High-performing people with heart

I am lucky that I get to spend time with a small number of people chasing high performance in sport and education. I am also grateful to touch on this topic as part of my doctoral studies on high performing teams. What follows is a summary of how high performing people behave their way to high performance. I hope it is useful to anyone wishing to enhance their performance.

A child is not born with the innate capacity to execute a bicycle kick in front of 80,000 screaming fans. Nor do they leave secondary school with the capacity to create a vaccine to end a global pandemic. Every aspect of those incomparable magnificent achievements is learned. But learned in precisely the same way that every-day-people learn to speak, read, and write – through deliberate, disciplined, sustained and reflective practice (Ericsson, 2008).

Reading and writing were once superpowers passed on to an exclusive educated elite. But mass education, over the past 150 years, has made that superpower normal. Could elite performance in sport, work and hobbies simply require the same focused attention as the teaching and learning of reading and writing? It certainly appears that way. 

What distinguishes the high performing athlete, leader, or successful scientist from the everyday person is that they somehow continue to learn and train with specificity in their given fields. Most of us, somewhere in our teens, trade specificity for generalised fluency. We get good enough at many things but not brilliant in one. The trend continues into adulthood.

High performing people (HPP), however, seem to maintain a learning/performance mindset that enables them to persistently build a basic set of skills into a formidable repertoire of expert practices in a specific field (Ericsson, 2008). Their high performance is not simply the expression of innate capacity but the result of sustained learning and mastery of a discipline.

What might be a mystery to us is how these HPP main such a fixed and specific focus on mastery. Several behaviours seem to be associated with this learning-performance mindset that results in expertise and high performance. Here are ten that I believe we can benefit from:

1. HPP have a bold vision of their potential, capacity and destiny. “I am the greatest,” said Muhammad Ali, one of the best boxers of all time, well before he could claim that title. Even if they do not reach their target, the act of envisaging the target elevates their performance.

2. HPP believe in their vision and are motivated to take daily focused steps towards achieving it. An Olympic marathoner does not just dream boldly, her twice daily training sessions are designed specifically to achieve her bold goal. She follows up.

3. HPP plan activities to achieve their vision bit by bit. They break down their vision into phases, segments, and parts. This could be decades, years, seasons, months, weeks and days. They keep a close eye on their progress and consult with experts to keep moving forward.

4. HPP gather feedback about their performance as a whole and their performance of specific parts. They monitor the execution of skills in training and make changes as they perform them. They exhibit an extraordinary specificity of attention in their focus on feedback.

5. HPP exert maximal effort in the execution of training tasks. Every day they get half a per cent better. Over time, their maximal effort adds up to massive improvement.

6. HPP watch others perform tasks expertly. They are curious about those tasks and seek feedback about how to improve them. They seek improvement rather than perfection and are not afraid to ask for help.

7. HPP not only add tools to their toolbox; they eliminate obstacles to their potential. These include the fear of failure, the self-limiting beliefs of other people and personal and technical issues.

8. HPP find communities that accept their discipline as wholesome and admirable. They work with like-minded people who help them achieve their vision.

9. HPP are mindful that a rising tide lifts all boats. The best competition is not a threat to their vision but a tool to enhance it. They seek out challenge rather than avoid it. They see improvement as a collective dance.

10. HPP help and inspire others along the way. They recognise the gift of self-mastery and its rewards. They know that human progress – and the ability to pursue and perfect their craft – rests on the broad shoulders of others that practised before them. They know it is available to others too and seek to be a positive ambassador for the gift of high performance.

A note of caution about high performance.

Some high performing people seem imprisoned by the quest for perfection and high productivity. Yes, they get a lot of stuff done, and have the symbolic trophies (insert your own score card) to prove it. But they end up feeling empty and unable to sustain their performance. How might we address this?

Building on the work of the legendary leadership coach, Ben Crowe (2020), I believe there are two useful antidotes to this problem. The first involves disconnecting the person from the performance. I think about it this way. A performance (work, a game, research) is like a painting. It is one item in a painter’s body of work. The painting is not the artist, and the artist is not the person. What you do is not who you are.

If you connect your entire self-worth to your performance, every performance is a test of your legitimacy as a person. In such a high stake’s environment, most people will stop taking the very risks that made them high performing. Once you stop taking those risks, you stop learning, and once you stop learning, you stop being a high performer. In short, to remain high performing, you cannot be your performance.

A second antidote is to set goals that resonate with your moral purpose. As a mature sports person, you could be motivated to crush your opponent or model excellence for the next generation. As a researcher, you could aim to impress people with your knowledge or solve a hard problem that could help a community. As a leader, you could use your leadership to bolster your next opportunity, or you could stabilise and enrich your workplace. All these options may lead to high performance but only a few have heart. And heart will save you from the emptiness of purposeless productivity and hyper-optimisation.

The pursuit of high performance captures the heroic impulse in humanity. Striving to be your best and learning how to do so is energising, productive and worthwhile. We can all benefit from the fruits of high performance. But we can do even better when we align our personal goals to causes greater than our own.

References

Anders Ericsson, K. (2008). "Deliberate practice and acquisition of expert performance: a general overview". Academic emergency medicine 15(11): 988-994.

Burchard, B. (2017). High performing habits: How extraordinary people become that way. Hay House.  

Bartulovic, D., Young, B. W., & Baker, J. (2017). Self-regulated learning predicts skill group differences in developing athletes. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 31, 61-69.

Clear, J. (2018). Atomic habits: An easy and proven way to build good habits and break bad ones. Avery.     

Crowe, B. (2020). The Dylan and Friends Podcast. Embrace your weird. D. Buckley. YouTube.

Coyle, D. (2018). The culture code: The secrets of highly successful groups. Bantam.

Coyle, D. (2009). The talent code: Unlocking the secret of skill in maths, art, music, sport, and just about everything else. Random House.

Gladwell, M. (2008). Outliers: The story of success. Little Brown.

Syed, M. (2010). Bounce: Collins.