Finding and Keeping Your High-Performance Self

How is it that we all have days where we shine as our best selves without even trying, and yet also have days where everything feels incredibly difficult? This natural inconsistency annoys and even worries most of us because we often don’t know exactly what got us into our amazing-get-everything-done-superstar self, nor what caused us to seemingly lose touch with that version of ourselves the last time. There’s this feeling of randomness about it all. Sometimes we are up, sometimes we are down. To make sense of it we usually decide we are flying or sinking due to whatever is happening to us at the time.

I just had a great training session so I’m feeling confident and excited.

I’m struggling to nail an important new skill so I’m feeling frustrated and worried.

But, when we see our feeling of being amazing, focused and centered, or distracted, anxious and unmotivated, as the result of whatever is happening to us in our lives we miss a key bit of information: our thoughts about an event have a bigger impact on our state of mind than the event itself. In fact, our thoughts about what happens to us almost completely shape our experience.

Everyone has that friend who stays mysteriously upbeat regardless of whatever difficult life experiences come their way. Equally, everyone knows someone who seems determined to be upset and anxious, regardless of how much is going well for them. What’s going on here? It comes down to our personal interpretation the things we experience. Our perspective of and reactions to what happens to us are incredibly powerful.

We tend to think of our high-performance self as something we have grow and develop into, or as a version of ourselves we are working towards. But, what if our high-performance self is already there? Being our best, high-performance self is really about choosing the right perspective. I believe we all carry two versions of ourselves around every day and that the real challenge exists in figuring out how to consistently choose to be our high-performance self and politely tell our low-performance self to get lost!

When we are talking about performance, research shows that knowing how to stay connected to a helpful perspective is incredibly useful. It’s important to recognize that this high-performing version of ourselves is so much more than positive and upbeat. I like to outline this self as the following:

BOLD : Willing to seek out challenges and risk mistakes to improve faster.

BRAVE : Willing to lean into discomfort and reach out to find the resources to move forward.

CURIOUS : Willing to stay self-aware and inquisitive about the source of a problem. Always looking for solutions and better understanding.

TRUSTING: Willing to trust in the time and effort you have invested developing your skills. Willing to let go and be in the moment and trust the process.

RESOURCEFUL : Willing to adapt and try new things in order to find solutions and a way forward in any circumstances.

Use these words or ways of being as a framework to direct your thinking in any and all circumstances, and you will start to experience a powerful shift in perspective.You will find it easier to find and keep that super-cool version of yourself that seems to fly in the face of challenges. One (of the many) secrets to high performance in sport, work and life is honing the ability to consistently chose to react to any and all situations, circumstances and events - good or bad - with these five characteristics.

Try it out and let me know what you think!