REDEFINING HIGH PERFORMANCE

What if trying harder to become a better performer is actually making you perform worse? 

You work hard, you’ve always been willing to work extremely hard to get where you want to go, and it worked well for you…until it didn’t.

You care about what you do. You have goals. Perhaps you are constantly looking for ways to improve—to become more disciplined, productive, successful, healthy, creative, or effective.

And yet, somehow, the harder you push, the further away you sometimes seem to get from the results, success, and life you actually want to be living. 

But maybe it hasn’t always felt quite this hard. You know that feeling when everything just clicked? When you are in the zone, completely present, things seem to flow, and you perform at a level that almost feels effortless?

Maybe you've experienced it once and thought:

Why can't I do it like that every time?

Or perhaps you've spent years thinking:

If I could just do a little more, get a little better, finally fix this thing, or get some recognition for all my hard work, then everything would finally be good. I'd finally feel like I'm enough, like I made it. 

I've been there.

In my lifelong pursuit of excellence in music, sport, business, and health, there have been times when I experienced endless frustration in my pursuit of high performance—and other moments when creating, competing, working, or simply being alive seemed to flow effortlessly.

I've also experienced what happens when the relentless and demanding pursuit of excellence goes too far.

An injury can force you to stop doing something you love. Circumstances outside your control can bring a dream to an abrupt end. And sometimes, you can simply reach a point where you're exhausted from trying so hard to become the person you think you need to be.

So what actually is high performance?

HIGH PERFORMANCE ISN'T JUST FOR ELITE PEOPLE

The term “high performance” is usually associated with words like elite, superior, efficient, faster, stronger, or more powerful.

The dictionary definition makes sense when we're talking about machines, cars, computers, or equipment. These things can be tuned for specific measurable outputs.

But what happens when we're talking about people?

Unlike a machine, a human being can't simply be tuned electronically for speed.

Our performance is influenced by a constantly changing mix of psychology, habits, physiology, environment, emotions, relationships, and the way we see ourselves.

And yet, I often hear people say: “Oh, I'm not a high performer.”

Usually, what they mean is that they're not an Olympic athlete, famous musician, elite entrepreneur, or someone at the absolute top of their field.

It's true. Elite athletes and other best-in-class performers have achieved a specific level of excellence through years of training, experience, repetition, sacrifice, and cultivating talent.

I respect every amount of “blood, sweat, and tears” that goes into bringing dreams to fruition. But here's where I think we've misunderstood something important about how high performances relates to human potential.

The reason stories about people who achieve extraordinary things inspire us isn't simply because they're “better” or more talented than everyone else.

They inspire us because they show us what's possible. They help us believe that perhaps we, too, can pursue our dreams, develop our abilities, create something meaningful, and experience the satisfaction that comes from doing something well that we care about. And therefore living life more fully. I believe that anyone can experience more life, and become a fuller expansion and expression of who they truly are, regardless of their starting point, circumstances, or experiences.

And that is where high performance becomes applicable and accessible to everyone.

Anyone can practice high performance.

Not everyone will become an Olympic athlete, a world-class musician, or the highest-performing person in their industry. Nor should they feel the need to. 

But anyone can learn to understand and positively work with the psychological, behavioral, and physiological factors that influence how they show up in their life.

Whether you're trying to do your job better, build a business, play an instrument, paint, create something, get healthier, win a race, surf giant waves, or climb Mount Everest, there are aspects of your mindset, habits, actions, and physiology that can either support you or work against you.

Success isn't linear, cultivating your potential and living a meaningful list isn’t linear. 

High performance isn't about being “on” every second of every day, it’s not about being better than others, it’s not about having achieved a certain metric. 

It's about learning how to create positive forward motion—and eventually momentum—towards the kind of life you genuinely want to live.

BUT THERE'S A PROBLEM WITH THE WAY WE'VE BEEN TAUGHT TO PERFORM

Often people see high performance as black and white, you either make the cut or you don’t. I am not here to “dumb down” high performance and pretend that excellence doesn't require work. It does.

I've spent my life pursuing excellence and deliberately seeking out the best teachers and environments I could find so that I could become better at what I cared about.

I spent six years studying classical music at two of the world's top conservatories.

I spent four years competing in the elite division of USA Boxing against athletes half my age with twice my experience.

I've spent years in business and broken revenue records in my work.

I know how to work hard. I know what it means to train, practice, repeat, visualize, persist, and dedicate yourself to something.

And I respect the hell out of what it takes to become excellent. We’ve been taught that there’s no shortcut around experience and no substitute for repetition.

Bruce Lee famously said:

“I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”

I love this quote because there is validity to truly mastering your craft. 

But growing up with dreams of becoming great, I felt like no matter how hard I tried, I was still on the outside. Like the keys to high performance were somehow gatekept by the people who were already elite. It sometimes felt like there was a secret password for becoming excellent—and that password was given only to people with the right connections, money, privilege, talent, or access.

I didn't have those things handed to me. So I worked incredibly hard to find my own path. And eventually, that pursuit almost killed me. I always felt like an outsider.

Today, we have access to more information, teachers, tools, training, and knowledge than at any other point in human history. The barriers to information have come down dramatically.

And yet we're still struggling with something. Doing more, achieving more, working harder, or applying more effort, grit, and hustle isn’t giving us the life that many of us truly want to be living. On the flip side, doing the opposite doesn’t create the desired results either. There has to be a better way!

Because having more information about how to perform doesn't necessarily teach us how to live while we're performing.

THE HIGH-PERFORMANCE TRAP

Much of the traditional high-performance advice sounds something like this:

Work harder.

