All Healthy High Achievers have Performance Lifestyles!

1] You establish a practical spiritual context for who you are, why and how to fully engage with the world, not longer encumbered by the negative influences of your ego.

2] You get your life into alignment, meaning: the way your life is structured, you lifestyle and your goals.

3] You no longer misinterpret uncomfortable emotions, fatigue, stress and fatigue as you evolve.

4] You learn how to story your life around what you want, not what you don’t want

5] You stop making goals out of lifestyle proficiencies like eating better and exercising, (these are not goals) and improve your lifestyle so that you can better achieve your life, business and sporting goals.

6] You get so clear on your goals, you know what to fully engage on.

7] You have a better quality of life.

It’s all about keeping your goals to yourself.

We’ve all done it and been told by hundreds of guru’s to declare our goals to our friends and get “leverage” on ourselves. Meanwhile this seemingly powerful idea, is preventing you from achieving your goals.

Yes, the problem is, you get the accolades before you’ve actually accomplished the goal and this kills your motivation.

Now imagine how you feel when secretly you know that impressing others with a goal completed is waiting for you in the near future.

How motivated are you?

Very.

See the video below with Derek Sivers.

Now about the only exception I can think of at this time, is this:

You have to tell some people your goals, like your associates and those who have a stake in it. Just don’t tell those people you want to impress. Therein lies your motivation.

We want you to desire to seek quality of life in everything you do; always.

To build momentum in your PerformanceLifestyle you must get to know yourself intimately – the good and bad – and discover how you function as a human being on multiple levels. This conscious awareness will help you develop the mindset and skills you need to maximize your abilities and focus in the important areas of life.

In our fast paced, success-driven world, where information transmits at rates never before experienced in human history, we need to develop a lifestyle where we proactively resolve our deepest issues and challenges, evolve our minds and actions so we can find the performance alignment we need to fully achieve our goals. (realize our potential).

Our competitive “performance culture” drives our society. It IS “survival of the fittest”, so no aspect of your lifestyle is a goal, you continue to improve your lifestyle so that you can achieve your goals and thrive in your life far beyond one dimension. To thrive is to achieve your goals while maintaining a high level of health. Living a PerformanceLifestyle requires that you learn and integrate a new set of skills that are practiced proactively. When you do, you are able to achieve much higher levels of success.

Without a performance lifestyle, you increase your chances for negative results. You must learn and invest in your lifestyle, get grounded in experience and recognize that – it is how we live that determines what you can achieve. Your ability, is based on your capacity and energy to perform and also requires that you successfully cope with, change or eliminate negative circumstances so you can move forward. By doing this, you can move past those barriers and open new doors for healthy goal achievement. Healthy goal achievement is the success benchmark for a PerformanceLifestyle and that success has no end – just your willingness to resolve, evolve and find the beginning to what you will achieve next.

I was with a client last night, who started coaching with me a few weeks back with his wife. He’s a very successful business owner who was basically ambivalent to his health and quite overweight.

Now, how do get through to a wonderful guy in that position, to not only change his eating habits but to change his lifestyle?

The answer is help him become more successful, and help him discover all the benefits of the lifestyle, in the context of the goals he want’s to achieve. Truth is, the lifestyle is all about how you achieve your goals; health, living at or near your ideal weight, balance and sustainability are really what you maintain in that process.

But even as a high achiever, his head was about as far way from that simple reality as can be. Make no mistake though, you could not believe how incredibly fast learning performance lifestyle got his attention when I didn’t take him off his path for him to look in the rear view mirror.

You see, achievers are always focused on  their goals, and things like eating better and exercise are not goals.

He has no interest setting dietary and fitness goals (at least at this time with respect to fitness) although he does see the value in eating better and exercising if it helps him achieve is life and business goals and that’s where the shift is really taking place.

His issues are performance related. He’s sick and tired of being tired, doesn’t want to get sick, and no longer wants to feel like he’s got to prod his way through the day feeling like he’s up against a wall energetically, only to come home and crash at the end of the day and eat!

