately, just six habits made the grade. We call these final six the high performance habits or HP6. Once we identified the HP6, we worked to conduct additional literature reviews and validity tests. We created the High Performance Indicator, which we call the hpi, based on the six habits as well as other proven success measures. We tested the HPI pilot with over 30,000 people from 195 countries and quantitatively proved its validity, reliability, and usefulness. We found that not only do the six habits combine to correlate with high performance, but each habit correlates with high performance on its own and together they correlate with other important life outcomes such as general happiness, better health, and positive relationships. The HP6 will help you succeed whether you are a student, entrepreneur, manager, CEO, athlete, or stay at home parent. Whether you're already successful or not, these habits will help you reach the next level while dozens of other factors can affect your long term success, luck, timing, social support, or sudden creative breakthroughs to Name a few. The HP6 are under your control and improve your performance more than anything else we've measured. If you want to reach higher levels of performance in anything you do, you must consistently do the the HP6. Number one seek clarity on who you want to be, how you want to interact with others, what you want, and what will bring you the greatest meaning. As every project or major initiative begins, you ask questions such as what kind of person do I want to be while I'm doing this? How should I treat others? What are my intentions and objectives? What can I focus on that will bring me a sense of connection and fulfillment? High performers ask these types of questions not only at the beginning of an endeavor, but consistently throughout. They don't just get clarity once and develop a mission statement that lasts the test of time. They consistently seek clarity again and again as times change and as they take on new projects or enter new social situations. This kind of routine self monitoring is one of the hallmarks of their success. Number two Generate energy so that you can maintain focus, effort and well being. To stay on your A game, you'll need to actively care for your mental stamina, physical energy and positive emotions in very specific ways. Number three Raise the necessity for exceptional performance. This means actively tapping into the reasons you absolutely must perform well. This necessity is 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, deadlines. It's about always knowing your why and stoking that fire all the time the time so you feel the needed drive or pressure to get at it. Number four Increase productivity in your primary field of interest. Specifically, focus on prolific quality output. We call that PQO in the area in which you want to be known and to drive impact. You also have to minimize distractions, including opportunities that steal your attention from creating pqo. Number five Develop influence with those around you. It will make you better at getting people to believe in and support your efforts and ambitions. Unless you consciously develop a positive support network, major achievements over the long haul are all but impossible. Number six Demonstrate courage by expressing your ideas, taking bold action, and standing up for yourself and others. Even in the face of fear, uncertainty, threat or changing conditions, courage is not an occasional act, but a trait of choice and will. In the book, there's a graphic here that shows the high performance habits sort of broken into two different areas. There's two circles that join together. On the left circle it says personal habits and you see three of the personal habits of high Performance. There, seek clarity, generate energy, raise necessity. And on the right circle you'd see the social habits. Increase productivity, Develop influence, Demonstrate courage. That's on page 39 of the book. So seek clarity, generate energy, raise necessity, Increase productivity, Develop influence, Demonstrate courage. These are the six habits that you need to adopt if you are to reach high performance in any situation. In the hundreds of personal efforts and social behaviors that we've observed, these habits move the needle the most in dramatically improving performance. In the next six chapters, we'll address the extraordinary power unlocked by developing these habits. Strengths alone are never enough. You may have noticed that nowhere in this list does it say to focus on your innate gifts, talents, blessings, past, or strengths. That's because no matter how great a personality you have, how many supposed innate strengths you possess, how much money you have, how beautiful you are, how creative you are, what talents you've cultivated or or how brilliantly you've succeeded in the past, none of these things would mean much on their own. They wouldn't matter if you didn't know what you wanted and how to get it. That's clarity. Felt too wiped out to perform. That's energy. Didn't have a sense of drive or any pressure to get things done. Necessity couldn't focus and create the outputs that matter most. Productivity lacked the people skills to get others to believe in or support you. Influence or fail to take risks or speak up for yourself and others. Courage. Without the HP6, even the most gifted person would be lost, tired, unmotivated, unproductive, alone, or fearful. Effectiveness in life does not come from focusing on what is automatic, easy, or natural for us. Rather, it is the result of how we consciously strive to meet life's hope. Harder challenges grow beyond our comforts and deliberately work to overcome our biases and preferences so that we may understand, love, serve, and lead others. When I make this argument, people often balk due to the popularity of the Strengths movement. Personally, I'm a fan of any tools that help people learn more about themselves. I also greatly admire Gallup, the organization