There's two ways to be a high performer. There's the stressful way, where you can't stop thinking
about work, you catastrophize things going wrong, you're insecure, you can't relax,
you don't sleep well, and you feel like you're constantly having to go at a million miles an
hour. And there's the peaceful minded way, where you relax just fine, feel confident,
you feel like you have plenty of space and time, and you're able to produce at a cruising pace.
Now, that second way isn't just happier and healthier, it actually works better in the
long run too. But what do peaceful mindful high performers do differently? Well these things!
First, they slow down when people in stress and insecurity would generally speed up. That
doesn't necessarily mean they work slow, but they slow down their head. When their
head isn't clear and they need to see more clearly, they slow down. When they get stuck,
they slow down. If they start to feel pressure or stress coming on, they slow down. When they have
a disagreement with somebody that disturbs the peace, they slow down. We don't see or
think clearly when our mental and emotional spaces are cluttered and busy. Slowing down
is what allows those spaces to clear, so you can roll back, reset, and roll forward again,
with clarity. I often say to my coaching clients to speed up first you generally have to slow down.
Second, they react unemotionally to life's bait. Now that doesn't
mean that peaceful mindful high performers don't have emotions,
or that they live on an emotional flatline. On the contrary, they're just as open to joy
and sadness as anybody, perhaps even more so. However, they master their equanimity.
That's the ability to maintain a peaceful balance of mind and emotion even when under pressure,
keeping our mental and emotional spaces clear for clear thinking. They stay grounded.
Third, they don't take things personally, they take them impersonally. You see,
when you take things personally, you make them mean something about you. You make it
mean something about your value and worth in the world. I didn't get that job so I'm worthless.
I must be a bad person because things are not going right for me. When you take things
personally you tend to take the role of the victim. The peaceful, mindful high performer
knows that what happens isn't personal. What happens is just what happens. Whatever that is,
rather than be victor or victim, they choose. They choose who they want to be, how they want to be,
and what the most useful thing is to do. They make those choices in every challenging circumstance.
The fourth thing is they get out of their head and into their body. Our head is a powerful place to
think about the world, and plan, and simulate what might go right, and simulate what might go wrong,
but sometimes when we get too much up in our own head we get tangled up. That's when it's
useful to get out of our head and into our body. What does that mean? Well don't worry,
I'm not being esoteric. I simply mean that, rather than concentrating all of our awareness in here,
like our entire existence is locked up here, the peaceful, mindful high performer would relax
and become aware of the whole body, and put their awareness in the whole body, whereas the stressed,
insecure person would just push harder up here and pull harder on the tangled knots.
And the fifth thing they do is they get things out of their head. We don't operate
very well with too many notes, and things to remember, and ideas spinning around up here.
Getting things that we're thinking about out of our head and onto paper is a great way of helping
clear that space. Some people use notebooks some people use whiteboards. The only thing is
we have to trust ourselves to use those notes on whiteboards, which means forming the habit
of actually using those notes on whiteboards! This is Steve wishing you health and happiness.