He wants more focus, more energy, less weight, better health, less risk of disease and more security that he and his family are going to be OK.

So I asked him, how do you think you’re going to accomplish all of that, without distracting yourself from your goals? You know those things you wake up motivated to achieve each day.

Well, part of his answer was, “I can’t get so far off track to begin with”. I did the happy dance.

Yes, Yes, Yes! You must get your lifestyle working for you in a way that you enjoy.

I then showed him the skills to do that the wall and he was hooked. For the first time ever, I think he could see why he has been so challenged when it comes to taking care of himself.

He sounded like me, years ago. Why doesn’t everyone know this stuff?

The answer is simple, the Performance Lifestyle formula has never before been assembled the way it is today for you to begin taking advantage of in your own life. This is the next level in healthy, “successful” living!

It’s not until you have the right mindset (first), then the right skill set, that you will begin to handle the stress of life in a proactive, and effective way and know what traps to avoid. Your lifestyle ultimately works best with experience, but it starts by having the lifestyle mindset and skills set.

What ultimately sold my client on making changes?

I asked him, how much time do you have to lose weight and make up for health problems? And what does it cost you not to function and perform well each day? He said, its incalculable! Then I said, then you don’t have time to eat, think and live poorly.

Ready to start making changes?

He said, I can’t wait!

~ JAM

At any given moment in time you have a certain energy capacity, that can be expanded, but at times, not in the moment when you need it to. That requires time and space.

And that is hard to accept, especially when you’re a high achiever faced with performance demands and the need to stay productive.

We fight this reality, and we struggle.

Down deep, you know differently, but you’ve bought into the idea that you are a machine; our westernized thinking is very mechanistic – input, throughout, output – and unfortunately your body does not work solely on that principle. If it did, simply eating healthy food and exercising would be all you need to know to look, feel and perform better.

You and I both know that’s not true.

Right in the moment when you are inspired to move forward, your body does not want to go forward. It pulls back and you are forced to shift into a different mode, else “hitting the wall” or “running out of energy”, becomes imminent, predictable, and an unavoidable experience.

So what do you do?

It’s either manage your personal energy or dramatically reduce your quality of life – your capacity to function and perform well. This IS the challenge of our time.

It is in managing our energy so to speak, that we can regulate our performance, expand our capacities, and manage our energy while we achieve our goals, without depleting ourselves to far in the process.

This IS the challenge that it is, because in our success driven world, we think that success is a function of motive alone, but we forget that the suffix of motivation “ation”, is all about energy!

If you have the motive, but don’t have the energy, you are a very detrimental place. Will power will last only so long until adrenal fatigue takes over and the wear and tear on your body, takes it’s toll, limiting your capacity, and your capability… due to lower energy.

This idea of managing energy, has always been the age old dilemma for achievers and it is at the root of ALL poor performance and lifestyle decisions.

As an achiever, I had struggled with this my whole life, until only recently in the grand scheme of things, when I learned how to stop struggling, surrender and actually manage my energy.

I would hit the wall, and not know why, and then fight it…

Ever been there?

You are running out of energy, but you’ve got lots to do, so you struggle with the exhaustion by putting the petal to the metal. You hit the wall because you are not managing your energy and you don’t know what to do. Maybe in theory yes, but in experience, no.

You are performing at a pace and at a level that your lifestyle does not support.

I know this is a real bitch.

How the heck to you slow down in the face of game that never stops?

You surrender.

Yes, I said it! ( achiever blasphemy!)

As an achiever, this has become my mantra and it was revealed to me in a conversation with Colin Collard and Shawn Phillips many months back in beautiful Golden, Colorado.

I never quite put it in those terms, even though I have been surrendering for sometime… sometimes by force. Now surrender has become a proactive affair.

In our conversation, we we’re talking about PerformanceLifestyle and the realities of how we’ve all bought into the seductive idea of non stop performance, while chasing the successful “lifestyle”, but realize we’ve been chasing the wrong carrot!