that has led the strengths based revolution. But I don't recommend that people use the strengths assumption to lead others or to seek the next level of success in their own lives. The Strengths movement is based on the idea that we have innate strengths talents that we were born with. It assumes we are naturally good at some things from birth and that we might as well focus on those things without question. That's a feel good formula and it's certainly better than obsessing about our weaknesses all the time. My main reservation about the strengths movement is that in a complex and rapidly changing world, reaching the top doesn't come naturally to anyone. Regardless of what you are naturally good at. To rise higher, you must go beyond what came naturally to you at birth or in your teen years, right? That's why the innate argument doesn't hold up so well. To reach exceptional performance and win over the long term, you will be required to develop well beyond what is easy or natural to you. Because the real world is full of uncertainty and ever increasing demands for growth, your natural birth strengths will not be enough. As Tom said in the email to me at the beginning of this chapter, it's about me rising to serve a mission. Not the mission bowing down to match my limited strengths. If you have great ambitions to contribute extraordinary things, you'll have to grow and stretch far beyond what's natural to you. And to rise to high performance, you'll have to work on the weaknesses, develop entirely new skill sets beyond what you find easy or what you like to do. It should be common sense if you really want to make your mark. You'll have to grow more and give more, and that won't feel easy or natural in the end, even if you don't agree with my thinking process here, knowing your personality type or supposed innate strengths just isn't all that useful in helping you achieve your next big goal in uncertain environments. Knowing your label or strength and just trying to be more of that is like telling a bear that's trying to get honey out of a nest high on an unexplored cliff. Just try being more of a bear. To my friends and colleagues running companies, let's stop spending all this money on expensive strength and personality assessments in vain attempts to categorize people, and instead focus on training our people in proven habits that anyone can use to up their performance. The good news is no one innately lacks any of the high performance habits. High performers are not lucky stiffs loaded with a great big bag of strengths at birth. They simply deploy the habits we've discussed and do it more consistently than their peers. That's it. That's the difference. So it doesn't matter whether you are an extrovert or an introvert, an INTJ or an esfp, a Christian or an atheist, a Spaniard or a Singaporean, an artist or an engineer, a manager or a CEO, an achiever or an analyzer, a mom or a Martian. The six high performance habits each have the power to make a dramatic impact on the areas that matter most to you. Together, they have the power to revolutionize your performance across every meaningful domain in your life. You're not supposed to be innately good at the HP6. You have to work at them all the time. Whenever you hope to succeed, a new goal, project or dream, you have to bust out the HP6. Every time you find yourself performing below your full potential, bring the HP6 to bear. If you ever wonder why you're failing at something, just go take the HPI. That's the High Performance Indicator. It's@highperformanceindicator.com and identify which habits you're scoring low in. Then improve that area and you'll be back on track. This deliberate focus is an important distinction, especially because it frees us from the myth that success comes more naturally to some than to others. Looking across my decade serving so many elite level achievers, as well as all our surveys and professional assessments, we just haven't seen high performance consistently correlate strongly with personality, iq, innate talent, creativity, years of experience, gender, race, culture or compensation. In the past two decades of research in neuroscience and positive psychology, researchers have begun to notice the same and flip the old model on its head. What we do with what we have tends to be far more important than what we have in the first place. What you're innately good at is less important than how you choose to see the world, develop yourself, lead others, and remain persistent through difficulty. We all know someone who has all the cards stacked in their favor. A blessed upbringing, great personality, creative mind. But who still doesn't get off the couch or succeed. Lots of people are highly paid, but not high performing. Anyone in an organization who has had their team take a strengths assessment can surely attest that plenty of their peers know their strengths and even do work related to their strengths, but still fail to deliver great work. And in any given great company culture, there are always high performers and low performers. Why? Because high performance is not about a specific type of person. It's not about winning the genetic lottery, how long you've worked, the shade of your skin, how many people are supporting you, or what you're getting paid. It's about your performance habits, which you have complete control over. This finding is worth hammering home because too many people use these factors to explain their poor performance. Just think how often you hear things such as I just don't have the personality to get ahead. I'm just not extroverted, intuitive, charismatic, open, conscientious. I'm just not the smartest person in the room. I'm just not naturally gifted like they are. I wasn't born good at that. I don't have the right mix of strengths. I'm not a right brain person, I don't have enough experience. I'm a woman, black man, Latino, middle aged white guy, immigrant and that's why I'm not succeeding. My company culture doesn't support me. I'd be