First: Find the Correct Coach for you
- What your coach achieved on or off the track or in business may translate into the excellent results or not. What matters most is for you to find the best coach for you. Someone willing to work with you.
- Decide what your goals of high performance are. Is your goal is to be the best you can be? Your choice of who will be your coach may change if your goal is to make the National team or become an Olympian or be the CEO of Fortune 500 company.
- The best coaches will have notable results with larger groups of people over time frames that exceed one year. Look for trends from where a person started and where they have ended up over time. Learn something about who will be your coach.
Second: Have a Plan with Steps
These steps should be in line with how others have achieved their goals as your starting point- It is not important that all steps be known at once. Adjusting the plan along the way is necessary.
- Financing or funding your plan: having money is not always a given but money is often needed to support a plan. Try to find a school, club or organization to help support your efforts.
As far as sports go, the following download explains details of what coaches in athletics need to think about beyond their knowledge of training. CF Lecture Series: Business of Coaching Bundle - Joining groups of like-minded people from University, college, and clubs or lead a group to support your goals. Surrounding yourself with the right people is important for daily and long-term support and success.
Tip:Executive minded Professionals benefit from habits scheduled to repeat daily the same way athletes practice training rituals of small exercises allowing them to shave off time for best performances. Example: keep training diary, calendars to log routines and performances that exceed previous goals
Third: Fix The Easy Stuff Now
Remind yourself that the easy stuff in part has to do with fixing aspects of your life where you are already spending time. Change or improvement in performance does not have to cost anything. Some of the easy to fix stuff now things are:-
Diet
Elite athletes will not sustain lifetime excellence without eventual troubleshooting of refined sugars, chemicals and what I call Fake food or over processed food, out of their daily nutrient plan. Corporate executives should think the same way. Think about a 90/10% or 80/ 20% rule. This means routinely eating excellent protein each meal, adding beans and lentils as protein, daily meals of vegetables which include dark leafy greens as well as super foods of sweet potatoes, yams, seeds like ground flax, whole almonds and fats of fish and olive oil. -
Sleep
Daily habits result in the quality of our sleep. High quality sleep helps to regulate normal body functions, restore energy and reset our over all nervous system which connects our mind and body. Read more about the importance of the interplay of diet and sleep and performance in “ The Hormone Diet” Dr. Natasha Turner”. -
Practice Routine Regeneration
The practice of renewal is the idea of recovering energy in small amounts performed often to expend greater energy in a more focused way.Question: How would I practice routine regeneration? Here are a few ideas.
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Go to bed early and get up early
Not always an easy task for certain hormones get released naturally at specific times in the day. These times are linked to darkness in part. Read more about sleep and hormones in “ No More Sleepless nights” Hauri and Linde -
Water Heals:
The word Spa is an acronym for salus per aquam’ which is Latin for ‘Health from water’. Drink water for the removal of waste products that might be polluting our body, soak in water for relaxation and the release of stress. Read more about the varied methods of how water can be used to help you help yourself. Heat and Cold as Therapy by Laurel Fowlie RMT, BA, M.Ed. -
Practice at least one thing every day that restores you.
It might be as simple as spending more time with those you love most in your life, or eating your favorite food. Practicing regeneration is a skill that can be improved and enjoyed.
I have seen the highest level of performance in sport. I have also witnessed the high performance of the most successful executives in the world. Athletes and executives who have sustained consistent results over time have done so by merging simple building blocks like the ones I have discussed above.
My hope is for you to find something helpful for your own personal high performance. If so I would enjoy hearing about it to share with others.
"Sprint your own race"
Coach Angé Coon
The following people, article and resources have inspired this article:
- Coach Charlie Francis
- “The Making of the Corporate Athlete” Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz
- Blog about our high performance hormone