High Performance Habits | Brendon Burchard

Twenty years ago, author Brendon Burchard became obsessed with answering three questions:

Why do some individuals and teams succeed more quickly than others and sustain that success over the long term?

Of those who pull it off, why are some miserable and others consistently happy on their journey?

What motivates people to reach for higher levels of success in the first place, and what practices help them improve the most?

After extensive original research and a decade as the world's leading high performance coach, Burchard found the answers. It turns out that just six deliberate habits give you the edge. Anyone can practice these habits and, when they do, extraordinary things happen in their lives, relationships, and careers.

Which habits can help you achieve long-term success and vibrant well-being no matter your age, career, strengths, or personality?

INTRODUCTION

Sure, you’ve gotten ahead so far by sheer passion, guts, and hard work. You’ve climbed a few mountains. But the next questions are throwing you off: Where to now? How to go higher? Why are others climbing more quickly than I am? When, if ever, can I relax and set down some roots? Does it always have to feel like such a grind? Am I really living my best life?

What you need is a reliable set of practices for unleashing your greatest abilities. Study high performers and you will see that they have systems built into their days that drive their success. Systems are what separate the pro from the novice, and science from armchair philosophy. Without systems, you cannot test hypothesis, track progress, or repeatedly deliver exceptional results. In personal and professional development, these systems and procedures are, ultimately, habits. But which ones work?

With the right habits, anyone can dramatically increase results and become a high performer in almost any field of endeavor.

High performance is not achieved by a specific kind of person, but rather by a specific set of practices, which I call high performance habits. Anyone can learn them, regardless of experience, strengths, personality, or position.

Achievement is not your problem—alignment is.

What’s achievable is not always what’s important.

Certainty is the enemy of growth and high performance.

Certainty is the fool’s dream and, thus, the charlatan’s selling point.

Technology won’t save us.

Amid all the excitement about technology improving our lives, it turns out that what does the job better than anything else are simple human habits of high performance.

The high performance approach extends beyond such popular concepts as “focus on your strengths” and “just put in your ten thousand hours.” Lots of people have amazing personal strengths, but they destroy their health in their quest for success and, thus, can’t maintain high performance. Lots of people obsessively practice or put in the hours to such a degree that they destroy the relationships they need to support their continuing growth.

I care that you succeed and have a healthy life full of positive emotions and relationships.

High performance, as I define it and as the data confirms, is not about getting ahead at all costs.

It’s about forming habits that help you both excel in and enrich the full spectrum of your life.

High performers are more successful than their peers, yet they are less stressed.

High performers love challenges and are more confident that they will achieve their goals despite adversity.

High performers are healthier than their peers.

They eat better. They work out more. The top 5 percent of high performers are 40 percent more likely to exercise three times per week. Everyone wants health, but they may think they have to trade it for success. They’re wrong. In survey after survey, we find high performers to be more energized—mentally, emotionally, and physically—than their peers.

High performers are happy.

We all want to be happy. But many people are unhappy achievers. They get a lot done but don’t feel fulfilled. Not so for high performers. It turns out that every single habit of high performance we’ve discovered, even if practiced without the others, increases overall life happiness.

There’s a myth that our innate “strengths” are what we all should be focusing on. But the time for navel-gazing is long since over. We must see beyond what comes naturally to us, and develop into what we must be in order to grow, serve, and lead. High performers get that. They’re less into “finding their strengths” and more into “adaptive service”—exploring what needs fixing and growing into the person who can fix it. The question they ask is less often “Who am I and what am I good at?” and more often “What is required to be of service here, and how can I grow into that or lead others to deliver that?”

High performers are uniquely productive—they’ve mastered prolific quality output.

It’s that high performers get more things done that are highly valued in their primary field of interest. They remember that the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing. That focus and effort to create only output that will be meaningful helps them excel.

High performers are adaptive servant leaders.

They don’t just develop skill; they develop people.

When you knock on the door of opportunity, do not be surprised that it is Work who answers.

To succeed, always remember that the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.

I’ll focus on what you should actually do to reach the next level of success. If you would like even more human stories or case studies, check out my blog or podcast via Brendon.com. If you want a more academic approach and a deeper look into our methodology, visit HighPerformanceInstitute.com.

BEYOND NATURAL: The Quest for High Performance

“Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going.” —Jim Rohn

If you want to reach higher levels of performance in anything you do, you must consistently do the following:

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. As every project or major initiative begins, you ask questions such as “What kind of person do I want to be while I’m doing this?” “How should I treat others?” “What are my intentions and objectives?” “What can I focus on that will bring me a sense of connection and fulfillment?” High performers ask these types of questions not only at the beginning of an endeavor but consistently throughout. They don’t just “get clarity” once and develop a mission statement that lasts the test of time; 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.

