Peak Performance vs High Performance

I got this question on Instagram today: “Is there a difference between peak performance and high performance?”

Such a good question. At first glance, they seem synonymous, right?

But actually, they’re quite different. Peak performance is where you experience an intense burst of optimal function in one area of life, but once it’s over, you drop back down to regular functioning. High Performance is sustainable success across all areas of your life over the long term.

For example, an entrepreneur might experience peak performance because they are working 18 hour days during a launch, but that isn’t sustainable over the long term, so they drop back down again and therefore feel like the journey fluctuates up-down-up-down. Similarly, an athlete might have one stellar game where they’re functioning in their absolute peak state, but then the next game they’re back to a stable level of performance, and that can be incredibly frustrating.

To combat this irritating fluctuation, we need to get ourselves in a High Performance lifestyle, by bringing up our baseline functioning and success across all areas of our lives.

I’m lucky enough to be certified as one of only a few hundred High Performance Coaches worldwide, and I’m honored to get to serve such incredible people. I’ve been blessed to work with people who have broken world records in sport, launched new technologies and broken into the film and modeling industries. I currently have two spots open to work privately with me, so if you’re interested in getting High Performance Coaching to take your life to the next level in all areas, apply for a free, no strings attached consultation here.

Should You Take a Break?

You’ve been hustling, you’ve been working your butt off, you’ve been making things happen.

You’re in GO GO GO mode – but are you headed for burn out?

Here are three questions to ask yourself to know if it’s time to take a break:

1. Am I sleeping at least 7-8 hours a night?
   Did you know that sleep deprivation is equivalent to intoxication when it comes to mental focus? Sleep is absolutely essential to function at our best. There’s no way you can perform at your optimum unless you’ve had enough sleep, or you’re basically going through your day drunk. If you haven’t been getting the recommended 7-8 hours of sleep a night (or more, I know I need about 8.5-9 hours to be at my best), then it’s time to take a break before you lose focus completely and make a mistake that could cost you.

2. Am I getting my social needs met?
   Countless studies in psychology and high performance have shown us that our social connection is our number one predictor of happiness. Yes, you read that right. More than money, career, status, and even health. If you’re not socially connected, you’re not living at your peak, and the more isolated you become, the more you risk a downward spiral into loneliness and burnout. Who could you connect with today, face to face or on a phone call (not just via text or social media) that would put a spring in your step?

3. Am I passionately motivated?
   While the loss of passion and motivation can actually be a sign of boredom, not burn out, there’s nothing like absolute boredom to burn you out! If you’re not feeling excited about your day ahead, then it’s time to take a break, rest, and reevaluate. What would get you excited to wake up in the morning again?

Renewing your energy before you burn out, will save you time, energy and money in the long term. Take a break, get some extra sleep, connect with a friend and reevaluate what you’re doing. I promise you, you’ll be twice as productive when you come back, ready to crush it at 100% again.

Morning Routine for People Who Hate Mornings

My Morning Routine Expectation:

I wake up moments before my 5am alarm, feeling refreshed. I jump out of bed, drink a tall class of water with a freshly squeezed lemon before hitting the yoga mat for a 30 minute yoga and meditation session. Now it’s time for my berry smoothie and journaling. Next, hit the gym! I love a morning workout, I just feel so refreshed. There’s still plenty of time to have a shower, wash my hair, blow dry it, do my makeup, pick a cute outfit, brush my teeth and read a quick chapter of my book before starting my day.

My Morning Routine Reality:

The alarm goes. SNOOZE. Again. SNOOZE. Again. SNOO – oh shoot, is that the time already?! I debate whether I have time to have a shower or if I should just throw on yesterdays outfit. I scoff a bowl of Weetabix cereal in under 90 seconds and tie my shoe laces in between bites.

That’s a classic morning for me. Any morning person will tell you I just need to get up earlier, but they’re wrong. Because getting up earlier means I would have to go to sleep earlier – and night time is my optimal functioning hours. 7pm-2am and I’m at my absolute best. All my great ideas happen then!

However, the personal development industry is filled with people talking about their 5am wake-ups, long morning routines and hour-long morning yoga sequences. It’s the ONLY way to be successful.

Well, I’m not convinced. Pushing night owls to become morning larks isn’t a great strategy. While it might mean we get to work on time, it does mean sacrificing our ‘genius hours’ in the evening. Either that, or sleep (and we all know sacrificing sleep is not a good long-term strategy).

