1-Page Summary

High performers are people who maintain their success and well-being over a long period of time. Many people believe that if they work hard, practice consistently, and focus on the things they’re good at, they’ll become one of these high performers. However, while these are wonderful practices, they don’t lead to high performance.

High performance is consistent and continued success and growth at a high level. It requires that you build effective habits, adapt to your environment, and align your priorities. There are six high-performance habits (the HP6) that will help achieve your goals in a healthy and sustainable way.

They’re deliberate habits, or habits that you actively choose to do and constantly revisit to improve your performance. They’re often challenging and require your full attention. This book explains why each of these habits is important, the dangers of not developing them, and ways to implement them in your daily life. The six high-performance habits are:

Habit #1: Search for Clarity

To become a high performer, you need clarity, or the ability to identify who you are and what you want. Clarity isn’t something that emerges on its own. It requires reflection and experimentation as you search for the values that matter to you and the goals that will define your journey. People with high levels of clarity tend to be more motivated, confident, and productive.

How to Search for Clarity

There are two ways to gain and maintain clarity in your life: Identify the feelings you’re seeking and determine what’s significant.

Identify the Feelings You’re Seeking

Emotions and feelings are different. Emotions are an instinctive response to a trigger. In contrast, feelings are your interpretation of any emotion. You can’t choose your emotions, but you can choose your feelings. For example, if an employee is late for the fourth time in a row, your immediate emotion may be anger. However, if you take a moment to make yourself feel calm, you’ll come into the situation more level-headed.

When something happens, take a moment to think, “What feeling am I bringing into this situation, and what feeling do I want to receive from this situation?” This lets you control how you handle your emotional responses. When negative emotions come to the surface, try to channel that energy into a positive feeling, using your body’s natural responses to deal with a high-intensity situation.

Determine What’s Significant

While high performers can tackle almost any task thrown their way, not every challenge is worth the effort. High performers spend their time investing in purposeful things and avoid the trials that don’t hold any meaning for them. For example, if you’re passionate about fitness, training for a marathon would be worth your time. While other challenges such as learning to cook or building a computer may be interesting, they aren’t meaningful in your life and, therefore, shouldn’t be your focus.

Habit #2: Improve Your Health

To be a high performer, you need to tend to your health and well-being because good health builds happiness, focus, and energy. Your health includes your mental, emotional, and physical well-being.

How to Maintain Your Health

To develop healthier habits, master transitions and treat your body better.

Master Transitions

People tend to carry tension without knowing it. To ensure that you don’t allow your frustrations to impact the rest of your day, learn to master transitions. A transition is the moment between two tasks or interactions. For example, if you’re responding to emails, then begin working on a project, you have a moment of transition between the two tasks.

If you feel frustrated or stressed after a task, use these transitional moments to do the following:

Treat Your Body Better

When you take care of your body, your emotional and mental health improve alongside your physical health. Eating healthy, working out regularly, and sleeping well give you energy, create mental clarity, and release chemicals in your brain that help with emotional management.

Improve your physical well-being by developing the following habits:

Habit #3: Find Your Drive

Drive is the force that motivates you to do your best work. It helps you stay on-track through even the most difficult challenges. Driven people know their motivations, are obsessed with their field of interest, feel a sense of duty to others, and hold themselves to deadlines.

How to Find Your Drive

Finding your drive requires active exploration and internal affirmation. Drive is hard to obtain and easy to lose. Use the following practices to maintain the internal and external forces necessary to create drive: Remind yourself of the “why” and surround yourself with the best.

Remind Yourself of the “Why”

Constantly remind yourself why you do what you do. Don’t just think it—say it. Verbalizing helps you solidify and affirm what you’re thinking. For example, if you’re an athlete with the goal of going pro, tell yourself before every workout, “This workout gets you one step closer to the big leagues. Your pain today will lead to strength tomorrow.”

Surround Yourself With the Best

Surround yourself with people who are smart, positive, and driven:

Habit #4: Increase Your Efficiency

Increased efficiency helps you focus on the important things in your life and maintain your work-life balance. Efficient people are less stressed and more fulfilled. There are three factors that impact your efficiency:

How to Increase Your Efficiency

Efficiency requires planning, reflection, and focus. Methods to increase your efficiency include planning your “five moves” and mastering important skills.

Plan Your “Five Moves”

Work toward an objective and focus your energy and attention on the tasks that are most important to your success. To create a long-term plan, find your “five moves”:

Master Important Skills

To start your journey towards mastery, define the five most important skills in your field. Constantly be on the lookout for new educational opportunities and improved ways of working. For example, if you’re a salesperson, important skills include communication, problem-solving, customer service, negotiation, and market awareness.

Instead of simple repetition, practice progressive mastery to improve your skills. Progressive mastery relies on setting increasingly challenging goals, attaching meaning to your process, and using teaching as a method to learn. Here are the steps of progressive mastery:

Habit #5: Generate Influence

To become a high performer, you need a group of people around you who are willing to support and invest in you. The best way to achieve this is by generating influence. Influence is your ability to mold other people’s perspectives and behaviors. With high levels of influence, you’ll boost your performance by avoiding unnecessary conflicts and developing a network of support.

