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.

This is why sports are such a great learning tool, especially when it comes to living a PerformanceLifestyle.
Heather Dorniden shows us what it looks like to keep your story straight (in your head), when things aren’t going well.

Here at PerformanceLifestyle.com we have been acknowledging the culture of achievement for sometime, because it has thrown most people’s lifestyles into a tailspin with overwhelm and burnout leading to overweight and health complications.

Simply put, your lifestyle is the way in which you achieve your goals and most people have never had lifestyle training, or coaching much the way an athlete would have to learn how to structure their lives, manage their energy, eat and train to achieve their goals.

The general public works longer, more consistently, and has to achieve more goals throughout the year than the typical athlete does under performance conditions, yet they don’t have anywhere near the level of lifestyle support that enables an athlete to function and perform as well as they do.

Hence, this is the reason why we don’t cater to athletes here at PerformanceLifestyle.com, but have opened up the Performance Lifestyle idea to the other 97% who may not be into sports or even a fitness enthusiast, but live in the culture of achievement and need to to change “improve” their lifestyle.

The benchmark is the PerformanceLifestyle formula above, but most people, including our children, have never learned the lifestyle mindset and skills set, and that’s why obesity and other dis-ease statistics keep going up and up in the wrong direction. We are driving ourselves so out of balance with a constant drive to achieve, that are bodies are not functioning and performing nearly as well as they could due to a depleted state.

That much change.

You can only burn the candle a both ends, eat nutrient poor food, be busy yet physically inactive and deal with all the unresolved issues that challenge you day to day and drive you to the point where you feel like you can’t stop to solve the real problem for so long before you run into real problems.

It’s happening with our kids and it creates performance addiction.

We think the need is to start living life at the next level where you buy into a new and improved set of concepts, and leave that old mentality behind. It’s the same mindset athletes and other healthy high achieving people have. It’s extra ordinary not overly exceptional, but you will appear “extraordinary” and exceptional without trying when you begin applying your rights to live in balance with vibrant health and peace of mind so you can achieve even your most ambitious goals.

Key is, our kids need to learn this out of the gate, so they don’t run the race to nowhere!

In our guts we know it probably has got some benefit, but most of us have no idea how powerful meditation really is it’s important place in a successful lifestyle, and therefore, rarely meditate.

Why is meditation so misunderstood?

Well, like most aspects of wellness and healthy living, once they get pulled out of the context of living, and are turned into industries and goals, genre’s and institutions of behavior and for some life pursuits into of themselves they become less practical.

Setting a “goal” to meditate one hour a day or live a life in quite meditation (which, as Katsumoto from The Last Samurai with Tom Cruise would say “would not be a wasted life”) but when making a goal out of meditation the purpose of idea can get lost.

Not say that you won’t still get some benefit if you set a goal to meditate and follow through, that’s not the point; but when you make goals out of aspects of living that enable you to achieve your real goals and you don’t do it perhaps because you are unclear as to it’s purpose, it becomes a tail chasing experience. One wonders why you might not be achieving bigger goals in your life when you can’t follow through on the personal practice of meditation or eating better or working out…

The key word here is practice. Meditation is a practice so that you can do something greater. The same would be true of eating a Nutrient Rich diet. Why are you eating healthy if you aren’t trying get some where in your life in a particular kind of style. That’s why the practice of meditation is part of your lifestyle.

I can’t tell you how many really smart people I meet who struggle with making time for meditation and what they don’t realize is that life is a meditation. When you really understand what meditation is you realize that in it’s most practical form, it’s the stilling of the mind and listening to your source.

When Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai was battling Katsumoto’s guard to no success in a practice session. the leaders son, said to Captain Algren, “no mind”. What he meant was stop thinking.

Meditation helps you get in touch with your source, staying calm and listening to the unfolding and then using your mind to steer your energy where you want it to go. And while that and many other descriptions of meditation can be explained, the description just provided can happen while you are in the midst of the intensity of the day or sitting with legs’ crossed on a mountain top.

This morning, I read one of the first articles that tells me the world is coming around to the PerformanceLifestyle view of seeing all mindfulness (or mindlessness depending on how you look at it) wellness, health, energy management and fitness… life “practices” as part of the lifestyle to achieve your goals and live the quality of life you want. It even references the idea of a high performance lifestyle.

In an article on meditation?

