Improving Your Productivity and Achieving Peak Performance

Peak performance requires:

Flexibility
Endurance
Strength
Resilience
Creativity

The challenge of peak performance is to manage your physical, emotional, mental and spiritual energy. A long time ago, I thought you had only to manage physical energy to be highly productive, for example such as consuming some nutritious calories. But I was wrong.

Have a think for a minute. Despite having lots of calories have you ever felt low in energy? Or are there times when you seemed to have lots of energy and someone gives you a job you really don’t want to do, maybe your income tax and all of a sudden your energy disappears? Or you may recall a time when you had lots of energy but what you were doing went against your values or maybe someone raised an emotional issue that seemed to drain you. Your emotional or psychological energy is a product of your motivation. If our hearts aren’t in it we simply cannot raise our energy. Lack of passion ultimately affects energy. Have you ever noticed how much energy you have for a project depends upon your passion for the project? Have you experienced how tiring it becomes when you are doing something that you don’t want to do? For me it is marking exam papers. It puts me to sleep. However, writing my chapters and books really excites me so I have a lot more energy for it. In fact a whole day can disappear and I might not even notice it once I am writing. Sound familiar?

Stress and procrastination are great energy drains despite the fact that they do not manifest in the physical realm. That is why we need to build our energy reserves in the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual realms. “Spiritual” does not have to mean religious; I take it to mean consistent with your own higher values.

There are many blocks to increasing personal, professional and business productivity, including procrastination, lack of vision, being too busy, having no motivation or direction, stress and more. However, these all stem for two major areas: the way we think and our energy management. In a very simplistic way the level of energy we have and the way we think influence all our behaviour and are therefore at the root of all our problems and solutions.

We develop a personal energy crisis where our physical, emotional, psychological (mental) and spiritual batteries are totally depleted and at the end of each day we feel frustrated and exhausted, leading to a negative, spiralling problem of communication breakdown and conflict.

A simple formula for peak productivity is:

Productivity = Energy + Motivation and Direction

So how do you achieve productivity? First understand that your physical energy is simply a product of many aspects of your life, including your nutrition. Athletes use many strategies to achieve peak performance. Top athletes use more of them and focus on them more because top athletes cannot afford to make too many mistakes. Businesses also cannot afford to make too many mistakes. Individuals work long hard hours but don’t use any of these techniques. The performance demands of most professionals outstrip those of most professional athletes. Athletes have a professional career of five to 10 years if they’re lucky.