How to Perform at Your Highest Levels

Performing at you highest level requires you to be full focused

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How can you perform at your highest level? In my work world performing at one’s highest levels can take many forms. It can be standing before a Board or Council and giving a presentation, or it can be having a conversation with an employee over a difficult performance issue, it can be writing a critically important memo about a policy alternative or it can be talking to investors about the virtues of my community or development.

Performing your very best requires one to be fully focused on the topic or issue at hand.

I have written often about the concept of flow and how it can help one achieve higher states of performance. Author Steven Kotler and his Flow Research Collective have studied flow and how it can help people achieve the highest level of performance. It’s a real thing.

An idea that has floated around the internet forever and probably even before that is the meme, “You only use about 10% of your brain’s function and ability, and think of what else you could do if you tapped into all of it”. The truth is that a person “in-flow” is actually using less of their brain than someone not in this altered state. This state is called “Transient-hypo-frontality” Your brian actually shuts down parts of your brain focused on your prefrontal cortex and giving you flow.

You have been there, I know you have. Admit it. In flow your sense of “self” goes away and your inner critic goes away. Nothing can seem to stop you from getting things done. Other things happen when you are in flow too:

• The sense of time goes away. You seemingly get a lot done in s short time and time “flies”
• A huge explosion of performance occurs
• Risk taking goes up, your fear diminishes
• You become one with everything
• Creativity is heightened

So how does one achieve flow? The one reason many people are missing the flow experience is because flow follows focus. Today in our constant pinging-notification world distraction can cause us to stay in a lower state of anxiety filled non-flow state that means we get little done. We are in the lower quadrant of the Eisenhower Matrix, doing non-urgent, unimportant things, answering emails, looking at cat videos, texting messages, all those little unfocused things that attract our monkey mind.

So getting into flow means getting into focus. Focus, you say is not achievable because of these distractions, right? Wrong.

Here are some steps to getting focused:

1. Generate leverage by massive preparation. Create the right environment for the task you need to do. Clear your desk of distracting items, clean your work area. Set out the items you need to do the job. The great chefs are good because they have learned the concept of mise en place, or ‘everything in its place’. They have all their ingredients, tools, and equipment in place ready to go prior to a session of cooking, Practice mise en place for your work environment
2. Destroy time assumptions — I often get bogged down by thinking something is going to take much longer than it does. “I’ll leave the dishes in the sink, because that will take forever…I’ll do them in the morning.” It will take just as long to do them in the morning than now. Gamify the task and turn it into a small self-created competition. “I’ll do the dishes in less than five minutes” Give yourself the prize of flow as you finish under tour self allotted time and wake up in the morning with no dishes to do and a clean sink!
3. Automate your decision making — This is really about creating the habits that make your day easier and distraction free. What decisions can you make to free up your cognitive load? Whenever “A” happens I always do “B”. Steve Jobs is famous for having one basic wardrobe, a black mock turtleneck and blue jeans — wore them every day. List the decisions you make every day, create a rule for them and abide by them.

These very small steps will have a huge impact on your productivity, it will lower your distraction level and will allow you to live in a state of blissful flow, because you will have more time to do the things you really want to do.

Are you willing to take on the challenge?