It’s shaped my leadership style, my coaching, and how I’ve approached the difficulties and traumas in my life. I always considered it critical for success in business, but a few years ago, I was brought on as the performance coach for the Netherlands National Lacrosse teams, and something clicked. A majority of the work I do helping these top sport athletes push themselves to be their best on the field is exactly the same as I do with business leaders.
The high performance mindset is theability to consistently do the hard things you need to do, especially when it is hard to do them.
It makes total sense as it is foundational to success in any (read: all) areas of your life. It’s a skill that highly productive and successful people seem to know, but is
not properly taught in schools or at conferences. It is about having a high-performance mindset, building mental toughness, and learning how to perform consistently at your best. More importantly, it is about accepting and understanding your own mind and body at the deepest level, so you can identify the things that pull
you away from being your best. It is the foundation for your excellence, which gives you the tools to help others find that excellence in themselves as well.
Why do we underperform? Why does our brain talk us out of doing the things we know we need to do to succeed? And most importantly, how do we identify and overcome the parts of ourselves that are holding us back? This is much too large a topic to cover in one article, so we must start with a foundation we can build on.
What is a High-Performance Mindset?
There are a lot of buzzwords all over Instagram influencers’ posts: focus, discipline, consistency, resilience, confidence, grit… The list is too long to address in this first article. So instead, I summarize it as “the ability to consistently do the hard things you need to do, especially when it is hard to do them.” It is about building and harnessing the mental tools necessary to operate at a high standard, in difficult moments, under pressure, and with speed. I stress the words ‘consistently’ and ‘building’ because it isn’t something inherited, and it isn’t something you can do just sometimes. It is built and strengthened over time, and it is lost much faster than it is gained.
It's quite interesting that even when we know what we need to do, we still struggle to do it. We're in a seemingly never-ending internal struggle against procrastination and lack of motivation. It feels like our brains are actively working against us, and this leads many to believe that something is actually wrong with them. The good news is there’s (probably) nothing wrong with your brain, it is just doing what it evolved to do. It’s trying to keep you alive, but its operating system is just old. For nearly all of human history, almost all of our energy was spent of survival: find food and don’t become food. Our ancestors had to conserve energy, avoid risks and stay accepted
in their tribe. These traits that were adaptive for our ancestors and helped them survive are now maladaptive in today’s world. This is called evolutionary mismatch, and it's a major cause of many of the issues we're dealing with today.
- NEGATIVITY BIAS
A thousand years ago, ignoring a potential threat could get you killed. Remembering that one mushroom that killed Geneva was more important than enjoying the 10 safe ones. Our brain is wired to focus on the negative and remember those events. These are critical to our survival, but if not understood and managed, they cause us to dwell on past traumas and negative events, which leads to depression. We also project negative possibilities onto future events, which causes anxiety. - FEAR OF REJECTION
Being thrown out of the cave was almost always a death sentence. Social judgment was therefore programmed into us as mortal danger. This is why we are still so concerned with what others think of us and avoiding embarrassment. You see in fMRI scans of the brain that the thought of public speaking activates the same areas of the brain as having a gun pointed at you. - FOCUS IS YOUR ENEMY
If you spend too much time focused on picking berries, you might miss the lion sneaking up on you. Our brain constantly “wakes us up” from our tasks with other thoughts, stealing our focus and attention. - ENERGY CONSERVATION
This is the biggest one. Up until the last few hundred years, food was scarce, so we evolved to crave energy-dense foods, store as much fat as possible, and find the most energy-efficient way to survive. This is the cause of your procrastination. Your brain doesn’t think the task is critical to your survival until the deadline starts to approach and triggers your fear of rejection and social judgment.
This is wired deep inside our ancient caveman brain, and, bad news, you can’t change it. Fortunately, we've also evolved other parts of our brain that can hear and understand that ancient voice and give us the choice to overrule it. You can learn to quiet it, but you have to accept that it will always be there, always trying to pull you back.
ACCEPT => UNDERSTAND => OVERCOME
The first step in mentally overcoming difficult things, especially traumas from our past or the hardwired caveman brain, is acceptance.
Too often, people try to skip the acceptance phase and immediately start trying to overcome, but there’s a reason the first step in AA and NA is also acceptance. That trauma happened and will have always happened. Your brain will always try to talk you out of doing the hard thing. If you can accept that, you can work to understand them at a deeper level and the thoughts, emotions, and feelings that they evoke.
You’ll sense the pattern and hear the trigger, then you’ll feel the emotion and hear the thought. You can then remind yourself that you will always carry this part of you around, like luggage, and that you get to choose how big or small the luggage is. Is it a chip in your pocket, or is it 747 strapped to your back? Is it something you use as an excuse to take the easy road, or is it fuel and experience that you use to accomplish even bigger things? It is hard work, but it is something you can learn to
control. Only through acceptance and understanding can you overcome the things that are holding you back in a lasting and sustainable way. Mastery is a process built with acceptance and consistency, not with force and intensity. We start that process by laying two critical foundations: one for the mind, using mindfulness and self-talk, and one for the body, prioritizing sleep, fuel, and movement. It’s a lot to cover, so stay tuned – I’ll be back here in the next article to help guide you through it.