a lot better if they paid me what I'm really worth. It's time we all recognize these reasons for what they lame excuses for sub optimal performance, especially over the long term. This is not to say intrinsic factors don't matter at all. There is strong evidence that they are important, especially in childhood development, and many of these factors can dramatically influence your mood, behavior, choices, health and relationships as an adult. If you'd like a more academic treatment of why those factors are important but matter less for long term success than most people imagine, please visit our published articles@highperformanceinstitute.com Research leaders should take note. Focusing on any of the factors I mentioned in that list won't get you very far in helping your people improve performance. Those factors are just not that easy to define, manage or improve. For example, imagine you're working on a project with a few teammates. You have one person in particular who is not performing well. Imagine how ridiculous it would be for you to walk over to that person and say if you could just improve your personality for us, if you could just up your IQ for us, if you could just change how you were innately gifted. If you could just be more right brained, if you could just have five more years experience under your belt here, if you could just be more Asian, black, white, female, male, if you could just improve the culture here real quick, if you could just pay yourself the perfect amount to be more productive. You get the point. These are simply not useful categories to focus on. The bottom line is that if you're going to focus on anything to improve your or your team's performance, start with the HP6. A rising tide lifts all boats one habit lifts or all others. We like to think of the HP6 as metahabits because they make all other good habits in life fall into place. By seeking clarity, you develop a habit of asking questions, looking within, observing your behaviors, assessing whether you're on track. By generating energy, you'll be better rested, you'll eat healthier, you'll exercise more, and so on. What's fascinating about our research in the HP6 is that each improvement in any one area improves the others. This means that if you increase clarity, you'll likely see improvement in energy, necessity, productivity, courage and influence. Our analysis also suggests that even though people who score high on one habit tend to score high on the others, each habit is giving them a little extra edge in increasing their overall high performance score. Improve just one of these habits and you improve your performance. Another fascinating thing we learned is that all the HP6 predict overall happiness, meaning the higher your score in any habit, the greater the odds you'll report being happy in life. Taken together then, the HP6 are a powerful predictor of not just whether you're a high performer, but also whether you'll be happy Happy Is there a high performance state of mind? Ecstasy is a full, deep involvement in life. John Lavelle People often ask me whether there is a specific state that will enable them to succeed over the long term. Well, by definition, emotional and mental states don't endure. They're fleeting. Moods stick around longer and habits hold the longest, which is why we focus there. But I think what people are really getting at is how will I feel when I've hit high performance? What does it feel like? So I can reverse engineer that. The question can be answered by the data In a keyword analysis of public survey Data on over 30,000 high performing respondents, it's pretty clear when people talk about how they feel in high performance, they report feeling full engagement, joy and confidence, in that order. This means they tend to be fully immersed in what they're doing, they enjoy what they're doing, and they have confidence in their ability to figure things out. Rounding out the top five were purposefulness and flow, as in I feel like I'm in Flow in the zone was not an option in our surveys because it's a phrase rather than a word, but it was the most common, written in descriptor. Determination, focus, intention, deliberateness, and conscientiousness rounded out the top concepts people used to describe what being in high performance felt like. Knowing this, you might as well start with the end in mind. Start bringing your full attention to the moments of your life. Start bringing more joy, start bringing more confidence. These things will not only make you feel better, they'll also help you perform better still. The same caveat applies to the states as to the strengths. Without effective habits, they're just not enough. Testing the HP6 the HP6 gave me a proven game plan for succeeding at my projects in life. Now they are a standard operating system for entering any new situation. I've been using them in my professional career, and the results have been astounding and quite public. Beyond myself, the habits and concepts in this book have measurably improved the lives of tens of thousands of our students. These students take the HPI that's the High Performance Indicator before and after our online programs, live training events, and coaching experiences. They love seeing demonstratable data that they are improving in their lives. We regularly see our students significantly increase their overall high performance scores and overall life happiness. We've also used the HPI in organizations to help them pinpoint where their employees and teams should focus their development. Further, we've seen remarkable results through client coaching interventions. Over 3000 hour long coaching sessions led by independent certified high performance coaches reveal that people can dramatically change their behaviors and reach high performance in many areas of their lives in weeks, not years. This isn't to say that high performance habits are a silver bullet for all life's challenges over the past decade. As a high performance coach and researcher, I've