How to Generate Influence

Influence is not tied to personality traits such as introversion or extroversion. Anyone can become influential if they put energy into developing their relationships. If you can create strong relationships with your friends, family, and colleagues, you will begin to gain the influence necessary for high performance. To foster these relationships, be generous and consider the ways you can use influence as a leader.

Be Generous

Be willing to provide favors. The more willing you are to give, the more your friends, family, and colleagues will trust and respect you. Often, people avoid being generous by making the excuse, “I’m simply too busy.” If you feel you’re too busy to be helpful or generous, chances are you have a time-management problem or are just unwilling to be generous.

Influence and Leadership

As a leader, gain influence by using the following three principles:

Habit #6: Be Courageous

High performers courageously step into the unknown and take action. Courage is the willingness to take purposeful action in service of a worthy and sincere goal despite fear, danger, or adversity. Even if they don’t know the ultimate outcome, high performers have a tendency towards action over discussion. Courageous people speak up for themselves, respond effectively in crisis, and master new skills.

How to Be Courageous

Courage requires a mindset of gratitude, a tendency for action, and the willingness to face your fears. High performers use these qualities to embrace risk and live confidently. To begin to develop courage, appreciate the hardship.

Appreciate the Hardship

Hardship is often the route to success. It develops your character, thickens your skin, and builds your skillset. For example, a world-class athlete didn’t get to the top of their game by using “get fit quick” plans. They worked out every single day, struggled through injuries, and fought to overcome obstacles.

To change your mindset on hardship, consider the following principles:

Maintaining High Performance

To sustain your success, be aware of the three traps that often cause high performers to fail: feeling superior, being unsatisfied, and neglecting important things.

Trap #1: Feeling Superior

When you become a high performer, it’s easy to feel superior without realizing it. Because you’re at the top of your game, you may subconsciously look down on people who haven’t achieved as much as you have.

Humility is the antidote to feelings of superiority. It keeps you from demeaning the people around you and shows you the value other people bring to the table. It also reminds you that you always have more room to grow.

Trap #2: Being Discontented

Many people believe that contentment prevents progress because it promotes “settling.” They’d rather use discontent to drive them to find “the next project” or “a better way.” However, while staying motivated is important, discontent creates negative thoughts.

High performers are able to stay motivated without resorting to negativity. While they accept critiques and strive to improve, they find contentment in what they do by recognizing their accomplishments. Their positive attitude keeps them from becoming overwhelmed by their work and helps them build relationships with their colleagues and friends.

How to Avoid Being Discontented

To be content without “settling”:

Trap #3: Neglecting Important Things

As a high performer, there are a lot of important things that you have to juggle at once. It's easy to lose sight of what’s important in your professional and personal life. These gaps in your focus can lower the quality of your work and lead to significant failures.

How to Avoid Neglecting Important Things

As you begin to reflect on your current circumstances and listen to the people around you, you’ll likely become aware of areas you’re neglecting. Take responsibility for your action (or inaction), and develop a plan to address the areas that you’ve overlooked. This requires patience, diligence, and a willingness to listen. To avoid neglecting important things in your life:

Exude Confidence

As you work on the six high-performance habits, one of the most important characteristics to develop is confidence. Confidence helps you take bold steps in the face of obstacles or adversity because it reminds you that you have the strength to overcome and succeed.

The Three C’s of Confidence

Even when under immense pressure, high performers know how to generate the confidence to push ahead. Confidence isn’t something you’re born with. It requires patience, hard work, and persistence. To build your confidence, think about the following characteristics:

Introduction

High performers are people who maintain their success and well-being over a long period of time. They usually:

Many people believe that if they work hard, practice consistently, and focus on the things they’re good at, they’ll become one of these high performers. However, while these are wonderful practices, they don’t lead to high performance. If these aren’t the keys to excellence, what gives successful people to their competitive edge? Developing high-performance habits.

What Is “High Performance?”

Before adopting the high-performance habits, you must first understand the definition of “high performance.” High performance is consistent and continued success and growth at a high level. The following are aspects of “high performance”:

Be wary of myths surrounding high performance. They’ll lead you astray or give you excuses not to strive towards excellence. The following are myths to watch out for:

The HP6

There are six high-performance habits (also known as the HP6) that will help achieve your goals in a healthy and sustainable way. They’re deliberate habits, or habits that you actively choose to do and constantly revisit to improve your performance. They aren’t things you do mindlessly or automatically. Instead, they’re often challenging and require your full attention.

In the next six chapters, you’ll learn why each of these habits is important, the dangers of not developing them, and ways to implement them in your daily life. The six high-performance habits are:

Habit #1: Search for Clarity

As you’ll see, to become a high performer, you need clarity about who you are and what you want. Clarity isn’t something that emerges on its own. It requires reflection and experimentation as you search for the values that matter to you and the goals that will define your journey.

