co-author of “the curse of the capable”
creator of the performance lifestyle®
Overachievement, for me, started early
I began working as an entrepreneur at the age of 9. I grew up in a modest, middle-income family, and my parents were pretty frugal. So, I enjoyed the freedom of having my own money. I never thought I would be anything but an entrepreneur and a business owner.
By age 19, while going to college, I had not only been running a small business for a decade while going to school, playing three sports, and “growing up,” I had already bought my first gym (open 19 hours per day) and then, by 21, co-founded what would become a chain of gyms.
I was a driven achiever type and applauded for it, but while my friends were just getting started after college, I was facing my first stint with burnout.
I couldn’t wrap my head around what “it” was that was driving me so hard, nor why I felt so worn down. I thought something was wrong with me!
Fatigue was considered an excuse in the ’80s and ’90s, but it wasn’t, and today it’s not.
But at that time, I turned to personal development to sort out what was happening, and all I heard was to push through fatigue with “mental toughness” in one form of psychology or another.
Then the Internet hit, and before I knew it, I had access to more information and opportunity than ever before in my history. Now, more over-engaged than ever, I faced a dilemma—the busier I got, I had even less time to care for myself, my body, and my life.
I started living with persistent performance anxiety, which I later learned was due to depleted energy.
Always engaged in learning, working, socializing, etc., I never stopped to regenerate. My sleep was limited, and I was afraid to stop, let alone rest, restore and rejuvenate. The story was that “I had to keep up and keep going or miss out.
Meanwhile, “energy debt” (fatigue) accumulated and compounded. I was crushing it on the outside, but on the inside, I was getting crushed by excess stress and fatigue.
With so much going on, I was barely hanging on, and it started affecting my health, success, relationships, and well-being.
By 31, when the 2000 market crashed, I was crashing, signaling I had to correct course. So I started thinking about a new way to achieve my goals without burning out or trading my health for success.
… a new approach to achieving my goals without burning out or trading my health for success.
This was not just about living “healthy” for me. Undoubtedly, I saw that as essential and thought I was already pretty adept at healthy living—nutrition, and fitness—which I was.
But being healthy was the given, not my goal.
The thing is, I grew to realize; that if I was living out of energy balance—overexerted, under-recuperated, and weary, I wasn’t living as “healthy” as I thought.
This was about a new approach to achieving my, or anyone’s, life, career, or business goals for that matter, without feeling so tired all the time, like I was in this picture on the left, ironically, at a conference on nutrition and natural products!
I needed to learn how to manage my energy, including but not limited to the qaulity of the food I was eating and my activity levels.
And to do that, I would need an approach (a lifestyle) that was adept at rejuventatiand recovery and optimal for energy management, health, and higher performance.
And that’s when it hit me that human performance as a whole ultimately translates to a lifestyle, and your lifestyle is how you achieve your goals.
So, if I wanted things to change to stop burning out and wearing out prematurely, I would need to know the fundamentals of energy and how to recharge, recover, restore, and manage it like a pro.
In addition, I would need to know the lifestyle that leads to promoting health and, ultimately, higher performance if I was going to bridge the gaps between staying energetic and disease free, performing well, and achieving at higher levels.
And that’s when I started studying the lifestyles of healthy, high-achieving people who were thriving.
Discovering Performance Lifestyle
I set out to solve the real problem of why so many people are successful but tired all the time or decending into poor mental and physical health; and, find a holistic solution that is actually wholistic!
It’s because your lifestyle is one thing, but it’s comprised of many different aspects of living and unless you connect the dots you’re potential is limited.
Plainly, I wanted to leave behind the old ways of achieving my goals that were tiring, burning me out, and leaving me feeling worn out and learning new ways. And that’s when it all began to change.
I was searching the Internet for insights into human performance, and I discovered an idea in elite athletics called “Performance Lifestyle,” a support service that enabled athletes to sustain their training and win in their sport by getting free of the distractions holding them back. It wasn’t yet defined, and I immediately knew this was the concept I was looking for.
Around the same time, I discovered a book called “performance addiction,” the dangerous new syndrome and How to stop it from ruining your life. If I was going to improve my energy, health, and performance and potentially help others in a bigger way, it sounded like something I needed to know about.
When I read it, I realized I had finally figured out what “it” was that had been driving me so hard for so many years and why.
“Performance addiction” is the only addiction you’ll ever be rewarded for, yet it can still ruin your life.
Einstein said, “If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions.” You need to know what you’re solving for, and that, in large part, reveals the solutions.