Generate energy so that you can maintain focus, effort, and wellbeing. To stay on your A game, you’ll need to actively care for your mental stamina, physical energy, and positive emotions in very specific ways.

Raise the necessity for exceptional performance. This means actively tapping into the reasons you absolutely must perform well. This necessity is based on a mix of your internal standards (e.g., your identity, beliefs, values, or expectations for excellence) and external demands (e.g., social obligations, competition, public commitments, deadlines). It’s about always knowing your why and stoking that fire all the time so you feel the needed drive or pressure to get at it.

Increase productivity in your primary field of interest. Specifically, focus on prolific quality output (PQO) in the area in which you want to be known and to drive impact. You’ll also have to minimize distractions (including opportunities) that steal your attention from creating PQO.

Develop influence with those around you. It will make you better at getting people to believe in and support your efforts and ambitions. Unless you consciously develop a positive support network, major achievements over the long haul are all but impossible.

Demonstrate courage by expressing your ideas, taking bold action, and standing up for yourself and others, even in the face of fear, uncertainty, threat, or changing conditions. Courage is not an occasional act, but a trait of choice and will.

Seek clarity. Generate energy. Raise necessity. Increase productivity. Develop Influence. Demonstrate Courage. These are the six habits that you need to adopt if you are to reach high performance in any situation.

If you have great ambitions to contribute extraordinary things, you’ll have to grow and stretch far beyond what’s natural to you. To rise to high performance, you’ll have to work on the weaknesses, develop entirely new skill sets beyond what you find easy or what you “like to do.” It should be common sense: If you really want to make your mark, you’ll have to grow more to give more, and that won’t feel easy or natural.

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.

HABIT 1: Seek Clarity

 “If you don’t have clarity of ideas, you’re just communicating sheer sound.” —Yo-Yo Ma

“There are two types of people. One walks into the room and announces, ‘Here I am!’ The other walks in and says, ‘Oh, there you are!’”

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.

You generate clarity by asking questions, researching, trying new things, sorting through life’s opportunities, and sniffing out what’s right for you.

Clarity is the child of careful thought and mindful experimentation. It comes from asking yourself questions continually and further refining your perspective on life.

Decades of research show that having specific and difficult goals increases performance, whether those goals are created by you or assigned to you. Clear “stretch” goals energize us and lead to greater enjoyment, productivity, profitability, and satisfaction in our work. Choosing stretch goals in each area of your life makes a good starting place for high performance.

You should also give yourself deadlines for your goals, or you won’t follow through. Studies show that having a specific plan attached to your goals—knowing when and where you will do something—can more than double the likelihood of achieving a challenging goal. Having a clear plan is as important as motivation and willpower. It also helps you see past distractions and inoculates you against negative moods—the more clarity you have, the more likely you are to get stuff done even on the days you feel lazy or tired. When you see the steps right there in front of you, it’s hard to ignore them.

Be more intentional about who you want to become. Have vision beyond your current circumstances. Imagine your best future self, and start acting like that person today.

What is apparent across all high performers is that they anticipate positive social interactions and they strive consciously and consistently to create them.

High performers are also working on skills that focus on what I call their primary field of interest (PFI). They aren’t scattershot learners. They’ve homed in on their passionate interests, and they set up activities or routines to develop skill in those areas.

This means high performers approach their learning not as generalists but as specialists.

“If you leave your growth to randomness, you’ll always live in the land of mediocrity.”

When someone becomes disconnected from the future and their contribution to it, they underperform.

Relevance has to do with eliminating things that don’t matter anymore. High performers don’t live in the past, and they don’t keep pet projects at the forefront. They ask, “What matters now, and how can I deliver it?” Differentiation allows high performers to look at their industry, their career, and even their relationships for what makes them unique. They want to stand out for who they are, and to add more value than others do. Excellence comes from an internal standard that asks, “How can I deliver beyond what’s expected?” For high performers, the question “How can I serve with excellence?” gets more attention than perhaps any other.

Sit and write out what you want of life. No goals, no growth. No clarity, no change.

“Unhappiness is not knowing what we want and killing ourselves to get it.” —Don Herold

Not every mountain is worth the climb.

What differentiates high performers from others is their critical eye in figuring out what is going to be meaningful to their life experience. They spend more of their time doing things that they find meaningful, and this makes them happy.

It was these findings that inspired me to ask myself this question every morning in the shower: “What can I get excited or enthusiastic about today?” That simple question has changed the way I walk into each day. Try it.