There are two levels of clarity—identity and future:

  1. Identity: Clarifying who you are helps you define your core values and the things that bring you fulfillment. Discovering who you are is the first step on the road to clarity.
  2. Future: Clarifying what you want helps you create clear, actionable goals towards an overarching objective. You can't clarify your future until you’ve found your identity. If you don’t know the values that drive you, you won’t know what you want to achieve.

The Benefits of Clarity, and the Risks of Its Absence

With Clarity Without Clarity
Self-Esteem People with high levels of clarity tend to have high self-esteem because they understand their values and know what brings them fulfillment. This allows them to feel good about the choices they make and the life they’re living. People with low levels of clarity tend to have low self-esteem because they don’t understand their values and can’t identify the things that bring them fulfillment. This leads to confusion about their choices and makes them question the life they’re living.
Motivation People with high levels of clarity tend to be more motivated because they have a clear goal they’re working towards, and they’re passionate about their objectives. This gives purpose to their work and inspires them to go above and beyond. People with low levels of clarity tend to be less motivated because they either don’t have a clear goal they’re working towards, or they’re not passionate about their objectives. Without any purpose to their work, there’s no reason to strive for excellence.
Confidence People with high levels of clarity tend to be more confident because they know the values that drive them and have a clear, actionable goal. This makes decision-making simpler as every choice feeds into an objective. People with low levels of clarity tend to be less confident because they don’t know the values that drive them and don’t have a clear, actionable goal. This makes decision-making harder because they don’t have a guiding purpose upon which to base their choices.
Productivity People with high levels of clarity tend to be more productive because they tend to do work that aligns with their values and goals. This makes the work more enjoyable and helps them stay on-task. People with low levels of clarity tend to be less productive because they don’t know what kinds of work align with their values and goals. This makes the work annoying or boring and makes them susceptible to distraction.

How to Search for Clarity

High performers possess all of the above traits thanks to clarity. To find clarity in your life: Think about the “Future Four,” identify the feelings you’re seeking, and determine what’s significant.

Think About the “Future Four”

There are four areas of goal-setting that you can use to develop clarity: Self, Social, Skills, and Service.

Self: High performers are able to create a future image of themselves. To do this, you need to be clear about the values you hold dear and the goals that you’re striving towards. Once you know these things, imagine the perfect future version of yourself and begin to implement characteristics from that image into your daily life. Hold yourself accountable by reminding yourself of the future that you want. For example, if the perfect future version of yourself is someone who is personable and curious, begin to find daily opportunities to relate to other people and expand your horizons. Ask yourself: “Did I relate to someone today, and did I learn something new?”

Social: High performers know how they want to interact with others. To do this, you need to be clear about the relationships you want to foster, and how you want to come across to your friends, family, and colleagues. Think about your daily interactions. Are you present and in-the-moment, or are you on autopilot? Are you concerned about how you’re treating the other person, or are you too caught up in your own ideas?

Give your full attention to the people around you and take their feelings and emotions into consideration when you approach them. Visualize the direction you want your relationships to develop, then begin to implement aspects of that imagined relationship into your daily interactions. For example, if you want to have a candid and respectful relationship with your colleague in the future, make an active effort to ask them for their input and take an interest in their goals and dreams.

Skills: High performers know the skills they need to develop to succeed. To do this, be clear about the skills you need to advance in your field. Be specific and schedule time to develop these skills. If you’re too vague about the areas you need to improve on, you won’t be able to focus on the most essential areas of improvement.

Note: These don’t need to be skills that focus on your “talents.” In fact, it’s often beneficial to find skills just outside of your field that could help bolster your area of expertise. For example, if your field is financial consulting, and you’re starting your own company, you may need to develop your marketing skills to sell your services to local businesses. Even though your expertise is in finance, gaining marketing skills gives you the opportunity to put your financial prowess to use down the line.

Service: High performers know the difference they want to make in the world around them.

For example, if you’re a website developer with a boutique clothing company as a client, you’d need to think about the following: the most relevant aspects of building a clothing storefront, the things that differentiate this boutique from others, and the ways you can approach the work that will complement the vibe and values of the company.

Identify the Feelings You’re Seeking

Emotions and feelings are different. Emotions are an instinctive response to a trigger, where feelings are your interpretation of any emotion. For example, if an employee is late for the fourth time in a row, your immediate emotion may be anger. However, if you take a moment to make yourself feel calm, you’ll come into the situation more level-headed.

In any situation, take a moment to think, “What feeling am I bringing into this situation, and what feeling do I want to receive?” Dictating your feelings helps you handle your emotional responses. When negative emotions come to the surface, try to channel that energy into a positive feeling, using your body’s natural responses to deal with a high-intensity situation.

For example, an athlete may experience anxiety right before an important match. However, they can take that emotion and channel it into the feeling of excitement. They then go into the match grounded and prepared, knowing that they want to leave with the feeling of accomplishment.

Determine What’s Purposeful

High performers spend their time investing in purposeful things and avoid the trials that don’t hold any meaning for them. For example, if you’re passionate about fitness, training for a marathon would be worth your time. While other challenges such as learning to cook or building a computer may be interesting, they aren’t meaningful in your life and, therefore, shouldn’t be focused on.

There are four elements of purpose—enthusiasm, connection, satisfaction, and coherence.

