3 Fundamentals to Increase Personal Performance

Learn It Live It Give It with Jairek Robbins

Download the worksheet that goes along with this episode here: http://www.jairekrobbins.com/3fundamentalsofperformance/

Today we’re going to be talking about 3 of the most important fundamentals that are necessary to increase your personal and professional performance.

So what are these fundamentals?

What’s the foundation you need as a human being to really excel and perform at your absolute best? Before I tell you, let me just give you a little bit of a test. Let’s say that you are a soldier and you get captured by the enemy. What are the things that they take away from you piece by piece to break you down as a human being – to break your willpower, to break your resilience, to keep you from being your absolute best? What do they take away?

First, many times they do something like sleep torture. So they take away your sleep. Your ability to have consistent, deep, quality sleep or even any sleep at all. Many times I’ve heard they put you in rooms, and I know this sounds crazy and I don’t know where I’ve read this. They put you in rooms and they play loud music at you, 24 hours a day that keeps you from having the ability to get sleep and replenish your mind and body. This breaks down yourself psychologically.

Not only that, what else do they take away? A lot of times they’ll take away food. They take away your ability to give your body the nutrients it needs to be at its peak. And so they feed you a little soup with a pea in it. Or they feed you a little piece of bread once a day. And it literally starts to deteriorate your body because you don’t have the fuel physically to keep running on.

The final thing they take away? They lock you in a little cell and they keep you from having the ability to move. And so what’s interesting is when you do this to a human being, it breaks them down. It breaks them mentally, emotionally and physically down to a point that they can no longer function at any level, if not peak capacity.

So what’s really wild is when you look at the foundational element it takes to get to a human being – you! – to perform at absolute best, what do you think are the 3 major components are to get you at your best?

Number one, we need to make sure you have high quality sleep. So in today’s download, we got a handful of tips from a good friend of ours, Shawn Stevenson, who wrote a book called “Sleep Smarter”. In the book, he describes 21 different ways you can amplify and intensify and increase the quality of your sleep.

So we gave you a couple of tips. I’d love to know how you currently rate yourself in the area of sleep and I’d love to also give you a handful of tips that can help you increase your sleep over the next days, weeks, months of your life and get better quality sleep every night.

The next piece is nutrition. How would you rate yourself currently in your nutrition, what you feed yourself?

Now most of the executives and entrepreneurs that I work with usually have a story that goes something like this: “Well I know what I should be eating every day, but you know. I mean it’s life, you’ve got to have fun. You’ve got to let lose, right? I mean, what am I supposed to do when I go out with a client and they asked me to have drinks? What do I do if it’s my niece’s birthday party last night and it’s my brother’s birthday tomorrow and it’s grandma’s birthday party on Thursday? Not only that, my uncle’s turning 50 on Sunday! So you know, I’ve got to have a piece of cake”.

And you hear all these stories about all the things they should be doing, but then in reality what they’re actually doing doesn’t match. So you rate yourself. How well do you fuel your body with food, with nutrition every single day? Do you put only the highest quality, best fuel on your mind and body physically? I mean not only what your feed yourself in the mouth but what you read, what you listen to, what you learn.

Are you putting the highest quality fuel, kind of a level 10 or 50-50 – some days you do, some days you don’t? Or are you kind of a 0-1 where you’re just putting junk in, expecting some high performance result when in actuality you’re really just breaking yourself down from the inside out?

So nutrition, sleep… the final is movement. How much are you moving every day? This is overly simple. But I’ll tell at a point in my life when I thought I was really active – I wake up, I do a 30-minute walk on the beach with a jog, I go lift weights at the gym, I do an hour of yoga in the afternoon, and I sat down and I use one of these little fitness trackers to see how much I was actually moving.

And I thought well I have to be way above average because I’m moving so much, I’m so active. I mean I work out, I do yoga, I lift weights – I have tons of steps. And I remember a saying that the average person should be doing 10,000 steps a day to stay super healthy. And I remember wearing it for the first time, coming home, looking at it, and thinking it must not be calibrated right because it said I only walked 4,000 steps that day.

I remember thinking, “wait a minute, holy smokes! I’m not even giving an average kind of result”. And I expect myself to perform above average. I want above average, extraordinary, outstanding results and I’m only showing up average in my steps. That’s weird. So I did it for a week and I found out it was true.

And all of a sudden I started to figure out what could I do each day to get to just a thousand more steps, 2500 more steps, one more mile in each day? And by doing it, it caused me to find ways to increase my performance and it paid dividends in results, phenomenal results! So question, how much are you actually moving?

Now here’s a bigger question and that’s in the download today, which is how are you currently tracking day-to-day all 3 of these categories?

Because what I find is when I work with top executives of different companies and say how well do you sleep, they’d say “Oh pretty well”. I’d say how do you know that? And you get the weird, “oh I guess I wake up most days feeling good and I normally sleep about this many hours”. I’d say what system, what device, how are you actually tracking the quality of your sleep not just the time? Are you using one of those Apple products to kind of watch how you move at night? Are you using a Fitbit or a sleep tracker in some way to see how deep your sleep is, the quality?

What about your nutrition, can you track not only what you’re eating but how nutritious it is for your body? Are you eating right for your blood type and those kinds of things? Are you putting the right fuel for your body, for the machine you have? You put a different type of fuel in the Lamborghini than you do a Toyota Corolla. But what kind of fuel and how do you know the difference? How are you measuring the quality of what you’re fueling your body with?

Not only that, movement! How are you tracking your movement? When you go to the gym, do you just write it down? Do you have a journal? Again, do you use a tracker?

So we have some suggestions for you if you want to increase your performance. This is the very first base level kind of rating we give any of our clients that come to work with us for one-on-one coaching. We help them figure out what are they actually doing. And then we help them create a plan and figure out how do they want to improve it, where do they want to go from here? And how they’re going to set up systems and accountability to make sure they’re actually following through. So it’s not something you intellectually know you should be doing, but something you’re actually applying and doing every single day.

So download today’s worksheet. Get a rating. Get a scale of how you feel you’re actually doing. Grab some of the tools we use. Try them out and see how you’re actually performing. If you want some help to increase your performance, give us a call. We’ll do a complimentary 30-minute session with you with myself or one of our coaches. And we’ll help you put together a plan on how you can increase your personal and professional performance.

So I hope you enjoy this episode. Pass it on if you think you know someone who needs it. Hit the share button and spread the love! And I’ll see you next week for another episode of JRCtv.

Enjoy!!

To Your Success,

Jairek