Winning doesn’t just happen. Even small wins like making a sales appointment or even knocking out all of your key activities for the day are not a given.
You must prepare to win. Preparation requires a holistic approach to winning. Your physical body must be primed for peak performance. Your emotional state must be balanced. Your mentality must be elite. Your spiritual resonance must be clear.
When all of these segments of the high performance pyramid are dialed in, you are ready to meet the demands of the day, can tackle the adversities coming your way and create wins.
Here’s 11 easy ways that you do to stay sharp in all areas of the pyramid.
#1 Meditate
A regular meditation practice of 15 minutes daily keeps your mind in the moment and lays a perfect foundation from which you enter into peak performance. I recommend mindfulness meditations that help you melt judgments and stay in the present.
#2 Prepare Your Activities
Failing to plan is planning to fail. Spend time to prepare as many of the activities that you need to achieve your goals, so that you can get into a flow performing the activity. Your efficiency will increase, and more importantly, so will your effectiveness.
#3 Get Sleep
Sleep is crucial to high performance. Studies show that the most effective sleep for restoration happens towards the end of the night. The longer you sleep, the better your body and mind will be.
#4 Ground Yourself
Grounding creates the experience of strength and stability. That leads to confidence. A quick grounding technique is simply planting your feet on the ground, shifting all your focus and attention to that connection with the ground. You’ll feel a greater connection and your feet will begin to feel “planted.” You can do this before major activities and anytime you need to take back control over your state.
#5 Connect With Your Vision
What are you going for? Where are you going? Why are you working so hard? The answer to those questions are found in your vision. When you connect into your big vision, it will pull you towards doing the work to achieve it.
#6 Eat Clean
Clean, whole food diets give your organs the ability to optimize your body as opposed to removing as many toxins. You’ll feel better physically, which clears the path to high performance. Plus, a clean diet keeps your body in great condition for a longer period of time.
#7 Exercise
Our bodies are designed to move. It’s actually designed for temporary stress. Getting exercise 5-6 days per week gives your body and mind the strength, endurance and greater blood flow to prepare you for elite performance at work.
#8 Gratitude Journaling
Consistency in finding things you’re grateful for trains your mind to look for positives. Your mind scans your environment all day looking for what is going well. This state keeps you positive and on your A-game. A simple exercise is to write down 3 specific things you’re grateful for in the past day. This could take 5 minutes or less for a massive gain.
#9 Breath work
Our breath is a gateway to our mind. Because the quality of our breathing is associated with mental states, deliberate breathing will transform your mind into a state that is primed for peak performance. Find a few exercises that bring you down from stress and exercises that can amp you up and bring you energy.
#10 Practice Peripheral Vision
Similar to breathing, our eyes are a gateway to our mind. When we’re stressed, we narrow our field of vision and focus. When we’re in rest or non-stress states, we use more of our periphery. Practicing your peripheral vision will calm your mind so that you use more mental energy to address challenges.
#11 Rituals
Much like athletes have rituals before they perform an activity, so too, you can create rituals before your activities. Think of small actions… touching the door frame to a room, placing your hand on your heart, pressing soles of your feet on the ground or mantras “you got this” “you can do it” or some combination that helps you get into a high performance state. Do that at specific times to make it a routine that puts you into the mind frame for winning.
Use some of the tactics on this list to help you get and stay prepared for the kind of high performance that will lead to you winning. Big wins don’t happen, it’s cultivated. You can take back control of that cultivation.