Exercise: Identify Your Feelings

To become a high performer, visualize and anticipate the feelings you want to feel. This will help you generate positive feelings when negative emotions arise. Remember: Emotions are reactionary feelings, while feelings are how you interpret an emotion.

Exercise: Determine What’s Purposeful

Discover the most important things in your life and invest your time accordingly. Working on the things that mean something to you will boost your performance.

Habit #2: Improve Your Health

To be a high performer, you need to tend to your health and well-being because good health builds happiness, focus, and energy. There are three elements to your health:

The Benefits of Health, and the Risks of Its Absence

Good Health Poor Health
Mental People with good mental health are able to stay focused on their work over a long period of time. They know when they need to take breaks, and how to pace themselves. This gives them the mental stamina to work effectively without burning out. People with poor mental health aren’t able to stay focused on their work over a long period of time. They don’t know when to take breaks, or how to pace themselves. They often burn out or give up because the strain of their work breaks them down.
Emotional People with good emotional health are able to effectively handle stress and have positive interactions with people. They don’t allow their emotions to dictate their behavior and don’t carry them with them from one task or interaction to the next. People with poor emotional health allow their stress to overwhelm them and struggle to interact with people. They let their emotions dictate their behavior and carry them with them from one task or interaction to the next.
Physical People with good physical health have high levels of energy and mental clarity. They’re able to get through an entire day without feeling exhausted and tend to be happier than other people. People with poor physical health have low levels of energy and mental clarity. They can’t get through an entire day without feeling exhausted and tend to be sadder than other people.

How to Maintain Your Health

Each facet of health requires your focus and attention. While these techniques and tips are by no means exhaustive, the following three concepts will help you begin to develop healthier habits and develop your well-being: master transitions, find your joy, and treat your body better.

Master Transitions

People tend to carry tension without knowing it. This tension is often the result of an emotional response or stressful interaction. If you carry this tension into the rest of your day, you may make poor decisions or take your frustration out on an innocent person. For example, if you blew out a tire on your way to work, you may feel your shoulders and neck begin to tense and a headache begin to form. If you don’t take a moment to release this tension, you may take your frustration out on a colleague.

To prevent your frustration from impacting the rest of your day, learn to master transitions. In this context, a transition is the moment between two tasks or interactions. For example, if you’re responding to emails, then begin working on a project, you have a moment of transition between the two tasks.

If you feel frustrated or stressed, use these transitional moments to do the following:

Find Your Joy

The most powerful positive emotion is joy. If you can find joy within your work and personal life, other positive emotions will rise to the surface. While you can’t control your emotional responses, you can put yourself into a headspace that promotes joy over negative emotions. To do this, consider the following practices:

In addition to the above practices, develop new emotional triggers that create positive emotions rather than negative ones. The following are mental triggers you can develop to keep yourself positive:

Treat Your Body Better

When you take care of your body, your emotional and mental health improve alongside your physical health. Eating healthy, working out regularly, and sleeping well give you energy, create mental clarity, and release chemicals in your brain that help with emotional management.

Despite the significant benefits of taking care of your body, many people make excuses to avoid improving their physical health, including:

Don’t buy into these excuses. Begin the journey of improving your physical well-being by developing the following habits:

If you want to take your physical health to the next level, consider the following:

Exercise: Master Transitions

Mastering transitions allows you to stay calm in the face of crisis and keep focused on your work, helping you perform more effectively.

Exercise: Improve Your Physical Health

Improving your physical health also boosts your mental and emotional health.

Habit #3: Find Your Drive

Drive is the force that motivates you to perform at your pest. It helps you stay on track through even the most difficult challenges. Drive comes from two types of forces: internal and external.

high-performance-habits-drive.png

Internal Forces

Internal forces are the feelings, values, and goals that drive you. They create the feeling of satisfaction when you’ve accomplished a goal, and the feeling of frustration when you sense you’re underperforming. They come from your internal desire to better yourself and gain mastery within your field. These forces are divided into two categories: identity and obsession.

Identity

Identity refers to the need to hold yourself to a high standard of excellence. High performers tie their identity to their performance, constantly self-monitoring and looking for opportunities to improve their work. When they achieve success, they feel validation and pride. However, when they underperform, they recognize their failings and commit to stronger performance moving forward.

Note: This doesn’t mean that high performers allow their frustrations to take over. In fact, their regular self-monitoring prevents them from spiraling when they notice a weakness. Instead, their instinct is to discover the areas that need improvement and take steps to strengthen their abilities.

Obsession

Obsession refers to the need to understand and master a topic. High performers obsess over their field of choice, pouring hours of research, practice, and discussion into their craft. They don’t need an incentive or reward to commit to their work. Instead, they feel an intrinsic need to learn as much as they can and put their understanding into practice.

High performers constantly talk and think about their work. While many may view their behavior as “too much,” high performers know that the only way to achieve excellence is to dive deeply into a topic and extract as much information as they possibly can.

