Defining Your Performance Edge: Tips for Sustainable Growth

Hey everyone, it's Sean. Welcome to the Meaningful Revolution podcast. In this episode, we're going to explain why now it's time to push your performance edge, what that means in all areas of your life and how to do it in a sustainable way. This is continuing the conversation a bit that we've had on Work, Life mix and burnout, and I hope you enjoy it. Let's get into it. Your performance edge is your success. It's your ability to systemically grow, improve, learn and progress. And it's also another word for resilience. It's resilience for the setbacks, the failures, mistakes, uncomfortable things you have to do in order to perform, to be your best self. In essence, your performance edge is your resilience to keep on your mission, your purpose, your aspirations. Now, most people, when they come into my coaching practice, they're struggling with resilience in some way, shape or form. And the interesting thing is this lack of fortitude shows up as self doubt, as overwhelm, as exhaustion, as, and I quote, laziness, and so on. And at the end of the day, that performance edge, or your ability to stay on mission in spite of the world around you is what's going to help you get through. So most people, when they're not performing it, usually these reasons that I just listed, self doubt, overall exhaustion and laziness, are excuses for why they're not pushing through. But in reality, it's all about how we don't connect with the reason why we should push through, to grow, to progress, to chase after our dreams and ambitions. And why is that? Sometimes we're pushing on the wrong things that don't make a difference to us. Right? It's busy work, it's knocking stuff off of the to do list, but it's not working on the things that matter to us. It's not working on our meaningful revolutions, as we have titled this podcast. Sometimes we get caught up in our ego and we think we should be at a different place in our lives in this particular moment or that we are special and should just have stuff handed to us sometimes. And sometimes it's just from exhaustion of doing too many things without feeling progress or without feeling support. So to hone our performance edge, we need to drive forward in a sustainable, joyful way that helps us make progress. And so that's what we're gonna talk about today. And I wanna talk about personally, my first job as a software engineer, it took me a couple of months to really get into dreading going into work. I'd wake up. And maybe you've related to this. Maybe you've had a job where you wake up and you're like, I don't want to do this. The whole fiber of your being, like, no way. And so I would wake up, dread getting out of bed, dread doing the morning thing, throw on my pot of coffee, put that in the giant mug, get in my car and commute and think about how much I was stressed out, how much I had to do and just not enough time, and how much I hated the fact I didn't feel like I had control over my tasks or how my day was going to go. I would get to work and then stuff would come up, just normal, like, hey, we need somebody to help fix this. We need someone to fight this fire and think, man, I really hate my job because I can't do the work that I've agreed to do. And ultimately, what that does to you psychologically is you start to really question your sanity because it's like, why do I show up and choose to do this thing that I really hate with everything, right? And that's a good question. And that question got me thinking, like, how could I show up differently and just try to eliminate some of this extra stress and overwhelm from really working on something that I didn't really love? It was showing up in my work where I stopped, you know, it was really hard. It took a lot of energy for me to engage and do great work. And that really was killing me, too. So something definitely needed to change. I discovered, is what I would do for a while is anytime I had this kind of repeating mantra of I hate my job, I hate my job, I hate my job. I'd pull out a journal and write it until my hand cramps, right? I started to think, what if I switched this a little bit and started writing I don't love my job yet? And so anytime I found myself in that zone, I tried to take five minutes to write, I don't love my job yet. I don't love my job yet. I don't love my job yet. And what that gave me was two things, right? First, it shifted my brain from an emotional response into a problem solving response where I'm like, if I don't love my job yet, then I should be writing down the things I don't like, and I should be thinking about what do I actually want in this job, right? And so getting clear on what did I really want for my career? Because at that point, part of the stress and this feeling I had was I Didn't really know how I got to that point in my life. Right. I expected graduated from college and get a job that I was really passionate about or something that I really cared about and didn't mind showing up for, obviously there's something going wrong in me is is what I thought at the time. And so that shift in language of again so I don't love my job yet is what do I not like? What do I do so I can then make a better decision. The other thing is resolve this disconnect in my head of you know what, I'm not showing up to do something that I hate. Right. And that took a lot of the stress out of it just with that little shift of I'm trying to figure this out, gave myself a little bit of grace, a little bit of time to figure it out. I took some responsibility for it to make some changes then. Right? So if I know what I want in my career and what I don't want in my career, and I know that I'm still trying to figure it out, I can now make some bold decisions and choices to shift how I felt. And so that's what I did in that particular organization is I found another adjacent position that was more in my skillset, that was a little bit more my style. It had more of the things that I liked than didn't like and I was really great at that job. That shift made work not so stressful. I was able to engage more at work and not feel exhausted all the time and I could wake up and look forward to the work that I was doing, which was huge. And what I want to take away from this particular story is shifting from an emotional place into problem solving. So how do we do that? I'm a high performance coach, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to outline what high performance is and isn't and then talk about four of the things that show up or showed up when you are really struggling with finding that performance edge, finding that resilience and so that's working through self doubt, exhaustion, lack of progress and not feeling supported. Okay with that before we jump into the first point too. If you are struggling with being clear on what you want out of your life, your personal meaningful revolution or how you show up in your life, I have a free PDF when you sign up for my newsletter called the Ultimate Work Life Mix and this will walk you through a self assessment and plan some of the big outcomes you want in your life. What's really great about this PDF is It gets you thinking a little bit more strategically about your career and life because so many times we don't think of, oh, I'm I want a particular level of abundance, I want a particular level of health in my life and I should be actively working on that. This PDF is really great at walking you through those steps and getting clear, which is something we'll talk about here and some steps soon here. But if you are interested below this video in the show notes or on the