Unleashing Your Peak Performance from Within
No matter what room, stage, court, or field you perform in or on—or what your current proficiency—there’s always room to improve your game and take your performance to new heights. This is especially the case in professions where human performance is paramount, and outcomes are plain for all to see.
Performance isn’t built on talent and training alone, nor can you separate your performance from the rest of your life. Who you are as a person, how you’re showing up, and your underlying mental and emotional states impact your performance immensely. Your performance is a snapshot of the state of your life. And when you’re in the spotlight, vice comes to the fore along with virtue.
Critical Factors in Performance & Effectiveness Coaching
Though many factors influence your performance in professional situations, five top the list and form the nucleus of Performance & Effectiveness Coaching.
360° MindPower™
Your capacity to remain focused, calm, aware, and relaxed under pressure is critical to performance. In the field of neuroscience, this capacity is known as operating in the “blue zone.” This mental and neurological state does not happen by chance, but is the product of training, particularly in 360° MindPower™ practices such as:
- Body awareness
- Bracketing
- Breathwork
- Concentration
- Effortlessness (flow)
- Relaxation
- Sensory acuity
- Problem solving
- Decision making
- Creative Ideation
- Visualization
- PMA (Positive Mental Attitude)
Emotional Wisdom
Most people can markedly improve their outer game by strengthening their inner game. This involves changing habitual self-talk, impulsivity, and emotional sabotaging. Learning how to constructively reframe perceptions and situations, while coaching yourself positively from within, will dramatically boost your performance.
Progressive Training
Some 90% of all training regimens are maintenance plans, geared to keep your performance right where it’s at. This is as true of people in gyms as it is of those in boardrooms. It takes a seismic shift in thinking to structure training and learning with continuous performance improvement (CPI) in mind. IPC applies advanced planning tools, targeted metrics, and purposeful training strategies that help you remain relentlessly focused on your near-term goals (milestones).
Human Performance Factors
Every performance undertaking ultimately consists of converting defined inputs into valued outputs through a work process with specific time, cost, quality, and resource constraints. But you’d be amazed at how many professionals don’t know what these parameters are for their roles. The further up the chain of command you go, the truer this becomes. It’s astounding to see how much better you perform when you learn to zoom in on the true measures of success—including those related to youyr communication, influence, self-belief, leadership, and purposefulness.
Wellbeing
I have never known a soul whose performance didn’t leap commensurate with improvements in her or his wellbeing and life balance. Your relationships, home environment, fitness level—even how much fun and recreation you have in your life—all figure into how well you perform on the court, field, or stage or in the boardroom. A happier, healthier person will inevitably be a higher-performing person. But wellbeing is no accident. A top priority of IPC is to help you cultivate it consciously.
Tapping the Power of Motivation
Through many years of experience as a performance coach, I’ve learned a lot about critical performance factors. One lesson is indelible: to recognize progress you must first know your starting point, otherwise known as baselining. But just measuring things because they’re easy to measure doesn’t help. The performance measures you choose matter profoundly and must be specific, accurate, and relevant to your real-world performance tasks.
Valid metrics also are key to motivation and goal setting; however, different goal-setting strategies work for different people. Some people do better with a close-up perspective, focusing on short-term, concrete, measurable goals—a “climbing the ladder” performance orientation. Others do better with a big-picture perspective, a kind of peak performance vision that’s more holistic. Still others thrive when there’s a spirit of competition. And some people don’t respond well to goals at all, preferring to pursue a general direction in the faith that sincere efforts will bear fruit.
What this means is that your coach must really understand you and your motivational language. This is one of the most important aspects of performance & effectiveness coaching.
The Inner Journey of Performance Coaching
Not everyone will admit they have room for growth—or that they could use some help closing the gap. IPC is ultimately an inner journey that takes courage, honesty, and humility. Humble people are always the ones who improve their performance the most.
IPC is effective because it’s tailored to your personality, mindset, individual needs, career stage and motivational style. I cannot emphasize this point enough. A performance coach must be willing to get to know you well and meet you where you’re at. If they come in believing they already know what you need because you’re like everyone else—a cookie-cutter approach—you’re unlikely to ever glimpse, let alone realize, your peak performance potential.
Shoot for the Stars—and Become One!
Performance and effectiveness coaching informs most of the professional coaching I do, because whether I’m coaching executives, producers, nonprofit leaders, or performing artists, their results are always centerstage.
You can most certainly improve your performance, since it’s ultimately a product of conscious and creative design and steadfast effort. You can take it to heights you might not imagine because, quite possibly, some key drivers of your current performance and effectiveness are hidden to you. My purpose is to help you discover and appreciate your performance profile, see where you’re strong, know what you’re truly capable of, and learn how to master your performance—inside and out—while enacting a perpetual improvement strategy that not only aims for the stars, but takes you there.
If you’d like to discuss how you can take your performance and effectiveness to new heights, please call or email me to set up a complimentary 30-minute phone or web conference. You’ll come away seeing your performance potential in a whole new light.