Healthy High Achiever Blog

Living a performance lifestyle that yields the health AND success you want is primarily the result of managing your energy, food quality and activity levels in the process of achieving your goals. But what gives you the ability to do this, is the understanding that you have more control than you realize.

Whether you feel like you are in control or not, you are and can be. You also need to be, most of the time.

Recently, I’ve been reading a book called "On the Edge and In Control" by Dr Deborah Bright an 8 Step Program for Taking Charge of Your Life. Initially, I hesitated to read the book, because I felt I was already in charge of my life and given the always looming potential for information overload these days, I am always filtering what I need to read and what I don’t to save time and energy. But given the book was recommended by Eddie Enriquez, President of my company Performance Lifestyle Solutions, I decided it was worth taking a look. WOW!

If I was in charge of my life before, I feel WAY more in control now. For me, knowing the actual dynamics of control is helping me manage my energy better, perform at better levels and make a valuable difference, both in how I take care of myself and serve others.

Learning the dynamics of maintaining control in your life and achieving your goals regardless of constant change, changing priorities, unexpected circumstances and depleted energy from time to time, is absolutely essential for lifestyle performance.

After years of teaching “healthy living” programs, and before the context of the Performance Lifestyle “system” was developed, a good portion of my coaching time with clients was dealing with obstacles and excuses about why something was not possible or too hard, or talking about achieving the desired results, which for some didn’t come; not because the “program” didn’t work, but because they were abdicating their control. The guidance they were getting fell flat.

I changed my teaching to the context of the Performance Lifestyle (which is a healthy lifestyle) and started targeting achievement oriented people; not because I didn’t want to help people get through their obstacles, (even achievers need that support) but because I wanted to cultivate what Dr Bright calls the "Pro Achiever" mindset we need to succeed from the start.

I call this the Performance Mindset, and I found that this mindset was essential for people to take control of their lifestyle, and stop looking for silver bullet answers that may actually be valuable, but don’t reinforce personal “responsibleness” - which Dr Bright sees as the key to control and the heart of taking charge of your life.

Understanding how to achieve your goals successfully.

The Performance Lifestyle System is all about achieving the breakthrough energy you need to achieve your life, and business goals. The people who get the best results are the people who take charge and develop control and know how to achieve their goals without getting caught up with stuff that may matter, but not that much.

Note: In the Performance Lifestyle System, you won’t get caught up debating over the science or sleep, or the difference between Beta Carotene, Retinol – A and your need for it, the ins and outs of Omega 3’s, or “analyzing the perfect exercise routine”. You can be sure that the lifestyle strategies you’ll be learning have already taken all those questions into consideration. You need the right frame of mind first, before you juggle all that stuff.

What we’re focused on first, is getting control of your lifestyle so you can achieve your goals starting with your energy! We are focused on developing a healthy high performing body as the central focus of the message. Once you have your lifestyle reinforcing health and success, THEN, you can go deep and focus on all the ins and outs.

I’ve learned allot of achievement oriented skills over the years, but only recently have I realized just how important “The Performance Mindset” really is to lifestyle success and success in general.

In today’s "moving forward" momentum- oriented world, unless you have the skills of achievement, your life can feel very out of control and actually get out of control, especially when you are giving up control and you don’t even realize you’re doing it.

Dr Bright, in her book, talks about how often we give up control. I was surprised. If you are not living a healthy lifestyle, let alone a Performance Lifestyle, chances are good, that you are giving up a lot of your control and you want to get it back! Focusing on performance inspires that.

I assessed my life, and came to realize that in key areas, I have actually been giving up my control. Of course, poor energy management was the biggest cause. I felt I lacked the capacity to take control in these key areas, and While partially true, I was also giving up control because I didn’t have the right mindset.

When we won’t have the right mindset and give up control that alone can cause poor energy and prevent us from taking steps to reclaim the breakthrough energy we want.

I was not new to the idea of control, matter of fact, I had been promoting the idea behind the title of this post for sometime, particularly as it related to energy management, but I MUST say that Dr Bright expanded my understanding of control significantly and thankfully.

Copyright © 2007 Custom Media Communications, Inc All Rights Reserved Worldwide.
This article requires permission from the author for re-printing in any capacity. Please Track back to the article on this site.

There is a lot of talk about energy today and understandably so. We have more demands on our personal energy than at any other time in history and I’m not talking about the kind of energy that we used to spend "plowing the field".

I’m talking about the vital energy (likened to the energy of a battery) that we spend processing information, staring at a computer screen for hours on end, communicating, contemplating, worrying, planning etc. This energy is in short supply, and a lack of it causes what you’ll soon come to know as the downward trend.

Discover how to reverse the downward trend. Download the Performance Lifestyle Manifesto.

On most people’s minds is how they can increase this "vital" energy. Don’t you feel that way? I do. Matter of fact, it was the need to manage my energy better for peak performance, to accomplish my goals in a more powerful way and improve my quality of life, that inspired the development of the Performance Lifestyle System.

For years, given the level at which I was performing, I was draining my vital energy in a big way and it was really hampering my attitude and success. Not only was I not looking or feeling the way I wanted, or performing at the level I wanted to maintain, my quality of life was going downhill because I always felt tired.

At one point I blamed it on "not getting enough protein", but how wrong I was. I was overlooking the fundamental idea of energy management.

But I didn’t want just to increase my energy a little I wanted what I later termed "breakthrough energy". Now you may think that’s just a great sounding spin on the idea of increasing energy, but it’s not. Breakthrough energy is the energy you get when you take a step or two back so that you can take many more forward in a position of strength.

Think about the last time you made a major stride forward in your body, with a business or life goal; I would venture to say if was after a sustained recuperative period where you were seriously recharged and rejuvenated. Well, it’s that kind of energy that I wanted to take advantage of on a more consistent basis, not merely once in a while after the opportunity to vacation, to achieve breakthough success in my body, business and life; which leads me to the main point of this post:

What we learn about in terms of "increasing energy” usually falls into tactical categories which are valuable, but miss the main point of energy management. To achieve breakthrough energy, you must have a lifestyle strategy or plan that works to regenerate the energy you need on a consistent basis.

Here’s what I mean. 

1) Getting more sleep or taking a nap are important ideas to understand, though they’re value is diminished if your lifestyle is burning you out, significantly out of balance to begin with and overspent.  What should be an enjoyable experience can actually become an uncomfortable experience.

2) Stimulation. There is no greater delusion in the world than thinking you are gaining energy when you’re actually losing it, especially when the method for stimulating yourself is not even health promoting such as when you consume commercial solutions for increasing energy like Red Bull. I suppose it has it’s time and place, but it’s not a method to depend on, more than every once in a while when the absolute need arises. 

3) Being more efficient. Energy allocation is one of the greatest skills you can learn. Especially today, we simply can’t spend our energy "all over the map". If we do, sleep and rest can’t even do their job! A great discipline yes, but you can’t allocate energy you don’t have. The less you have the more you spend.

4) Positive thinking is an important element of energy management, because negative energy is associated with a poor attitude and a poor outlook and that can dampen anyone’s spirit and success; but it’s just plain hard to be positive when you’re on a downward energy trend. Positivity takes energy!

5) Working with  the bodies’ energy center’s to increase energy flow (Chakra’s)… and other less practical, methods of energy management (not to diminish their value or the value of their practitioners), are useful practices as well. But I say “less practical”, only because energy management as we teach in the Performance Lifestyle System has to be something that anybody can do, anytime independently, and it has to be easy to grasp. Methods that fit this category have a degree of mysticism involved and require a great deal more understanding to be applicable to most people. It is my belief that there are many more “tier 1” answers that people overlook that should be put in play first, before “relying” on the less practical.

6) There are many others. Matter of fact, Jon Gordon Author of Energy Addict, will give you 101 Physical, Mental, and Spiritual Ways to Energize Your Life. Virtually all lifestyle factors can be discussed in the context of energy management.

So What’s Missing?

What’s missing is a lifestyle “strategy” that promotes energy balance as the basis to health and high performance. A lifestyle strategy is different for everyone, but nonetheless there are essential skills that make it possible. Athletes and other healthy high achieving people know and live by these skills, because their very success depends on it!

For example, when you learn how to "periodize" your week the quality of your life is going to change in a big Way. If you want to know how to achieve breakthrough energy, you want to learn this key to success.

This is just one of the skills you’ll learn when you take the 7 Steps to Look, Feel and Perform Better, In a Lifestyle that Works for You! - See The Driver’s Manual of the Performance Lifestyle.

On February 13th, 2007 the Wall Street Journal ran a full page article titled HIGH PERFORMANCE: Serial, Timely Transformations Help Successful Companies Stay Ahead of the Curve.

In the first paragraph is goes on to say "It took man about 3 million years to evolve and create companies. By contrast, companies have about the blink of an eye to evolve or become dinosaurs". The rest of the article goes on to talk about how technological change has essentially sped things up to a lightening fast pace (as we all know at this point) and gives a 4-prong plan of attack for companies that want to win at the Darwinian game.