Passion + Growth + Contribution = Personal Satisfaction

Enthusiasm + Connection + Satisfaction + Coherence = Meaning

“The meaning of life is whatever you ascribe to it.” —Joseph Campbell

HABIT 2: Generate Energy

If you want to be a high performer, show up and bring the joy.

The first trigger was what I call a “notification trigger.” I put the phrase BRING THE JOY into my phone as an alarm label. I set the alarm for three different times throughout the day, and I set the text for the label of the alarm to read BRING THE JOY! I could be in a meeting, on a call, or writing an e-mail, and all of a sudden my phone would vibrate as the alarm went off and display those words. (As you learned in the chapter on Clarity, I also put other words and phrases in my phone to remind myself of who I want to be and how I want to interact with others.) When your phone vibrates, you look at it, right? So there I was in the middle of my day, sometimes just going through the motions trying to recover from my accident, and bam, my phone goes off. It reminded me to bring joy to the moment. For years now, that reminder has conditioned my conscious and unconscious mind to bring positive feelings into my everyday life.

The second trigger I set was what I call a “door frame trigger.” Every time I walk through a doorway, I say to myself, “I will find the good in this room. I’m entering this space a happy man ready to serve.” This practice helps me get present, look for the good in others, and prepare my mind to help people. What positive phrase or sentence could you say to yourself every time you walk through a doorway?

The third trigger I set up was a “waiting trigger.” Whenever I’m waiting in line to buy something, I ask myself, “What level of presence and vibration do I feel right now, on a scale of 1 through 10?” By asking myself this question, I’m checking in on my emotional state, scoring it, and choosing whether it’s sufficient to how I want to feel and how I want to live my life. Often, when I feel at a level 5 or below, my mind snaps to attention and says, “Hey, man, you’re lucky to be alive. Raise your energy and enjoy life!

Gratitude is the golden frame through which we see the meaning of life.

So if the demands of your job or life require you to learn fast, deal with stress, be alert, pay attention, remember important things, and keep a positive mood, then you must take exercise more seriously.

If you care about your contributions to the world, you’ll care for yourself.

If you’re going to start anywhere to improve your health, you should start with a regular workout schedule, especially if you’re in generally good health. When people work out, they tend to start caring more about their diet and sleep.

On the flip side, I’ve found that for those who were in poor health, starting them with good eating habits helped get them into exercise. This is because losing weight is often easier to accomplish by changes in diet than by hitting the gym three times a week. Going to the gym is a new thing; eating is not. Changing what people eat is easier than getting them to adopt an entirely new habit of regular exercise.

Make improving your energy a commitment. Start taking more moments during the day to release the tension in your body and mind. Choose to bring joy to your everyday life experience.

HABIT 3: Raise Necessity

People who become world-class at anything focus longer and harder on their craft.

“You never know how strong you are until being strong is your only choice.” —Bob Marley

“Without a sense of urgency, desire loses its value.” —Jim Rohn

We change and improve over time only when we must. When the internal and external forces on us are strong enough, we make it happen. We climb. And when it gets most difficult, difficult, we remember our cause.

High performers are confident about their why but open about how.

When we verbalize something, it becomes more real and important to us. It becomes more necessary for us to live in alignment with that truth. So the next time you want to increase your performance necessity, declare—to yourself and to others—what you want and why you want it. —Amy Poehler

“Find a group of people who challenge and inspire you, spend a lot of time with them, and it will change your life.”

“Make a conscious effort to surround yourself with positive, nourishing, and uplifting people—people who believe in you, encourage you to go after your dreams, and applaud your victories.” —Jack Canfield

You are only as strong and extraordinary as you give yourself reason to be. So determine your musts, my friend. Make them real. Feel them in your gut. Because the world needs you to show up now.

HABIT 4: Increase Productivity

“The day is always his who works with serenity and great aims.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson

No goals, no focus, no energy—and you’re dead in the water.

Productivity starts with goals. When you have clear and challenging goals, you tend to be more focused and engaged, which leads to a greater sense of flow and enjoyment in what you’re doing.

You’ll always feel out of balance if you’re doing work that you don’t find engaging and meaningful.

“There is virtue in work and there is virtue in rest. Use both and overlook neither.” —Alan Cohen

“I believe half the unhappiness in life comes from people being afraid to go straight at things.” —William Locke

The bigger the goal, the more to manage and the more interaction points with other people. To become a high performer requires thinking more before acting.

Remember that the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing. Know the big five moves that will take you to your goal, break those moves down into tasks and deadlines, then put them in a calendar.

