Photo by Drew Beamer on Unsplash
This is my first book review that I’ve done here in my blog, I hope this would help you have a deeper understanding on some of the key habits that we have to implement in each of our life for us to significant change our life.
I have recently read the book Performance Habits by Brendon Burchard and he summarized the different habits of High Performers. High Performers are those people who excel, considered outstanding and influential in their respective fields.
The book came from Brendon’s years of expertise in the field of self-improvement and data taken from thousands of people that he worked with before. Brendon told his story in this book, and gives a very important reminder to us, on how we live our life. His mantra became his purpose in life. LIVE.LOVE.MATTER.
Live – Are you living your life to the fullest?
Love – Are you living with love?
Matter – Did you matter to other’s life?
I was amazed that this simple mantra became a very powerful way to define his purpose in life. These words gave him the reason to live and see life on a far different perspective than most people live their life. Have you asked yourself what’s your purpose in life? I guess it is the most common question that we often encounter and not everyone has the precise answer to that.
He summarized the following habits that make High Performers different from the crowd, but the good thing is that this is not a God-given talent or gift that only people has, but the characteristics or traits that anyone can do to that let the High performers be the person whom they are today.
1. Seeks clarity
They have clarity of who they wanted to be and they know their purpose. People whom we considered high performers are those people who knows their purpose, they always have this clarity in what they are doing, on who they wanted to be, and what they wanted to achieve.
Often times, we mindlessly do things without the clarity and proper intention, we scrolls through other people’s timeline and IG and spend the whole day browsing social media, binge-watch netflix series and don’t have the clarity on how we would want to run our days.
If you wanted to have a more meaningful life, live with a purpose, be intentional on what you do each. You have to be certain on what you wanted to achieve and act on it, don’t fill the time with stuffs that waste your time but rather make use of it to something worthy. Spend your time wisely on what truly matters to you. Remind yourself that seeking clarity means everything if you wanted to change your life.
2. Generate energy
People who performs well in life, knows that their mind and body is everything. They understand that you can’t face life if your body or your mind is not healthy. They spend time doing exercise regularly and ensure that they are eating right. In addition, mental wellness is also a must to them.
You can’t excel in your field of interest if you are constantly out of focus or your health is in bad condition. Have you noticed that most of the successful people have at least few minutes set each day to exercise. This helps them to be more focus and active in facing each day’s grind.
3. Raise Necessity
Raising necessity means they are doing things differently. They understand and see their action as a necessity and not just a task. They see their actions as something that needs to be done for other people. If you will ask them, they will often say that they are doing meaningful jobs as they were able to see it as a necessity and not just to earn money.
They see it beyond what we normally see.
Have you look at your current job and see what’s beyond all those tasks? Have you asked yourself if who needs it that the most?
Raising the necessity creates the urgency that ensure them to be more focus and to avoid procrastination. They have developed within themselves these habits and values to raise necessity to do their job or stuffs better than most people.
4. Increase productivity
We know that productivity means that you are doing something that results to an output. You can’t say that someone is productive if they don’t create results. One of the habits that we have to build is to build the skill to identify what is important and this will significantly increase anyone’s productivity.
The goal is to make the important the important, we often think that all the task in front of us is important, but we forgot to assess which task is the most valuable. Productivity is not about how many you’ve accomplished but more of what have you accomplished that matters the most.
Focus on being productive and not just being busy.
5. Develop influence
In all organizations we can easily identify those people whom we considered as leaders and as a “boss”. We often lookup those people who can lead, we know they have something different than what other people don’t have. They are often relied a lot and usually the go-to person of the organizations. They were able to influence a lot of people not because of their authority but because on how they lead.
High performers are those people who constantly influence the people around them. They don’t control anyone but rather make their actions influence the other people to be better and better. They can also be the person who sets a higher standard for everyone to follow, which inspires the people around them to meet those standards.
6. Demonstrate courage
One of the most important skills that we need to build is having the courage. We often see high performers as a person with tons of confidence to do things or speak their thoughts freely. We admire those people and resent to ourselves that we are just not like them. The truth is, they are also once like us who have a lot of self-doubt.
But what makes them different, is they constantly act and build the courage. If you will ask them, they will tell you that they initially felt the fear but since they’ve been too focus in growing and it became normal with them to take courageous action, they were able to get a hold of their fears and instead decide to act and grow.
Courage never happens in an instant, it takes a lot of practice until you’ve come to a point that overcoming your fear through courageous acts become normal to you. Start little by little doing something that feels you uncomfortable, you must understand that this is a skill that requires repetition for you to master it.
Final Thoughts
High performers were never born with innate abilities or talents. They are just once like us who has a lot of shortcomings and self-doubts. But what makes them different is that they have intentionally build themselves to become better and better. The above are the key habits that they build up and developed to be the person whom they are today. Try and implement these in your life and see how these will significantly change your life.
Vir Glarea 