So here’s my solution.

As a night owl through and through, I want to offer you fellow night owls an alternative:

The evening routine.

The evening routine is just like the morning routine, but instead you’re prepared before you even wake up (to me that sounds even more effective than planning when you wake up!).

Here is how I prep for the day the night before:

• Write out my to-do list for the next day, using a productivity planner.

• Visualize my long-term goals and make sure my plan for the next day reflects that.

• Do a guided meditation

• Do some push-ups if I haven’t already gotten them in earlier

• Do my gratitude journal with my partner Daniel, and read them out to each other

• Pack my bag with anything I need for the next day

• Read a book (not something too stimulating!)

• Sleep

In the morning, I have a mini morning routine. It looks like this:

1. Wake up, and DON’T check my phone, emails or notifications (high performance studies show that you will be up to 30% more productive throughout your day if you don’t check email for at least an hour after you wake up.)

2. Take my vitamins

3. Have a gratitude shower (listing everything I’m grateful for for the entire duration of the shower)

4. Get dressed

5. Eat breakfast (this is almost always a bowl of Weetabix – occasionally I make a smoothie if everyone else in the house is awake, otherwise the noise wakes people up!)

6. Check my to-do list I wrote the night before

7. Hit the day!

8. Check-in with the world (At this point, after I’ve done some work, I’m allowed to check my emails and notifications. I never, ever check the news. I never have, and I never ever will in the morning. I don’t want the chaos of the world entering my consciousness first thing in the morning!)

This list looks long, but really, it can be done in 20 minutes. It’s effective because in the evening I have already done the preparation, and now it’s time to just GO!

Would you try the mini morning routine and the evening routine as a replacement for the pressure of an elaborate morning routine? Let me know in the comments!

Learning lessons from 300 days of Meditation

I can’t believe it’s been 300 days since I made the commitment to meditate every day for a year. For the whole month of December, I meditated every day without any guided help, but I’m grateful to be back with my guided audios. I’m far less distracted when I have a path to follow.

Here’s what I’ve learned in the last 300 days:

1. Don’t meditate right before bed, or you’ll fall asleep. I still haven’t mastered this one, but I’m getting better. I’d rather meditate right before bed than to not mediate at all. They key is to sit up straight. If I lie down, I’m toast.

2. I don’t think it’s had a profound impact on my life, but I do think if I stopped meditating, it would have a negative impact. I really enjoy making meditation a part of my day – even if it’s only 2 minutes of focused breathing (doing some meditation is better than doing none!)

3. Doing it in the morning is better, but after 300 days of struggling to do it first thing when I wake up, I’ve realised daily morning meditation is probably not going to happen, and that’s okay. I’m a night owl. I prefer to meditate in the evening when I need a break from the day, but not too late or I’ll fall asleep (see point no. 1). After a discussion with a fellow High Performance Coach the other day, I realised that if mornings aren’t my optimal time, doing a lengthy morning routine isn’t necessarily the best thing for me. Crafting a shorter routine I can do no matter how late I wake up (hello, listing my blessings and drinking some hot water while I hurry to find socks that aren’t odd). I think I’m going to do a post about my mini morning routine!

4. I struggle to just be. I know, we’re human beings, not human doings, but my ambitious drive gets in the way sometimes. I want learn to meditate to meditate, not to check it off my to do list. Doing guided meditations helps with this a lot, but I also know that I still need to work on it. Perhaps that will be my challenge once I hit 365 days (ha, yes, I see the irony of setting a challenge to be in the moment and not be making it everything a challenge all the time!).

5. It’s still not a fully engrained habit. Whoever said you need 21 days to form a habit is seriously misinformed 😂😂😂Getting my butt onto the meditation pillow is still a challenge every single day. Why do we resist the things we love?

6. The most important thing is to just keep meditating. I know that it’s a lifelong skill to hone, and I’m in it for the long run.

Do you meditate daily? What are your best tips? Let me know in the comments below.

The Habit of the Habit is More Important Than the Habit Itself

I stayed up until 4am last night just to post on Instagram, write a blog post, meditate and do my push ups.

In the past, it would have got to 12:30am, I’d think “Nah, sleep is more important than my habit tracker.”

And I can already hear my morning-person friends telling me off 😂

But here’s the thing I learned from the brilliant Gretchen Rubin: The habit of the habit is more important than the habit itself.