That is unusual, but I suspect it will become more commonplace.

Notice who wrote the article; a corporate Trainer who knows how to share the benefits of this ancient practice and put it into the context of the performance culture we live in today.

Contact Name: Subodh Gupta
Role: Corporate Trainer
Company: Indian Foundation for Scientific Yoga

Traditionally you would never see the two mix.

He says:

Corporate leaders often have to perform at high levels of personal effectiveness and productivity and that, too, under constant work pressure.

They are constantly involved in analyzing, planning, strategic decision-making and reading, which need superior brain power.

The most practical and effective tool to increase brain power is the daily practice of the meditation which improves cardiovascular health, reduces harmful stress and develops the whole brain.

Meditation is often considered as a practice for relaxing, however, people fail to realise that meditation practice can actually act as a effective tool for boosting brain power.

After meditation one can feel more balanced and calm. This enables one to take the right and effective decision. Calm mind can also help in building healthy interpersonal relationships. One can feel more energetic and develop more focused attention. Read More.

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.

It read:

“John,

This story reminds me of our conversation on how “doing nothing” is sometimes the best thing for us…

You may remember the name Alex Tew. He’s was that young, aspiring student that found internet fame in 2005 after making $1m with his ‘Million Dollar Homepage’, set-up to fund his university education. He now hopes his new site will provide an antidote to information overload.

A website that invites users to log on and do nothing has now become a web phenomenon.

The site – donothingfor2minutes.com – has received more than 2 million visitors since launching nearly two weeks ago, according to its creators, entrepreneur Alex Tew and developer Ben Dowling.

Users arriving at the site are presented with a sunset view and the sound of ocean waves, together with a countdown that resets to 2 minutes if the mouse or keyboard are touched.

Not everyone is up to the challenge though, explains Tew, “only 38% of visitors are managing to take a step back and do a full 2 minutes of nothing, which I think highlights the point of the site.”

“The idea is to use technology to give back what it has taken away: calm,” explains Tew, “I read somewhere that our brains are being re-wired by the internet, because we get a little dopamine kick every time we check our e-mail or Twitter or Facebook and there’s a new update.

So we’re all developing a bit of ADD, which can’t be good.”

According to Tew, the site – which has received more than 250,000 “likes” on Facebook – is not a business venture but simply “a fun side-project” and a “meditation on how technology is changing the way we think and behave.”

~end

I say…Hat’s off again to Alex Tew.

When I first read the email I was just in from the gym after a nice conversation with one of the trainers. No sooner did I walk in the house, I read the email and my first impulse was to do something, then do nothing, but that kind of thinking always flag’s me to look at the order at which I do things. So, I did the nothing option first.

I often meditate to determine my next steps or actions throughout the day, so it was very familiar to me, but since there was countdown clock on this site and I was aware that I was going to be doing nothing for 2 minutes, it was very interesting to experience what doing nothing for 2 minutes actually is like.

Many of us have done nothing before.  In fact very soon I am going to do nothing for two whole weeks as I embark on a rejuvenating and medically supervised fast. I’m not even going to digest food!

But you may not be ready for the ultimate in rejuvenation, a fast, so try this. Doing nothing for even two minutes is a challenge and during that time, what makes it a challenge is this:

When you do nothing for a period of time you end up facing your true present condition energetically, psychologically, physically and sometimes even emotionally. Hint: This is why living in balance, with vibrant health and peace of mind so you can achieve even your most ambitious goals, is a lifestyle, not something you do after your lifestyle drives you into a wall.

Basically, when your energy is not directed outwards in some form of achievement, which can often masque your present condition, you begin to restore yourself. Facing your true condition can be uncomfortable and that’s one really good reason why people can’t and often don’t stop themselves. It’s just too uncomfortable; which, is why you want your lifestyle working for you, supporting you every step of the way, so that when you do stop and take care of yourself and your body, it is a peaceful experience.

If you have significantly low energy, two minutes is just enough time to begin the process of restoration, to help you in your day, maybe even a little longer, without getting groggy which would signal you’ve gone too far at a time when you are not prepared to go into a rest or sleep mode.

So, if you start to get lethargic and feel like a tidal wave of exhaustion is on its way, you are in personal energy debt and you need to learn how to manage your energy better.

Give it a shot and do nothing for two minutes. Remember to breathe and focus inward on your thoughts.