podcast show Notes, I should say you can find a link to sign up, provide your name and email, get that PDF and get on the newsletter where every week you get an email letting you know about the new episode of the Meaningful Revolution and some other cool stuff that's going on with me. Love to have you there. Go and click the link below to sign up and we'll see you there on that. Okay, now that said, what is high performance? High performance is beating whatever normal in your life without impacting your health or relationships. And when you are consistently improving every day just a little bit, right? And you are able to take care of your health and relationships, you feel fully confident, fully present and fully joyful because you're living into your best self. So that's how we define high performance as a high performance coach. And again, when you're trying to find your performance edge, we want to do it in a way that's sustainable. That's why I like the definition of improving what normal results in your life without impacting, right? So it's a holistic approach as a certified high performance coach. But ultimately it's how do you maintain forward progress the most amount of days you possibly can without burning yourself? If that's what we're aiming at, if we're aiming for that performance edge, we're aiming for you to be your best self so you can experience life in its fullest way. Then we have to handle a couple of things that I've seen again come up in my coaching practice. The first is self doubt. If you have self doubt, if you doubt your ability, your worth, if you doubt if you deserve a job or a relationship, then you really need to seek clarity, right? Because when you are clear on your values and who you are and how you've been successful in your dreams and ambitions, then you can start to make different decisions. You can get clear on the work that really matters for you in your job and say no to everything else. Hey, and that would have helped me in my story if I would have in that particular way been really clear on What I wanted in my career, which is why that little journaling exercise turned into this thing of this is what I like in my job, this is what I don't like in my job. What are the other jobs that meet that mold a little bit more? Because you're young and you're trying to figure out your career, seeking clarity is highly important one for your performance, but can also help you get your performance edge. When you start saying yes to the right things and no to the things that aren't working in your life. Right. It's cool. Second or point number three. But the second thing to work through is if you are exhausted, seek rejuvenation. And I use the word rejuvenation versus rest because sometimes, and we know from high performance work, taking short breaks during the day can help you stay focused, can help you stay motivated, can help keep your energy up. Right? But sometimes rejuvenation is also taking a walk outside, getting some sun on your face or working out or covering the basics of your health of sleep, hydration, nutrition, exercise, those types of things. And so if you're feeling consistently exhausted, we need you to add more of these rejuvenating habits or things during your day to help fight that. Right? And don't underestimate the power of a quick three minute break with your eyes closed, short meditation, or just sitting in quiet giving your eyes a rest. It's amazing how much a three minute rest every hour can help people. I've done it, I've seen a lot of my clients do this. It, it's something that you should definitely try out if today or tomorrow, your next workday, you're out there and you have a lot of work planned, plan 5 minute breaks every hour if you can, to, you know, use the bathroom, do the bio break stuff, but do something that'll help you rejuvenate. And I know this will help you stay again, stay motivated, stay focused, and you are more in control of your energy than you think without needing to do coffee and energy drinks and stuff. Give that a whirl if you're feeling exhaustion. Point number four, if you are lacking progress, seek efficiency. What do I mean by that? It means make sure that you could do the Tim ferriss thing, the 8020 rule, where you think the 20% of the work that I'm doing is giving me 80% of the results. What if you got really focused on that 20% that drove all those results in your life and discarded everything else? Right? And sometimes working on the right things gets you the momentum to help you feel more engaged, more present, but also to get you again more motivated. If you see the results of your labor or your work, it's going to be really important for you. So the question to ask yourself is, what do I need to do every day to see progress? And try to do that as early in the day as you possibly can. And we know that if you get some momentum, if the first hour you work is totally focused on these things that are helping you, excuse me, helping you accelerate your results, that you will feel like you're leaning into your performance edge. You will feel more resilient. You will feel like you are able to solve problems in a way that allows you to be productive. Right? Fifth and final point. If you don't feel supported, seek mentorship and strengthen relationships. So sometimes seeking a coach like myself or one of my other certified performance coaches or a mentor in the space that you want to grow is essential. Right, Everyone? At least I know I've felt in my life times when I'm like, I'm going to do this crazy thing and my good friends will be like, that's awesome. Let's talk about this. Let's work this through. And the people that have something to lose, right? Oh, you're going to be spending a lot less time since you're running this marathon. They get jealous, they get judgmental, and that can really hurt your performance or your performance as. Or your willingness to. To go through with it. Because we're humans, we're social beasts. And what you want to do is be cult, continually cultivating your friendships and relationships inside of work and outside of work to be around the people that you want to become. I mean, you could go, I know there's a lot of people that talk about your net worth is in your network and the power of association. We can save that for other YouTube videos or other formats of podcasts or whatnot. But ultimately, if you don't feel supported, your task is to go and find the people that'll support you because they're out there. There are tons of people that love the thing that you're passionate on or working on something similar to the thing that you're working on. I would love to share their knowledge and encourage you to keep moving forward. And I know I myself discount this particular point a lot. And so I do a lot of work to try to engage people and get out of my head and get that level of encouragement and honest feedback that we all need in a way that propels me to accomplish the things I want to accomplish. Right so get out there and find your performance edge. Double down on the good works and the good things you're putting out there in the world. And this is Sean Butner signing off on the Meaningful Revolution Podcast. I want to remind you to sign up for my newsletter where you get updates on the podcast, other content and things going on that I'm working on, and weekly updates on episodes just like this. If you like this episode, you might like my last week's episode on Burnout Found over here. So give that a watch. And if you like this, please be sure to subscribe on Apple podcasts or on YouTube and we'll see you in the next episode of the Meaningful Revolution. Guys.