External Forces

External forces are factors outside of a person’s control that drive them to perform well. Some equate these forces to “pressure.” However, while these forces do create a degree of pressure, high performers don’t view them as negative. This is because they actively decide which external forces hold weight in their life. These forces are divided into two categories: duty and urgency.

Duty

Duty is an obligation to someone or something outside of yourself. This could be anything from an obligation to a significant other to a sense of responsibility for an organization. For example, a high-performing Marine feels a sense of duty to their country. Because of this, they’ll make sure that their actions reflect their desire to serve, even if that means sacrificing almost everything..

While underperformers may view obligation as a bad thing, high performers use it to help them get through even the most difficult challenges. For them, duty creates an external motivation that pushes them to excel and reminds them why they do what they do.

Urgency

Urgency refers to an obligation to a hard deadline, rather than a soft deadline:

High performers hold themselves to hard deadlines because it creates a sense of urgency that helps them prioritize. They don’t get distracted by soft deadlines, instead focusing their energy on completing time-sensitive tasks. Also, because these deadlines are usually set by other people, high performers recognize that their timeliness affects other people’s ability to do their jobs. This further encourages urgency and service.

The Benefits of Drive, and the Risks of Its Absence

With Drive Without Drive
Identity People with a strong identity hold themselves to high standards and achieve or exceed those standards. They push themselves to go above and beyond and take time to self-evaluate. People without a strong identity don’t hold themselves to standards and often underperform. They don’t push themselves to do more than the bare minimum and don’t take time to self-evaluate.
Obsession People who are obsessed with a topic invest significant amounts of time studying, researching, and discussing their field of interest. They take the time to implement what they’ve learned and strive to master the core concepts of their field. People who aren’t obsessed with a topic don’t invest time in studying or researching a field of interest. They may discuss it, but only at a surface level. They won’t take the time to implement what they’ve learned and they don’t care about mastery.
Duty People who feel a sense of duty to a person or group push themselves to excel beyond the expectations of that person or group. They understand why they’re doing what they do and who they’re serving in the process. People who don’t feel a sense of duty to a person or group don’t care about the expectations or standards of others. They don’t understand the purpose of their actions and don’t know who they’re benefiting in the process.
Urgency People who feel a sense of urgency complete work in a timely manner. They prioritize important things and create hard deadlines. People who don’t feel a sense of urgency don’t complete work in a timely manner. They don’t know how to prioritize and don’t use hard deadlines.

How to Find Your Drive

Drive is hard to obtain and easy to lose. Use the following practices to maintain the internal and external forces necessary to create drive: prioritize, remind yourself of the “why,” and surround yourself with the best.

Prioritize and Get in the “Flow”

To be a high performer, know what tasks are the most important at a given moment. This helps you maintain your sense of duty and urgency. To do this, create a “desk trigger.” Anytime you sit down at your desk, take a moment to think about who needs you the most in that moment, then focus your efforts accordingly.

Once you know where to focus your attention, give 100% to the task at hand. When you give all of your attention to a challenging but achievable goal, you may get in the “flow.” When in the “flow”:

Remind Yourself of the “Why”

To become a high performer, determine why you’re doing what you’re doing, then repeat the reason to yourself frequently. Don’t just think it—say it. Verbalizing helps you solidify and affirm what you’re thinking. For example, if you’re an athlete with the goal of going pro, tell yourself before every workout, “This workout gets you one step closer to the big leagues. Your pain today will lead to strength tomorrow.”

Note: Having a strong sense of why you’re doing something doesn’t mean you should be married to how you do it. Be on the lookout for better and more effective ways to work towards your goals and have the humility to embrace new concepts when they come to your attention. Be willing to adopt new technology and concepts if they help you achieve your goals. Don’t get stuck in your ways of “doing things” just because they’re comfortable.

Surround Yourself With the Best

To be a high performer, surround yourself with people who are smart, positive, and driven. This helps you develop and maintain all four forces (identity, obsession, duty, and urgency) of drive. It solidifies your internal standards, gives you role models who share your obsessions, creates accountability through mentorship, and urges you to take action to improve. To surround yourself with the best, consider the following actions:

Exercise: Find Who Needs You and Get in the Flow

To increase your drive, determine who needs your energy the most in any given moment.

Exercise: Surround Yourself With the Best

Surrounding yourself with the best people boosts your confidence and pushes you to excel.

Habit #4: Increase Your Efficiency

Many people claim there aren’t enough hours in the day to get their work done and focus on their personal life. However, for most people, their problem isn’t time. It’s inefficiency. Increased efficiency helps you focus on the important things in your life and maintain your work-life balance. This increases your performance by helping you achieve the goals you care about, lowering your stress levels, and giving you time to relax. There are three factors that impact your efficiency:

The Benefits of Efficiency, and the Risks of Its Absence

With Efficiency Without Efficiency
Work-Life Balance Efficient people have a strong work-life balance. They use their work time wisely and spend their personal time focusing on things they want to. Inefficient people have a poor work-life balance. They don’t use their work time wisely and often spend their personal time worrying about work.
Stress Levels Efficient people have lower levels of stress. They know what tasks are important and organize their time to ensure those tasks are completed in a timely manner. Inefficient people have higher levels of stress. They don’t know what tasks are important and, therefore, can’t organize their time accordingly.
Achievement Efficient people feel that their work is helping them achieve their goals. Every task has a purpose. With almost every completed task, they feel determined and focused on their long-term objectives. Inefficient people don’t feel that their work is helping them achieve their goals. In fact, they often feel like their work is getting them nowhere. Buried in “busy work,” they get overwhelmed and frustrated by their daily routine.

