High Performance: Lessons from the Best on Becoming Your Best

by Jake Humphrey

had uncovered the greatest secret of high performance. The teenage me had been wrong. Nothing is fixed. And you can change almost anything about ‘you’ if you want to.

When we met the multimillionaire businessman Steve Morgan, he told us his golden rule for achieving excellence: ‘Thou shalt work like hell.’

High performance begins in the mind: before you can behave like a high achiever, you must think like one. Next comes behaviour, in which you turn that newfound psychological state into concrete actions. Then, through that behaviour, you can pass a culture of high performance on to your wider team, which will help both you and them. High performance ripples outwards from our minds, to our actions, to our teams.

‘Do the best you can, where you are, with what you have got.’ Phil Neville

knew it wasn’t my fault but how I reacted was my responsibility.’ Billy Monger

But it hadn’t. Monger had realised that, even when things happen to us that aren’t our fault, there is one thing we can control: our reactions. This is what he meant by ‘responsibility’ – taking control of your reaction to the things life throws at you. As we’ll learn in this chapter, the ability to distinguish between ‘fault’ and ‘responsibility’ is one of the key skills – perhaps the key skill – in a high performer’s mental toolkit.

But if you want to be a high performer, you must realise that how you react to setbacks is down to you alone.

Today, there are heaps of evidence suggesting that high self-efficacy significantly increases your life chances. Having a strong sense of control over your life has ‘been linked with academic success, higher self-motivation and social maturity, lower incidences of stress and depression, and longer life span,’

‘High performance is about how you respond to pressure. It took me some time to realise I was in control.’ Robin van Persie

People who view their problems as pervasive, permanent and personal tend to end up with worse life outcomes than those who view them as specific, temporary and external.

When you find yourself thinking, ‘Everything about this project is going wrong,’ try to think of what elements of it (however small) have gone right. And when you spot a friend saying, ‘They always do X,’ try to offer up an example of when they’ve done Y.

‘When it does go wrong, I’ve only got one person to look at, and that’s myself. No excuses.’ Ant Middleton

High performers take absolute responsibility for their actions. They focus on the elements of their life they can control, they avoid overgeneralising in tough situations, they own up when they screw up.

(Life + Response = Outcome)

‘Winners take control. They blame themselves, and they look where they can improve.’ Robin van Persie

Taking complete responsibility for yourself is the first step to high performance. No one can control what happens to them, but everyone can control their response.

isolate the elements of your situation that you can control – and spend your time and attention on them.

Psychologists define autonomy as acting in harmony with your sense of self – and, as Wabara’s experience shows, it is an integral part of internal motivation.

Taking control of your situation – or, as Deci and Ryan would put it, exercising your competence – is the second crucial way to build motivation.

It taught me a valuable lesson about motivation – or, more importantly, about demotivation. When you’re feeling demotivated, it can help to just focus on the things that are in your hands.

Frank Lampard’s insight from his earliest days at West Ham: when you feel like you belong, you are prepared to work harder.

Internal motivation comes from three sources. First, ‘autonomy’. When your behaviour aligns with your values, it’s easier to get excited about it. Second, ‘competence’. We are most motivated when we have control over what we’re doing. Third, ‘belonging’. When we feel part of something bigger than ourselves – like a team – we can sustain our motivation for longer.

‘In the 2004 Olympic 800 metres final, there was 0.2 seconds which divided the top four finishers,’ she said. ‘Our talent was roughly equal. We could all run fast, we were all as strong and as tough as each other.’ And so 80 per cent of victory is in the mind.

need adrenaline to gear up for a race, but too much and you are lost.

visualise what is actually required of you, and cut out the rest.

He reminded me that what I already had within me was what I needed to win.’ Dina Asher-Smith

One trick is to emphasise that who you are and what you achieve are not the same.

The goal is to reduce your sense of the demands, increase your belief in your abilities and balance your view of the consequences.

If there’s one lesson to take from this chapter it’s this: the road to high performance is long. You don’t need to get there right away, and even if you fail, you’ll have chances in the future to succeed.

So, if we’re serious about working out our strengths, we need to remain vigilant – and keep checking that we’re focusing on what we’re great at. This leads on to the second principle of finding your strengths: reflection.

The Dunning-Kruger effect suggests that assessing how good you are at a task, and actually being good at that task, often require the same skills.

The solution is to scrutinise what you’re good at – and to do so with ruthless objectivity.

According to Csikszentmihalyi, indicators of flow include the look on your face, your breathing patterns and the amount of muscular tension in your body. Think of a pianist performing in a concert: every part of their body is given over to playing – they seem overjoyed by the complete focus that it requires.

The moral is clear: if you convince yourself you can solve a problem, then you’re much more likely to be able to. How you are now isn’t how you’ll always be. How you think now isn’t how you’ll always think.

Teams that are more cognitively diverse have a wider array of opinions. They see all the most important questions in different ways.

If you find yourself getting stuck, the worst response is to go with the crowd. Great minds rarely think alike. Great minds think differently.

‘Winning isn’t a some-time thing; it’s an all-time thing. You don’t win once in a while; you don’t do things right once in a while; you do them right all of the time.’

‘You want to perform well? Then commit.’ Steven Gerrard

Instead of goals related to outcomes – hitting a sales target or winning over a client – they set goals related to behaviours, like turning up on time or dressing smartly.

‘The stronger the organisation, the better they do the real simple, basic things.’ Shaun Wane

When the pressure is on, everything but the essential behaviours go out of the window. The trick, then, is to work out what trademark behaviours will make a difference in these moments. Imagine a stressful situation in your life: a big pitch meeting, a job interview, even a first date. What behaviours are going to make the difference between success and failure? Your posture? Your tone of voice? Try to work out what matters when the heat is on, and practise it obsessively when the heat is off.

An action trigger is when you commit to do something at a set time. In practice, that means using the formula, ‘When I do X, I will also do Y.’

But also practise the trademark behaviour when you’re alone, when the pressure’s off and nobody’s watching. Why? Well, as I sometimes put it to the athletes I coach: what is done in the shadows reveals itself in the light.

March argued that identity is the more powerful force in determining our decisions in the long term. If we think of ourselves as a certain type of person, we make decisions that chime with that identity.

If you’re serious about building a behaviour in the long term, try not to frame it as a one-off choice. Frame it as a series of questions about the type of person you want to be. Who am I? What kind of situation is this? What would someone like me do in this situation?

To make your trademarks long-lasting, build them into your identity. Imagine an ideal version of yourself and ask: What would they do in this situation?

‘Noses point in the same direction’ ‘The minimum requirement is maximum effort’ ‘Give us your legs, hearts and minds’

takes its inspiration from what Jim Collins calls a ‘stop-doing list’. Write down a list of everything you’ve done at work in the past week, focusing on tasks that take more than one hour. Next, go through that list and give it a mark out of ten for how much it aligns with your goals – or, even better, your BHAG.

Keep your eye out for moments in which you seem to be excelling, and consider why. In particular, remember the three Rs: recognition, reflection and rhythm.

‘If you are good, you’ll get there. If you are consistent, you’ll stay there.’