How to sustain long-term high performance
In the film Groundhog Day, its easy to relate to the painful daily experience of the alarm clock waking you to yet another day of humdrum same-old daily life…
One of my former colleagues used to quip "another day another dollar".
As if working life was simply a means to meager survival.
Not the kind of place I wanted to be in at his age. But how can your daily experience with work be constantly full of vitality and enthusiastic drive.
Well, I'm not sure that it can.
But I have found the lessons in The Power of Full Engagement to be most relevant to my own habit of pushing myself way too far and burning myself out regularly.
The authors demonstrate how top athletes and successful professionals work at full capacity only for brief periods, and then take short renewals completely devoid of that normal daily hard grind.
If you do not exercise regularly, have fun regularly, and rest regularly, then you will never be able to sustain top performance in your professional life. Work, rest and play. A genuine key to a NP's maximum performance.
Notes from The Power of Full Engagement by Loehr and Schwartz
Life isn't a marathon, rather it's a series of sprints.
The greatest [tennis] players developed rituals to help calm and relax themselves in the short time between points.
By building highly efficient and focused recovery routines, these players had found a way to derive extraordinary energy renewal in a very short period of time."
Four principles: 1) four related sources of energy are physical, emotional, mental, spiritual; 2) don't overuse or underuse energy, balance expenditure with renewal; 3) train like athletes; 4) keep positive energy rituals (Rituals must be nearly automatic.)
Originally posted 2009-07-02 20:26:36.
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