How to Increase Your Efficiency

Efficiency requires planning, reflection, and focus. To find important tasks and avoid distractions, you need to master your workflow and stay calm and collected. To do so, chart your work-life balance, take a break, then develop some advanced practices.

Chart Your Work-Life Balance

People often claim their life is “out of balance” without knowing what balance looks like. Charting your work-life balance gives you a clearer picture of what your life looks like when you feel “in balance” and “out of balance.” This exercise doesn’t focus on hours. Instead, it focuses on the amount of happiness and satisfaction you’re feeling in the various areas of your life.

To chart your work-life balance:

Think about which areas of your life are bringing you satisfaction, and which areas need more focus and attention. Focusing on how you feel about each area instead of the amount of time you’re investing in it shows you that time doesn’t necessarily correlate with happiness or contentment. For example, you could spend only four hours a day at work and still feel overwhelmed or frustrated. Conversely, you could spend only four hours a day with your family and feel happy and content.

Take a Break

Working straight through your day isn’t the best way to be efficient. Though it sounds counterintuitive, taking 5-10 minute breaks every hour increases your productivity by refreshing your mind and body. This allows you to return to work with more focus and a clearer head.

To effectively take breaks:

Advanced Practices

Once you’ve completed the first two steps, you can move on to the more advanced methods of increasing efficiency: Prioritize your time, plan your “five moves,” and master “essential” skills.

Prioritize Your Time

Your time and energy are finite. To effectively use the time you have, you have to focus on the tasks that are most important to your goals. Anything that doesn’t contribute to your goals is secondary and shouldn’t be given significant amounts of focus. Things such as deleting junk e-mail, attending unnecessary meetings, and attending to false emergencies can distract you from your important tasks. For example, if you’re a business owner with the priority of selling more products, you shouldn’t spend a significant amount of time creating complex internal memos. Write succinct, to-the-point emails, then use your time to analyze market research, find potential buyers, improve your product, and develop a strong marketing plan.

Plan Your “Five Moves”

High performance requires strategic action towards an objective. If you don’t plan for your long-term goals, you likely won’t achieve them because you won’t know what’s important. While you may be working hard, you may be giving too much energy to nonessential projects or “busy work.”

When you create a road map, you focus your energy and attention into the tasks that are most important to your success. To create a long-term plan, find your “five moves:”

Master Important Skills

People often make the excuse that they’re “just not equipped” to learn a new skill. However, you can learn to do almost anything with time and effort.

To start your journey towards mastery, define the five most important skills in your field. Constantly be on the lookout for new educational opportunities and improved ways of working. The more you know about the essential elements of your field, the more effectively you’ll be able to work. For example, if you’re a salesperson, important skills include communication, problem-solving, customer service, negotiation, and market awareness.

Note: As you find the skills you need to develop, don’t rely on mindless repetition. While mindless repetition can produce some results, it’s not the best way to improve. For example, a runner looking to improve their time can run the same route every day, but, if they’re not pushing themselves to beat personal records, they won’t see significant improvement.

Instead of simple repetition, practice progressive mastery to improve your skills. Progressive mastery relies on setting increasingly challenging goals, attaching meaning to your process, and using teaching as a method to learn. Here are the steps of progressive mastery:

Exercise: Plan Your Five Moves

Work towards your goals by planning the five major moves or steps necessary to achieve them. This will boost your efficiency by creating clear actionables for you to work towards.

Exercise: Master Important Skills

To excel, you must master the most essential skills in your field.

Habit #5: Generate Influence

To become a high performer, you need a group of people around you who are willing to support and invest in you. The best way to achieve this is by generating influence. Influence is your ability to mold other people’s perspectives and behaviors. This habit mostly applies to leaders and work-related relationships but can also be applied in personal situations.

Trust and respect are key components of influence. They allow you to form strong relationships that you can use to further your goals, build a network of support, and defuse tense situations. Here are a few ways you can use influence:

People often make the excuse that they can’t gain influence because they’re not “a people person.” However, influence is not tied to personality traits such as introversion or extroversion. Anyone can become influential if they put energy into developing their relationships. Influence is also not explicitly tied to effort in the workplace. You can give your all in your work, but, if you don’t know how to garner support from others, you won’t gain influence.

The Benefits of Influence, and the Risks of Its Absence

Strong Influence Weak Influence
Favors Influential people have an easier time getting people to do favors for them. They can persuade people to carry out tasks without having to beg. Uninfluential people have a hard time getting people to do favors for them. They often have to resort to begging to get people to carry out tasks. Even then, the tasks often go incompleted.
Trust Influential people can gain people’s trust. This allows them to take risks and guide people in their growth because the people around them trust them to lead. Uninfluential people struggle to gain people’s trust. They can’t take risks or guide people along because the people around them don’t trust them to lead.
Support Influential people have a strong support system around them. They’re able to fail without fear and ask people for help when they need it. Uninfluential people don’t have a support system around them. They constantly fear failure because they don’t have people around them who will be willing to help should they fall.

