Goal Setting & Peak Performance

Before we ever set foot on the stage, athletic pitch or into the corporate board room for the big event we’ve been training and preparing for – it starts with a simple question.

Where are you going? And Why?

I believe so much of goal setting that is taught today skips these two hard to pin down questions and begins immediately at “how are you going to get where you’ve stated you want to go”, providing strategies and tips on ensuring goals are SMART and then breaking your big objective down into micro-goals, etc. etc.

But Why?

Why are you choosing to invest your most important resources and assets, your time, energy, and attention, into this specific goal.

Key Questions to Consider when setting goals

As you think about your next goal setting process, here are some questions I would encourage you to ask yourself:

• First of all, simply ask yourself why you want to achieve the goal you have articulated or written down. Try to get several layers deep to find the real reason as it usually isn’t the first or second answers you tell yourself which are over-influenced by our ego’s.
• Is your goal aligned with your core values and virtues – the non-negotiable principles you want to live your life by. If you don’t know what these are, then this is where I recommend you start the work (more on that here).
• Is your goal aligned with the deepest transcendent skills you desire to develop throughout your life? Again, do you know what these things are, this is your core craft that you will develop over the 30, 40, 50+ years of your life that can be transferred from chapter to chapter.
• Have you thought about how big and ambitious your goal is and therefore how much time it will take to accomplish? The bigger the vision, the longer the time horizon, and therefore the greater the sacrifices – whether you want to admit it or not.
• Have you thought about how it will feel to be slogging through the War of Attrition, trying to sustain your effort working towards this goal for that extended amount of time?

The Purpose of Goal Setting: The Deep End and Peak Performance

I actually believe that goal setting is less about achieving a desired outcome or objective and more about ensuring there are the right set of ingredients in our lives to ensure that we are challenged, face adversity, find flow and experience performing at our best. Goal setting is about navigating to the right High Dive, jumping into a Deep End that simultaneously challenges us and fulfills us, and allows us to experience flow an fulfillment in our Peak Performance Windows.

Balancing Peak Performance & Recovery Windows

One of the areas I see most aspiring corporate leaders and high performance athletes undervaluing is the role and important of Recovery. Through each of our journeys there will be dozens, hundreds and potentially thousands of “Performance Bursts” where we are preparing for a Peak Performance Window – a presentation, an athletic event, a major speech or performance. These Performance Bursts are critical to ensuring we are pushing our limits towards our ultimate goal – they provide us with the intrinsic drive and motivation and the rush of positive neurochemicals that make us feel present and fulfilled while aiming to perform at our best. These experiences also provide us with significant opportunity for accelerated learning and growth, more on that later.

But they also take their toll. Ramping up for a Peak Performance burst puts stress on our mind, spirit, body and psyche – this is the good kind of acute stress that allows us to hone in and focus on being at our best in the exact moment when we need to perform. Sometimes these bursts will be extremely short lived, only last for minutes or hours, other times there will be a longer, more gradual build out to bigger events culminating with a significant push to the finish line – I think back to the long nights leading up to a major business presentation or event.

We have to give ourselves the space to recover after these Performance Bursts. And the recovery window should be of a similar intensity and duration as the previous Performance Burst. Over the years, I have acknowledged that my body and intuition generally know exactly the type of rest I need after a Peak Performance burst. Sometimes it is taking an entire day or set of days off – getting out of work or athletics and being with family or going on an adventure. For smaller bursts, I find myself being drawn to going for long walks, sequestering myself for a few hours offline with a book, or even spending a few slow hours in the morning working from my bed or a couch – embracing the slow pace after the intense Performance Burst.

So often, despite feeling or hearing the pull from our body and energy that we need to rest, that we are dragging, tired and unmotivated, we ignore these signals and push on. Over time (And sometimes it doesn’t even take that much), this shifts our acute Peak Performance stress to acute stress that lingers between Peak Performance bursts. Ultimately, this often leads to becoming ill, burning out, becoming resentful and disengaged, or increasingly developing negative self talk and narratives in our heads.

Permission to Pause and Rest

Finally, when it’s all said and done and you have either achieved your Audacious Goal, or you have failed or given up along the way – you must give yourself permission to pause and rest. Again this is something currently our current generation seems to struggle with – whether out of social pressures and anxieties or out of the discomfort experienced from the practice of stillness and rest.

The long term benefits of providing yourself the permission to pause and recover disproportionately outweigh the decision to immediately start moving after failure or success. Here are some of the observations I have made when we give ourselves the space to adequately rest:

• We avoid burnout and build resilience against the notion that we must always be doing something.
• This is largely through the fact that this permission often provides us with the space to realize and acknowledge that we are not that important, life will go on whether we choose to charge forward or not, and therefore it becomes much more important to align that charge with our own personal fulfillment and wellbeing so that we can have the greatest impact possible with the short time we have.
• All of the rich learning and lessons we experienced in our Performance Bursts cannot actually be fully grasped nor integrated while we are on our journey to the summit of our audacious goal – our brains instead tuck these away in our subconscious layer for us to process when we are not so laser focused on goal achievement. The Pause is exactly where this processing, identification and integration of profound new learnings can occur.
• Because we are able to take the time to integrate these new learnings and evolve the most foundational layers of who we are, we emerge from this pause more confident in our self-belief and the next path we want to chart in alignment with our values, virtues and inner passions.
• The body is a massively complex system and there is so much that we will likely never know about it’s entire inner workings. However we do know things like chronic stress, anxiety, fatigue, inflammation are net-negatives on our lifespan, performance and wellbeing. By taking a complete pause to rest, we give every aspect of our body (mind, energy, nervous system, gut, brain, etc.) the time it needs to fully recover – this impact is compound by the new spring we feel as we move from our pause into the next goal, feeling refreshed and ready to dive back into the Deep End, versus sluggish, lethargic and exhausted by the Deep End when we don’t take that pause.

Support at the Next Level

If  some of the content in this post has resonated and you want to learn more about Peak Performance and developing your mental game and set of performance tools – you’re welcome to take our Human Performance Baseline Assessment or learn more about the Human Performance Lab 30 Day Program. We would love to hear from you and discuss how we can support your journey through life.