So I called the author, a Harvard Psychologist, and ultimately co-authored a book on the subject of performance addiction and how it drives us, with him and a Superbowl MVP, who wrote the foreword, called The Curse of the Capable—the Hidden Challenges to a Balanced and Healthy High Achieving Life.
That I was driven or ambitious was never the problem. I still am today. The problem was that my story was driving me in comparison to others and therefore I had only one gear, hard and fast.
I simply couldn’t stop, or slow down, to take care of myself, my body, and my life; in other words, get my needs met at the level I needed in the flux of my relentlessly busy life.
And despite being adept at nutrition and fitness, I was chronically worn down and coping with excessive stress and fatigue in ways that created more stress and fatigue, not more energy and freedom.
Many of us are so psychologically driven, primarily by our “story,” we end up doing things and achieving our goals for the wrong reasons; without a solid understanding of the fundamentals of human energy, health, and performance. Our lifestyles can’t support our success without the persistent distress that comes from rapidly depleted energy…
For me, all of that needed to change, and I needed to find the optimal performance state.
The Antithesis of the Performance Addicted Life.
It would take another ten years and nearly $3,000,000 in accountable costs to get free of performance addiction and its consequences, grounded in my true potential, define and learn how to proactively manage my energy, and develop a “performance lifestyle” I could call my own.
In the process, I stopped endlessly striving, and overachieving eliminated my ambivalence about my situation and one by one took the performance lifestyle mindsets and skill sets of healthy high achievers who thrive, from theory to practice to mastery.
Including, the foremost #1 habit that sets successful people apart from everyone else. It’s not the willingness to push past limits; it’s their ability to proactively recuperate their energy, and recover.
And as I shared my story and the discoveries that were helping me, more and more men and leading women started showing up, and raising their hands. They wanted to overcome their mounting fatigue and were done numbing themselves.
They didn’t want to go solo through all the default inertia, the path of least resistance, never complaining or explaining while going through all the physical and psychological pain that debits their joy, longevity, and more.
They felt, precisely like I did, wanted to learn the new way and didn’t want it to take decades!
Performance Lifestyle
Was Born
Become a Healthy, High Achieving Person Who Thrives
Today my company, Performance Lifestyle Inc., is dedicated to training and coaching Men and leading women entrepreneurs, business owners, and professionals to go beyond being grinders, overachievers, and high achievers who are prone to tiring out, burning out, and feeling worn out and become Healthy High Achievers Who Thrive.
We help our clients live their true potential by regenerating, restoring their bodies, and learning to manage their energy like the pros do at the core of developing a Performance Lifestyle they can call their own.
Our experience as the founders of REGENUS CENTERS enables us to help our clients unlock their bodies’ resilience to bounce back from stress, pain, and fatigue with proactive retail, on-site, and at-home recovery solutions that dramatically improve health and performance.
Success without the energy to enjoy it is not fulfilling, it's distress, not fun.
We believe in understanding the present situation and applying the right solution:
Too often, when it comes to energy, health, and performance, practitioners and coaches are “hammers” for their specialty, and everything else becomes a nail; we don’t operate that way.
We believe in developing a lifestyle
Based on all the known fundamentals of successful living, illuminated by the idea of becoming a healthy high achieving person who thrives, which provides the context for a lifestyle that fully supports the individual and what they are up to in the world.
We do not support living one way and then trying to resolve it with a short-term stint in another.
Your lifestyle must promote your energy and health, performance, and success, and it must be “set up” to do so in stages.
We know that living grounded in your true potential will reveal the best version of you.
And if you live intelligently, in right-relationship with our body/brain, every aspect of our lifestyle and every area of our life can improve with much greater simplicity and ease.
We value grace and humility in what we are
Not who and how we think we should be, so that performance addiction can become a thing of the past and “the zone and flow” can become our new normal
We only go into the past to the extent that it helps us in the present and future.
The past is comprised of memories with feelings and emotions attached with potentially consequences we're still experiencing today, but it does not represent our true, current, or future potential, even if we have to deal with significant consequences. We focus our clients on what is important now with gratitude for everything that got us here here and will help us improve moving forward.
We practice
Aligning life structure and lifestyle with goals so that people can become healthy, high-achieving people who thrive with fewer distractions that hold them back.
We believe in evidence-based science.
We don’t promote status quo answers that cannot withstand intelligent scrutiny. Instead, we reduce every challenge to its root elements. We also believe that once you find the original cause, you resolve problems in a way that works.
We believe that life force energy (which goes by many names) is the key to health, and a high performance life.
Many men and leading women, believe that psychological strength is what's driving their success and that may be true, but it will only last so long, if you don't manage your energy like a pro and develop a performance lifestyle.
