Hey professionals! Do you want to be in a peak state? Do you want to be in a peak state all
the time? Imagine how much you could get done if you were pumped 24 hours a day!
Honestly the personal development field is so ungrounded sometimes!
In this video I want to talk about the myth of being in a peak state all the time.
I want to talk about how we have a healthier relationship with peak states, and I want to
talk about the true unsung hero of long-term productivity, and it's not the peak state!
My name's Steve and I coach professional people just like you to combine your personal brilliance
with unshakeable emotional freedom so that you can create a happier and more successful experience
of your life and work. And a good place to start is to download my free simple five-step guide to
managing stress in the moment. Now let's be clear, there's nothing wrong with peak states per se,
there's nothing wrong with learning how to enter into peak states for bursts of performance,
and there's nothing wrong with training what kind of peak states we can enter into
when we need those bursts of performance. I mean peak stakes definitely have value. Imagine if you
were a professional 100 meter sprint runner, then you would thrive on your ability to enter into a
peak state and have a burst of performance, but you would also understand the value of
resting after that burst of performance, you would also understand that it's not a way that you can
live your life, you would understand that it's not a way to run a marathon! But what happens is
charismatic people in the personal development world try and get the jump on each other and
try and get you into the idea that you can have bigger peak states for more of the time. They
pose the question: Imagine what you could get done if you were pumped all the time! But that
to me is like saying: Imagine how much I could get done if I never stopped to eat and if I never
stopped to sleep. It's a fallacy and a self-care nightmare, but every so often you'll see people
who are addicted to ultra performance, and often they've got white skin, they've got cold sweats,
they're shaking all the time with palpitations because they're drinking like 10 tins of red bull
an hour! And for what? To be happy and healthy? I have to say that often when I speak to people who
have that kind of addiction to ultra performance they're actually coming from an ungrounded place.
It's actually coming from fear, ego and insecurity rather than groundedness; and what we need to
understand is that a peak state is by definition peak, and any state that we can maintain for any
length of time is by definition not a peak state but a sustainable state. If it was genuinely a
peak state and you tried to be in it all the time then you would be like the marathon runner who's
trying to sprint the whole 26 miles. You will burn out, you will break down, but that brings
me to the unsung hero of long-term performance: not the peak state but the sustainable state,
and the beauty of the sustainable state is that if you can have a sustainable day
every day you will produce results, you will keep producing results, you will multiply the results
you produce and you won't burn out, you will be able to keep going. Now to be clear aiming
to have a sustainable day every day is not about aiming low, and by the way you might want to train
what pace you can sustain to improve it, there's nothing wrong with that. So how do we readjust
to having a sustainable day every day? Number one is to set hours that we can maintain. We sometimes
get sucked into the idea that if we work days and evenings and weekends, just temporarily you
understand, then we can overcome the hump, we can get ahead, we can overcome a crisis. And that's
true, and let's face it sometimes we do need to work evenings or weekends to overcome a crisis,
but once we get sucked into that though it's not temporary, we keep it going, we keep getting
sucked into the idea that we have to work harder and harder and harder, but what actually happens
is that whilst we might maintain the hours, our productivity drops off. Number two is to set a
pace that you can maintain. If we set ourselves to a higher pace, what happens is we run out of
energy before the day is up, we start seeking more distractions and the length of those distractions
increases. Running at a pace that we can maintain means we can keep producing work without tiring
out, without needing those distractions, and that does require some personal experimentation, but
it's certainly a lot more joyful to work that way than to work with adrenaline flowing all the time,
like there's a claxxon going, like there are alarms going, like we have to be in panic mode
all the time. By the way if you're liking this video so far do give it a thumbs up and don't
forget to subscribe to the channel and click the notifications bell so that you'll know when new
content arrives. Number three is to visualize your work. Now I love this one and I love kanban boards
which come from lean manufacturing. The idea of a kanban board is that you lay your workout visually
in workflow columns where each ticket or card on the board is a piece of work that you can pick up,
do, get done, pick up, do, get done. Now to create cards like that you may have to
do some work to decompose larger pieces of work into that kind of small chunk size,
but with the work being displayed on a board like this not only can you see where the work is in
its workflow stages but you can see what there is to do next. You don't have to keep thinking:
What do I have to do next? It's there on the board and you can keep moving because
you can keep picking up cards, pick it up, do it, get it done. It helps you achieve
flow. Number four is to eliminate wasted time. Now there are two aspects of wasted time that I
want to draw your attention to. The first is time wasted on work that doesn't really need doing,
work that doesn't have high value, so spend some time learning what do you do that is actually just
wasting your time rather than producing value and eliminate that from what you do. The second aspect
is time wasted by the need for distraction. As we get tired we start to crave distractions,
now that could be an artifact of not setting the right pace for yourself and it can be an artifact
of not setting the right working hours for yourself. Now a great way to eliminate that kind
of wasted time is with a thing called the Pomodoro technique. The Pomodoro technique gets you to set
25 minute productivity time boxes and in that time box your agreement with yourself is that you will
focus on the work and not succumb to distractions; and then once the 25 minute time box is up
you have five minutes where you can take a break where you can relax, where you can calm your mind,
where you can engage with some distraction before you set into your next time box. Number five
is you have to be willing to let your results dip temporarily whilst you adapt to the new way
of working. If you don't do that you will never get out of the pattern of working long hours and
pushing harder than you need to do. And bonus tip number six is to eliminate ungrounded goals from
your goals list. Now to understand how to do that watch this video up here or if you already watched
that video then watch this one down here instead. This is Steve wishing you health and happiness.