Does Your Performance Match Your Mission?

Every business owner or CEO of a company has a mission and/or a vision of where they would like to see their company in the future. These are the seeds of why someone goes through all the pain and sacrifice of starting a business in the first
place.

It’s very easy to get lost in the day-to-day demands of running an operation. Fires to be put out, quick decisions to be made, stakeholders looking over your shoulder, difficult employees, big egos and so on.

Having worked with a number of CEOs and high-level managers over the past 34 years, I intimately know their struggles. The question becomes, “How can I perform at my peak when I’m being pulled in a thousand different directions?” And we’re not even mentioning the personal challenges that arise outside of work.

Some people seem to have mastered this dilemma. They’re calm in a crisis and people want to be in their presence. But for the vast majority, this is not a natural state. It has to be learned and practiced and is difficult to do on your own.

For any of you who have been following my blogs, I frequently use sports as a metaphor to extrapolate lessons learned from great athletes. Without a strong mental game, they are eliminated quickly from the competition.

At the time of this writing, the finals of the 2017 U.S. Tennis Open are underway. I watched Madison Keys seem to fall apart in a match that should have been her finest hour.  Under intense pressure, she did not appear to have the mental resiliency to fall back on when she needed it the most.

To be a great leader and make your mission and vision a reality, you have to continuously become bigger – meaning you have to expand your mental and emotional capacity to solve more and more complex issues.

The world needs you! We need you to lead at the highest level of your capacity. Everything you do, every decision you make filters down through your organization and to the rest of the world.

Over the next few months, I will write and speak about the performance skills you need to learn to achieve what I call “Mastery Under Pressure.” Much of what I teach you have heard before. But I say, “It’s common knowledge, not common practice.”

These skills are:

• Focus

• Relaxation (Including Meditation and Mindfulness Training)

• Changing Negative Self-Talk

• Creating Powerful Visualizations

• Transforming Fear

Great leaders are self-reflective. I hope you will take the time to assess where you are strong and where you could use some support.

I invite your comments and questions.

And if you’d like to dive deeper with me in person, I invite you to join me October21st in Emeryville, California – just outside San Francisco.

Go here to register!