The world wouldn’t fall apart if I didn’t meditate or post on Instagram last night. And yet, the consequences could be drastic, because it’s about the consistency of showing up for my dreams every single day that matters.

That’s why I made a phone screensaver of my motto:

There’s a reason I’m always banging on about this motto – it has changed my life so rapidly in the last few months.

• I’ve gone from 0-40 push ups. Last night I smashed out 20 without even feeling a thing. Every single day, I train (and on rest days, I condition my body, so I’m always doing SOMETHING towards my goal of 100 push ups).

• I’ve meditated for 291 days in a row. For real.

• I’ve written 170 blog posts.

• I’ve built a membership site that I’m in love with, that has amazing people in it.

There’s a lot of hype about being consistent, but it’s the DAILY consistency that is the real trick to making success part of your DNA.

Feel free to screenshot or save it to your phone screensaver too!

Gary Vee Mode: Update

Today I was searching through my website when I stumbled across a post from last year: Gary Vee Mode.

On the post, I set myself a goal to go into “Gary Vee Mode” for 4 days. Think of it like Hell Week in the Army, but for online content. (Haha okay, I see why people call me dramatic!)

Every single day it involved:

1. Post on my blog (as usual)

2. Post on Instagram stories (10x minimum)

3. Film and post a YouTube video

4. Post on Instagram

5. Post on Facebook

6. Post on Tik Tok

This ‘mode’ started because I had announced that I feared I wasn’t truly putting in the effort required to achieve my dreams. That’s a bitter pill to swallow. Unless you spit it out.

And I’m so excited when I look back because now I can tell you I well and truly spat it out. (Don’t ask me where this is metaphor going.)

Last year, I was struggling to put out content. This year, I’m happy to say that I’m finally producing a lot more content. Not Gary Vee level (64 posts a DAY), but I no longer feel like I’m not putting in enough effort.

The only thing on that list I’m not doing every day is creating a YouTube video. Now it’s my goal to put up a YouTube video every week. But everything else, I do every single day.

And even though it sometimes takes me into the middle of the night (like right now, it’s one in the morning), it feels. so. good.

Of course, I don’t wish to be “hustling” all day and night to get content out forever, but as I create more, I’m getting the content out quicker and quicker.

Like I said yesterday in my post about how you’ve already made it, I believe the real dream is the struggle along the way – the pursuit.

#honourthestruggle!

Hire an Imaginary Manager

Every single day, I keep habits.

• Meditating

• Blogging

• Push ups

• Social media

• Vitamins

Some i don’t even think about, like brushing my teeth or teetotalling, and others require more effort to keep up, like meditating or posting on social media.

Recently I’ve been using the brilliant habit-keeping strategy employed by habits zealot, Gretchen Rubin: the strategy of the Imaginary Manager.

Imagine you’re a celebrity – one so glamorous and in-demand that you need a manager. Not a manager like a boss, but a manager that keeps your schedule and helps manage your booming career and VIP party invites.

My manager is called Barbara. I ‘hired’ Barbara in my first year of university when I was swamped with what felt like a million things to do for study, work, and social events.

When you’re unsure whether to follow a habit now (e.g. study for finals) or let yourself of the hook (e.g. go to the house party), you can ask yourself, “What would my manager say?”

Barbara would say things like:
“Sarah isn’t available right now, she’s got to meditate.”
“Sarah always does her push ups before dinner, I’m afraid she can’t take your call.”
“She has a prior appointment. She can’t attend your party at that time.”

Barbara knows what’s best for me. She’s like the cartoon angel on my shoulder.

I’ve even been known to leave Barbara sticky note to-dos (not even kidding).

If you’ve ever watched the TV show Suits, one of the main characters, Louis Litt, has an executive assistant known as Norma, and although we as viewers never actually see Norma, she is always alluded to (in one episode she even dies!). Louis leaves voice note memos to Norma daily.

The point is, Norma, Barbara, your higher self, whoever your manager is, they are there to set boundaries and keep your habits in check with a tight schedule. The beauty of your manager is that you are the boss of your manager, and your manager knows you inside and out. She knows what is best for you, but also what your biggest distractions are. She knows your strengths and your weaknesses. She knows you better than anyone in the whole world.

Imagine if you had a manager. Give him or her a name.

Then, whenever you’re contemplating a habit, you can ask yourself, ‘What would my manager say?’

