The 7 Challenges of Elite Performance

I want to share with you the seven challenges that come with being an elite performer. Now, I share this with you because I have chased success all my life, be that in my corporate career, be that through what I've been doing over the last 10 years in private equity. And what I found is that once you achieve something big in life and you get there and you realise actually you don't feel fulfilled, it can be quite a shocking realisation.

In many cases, people who are always there trying to strive to be their best, trying to be the best version of themselves, they're the ones that can often feel the most lonely, they can be the ones that often need the most help, but from the outside looking in it doesn't always look that way. So let me share with you the seven challenges, and I'll also leave you with a perspective of what you can do about it.

So the first challenge of being an elite performer, someone who sets big ambitious goals and gets those things done, is that everyone expects you to be happy and more often than not, quite a lot of the time, you're just not. And in my life, that was because I was always looking for the next thing. I was always looking for the next goal, the next mountain to climb, and I wasn't stopping to really appreciate everything that was around me, being grateful for what I had and feeling fulfilled.

And the other thing is, I wasn't necessarily cognisant that I was making a bigger contribution, it was all about me. So sometimes when you're in that world, you forget the bigger impact that you're actually making. The second thing is that you've achieved so much compared to others, but so little in terms of what you want to achieve.

And that's interesting in its own right, but the other perspective here is that so many people that you talk to can't comprehend this because the majority of people out there just don't set ambitious goals. Now, I'm a big believer that you're always growing, always learning, that's what life is about.

And, my whole ambition is to build an empire, to be able to create more impact, and I like to help other people do that as well. But sometimes it's hard and sometimes as I said before, it's lonely because other people just aren't stepping up and showing up in that way. 

The third one is everyone wants a piece of you and, to be frank, you can't blame them for that.  You can't feel that that's unfair, often we are attracted to people who are doing extraordinary things, stuff that looks impossible from the outside, and everyone wants to kind of understand what you're doing, how you do it. Now, what's interesting about that piece is that when you tell them it's simply about focus, it's about being clear, it's about hard work, it's about managing and maximising your energy, most people want to give up at that point, they don't realise that it takes work. I think it was Michael Jordan that said ‘you get rewarded in public for the hours that you put in practice’, and in context, that's obviously something that people don't quite see from the outside, but everyone who achieves big things knows exactly what I'm talking about. 

The fourth one is that your closest connections depend on you and they freak out if you show too much weakness, and this is a hard one because sometimes you have to be the rock. You have to be the person that everyone thinks, he's almost bulletproof, but, I've found that sometimes I'm just like everyone else, you can feel fragile, you can feel that you are overwhelmed, you can feel stressed, you can feel burnt out. We’re all human in that respect, but sometimes you feel the pressure to have to be that person. And if you're in a peer group of people that you've always been the person who's hit the home run, smashed it out of the park so to speak, that sense of pressure can be even more. 

The fifth one is that you've become successful, but it's been at the detriment of other things. Most likely your family. And this is a common one because I find that really successful people sometimes get blinkered. They sometimes try and do things at an incredible pace, they're hustling all the time and they stop sometimes and they look around them and they realise that life has passed them by, the important things, being present, being grateful, those things have been forgotten with this relentless desire to achieve and to make an impact. And that's really hard, and a lot of the people that I work with specifically, and I had to go through this journey myself, I have to tell them to stop, to slow down before they can speed up because life is a journey and it's about enjoying the journey. It's certainly not about trying to do everything at a hundred miles an hour.

And the last one is that few people are insightful enough, maybe brave enough to talk to you about how you feel and give you that feedback. So, often people who are high performers, elite performers, they can be quite intimidating and it's difficult to have people tell them or feel comfortable telling them that actually, you might be on the wrong path, but quite often, that elite performer, that's exactly what they need.

When they start to get that, then they really start to change, they start to become more aware. And the canny thing about that, the paradox is they then become more successful. So there you go. That's the challenges that I see facing anyone becoming an elite performer. 

And the last one that this is the final point, is that, what do you do about it?

Get yourself in a different room. You get yourself around people who are sharing the same journey as you are. I've often found, and I've said this a few times, that if you're the biggest person in the room, you're in the wrong room and you need to think about that. And the other thing is get someone around you, get a coach, get a mentor, someone who can actually see everything for what it is, someone who's had that success path before, they've fallen down sometimes through the cracks and had to build themselves back up, find that person. And if you can do that, that is certainly going to help you on your journey.