How to Generate Influence

To generate influence, you need to focus on your relationships. If you can create strong bonds with your friends, family, and colleagues, you will begin to gain the influence necessary to bolster your performance as well as the performance of those around you. To foster these relationships, ask for what you want, be generous, and elevate your people.

Ask for What You Want

One of the best ways to gain influence is to ask for what you want. While most people fear revealing their wants and needs, the action of asking for a favor helps develop and build relationships. You’ll find that more people are willing to help you than you may think.

When someone has the opportunity to give you what you want, it makes them feel good about themselves. This, in turn, makes them feel more connected to you. When you build a network of connections, you’re generating influence by building up your network of trusted colleagues and friends.

Be Generous

In addition to asking for more favors, be willing to provide more favors. Look for opportunities to offer your support and build up the people around you. The more willing you are to give, the more your friends, family, and colleagues will trust and respect you.

Often, people avoid being generous by making the excuse, “I’m simply too busy.” If you feel you’re too busy to be helpful or generous, chances are you have a time-management problem or are just unwilling to be generous.

Elevate Your People

Words of encouragement and appreciation go a long way in generating influence. Take the time to show gratitude to your colleagues, family, and friends. This will boost their self-esteem and improve your relationship with them.

If you’re in a leadership position, show that you trust the people around you by giving them a level of autonomy. Let them work towards goals in ways that best suit them and praise them when they do good work. If you offer your trust and support, the people around you will likely offer the same to you.

Influence and Leadership

As a leader, gaining influence allows you to boost the performance of your team as a whole. Consider the following three principles: Show others how to think, challenge people to raise the bar, and practice what you preach.

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Show Others How to Think

High-performing leaders show others how they want them to think. Most people already do this through a method called “framing.” Framing is the act of leading a person to an answer by offering guiding questions or statements. Use framing strategically to guide people through a specific way of thinking. Framing statements and questions can include:

If you lead people into more efficient models of thinking, you’ll start to earn their trust. As you do, you’ll be able to shape the way that they think about their role and their impact on the world around them. To effectively guide your people, ask yourself the following questions:

Once you know the answers to these questions, share them. Tell your employees the answers to these questions frequently. It will shape how they think about their role in your organization, the way they behave around others, and the impact that they’re making in the world around them.

Challenge People to Raise the Bar

High-performing leaders know how to challenge the people around them without insulting or degrading them. They set standards for the people around them and hold them accountable. Though they have to endure the occasional awkward conversation, high performers know how important it is to push people to meet and exceed expectations.

To challenge the people around you, create standards in three areas of behavior:

Practice What You Preach

Once they’ve set high standards and shown people how to think, high-performing leaders adhere to the expectations they set. The best way to maintain influence is to be a role model and practice what you preach. If you don’t, people will view you as hypocritical and ignore your guidance.

Being a role model doesn’t mean that you’re trying to be a generically “good person.” While being kind and generous is important, being a role requires that you show others how to think and act. This allows others to look to you as an example of how they can meet and exceed your expectations.

Exercise: Show Others How to Think

As a leader, when you show your employees how to think, you gain their trust and help them approach their work from a new perspective. This helps boost the performance of your team as a whole.

Exercise: Challenge People to Raise the Bar

As a leader, challenging the people around you motivates them to meet and exceed expectations. If you’re practicing what you preach, raising the bar for other people also forces you to raise the bar for yourself.

Habit #6: Be Courageous

High performers are courageous. Courage is the willingness to take purposeful action in service of a worthy and sincere goal despite fear, danger, or adversity. These actions don’t have to be bold to be effective. Any step toward overcoming fear or embracing the uncertain is a courageous act. Courage doesn’t include actions that harm other people or encourage needless risk.

There are four primary types of courage:

Even if they don’t know the ultimate outcome, high performers have a tendency towards action over discussion. While they’ll strategize and plan when necessary, they don’t get lost in talking about doing something. This allows for quick decision-making and decisive action, boosting your performance.

The Benefits of Courage, and the Risks of Its Absence

With Courage Without Courage
Decision-Making Courageous people make quick-decisions and take decisive action. Even in the face of fear or adversity, they don’t just talk about doing something. They actually do it, even if they’re afraid. Uncourageous people don’t make decisions or take action. They often talk about doing something, but they rarely actually do it, usually out of fear of failure, judgment, or retaliation.
Crisis Courageous people act quickly in a crisis. They don’t let the circumstances overwhelm them and respond to the needs of others. Uncourageous people freeze up in a crisis. They let the circumstances overwhelm them and focus on their own needs over the needs of others.
Hardship Courageous people embrace hardship and don’t complain about their work. They know that their actions serve a purpose and focus on the good they’re doing over the difficulty of their present circumstances. Uncourageous people fear hardship and frequently complain about their work. They don’t have a clear purpose for their actions and are too focused on the difficulty of their present circumstance to look to the future.
Growth Courageous people take active steps towards growth, even when those steps require risk. This allows them to develop skills quickly and leads them down avenues they may not have known about before. Uncourageous people only take steps towards growth if there’s no risk involved. This prevents them from developing quickly and shuts them out of avenues that could have benefited their development.