This is surprisingly simple but highly effective for sticking to good habits.

I can almost never resist Barbara.

This will make you happier

“Gratitude turns what we have into enough.” – Aesop.

Oh here we go, another boring post about gratitude. Yeah yeah, I KNOW, it’s important.

If I parachuted into your life right now, would be able to show me evidence of a daily gratitude practice?

Errrm… eeek.

So many of the things we think we know we really DON’T know, because we aren’t actually doing them.

Imagine how much happier your life could be – without even lifting a finger – if you acknowledged all the good there already is?

Gratitude, baby. Every single day.

My motto is If it matters, do it daily. IIMDID. I’ve said it so many times I want to get it printed on a t-shirt, and a mug. And make desktop screensavers.

When I first began daily gratitude journaling, I can honestly say I had the most blissful 3 months of my life. I'd never felt so content.

Here’s my gratitude practice:

Every morning, with my partner, we write gratitude journals (sometimes on paper, sometimes on an app). These are the questions we answer:

1. 3 things I am grateful for today…

2. Today I want to feel…

3. To make today great I will…

4. Affirmation. I am…

I’m telling you, this has changed my life, and it will change yours too. But only if you actually DO it.

How to change your habits

You donate to the gym every January.

I’m usually all for philanthropy, but this pesky habit needs to change. You know it does.

How come some people stick to their habits more easily that you?
At the core of our habits are expectations.
But why do we struggle to meet those expectations? (Ahem, actually going to the gym).

The brilliant Gretchen Rubin, author and habit zealot, developed a framework for understanding why we struggle with expectations and solved the puzzle for how to hack them.

The framework categorises people into one of four tendencies: Upholder, Questioner, Obliger, and Rebel.

If we understand our tendency, we can form habits much more easily.

There are two different types of expectations:

1. Inner expectations (expectations we impose on ourselves)

2. Outer expectations (expectations others impose on us)

Upholders respond readily to inner and outer expectations. They are easily able to follow through with their own expectations, as well as the expectations of others. E.g. They go to the gym because they expect it of themselves and because they don't want to let their gym buddy down.

Questioners respond readily to inner expectations but resist outer expectations. They question an outer expectation, and will usually only follow through with an outer expectation if it matches an inner expectation. They go to the gym because they've decided it makes sense to go.

Obligers respond readily to outer expectations but resist inner expectations. They oblige other people but struggle to commit to their own expectations. They go to the gym because they don't want to let their gym buddy down.

Rebels resist both inner and outer expectations. They don't like to be bound or to bind themselves; they want to do what they want to do - in their own way and on their own timeframe. They go to the gym because they feel like it, and won't go if someone expects them to (even if that someone is themselves!).

How to use your tendency to change your habits:

If you're an upholder dealing with burn out: take a leaf out of the questioners handbook and question why things need to get done. Is it reeeally necessary for you to do everything on your to-do list?

If you're a questioner struggling to meet outer expectations: Turn them into inner expectations (I will help my husband because if he's happy, it will make my life easier!).

If you're an obliger struggling to meet inner expectations: turn inner expectations into outer expectations. Have a gym buddy you can't let down. One word: accountability!

If you're a rebel struggling to meet inner or outer expectations: set yourself a challenge. People think you can't tone up? You'll show them! There's a reason the saying is "a rebel with a cause" and not "a rebel with an expectation."

Not sure which tendency you are? Take the quiz here!

How to crush it even when you’re exhausted

If you’ve been running yourself into the ground for your dream, you’ve been doing it wrong. I know this because I’ve run myself into the ground more times than I care to admit.

Trying to do #allthethings feels amazing in the beginning when you’re so productive. Waking up at 5am, going to the gym, working hard, starting a side hustle, working towards your dreams, following through on your commitments... but if you’re not careful, it can get a bit intense – no time for anything, always behind schedule, sleep deprivation and sickness.

However, I’m not here to tell you about “balance”. Balance is just a sophisticated way of saying half-hearted. I believe in going all-in on your dreams. So instead, here’s my solution: Set your ONE THING priority.

What is the one thing you are focusing on in 2020?

What is the one thing you are focusing on today?

If absolutely nothing else gets done, what is the one thing that will propel you forward towards your dream?

For me, that’s showing up online, every single day. If I show up and add tremendous value, I’m working towards my goal of building my coaching practice.

Let me know what your ONE thing is that will propel you towards your dreams in the comments!