Dream lofty dreams, and as you dream, so you shall become. Your vision is the promise of what you shall one day be; your ideal is the prophecy of what you shall at last unveil.
James Allen
High performers are clear on their intentions for themselves, their social world, their skills, and their service to others. I (Brendon Burchard) call these areas self, social, skills, and service, or the Future Four.
Social
High performers also have clear intentions about how they want to treat other people. They have high situational awareness and social intelligence, which help them succeed and lead. In every situation that matters, they know who they want to be and how they want to interact with others.
If this sounds like common sense, let’s find out whether it’s common practice in your life:
Before you went into your last meeting, did you think about how you wanted to interact with each person in the meeting?
Before your last phone call, did you think about the tone you would choose to use with the other person?
On your last night out with your partner or friends, did you set an intention for the energy you wanted to create?
When you were dealing with that last conflict, did you think about your values and how you wanted to come across to the other person when you talked to them?
Do you actively think about how to be a better listener, how to generate positive emotions with others, how you can be a good role model?
Dream lofty dreams, and as you dream, so you shall become. Your vision is the promise of what you shall one day be; your ideal is the prophecy of what you shall at last unveil.
James Allen
High performers are clear on their intentions for themselves, their social world, their skills, and their service to others. I (Brendon Burchard) call these areas self, social, skills, and service, or the Future Four.
Self
“Know thyself” is the timeless advice inscribed on the Temple of Delphi in Greece over 2,400 years ago. But there’s a difference between “know thyself” and “imagine thyself.” High performers know themselves, but they don’t get stuck there. They are more focused on sculpting themselves into stronger and more capable people. That’s another big difference: introspection versus intention.
We’ve found that high performers can articulate their future self with greater ease than others. Tactically, this means they tend to have a faster and more thoughtful, confident response when I ask them, “If you could describe your ideal self in the future, the person you are trying to become, how would you describe that self?”
In reviewing recordings from my interviews, it’s clear that high performers have thought about this more than others. Their descriptions came sooner, with the coherent part—the part after the “hmm’s” and “good question”—clocking in an average of seven to nine seconds faster. Their responses were less meandering than the others’. When I asked people to describe their future best self in just three words, high performers also replied faster and in a more confident tone.
Most recently in my career, I (Brendon Burchard) have wondered whether high performers have a particular worldview on clarity—about themselves, what they want, and how to get it. I wondered what, if anything, they were clearer about than most people.
To find out, I analyzed the comments of high performance students, called on achievement researchers, and spoke with Certified High Performance CoachesTM about what gives their clients an edge. I also conducted structured interviews focused solely on the topic of clarity, with nearly a hundred people who reported in our surveys as being high performers, I asked them questions such as:
Which things are you absolutely clear about that help you perform better than your peers?
What do you focus on to stay clear about what matters most?
What aren’t you clear about, and how does that affect your performance?
What do you do when you are feeling uncertain or undirected?
If you had to explain to someone you were mentoring what it is that makes you successful, what would you say?
What else do you know about yourself—beyond your values and strengths and plans—that makes you successful?
The feeling is clear and indisputable. As if you suddenly sense the whole of nature and suddenly say: Yes, this is true.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
This chapter is about finding clarity in your life. 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.
Our research shows that compared with their peers, high performers have more clarity on who they are, what they want, how to get it, and what they find meaningful and fulfilling. We‘ve found that if you can increase someone’s clarity, you up their overall high performance score.
Whether you have a high degree of clarity in life or not, don’t fret, because you can learn to develop it. Clarity is not a personality trait that some are blessed to “have” and others are not. Just as a power plant doesn’t “have” energy—it transforms energy—you don’t “have” any specific reality. You generate your reality. In this same line of thinking, you don’t “have” clarity; you generate it.
So don’t hope for a flash of inspiration to reveal what you want next. You generate clarity by asking questions, researching, trying new things, sorting through life’s opportunities, and sniffing out what’s right for you. It’s not as though you walk outside one day and the Piano of Purpose falls on your head and all things become clear. Clarity is the child of careful thought and mindful experimentation. It comes from asking yourself questions continually and further refining your perspective on life.
Will the HP6 get as dramatic results for you as we’ve seen in our research, training, and coaching? I (Brendon Burchard) would love to test them with you. That’s why, once again, I invite you to be the judge of how effective these habits are. In case you haven’t yet gotten around to following my advice in the previous chapter, before you read further, take the HPI. It takes only a few minutes, and it’s free online at HighPerformanceIndicator.com. It will give you a score on each of the six habits, and no, it won’t “label” you. Take the survey. Do it now. And be sure to enter your e-mail so I can send you another link to take the assessment again in seven to ten weeks. You’ll know by your own responses to the assessment in a few weeks just how much this work can begin to change your life.
One thing is abundantly clear from our findings: You should never wait to pursue a dream or add value out of fear that you lack the “right stuff.” High performance happens because of what you deliberately think and do on a routine basis in order to excel and serve at higher levels. It is this quest to challenge yourself to develop good habits that will make you feel enlivened and help you realize your full potential.
The HP6 gave me (Brendon Burchard) a proven game plan for succeeding at my projects in life. Now they are a standard operating system for entering any new situation. I’ve been using them in my professional career, and the results have been astounding and quite public.
Beyond myself, the habits and concepts in this book have measurably improved the lives of tens of thousands of our students. These students take the HPI before and after our online programs, live training events, and coaching experiences. They love seeing demonstrable data that they are improving their lives. We regularly see our students significantly increase their overall high performance scores (and overall life happiness). We’ve also used the HPI in organizations to help them pinpoint where their employees and teams should focus their development.
Further, we’ve seen remarkable results through client coaching interventions. Over three-thousand hour-long coaching sessions led by independent Certified High Performance CoachesTM reveal that people can dramatically change their behaviors and reach higher performance in many areas of their lives in weeks, not years.
People often ask me (Brendon Burchard) whether there is a specific “state” that will enable them to succeed over the long term. Well, by definition, emotional and mental states don’t endure. They’re fleeting. Moods stick around longer, and habits hold the longest, which is why we focus there.
But I think what people are really getting at is. “How will I feel when I’ve hit high performance? What does it feel like, so I can reverse-engineer that?”
That question can be answered by the data. In a keyword analysis of public survey data on over thirty thousand high performing respondents, it’s pretty clear: When people talk about how they feel in high performance, they report feeling full engagement, joy, and confidence (in that order).
This means they tend to be fully immersed in what they are doing, they enjoy what they’re doing, and they have confidence in their ability to figure things out.
Rounding out the top five were purposefulness and flow, as in “I feel like I’m in flow.” (“In the zone” was not an option in our surveys because it’s a phrase rather than a word, but it was the most common written-in descriptor.) Determination, focus, intention, deliberateness, and conscientiousness rounded out the top concepts people used to describe what being in high performance felt like.
We like to think of the HP6 as “meta-habits” because they make all other good habits in life fall into place. By seeking clarity, you develop a habit of asking questions, looking within, observing your behaviors, assessing whether you’re on track. By generating energy, you’ll be better rested, you’ll eat healthier, you’ll exercise more. And so on.
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. Our analysis also suggests that even though people who score high on one habit tend to score high on the others, each habit is giving them a little extra edge in increasing their overall high performance score. Improve just one of these habits, and you improve your performance.
Another fascinating thing we learned is that all the HP6 predict overall happiness, meaning the higher your score in any habit, the greater the odds you’ll report being happy in life. Taken together, then, the HP6 are a powerful predictor of not just whether you’re a high performer but also whether you’ll be happy.
* Source: High Performance Habits by Brendon Burchard