What we really need is a successful lifestyle to support our performance to get the golden carrot.

It’s all a matter of how you define your lifestyle. In a PerformanceLifestyle we define lifestyle as how you achieve your goals.

To live a balance, with vibrant health and peace of mind, you must “surrender” at times to the natural experience we talk about in PerformanceLifestyle training, yet in a proactive way.

Trust me, if you think you can just keep going while living on artificial stimulants, filling your body with nutrient poor food, let alone being physically inactive because you don’t have enough time and excess capacity to activate and strengthen your body, then you are GUARANTEED,  to have performance (low energy) problem, weight, and health problems in your near or not to distant future.

The latest diet and exercise program will not save you.

To know how to surrender in a proactive way, we need to shift our mindset to understanding how to function and perform well, to “thrive” in the process of achieving our goals, and not simply make goals out of stuff, that are part and parcel of that outcome, like eating better and exercising, which are not goals in and of themselves.

As my associate, Shawn Phillips states… Fitness is not about Fitness.

We need to focus on what the essential lifestyle concepts and skills are for achieving our goals… including but not limited to fueling our body with great tasting food, staying active and conditioned, and achieving our real goals in life… without driving our selves into the ground!

To do this, we need to understand how to get all aspects of our lifestyle working for us, not against us.

In the age of achievement, your capacity to perform well becomes your dominant focus, and each and every aspect of your lifestyle is essential to your success.

Don’t struggle with it all, proactively surrender, and learn the insights and skills that enable you to move forward in a position of strength.

This is the way of the Healthy High Achiever

What do you think?

I’d love to hear your thoughts…

John Allen Mollenhauer “JAM”

Ever feel like this Bear, surrounded by Giants?

Has life ever felt like a bear, where you being clobbered by giants all around you?

In a Performance Lifestyle, being able to tell a story that supports what you want is everything.

Stories that don’t support you are the giants, and when your stories (your thinking) do not support you, you will get clobbered.

The difference between this reality and the picture on the left, is that you can see the Giants football team, you can’t see so clearly when you have a story that doesn’t support you, but you can feel it’s negative impact.

You know something is wrong, you just can’t quite put your finger on it.

That’s why the curse of the capable person is drama, negativity, and beating the drum of a story that does not get you want you want.

In the video below, the lead character, Brock, has to face his giants when his coach calls him on his unsupportive (negative) story about the upcoming game against the “giants”. The thing not to take away from this post is the heroic “give me your very best” mantra of the video as a lifestyle solution. Heroics are not lifestyle solutions, they are tactics that summon huge amounts of energy for short periods of time. Live that way and you’ll burnout as a performance addict.

Give me your very best, is a powerful mantra and admirable, and it has it’s place in a lifestyle that will work for you (sometimes, you just gotta summon huge amounts of energy) but it is not sustainable without your lifestyle supporting the capacity to do so and even then, “giving your very best” is at best, periodic.

I know of few people giving their very best all the time. Those who do, are usually burnt out. It’s only those people who are living performance lifestyle, who can give their very best on a periodic basis and do so consistently. And the truth is, that’s all you need to do, to be wildly successfully. You don’t need to be doing your “very” best all the time.

The reason is the need for recuperation; which is why most people don’t give their very best most of the time or at all. They aren’t managing their energy and are chronically fatigued, so giving their very best gives rise to complacency and laziness as the status quo, as their energy level sinks without the level of recuperation they need to sustain.

Facing the Giants – Your Giants.

The thing to really take away from this video, is what happens when your thinking is not aligned with the outcome you want and how a change in story can change your mindset and take you to a place(s) you never imagined. Literally. Add to that, the reality check on doing your very best and the need for the energy to do it and your very best will become more regular. And that’s just one reason why we live a performance lifestyle.

In this video, I the “giants” are the negative, unsupportive stories holding the team back. Your story is your mindset and to the extent that you develop more supportive stories, the more stable and forward moving you becomes. Just like the team in this video, amazing things can happen when you change your story.