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I care that you succeed and have a healthy life full of positive emotions and relationships.
High performers work passionately regardless of traditional rewards.
don’t just develop skill; they develop people.
We call these six habits the HP6. They have to do with clarity, energy, necessity, productivity, influence, and courage.
“Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going.” —Jim Rohn
Seek clarity on who you want to be, how you want to interact with others, what you want, and what will bring you the greatest meaning.
they consistently seek clarity again and again as times change and as they take on new projects or enter new social situations. This kind of routine self-monitoring is one of the hallmarks of their success.
actively tapping into the reasons you absolutely must perform well.
This necessity is based on a mix of your internal standards
Increase productivity
Specifically, focus on prolific quality output (PQO) in the area in which you want to be known and to drive impact.
Develop influence
High performers are not lucky stiffs loaded with a great big bag of strengths at birth. They simply deploy the habits we’ve discussed, and do it more consistently than their peers. That’s it. That’s the difference.
Whenever you hope to succeed at a new goal, project, or dream, you have to bust out the HP6. Every time you find yourself performing below your full potential, bring the HP6 to bear. If you ever wonder why you’re failing at something, just go take the HPI and identify which habits you’re scoring low in. Then improve that area and you’ll be back on track.
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The bottom line is that if you’re going to focus on anything to improve your or your team’s performance, start with the HP6.
What’s fascinating about our research into the HP6 is that each improvement in any one area improves the others. This means that if you increase clarity, you’ll likely see improvement in energy, necessity, productivity, courage, and influence.
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Knowing this, you might as well start with the end in mind. Start bringing your full attention to the moments of your life. Start bringing more joy. Start bringing more confidence. These things will not only make you feel better, they’ll also help you perform better. Still, the same caveat applies to states as to strengths: Without effective habits, they’re just not enough.
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Like any researcher, I’m always open to new evidence, and I look at findings, including those in this book, as merely another messy step in the long march of understanding humans and how they work.
At the beginning, the decline in their performance is subtle. They start to feel that something is off, so they don’t bring as much intent to their efforts. They back off just a bit. That’s not to say they feel their life is lacking. “I have a lot to be grateful for,” they will say. But the issue is not about something external they should feel grateful for—it’s that something inside doesn’t feel right. Like Kate, they’re frustrated or restless even though life is good.
Ultimately, the dissatisfaction spreads into relationships at home or at work, and others notice.
“The feeling is clear and indisputable. As if you suddenly sense the whole of nature and suddenly say: Yes, this is true.” —Fyodor Dostoyevsky
It’s about how you think about tomorrow and what you do to stay connected with what matters today. The essential habit of seeking clarity helps high performers keep engaged, growing, and fulfilled over the long haul.
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associated with overall self-esteem. This means that how positive you feel about yourself is tied to how well you know yourself. On the flip side, lack of clarity is strongly associated with neuroticism and negative emotions.
Next, you need to have unambiguous and challenging goals.
having specific and difficult goals increases performance,
The higher the scores on questions such as these, the better the overall high performance scores.
higher clarity scores are significantly associated with greater confidence, overall happiness, and assertiveness.
This “future focus” went well beyond what they wanted to become or how they would achieve what they and others wanted.
Your vision is the promise of what you shall one day be; your ideal is the prophecy of what you shall at last unveil.”
High performers are clear on their intentions for themselves, their social world, their skills, and their service to others. I call these areas self, social, skills, and service, or the Future Four.
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They are living into their best self now.
These three words became my clarity checkpoint in life. Every night, lying in bed just before dozing off, I would ask myself, “Did I live fully today? Did I love? Did I matter?”
They ask questions like these:
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High performers are looking out there, beyond today, beyond the meeting, beyond the month’s to-dos and obligations.
To help Kate change and improve her relationships, I had her imagine in advance her interactions with people and then live into those intentions each day.
“What three skills are you currently working to develop so you’ll be more successful next year?”
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to actively develop mastery.
High performers are also working on skills that focus on what I call their primary field of interest (PFI).
Reconnecting with your passion and setting up structure to develop more skills related to it is a game changer.
What will provide the most value to those you serve? This is a question high performers obsess about.
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They ask, “What matters now, and how can I deliver it?”
Performance Prompts
they can accurately describe their emotions, but more importantly, they can also calibrate the meaning they draw from those emotions and determine the feelings they want to endure.
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They can sense their emotional state in any given moment, but they often choose to override it by defining what they want to feel.
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The word feeling here is used to refer to a mental portrayal of an emotion.
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high performers contemplate how they want to feel regardless of what emotions might come up, and they envision how they want to feel leaving the situation regardless of what emotions might come up. Then they exert self-control to achieve those intentions.
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Instead of allowing the emotion to evoke the feeling of dread, I can just let it be, take a few deep breaths, and choose to feel alert yet calm.
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if we seek to experience life and all its emotions and yet choose to feel centered, happy, strong, and loving right through the ups and downs, then we’ve accomplished something powerful. We’ve wielded the power of willful feeling, and suddenly life feels the way we want it to.
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All I had to do was get her to choose how she wanted to feel in each situation she entered, and that intention and activity alone brought more vibrancy and color back into her life.
high performers tended to equate four factors with meaning.
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