How to Be Courageous

Courage requires a mindset of gratitude, a tendency for action, and the willingness to face your fears. These qualities allow you to embrace risk and live confidently. To build your courage, consider these tips: appreciate the hardship, share your dreams, and fight for someone.

Appreciate the Hardship

People are always searching for the “easy way” to do things. Whether it's getting rich or getting fit, people don’t want to put in the work to achieve their goals. This aversion to hardship prevents people from developing healthy habits and taking risks.

High performers know that hardship is often the route to success. It develops your character, thickens your skin, and builds your skillset. For example, a world-class athlete didn’t get to the top of their game by using “get fit quick” plans. They worked out every single day, struggled through injuries, and fought to overcome obstacles.

To change your mindset on hardship:

Share Your Dreams

Many people refuse to share their goals out of fear of judgment or ridicule. They’ve been taught that expressing your ambition is pretentious and demeaning. This leads people to hide their desires from others and minimize their own accomplishments.

However, high performers overcome their fear of judgment and openly talk about their dreams and achievements, finding the people that will support them and getting away from the people that tear them down. For example, you share your dream of starting a small business with Martha and Kendra. Martha tells you that you should focus on more “attainable” goals. Kendra, on the other hand, immediately starts brainstorming with you about next steps. Because you shared your dream, you now know that Martha is someone who will tear you down, while Kendra is a great source of support and encouragement.

As you start to share your dreams, consider the following tips:

Fight for Someone

High performers find someone to fight for. This motivates them to overcome difficult or frightening obstacles for the benefit of someone they care about. For example, if you want to provide for your child’s education, you may fight harder for a promotion or lucrative project.

People are more inclined to go above and beyond for others than for themselves. For example, a mother may not argue with her boss for treating her poorly, but she’ll fight for their child if she sees them being bullied.

Exercise: Appreciate Hardship

Embracing hardship gives you the strength to push through obstacles on your way to achieving your goals.

Exercise: Fight for Someone or Something

Fighting for someone or something can provide you with the motivation and courage to achieve your goals.

Maintaining High Performance

When high performers fall from grace, it’s unexpected because of the high-level at which they’re accustomed to performing. To sustain your success, be aware of the three traps that often cause high performers to fail: feeling superior, being unsatisfied, and neglecting important things.

Trap #1: Feeling Superior

When you become a high performer, it’s easy to feel superior without realizing it. Because you’re at the top of your game, you may subconsciously look down on people who haven’t achieved as much as you have. People who feel superior believe:

While you may not actively show your superiority, these thoughts often lead to condescension and dismissal. People won’t want to work with you if you demean or ignore them. While your colleagues may put up with you for a while, you’ll eventually lose the support of the people around you regardless of how strong your ideas are.

How to Avoid Feeling Superior

Humility is the antidote to feelings of superiority. It keeps you from demeaning the people around you and shows you the value other people bring to the table. It also reminds you that you always have more room to grow.

To humble yourself, consider the following practices:

Trap #2: Being Discontented

Many people believe that contentment prevents progress because it promotes “settling.” They’d rather use discontent to drive them to find “the next project” or “a better way.” However, while staying motivated is important, discontent creates negative thoughts such as the following:

High performers are able to stay motivated without resorting to negativity. While they accept critique and strive to improve, they find contentment in what they do by recognizing their accomplishments. Their positive attitude keeps them from becoming overwhelmed by their work and helps them build relationships with their colleagues and friends.

How to Avoid Being Discontented

To maintain high performance, you must find contentment in your work without losing motivation. To be content without “settling,” use the following tips:

Trap #3: Neglecting Important Things

As a high performer, there are many areas that require your attention. Because of this, you may sometimes accidentally neglect important things because you’re too focused on a singular task or you’ve overextended yourself with too many tasks.

How to Avoid Neglecting Important Things

As you begin to reflect on your current circumstances and listen to the people around you, you’ll likely become aware of areas you’re already neglecting. As this happens, don’t blame your neglect on other people or external factors. Instead, take responsibility for your action (or inaction), and develop a plan to address the areas that you’ve overlooked. This requires patience, diligence, and a willingness to listen.

To avoid overlooking important things, first, consider the following tips to avoid a lack of awareness:

Now, consider the following tips to avoid overextending yourself:

Exude Confidence

As you work on the six high-performance habits, one of the most important characteristics to develop is confidence. Confidence helps you take bold steps in the face of obstacles or adversity. It helps you rise to any challenge because it reminds you that you have the strength to overcome and succeed.

The Three C’s of Confidence

Even when under immense pressure, high performers know how to generate the confidence to push ahead. Confidence isn’t something you’re born with. It requires patience, hard work, and persistence. As you begin your journey towards more confidence, think about the characteristics of confidence: