Healthy High Achiever Blog

When the great Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz wrote the book, The Power of Full Engagement, they made a powerful point that I’m not sure enough people got, even though it was on the cover of their book - "Managing energy, not time, is the key to high performance and personal renewal".

These guys were a major inspiration for me, and influenced my thinking differently about health, lifestyle and the mindset of high achieving people. But the one thing I’m reminded of over and over again, when I read that quote… is this. Many people understand this concept. But do they know how to apply it in their life? Do they know the implications, the realities, and what it really takes to manage energy?

Once you start to explore these questions you immediately start seeing that your goals and how you plan to achieve those goals will be become the key determinants in how you look, feel and perform, and vice versa.

Think about it, we wake up and achieve objectives and goals every day, from the moment we open our eyes. It’s how we achieve them and whether we compromise our health in the process, that determines how well we’ll perform while we do it.

It’s not as easy as the traditional model of living one way (overwhelmed, exhausted and overweight) and then trying to solve the problems that arise with another (dieting and exercising). In a strange way, the problematic way is easier to grasp.

As Loehr and Schwartz put it, the Power of Full Engagement is about managing your energy more skillfully both on an off the job. I highly recommend you read this book. One thing I can tell you now is that the Power of Full Engagement does not mean "over engagement" to the point of driving yourself into the ground.

What’s driving you? You’ll answer this question when you have a Performance Lifestyle. The answers will prevent you from living over engaged and ultimately change you life and body, forever.

To understand the difference between full engagement and over-engagement, you have to experience a Performance Lifestyle. It’s much more dynamic than the current way people live, yet the quality of life is better. By the name of it, you might think it means you’re always performing, but the reality is, quite the opposite.

Fully engaged assumes you’re managing your energy, and have a lifestyle that’s promoting success. Over-engaged is the direct opposite, as your lifestyle is compromised in the process, therefore you drive yourself into the ground. This is called the downward trend.

Learn how to break out of it, read the Performance Lifestyle Manifesto.

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.

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First off…My hat is off to Chris Carmichael! I recommend this book to anyone as a good book to have in your library. You will learn something from every page that will help you live a performance lifestyle better.  I consider it a great start to defining what it means to live a performance lifestyle; although I agree with the others who wrote reviews on the book that this book starts out strong, but then descends into another "before and after" diet and exercise book that lacks clear distinction.

As founder of PerformanceLifestyle.com, a businessman, lifestyle coach and trainer, and also founder of NutrientRich.com, I sought out this book to get an even better grasp on what it means to live a lifestyle that yields better health and performance.

Here are my thoughts…

A book about performance living is not necessarily a book about body transformation, although body transformation is a likely result of a performance focused lifestyle. Relationships and improved sex are good subjects yet as Chris Carmichael says, I think they are components of a "winning life", not the central focus of a performance lifestyle which is really about managing your personal energy, food quality and activity levels and can confuse the subject a bit. Nonetheless I learned alot from this book.

Having spent years understanding performance "lifestyle" concepts and language, in the process of constructing the Performance Lifestyle System, which I’ve learned will always be in refinement, I can appreciate how hard it is to write a book on this subject and not get caught up in becoming a diet or exercise book. I did this early on but I knew in my gut that a performance lifestyle is about so much more. Diet and exercise alone don’t deal with the real problem for every day people and athletes alike, which is managing personal energy, time and space, food quality and activity levels…

Training and conditioning programs are a component of managing your activity levels and are relative to your goals, but they are not the central focus of a performance lifestyle.

I think it’s also harder to understand a performance lifestyle if you are coming from the angle of the elite athlete and trying to apply those insights to even the achievement oriented Joe and Jane. Elite Athletes have very different lifestyles that are set up to reinforce success in sport; their lifestyles are health and performance oriented, whereas the average achiever is living one way, and trying to solve it with another. 

The key is now helping other people set their lifestyles up to fast track their health and success and become healthy high achievers.

I am a raving fan of Chris Carmichael and read all of his books. I am promoting his book at the listmania list for the Performance
Lifestyle at Amazon.com, and here at www.PerformanceLifestyle.com.

Read the Performance Lifestyle Manifesto