How many of these 10 factors are restricting your personal performance?

Right now, you’re likely bombarded with messages about what you could, should and need to do regarding maxing out on your personal performance?

On the face of it some might make some sense. But only if you’ve the wind in your sails and you’re ready to move forward without the common restrictions that hold back many people.

What if you have a bit of ’spring cleaning’ to do?

What if there are a few important elements you need to understand and action before it’s right to add anything to your personal performance matrix?

Anchors

Quite often, we all have several anchors that are holding us back; normally these are unrewarding habits that exist at a subconscious level. They impede you without you recognising them. Sometimes because they are ingrained old habits you pay no attention to and sometimes because they have become the norm in your workplace, home, or social environments.

Let’s jump in and examine the more common restrictors that I witness among leaders, executives, sales teams, and entrepreneurs daily

10 Performance Inhibitors - how many do you recognise?

Answers rather than better questions: Today we’re surrounded by tips, insights, and answers. We gobble them up. However, we do this under the assumption that we’re asking the right questions to begin with. One popular example is when people look towards improving their personal performance. Quite often they seek answers based on the felt need to improve their performance. But when we pull the curtain back a little, we soon discover that a better place to start may be to ask, “how can I improve my ability to perform??” Or “how can I ensure I can improve at being ready-to-perform”. Often a ‘how’ question can be more rewarding that a ‘what’ alternative.

Running fast down the wrong road: We’re all action oriented. We need to feel, and be seen, to be doing our utmost. Nothing inherently wrong with this - but again it’s like looking for answers rather than better questions and we may well find ourselves moving at a pace in the wrong direction. Is your ladder against the right wall? All that effort and striving for little reward except to move us deeper into a place that may not be working for us.

Focused on outcomes rather than process: The shiny prize is alluring, attractive and, at times, all-consuming. So much so often you’ll fall into the trap of keeping both eyes only on the prize. This often leaves us working on autopilot and living in the future rather than the present. It can bring about an anxiety and overwhelm if we’re not moving ever closer to the prize. How about agreeing on the prized outcome(s) and then investing time and effort into an evolving process that will bring you every day closer? As well as getting to your promised land you’ll also understand intimately the steps you can trust to get you through similar future journeys.?

Wrong start points: In an era of hacks and shortcuts its worth pausing to understand our start point. Are we skipping steps 1 to 3 and starting at step 4? Just because it seems like it might be a short-cut and get us to our desired destination faster? Personal performance doesn’t work like that. Whilst you might not grind to a halt, every skipped step along the way reflects a lack of attention to detail and process that often means compromised performance and outcomes. How many times have you gone down a path you knew was cutting corners only to have to start over??

Environment: It’s quite simple; your environment must support the performance that you require; it’s got to normalise the results you seek. That ranges from the people around you [do they lift you up or drag you back] to the actual physical environment [is it conducive to peak performance or does it feel restrictive because of situational constrains that can have a negative impact? e.g., noise, ventilation, natural light, temperature]

Neglecting the fundamentals: There are so many cool hacks, gadgets, and apps to help support your performance. Many are worthwhile, but they only have relevance and efficacy if you have the right building blocks and foundations in place first. These cornerstone principles of personal peak performance are what I call the 5S - Sleep, Stress, Sustenance, Staying Active and your pSychology. These are all measurable [e.g., see below image for our CONNECT assessment of one client’s sleep]. It’s vital that you are doing well in each of these factors to ensure your performance is not only at the level you desire but also sustainable and not subject to the roller-coaster effect where you grow deflated and de-energised because of fluctuations across your week.

Knowing what “playing-from-a-10” looks and feels like: We all know what a bad day looks and feels like. But can you visualise and describe in detail what a great day looks and feels like? If you haven’t distilled how peak performance looks and feels then it’s quite the challenge to manifest it on a regular basis. Think of a good athlete in this regard; they will invest time understanding and internalising, at an intuitive and felt level, the experience and behaviours that support and give expression to their best performance. They’ll ‘see’ what makes it real, what makes it good, and what will drive it forward. Equally they come to understand how to respond to issues that can potentially derail desired performance. When you can give verbal expression to what a great day/week looks and feels like then you can begin the dual process of (i) working towards that and (ii) working backwards from there to a point where you understand your “controllables” to make personal peak performance a regular reality.?

Cognitive overload: Would you disagree that these days we have way too many non-important matters taking up cognitive space? Your cognitive bandwidth is a finite resource, so it pays to do a cost-benefit analysis on all your actions. The cost attached to overload flares up as frustration, demotivation, and a feeling of spinning your wheels and feeling stuck. Think of your cognitive resources as a pot of gold that replenishes each week; will you spend it wildly and be ‘broke’ by Thursday or wisely guard it as a vital element of your performance support system?

?“Unproductivity and loss of drive can result from decision overload.” [The Organized Mind by Daniel J. Levitin]

So much information: As we’ve mentioned you have only so much cognitive bandwidth and it’s not a limitless resource. Taking more and more information inwards brings the law of diminishing returns to life. Because this is a relatively new phenomenon, we’re not evolved to it and you end up jamming up the bandwidth which leads to slower performance and, ultimately, crashing your internal system. Distinguishing the trivial from the important is simple yet not easy. It takes focus and a strong filter that is grounded in what you know to be urgent versus what’s important. Overwhelm is the enemy of the consistent high performer; choosing how and where to invest your attention [rather than spend it] is among the wisest personal performance investment decisions you can make.

Multi-tasking: Are you behaving like a butterfly? Continually Jumping from one attractive proposition to the next? Research shows that the minds of multi-taskers are more disorganised than their counterparts that simply D.O.T. [do one thing]. They’ve greater difficulty differentiating between relevant and irrelevant information. Worse they find it hard to ignore what is, largely, irrelevant detail and information. When it comes to your focus it’s either laser-like or diluted. Diluted, dispersed attention is draining, taxing, and burdening. In effect, it’s like going hunting with a shotgun rather than a rifle.

Effort vs Reward: How much time do you invest doing cost-benefit analysis into how much attention and intention you assign to particular tasks? Chasing excellence cannot be the appropriate strategy for everything we do. Yet many people place the same effort into all pursuits. There are many tasks where ‘good enough’ is completely ok; you reach a balance between effort, benefit and outcome that makes it clear what is acceptable so that you might place more focus & effort into the tasks and jobs that will move the needle significantly forward in the areas that will make a real difference toward your most rewarding commitments.

Now, how many of these inhibitors are holding you back from the performance you are capable of??

Paul Clarke operates at the intersection of human performance and professional success. If you are a capable business leader, executive or entrepreneur who is frustrated by a stagnant or declining performance, perhaps Paul's trusted principles & process could remove your blockers and help you break through to peak personal performance.

Have a complimentary consult with Paul via [email protected] or +353868595155