Be more efficient.

Stack your habits.

Optimize your morning.

Improve yourself.

Reinvent yourself.

Try this productivity hack.

Fix yourself.

Fix your life.

And for a while, this can work.

Until it doesn't.

A huge number of ambitious, driven people are exhausted from constantly trying to optimize themselves into becoming the person they believe they need to be.

And I've been on both sides of this pendulum.

Because when you've spent years pushing yourself to perform, eventually you may swing in the opposite direction.

You start hearing:

Just align yourself.

Go with the flow.

It shouldn't be this hard.

You need to believe more.

You need to reprogram yourself.

You need to believe you deserve it.

Some of these ideas can contain useful truths. But taken to an extreme, they can create another problem.

Instead of relentlessly trying to improve ourselves through effort, we start relentlessly trying to fix ourselves internally.

Then the story becomes:

There's something wrong with me.

There's something wrong with my nervous system.

I have a mental block.

I have a money block.

I'm not enough.

I'm doing this wrong.

Maybe I'll never get there. Maybe I’ll never be “healed” enough to become who I truly want. 

And suddenly we're caught in another loop—constantly analyzing ourselves, our symptoms, our problems, and our lives, searching for the thing that needs to be fixed before we can finally become who we're supposed to be.

But what if the problem isn't that you're broken?

What if the way you see yourself is simply influencing the way you approach everything you're trying to accomplish? Maybe you already know this, and have tried everything you possibly can to change it, but it still feels like something keeps pulling you back. 

THE ROOT OF PERFORMANCE

To a large degree, our reality and our results are shaped by what we think about and our attitudes.

We've all heard the saying: “We become what we think about.”

My whole world started to make more sense when I took that saying literally, and even one step further.

What we think about ourselves, and the attitudes we hold towards ourselves, heavily influence the way we live, the decisions we make, the risks we're willing to take, and the way we pursue our goals. The summation of which creates who we become. 

In other words, identity matters.

How you identify yourself, what you believe about yourself, and your awareness of exactly who you are can influence not only how you go about accomplishing a goal, but also how you feel while you're doing it—and even which goals you believe you can pursue in the first place.

So here's the question I invite you to ponder:

What might change if your identity expanded towards the person you're seeking to become?

Not pretending to be someone you're not. Not becoming someone others want you to be. 

Not forcing yourself to “believe” something that doesn't feel true.

Not bypassing your challenges with positive thinking.

But actually exploring the relationship between who you believe you are, how you feel, how you behave, and the results you're creating.

That's where things started to change dramatically for me.

PERFORMANCE WITHOUT OVERRIDING YOURSELF

My experience as a seeker of high performance changed when I began to understand the relationship between my sense of identity, my internal state, and the way my energy was directed into the world.

And by “energy,” I don't mean something mystical. I mean the very real combination of your physical state, attention, emotions, motivation, thoughts, and capacity to act.

“Where focus goes, energy flows.” It's an overused phrase, but there's something useful in it.

When we're calm, present, and well-regulated, we often have access to a different quality of thinking and action than when we're operating from chronic stress, fear, pressure, self-doubt, judgement or criticism.

Many high achievers describe feeling calm, present, and deeply engaged when they've experienced what is commonly called “flow.”

So what if we stopped treating wellbeing and high performance as opposites?

What if personal high performance could instead be understood as the art of fine-tuning the system that drives how you think, feel, act, create, and perform?

That doesn't mean removing ambition.

It doesn't mean lowering your standards.

It doesn't mean becoming passive or waiting for everything to feel easy.

It means learning how to pursue ambitious goals without constantly overriding your physical needs, mental health, or emotional state in order to get there.

You don't have to choose between performing at your fullest potential and feeling well. Both are possible.

WHY I DO THIS WORK

My life's mission is to help people feel more vibrant and alive so that they can perform at their fullest potential.

I know firsthand how much the pursuit of perfection and high performance can cost an individual. I understand where that drive can come from, and the anxiety and pressure that comes with it. 

I understand the frustration of knowing you're capable of more while simultaneously feeling exhausted by the effort it takes to get there.

And I understand what it feels like to believe that if you could just fix one more thing about yourself, everything would finally click.

I've come to believe that the answer isn't always to push harder. Sometimes the answer is to understand yourself differently–to shift your perspective, your understanding, and your approach.

To change the relationship you have with your own performance. And to learn how to pursue what matters to you from a place of greater awareness, wellbeing, and calm.

Life isn't a rehearsal for some magical day when you finally arrive. This is it! You deserve to feel whole and perform your best today, not just someday in the future. 

And you don't have to navigate the grueling parts alone.

READY TO RETHINK THE WAY YOU PERFORM?

If you're ambitious, driven, and committed to creating something meaningful—but you've reached a point where the old ways of pushing yourself aren't producing the results, wellbeing, or satisfaction you want—I'd love to talk with you.

I offer a complimentary Next Level Call for people who want to explore what's currently getting in the way of their performance and what might be possible with a different approach.

On the call, we'll look at:

• where you are now and what you're trying to create

• what's currently getting in the way

• how your current approach to performance may be helping or hindering you

• what might need to change for you to move forward with greater clarity, energy, ease, and momentum. 

There is no obligation to work together.

It's simply an opportunity to have a real conversation about where you are, where you want to go, and whether I might be the right person to help you get there.

Book your complimentary Next Level Call.

Let's explore what becomes possible when high performance and wellbeing stop being treated as opposing forces. Because you can thrive while doing what matters most to you.

Never stop dreaming, creating, and doing what lights you up!

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