sought plenty of disconfirming evidence for the HP6, and I'll happily share that here. In seeking disconfirming evidence, we've looked for people who are not high performing despite practicing the habits in this audiobook. Are there individuals in the world who actively seek clarity, generate energy, raise necessity, increase productivity, develop influence, and demonstrate courage who are in fact under performers or even failures? I've never seen that to be the case, but common sense says there's bound to be an exception somewhere. Can someone lack one of the habits and still become successful? For example, can someone be a wild success yet still lack clarity? Absolutely. Can someone lack courage and still be a success? You bet they can. But remember, we aren't talking about initial success here, we're talking about the long term. Odds are if you lack any of the HP6 for too long, you your high performance scores and happiness scores will drop. You simply wouldn't be as effective or as extraordinary as you could be. Some critics will say that our descriptions of high performance habits or statements used in the HPI are too vague or open to interpretation. That, of course, is always a risk when describing human behavior. If we say someone has grit, is creative, is an extrovert, or struggles to maintain focus, one could always argue that such descriptions are vague or generalized, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't attempt to define them, measure them, or educate people about them. Studying human psychology is an imprecise endeavor, but it's worth the work if it helps us learn what makes someone high performing. All we can do is use the validated yet inexact tools available and continue homing in on how to describe and correlate the statements and habits that are true for high performers. And that's what we've been doing. In addition to actively seeking to disconfirm our own assumptions, we have sought to overcome self reporting biases by checking to see that what people reported in our initial surveys was true in their real lives. We did this by randomly interviewing them, comparing objective performance measures, and seeking peer feedback. For the most part, we found that people share their honest responses in this field, and because they want to accurately assess where they are and discover where they can improve, we've also included reverse statements and scoring in many of our surveys to see whether responses held true. Like any researcher, I'm always open to new evidence, and I look at findings, including those in this book and audiobook, as merely another messy step in the long march of understanding humans and how they work. I'll remind you that I'm not a psychologist, psychiatrist, neuroscientist, biologist, or any other title I'm aware of that ends in ist. I'm a professional high performance coach and trainer who is paid for results, not discussion or theory, and this inevitably biases me toward what I've seen work. And while I feel blessed to have become the world's highest compensated and most followed on this topic, I I am without question as fallible as any writer or practitioner trying to take on a topic of such scope and complexity. I have a lot more to learn about high performance. There's plenty that this entire field does not yet know and that needs to be explored. What effects do mental illnesses, childhood experiences, and socioeconomic and neurobiological factors have on forming and sustaining these habits? Which of the habits move the needle most in specific industries, careers, or educational levels? Throughout this book, I openly invite you to ask your own questions as well as question my assertions in our published articles. I have openly called for further testing of our ideas. And I'd love to hear your feedback too. Every day my team and I try to learn more and finer distinctions about this subject. I I'll be studying it for life. I'd love to hear what works for you and what doesn't, and whether or not you agree with what you'll find in the pages ahead or in what you will hear ahead? I merely suggest you keep what works for you and discard the rest. Test it for yourself. Will the HP6 get as dramatic results for you as we've seen in our research, training and coaching? I would love to test them with you. That's why, once again, I invite you to be the judge of how effective These habits are in case you haven't yet gotten around to following my advice in the previous chapter. Before you listen any further, take the hpi. It takes only a few minutes and is free online now@highperformanceindicator.com it will give you a score on each of the six habits and no, it won't label you. Take the survey. Do it now and be sure to enter your email so I can send you another link to take the assessment again in seven to 10 weeks. Between now and then, listen to this book and watch the videos that you'll receive after you take the assessment so that you have the tools needed to improve. You'll know by your own responses to the assessment in a few weeks just how much this work can begin to change your life. One thing is abundantly clear from our findings. You should never wait to pursue a dream or add value out of fear that you lack the right stuff. High performance happens because of what you deliberately think and do on a routine basis in order to excel and serve at higher levels. It is this quest to challenge yourself to develop good habits that will make you feel enlivened and help you realize your full potential. In Montana, where I grew up, we had the saying, the time to have the map is before you enter the woods. Someday soon you'll enter an uncertain situation where your performance really matters. Before that day, listen to this book and begin the six high performance habits. This is your map and it will lead you through the thicket of life to your highest levels of success. In the next chapter, we put an X on that map. We get clarity about who you are and where you want to go at this stage of your life.