It doesn’t matter whether you know how to achieve your Five Moves at first. The important thing is that for every major goal you have, you figure out the Five Moves. If you don’t know the moves, you lose.

So test yourself. If I showed up at your house, could you open your calendar and show me the blocks of time on your calendar that you saved and structured specifically to complete a major activity leading to a specific big goal? If not, you know your next move.

I know it’s good to remember that without discipline, our dreams will forever remain delusions.

Everything is trainable. No matter what skill you want to learn, with enough training and practice and intention, you can become more proficient at it. If you don’t believe this, your journey to high performance stops here.

Repetition rarely leads to results.

Identify the factors critical to success, and develop your strengths in those areas (and fix your weaknesses with equal fervor).

Attach high levels of emotion and meaning to your journey and your results.

Identify the factors critical to success, and develop your strengths in those areas (and fix your weaknesses with equal fervor).

Develop visualizations that clearly imagine what success and failure look like.

Schedule challenging practices developed by experts or through careful thought.

Measure your progress and get outside feedback.

Socialize your learning and efforts by practicing or competing with others.

Continue setting higher-level goals so that you keep improving.

Teach others what you are learning.

“Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.” —Pablo Picasso

HABIT 5: Develop Influence

“It’s about influence strategy. And it probably begins with something the legendary basketball coach John Wooden said: ‘You handle things. You collaborate with people.’”

People only like to work with leaders who make them think bigger and grow more.

If you want more influence, remember: Ask and ask often.

High performers have a giving mindset. They enter almost every situation looking for ways to help others.

If you’re the one who appreciates people the most, you’re the most appreciated.

“The words that a father speaks to his children in the privacy of home are not heard by the world, but, as in whispering galleries, they are clearly heard at the end, and by posterity.” —Jean Paul Richter

HABIT 6: Demonstrate Courage

“Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.” —Mark Twain

To achieve excellence requires hard work, discipline, routines that can become boring, the continual frustrations that accompany learning, adversities that test every measure of our heart and soul, and, above all, courage.

There are only two narratives in the human story: struggle and progress. And you can’t have the latter without the former.

Embrace the suck. Sometimes, doing your duty sucks. Training sucks. Patrol sucks. The weather sucks. Circumstances suck. But you can’t just avoid them or be bitter. You have to deal with it, face it, and will yourself to persevere and rise. You have to embrace the suck.

Just because the sky is cloudy doesn’t mean there’s no sun.

BEWARE THREE TRAPS

To become high performers, people have learned to get comfortable with the uncomfortable.

What seems a big issue to you, what might be separating you from others in your circle of influence, might be child’s play to a bigger fish in another pond. That perspective can prove hopeful. Someone out there has already solved the dilemma, mastered the thing that you believe makes you so different from others. If you can find them, you can find a mentor, a solution, and a path back to reality and humility.

You can’t maximize your potential while minimizing others.

Those who are never satisfied are never at peace.

I’ve just made what I consider a simple choice in life: to be a satisfied striver rather than a dissatisfied curmudgeon.

Obsession in one area of life hurts another area, setting off a negative cascade of events and feelings that eventually unseats the high performer.

Slow down, be more strategic, and say no more often.

If a good opportunity comes up but it’s going to rob you of a few nights’ sleep, force you to cancel strategic moves you planned long ago, or knock you out of time with your family, then just say no. Cramming your day so full that you have no time for thought or rejuvenation just makes you tired and irritable. And no one credits fatigue and a bad mood for their world-class performance.

THE #1 THING

when you are more confident, you are more willing to say no and more sure of what to focus on, which makes you more efficient and less prone to distraction.

Confidence is not a fixed personality trait. It’s a muscle you build through exertion.

The key competency that gives high performers confidence is the ability to quickly gain understanding or skill in new situations. In other words, the competency that matters is the ability to become competent.

Confidence comes from being truthful with yourself and others. You have to avoid the little lies that can easily tear at the fabric of your character. If you lie about the small things, you will cause a catastrophe when faced with the big things. Your heart and soul want to know you’ve lived an honest life. If you break that trust, you risk feeling incongruent and ruining your performance. Stand in your truth and tell the truth, and you’ll feel congruent.

The more you work with people, the more you learn about yourself. And the more you work with others, the more you learn new ways of thinking, new skills, new ways of serving. That hit of learning is what high performers told me gives them so much drive to engage.

Curiosity x (Competence + Congruence + Connection) = Confidence

Lastly, for even more resources, including checklists, posters, assessments, day planners, journals, and corporate training tools, visit HighPerformanceHabits.com/tools.