The Five Drivers of High Performance

Part of the reason we saw a need for what we do is because of how lonely it is to be an entrepreneur.

Josh Matthews-Morgan, Learn Your Brain

Josh: Tell us how you got started in your business and what you’re excited about with what you guys are doing now?

Josh MM: I was fresh out of college when my mom actually started the coaching company and realized she needed a business partner. And her thoughts kept coming back to me, so she finally asked and I said yes without even a second thought. Just followed my intuition. 

Long story short, we started off working with someone else’s program and it just wasn’t the ideal thing. We wanted to have more control over the experience and coaching people. And we ended up developing our own process, which is what we’ll talk about today, The Five Drivers of High Performance.

Chad: You and your mom start with coaching college kids and quickly pivot away from that and into entrepreneurs. Was there some glaring thing entrepreneurs are lacking or a need they have that you saw you could fill?

Josh MM: For us, it was less about what they were lacking and more who they were and how they incorporated the training that we taught them. We started nine years ago. So about four years ago, we said, “who have been our favorite clients to work with? And who have been gotten the most results out of our coaching process?” 

And we came up with five to seven clients that just loved it and ran with it. And they were all business owners and entrepreneurs. There isn’t really a guidebook out there for being an entrepreneur, most of it is just making stuff up as you go and hoping it sticks. So we thought we could help with some of that.

Josh: So man, launch us into this, The Five Drivers of High Performance. What is the first thing?

Josh MM: These are a high level overview of the things every business owner needs to build a high growth performance. If you’re not where you want to be in your business it’s going to be most likely due to a deficit in one of these five areas. 

The first one is actually a combination of two concepts that play off one another really well. 

1. Vision and Purpose. 

Purpose is not just a mission statement that you stick on a wall and forget about. Purpose is the deep impact you want to have, either on your clients’ lives or on the world as a whole. The you build your business around purpose, you make a lot more money. Jim Collins in his book, Good to Great, found that purpose-driven companies as a whole out-performed the market by 15 to 1. 

Imagine you’re heading out on a road trip from Athens, GA to Los Angeles, CA. In order to get there you have to have a car that’s performing well. Your organization is the car. And when you add purpose to that well-performing car, it’s like adding nitrous oxide to your fuel tank. It’s a catalyst for success. Purpose is related to employee engagement, hiring and firing decisions, and overall better financial performance. 

It is a little different than a “life’s purpose,” which is a great thing that I encourage people to explore as well. This business purpose is a bit more strategic and tactical and it’s usually founded in something that was a struggle in your formative years. Lack of money as a child, depression, abuse, bullying, weight; all these things can be a root that presses you forward toward your purpose later in life. 

Here’s how it becomes tactical.

You get fulfillment in the area where you can provide value to your clients, and by providing value beyond simply a product, you can rise above your competition. 

Josh: How can I make a difference and provide value to my clients. If I’m able to do that, I go home every day with purpose and fulfillment. Which means I’m going to have more passion and vision, which will help me continue to grow my business. 

Chad: You’ve grouped purpose and vision together, but how are they different from each other and how are they aligned? 

Josh MM: Purpose is the impact that you want to have on the lives of your clients or on the world. Vision is a very clear picture of where you want to be and what success looks and feels like to you. It’s not a vision statement. It’s a picture you can put yourself into for the future. It should drive emotions within you. 

Your vision can also include your purpose. Example: By 2020 we want to do X to impact the lives of 10,000 people and transform their lives. So it’s like a goal, but it’s purpose driven. And achieving that goal changes or impacts those people’s lives, but it also will turn them into customers or cause them to interact with your business in some way. So your business benefits from your purpose and vice versa. 

In this digital age, one email that sounds sales-y and off purpose can drive away customers and subscribers in the casual click of a button.

People’s emotions are what drives them to become a loyal customer. So if we’re not acknowledging the emotional side of the business game, we lose out on the potential of our business. 

Chad: So the first driver is purpose and vision, take us to the second. 

2. Belief.

There are a lot of cliches about belief. It’s all about “how hard can you believe this will happen,” “if you’re a true believer it’ll make life easy,” “smash like if you agree.” 

Beliefs make up a core part of our being and they can drive us forward or hold us back. And since they’re subconscious and often buried somewhere deep inside, it can take some effort to uncover them. 

Josh: So when you say belief, you’re almost talking about limiting beliefs, things you can’t be. 

Josh MM: It’s belief in the areas holding you back. If you have a strong foundation of belief in yourself on that base level, that will carry you far. And that’s essential. There’s a lot of people who have situational beliefs come up that trip them up in their business. Fears around marketing, selling, rejection… People don’t consider them beliefs but they are subconscious, implicit beliefs that you can pinpoint and shift into empowered beliefs. 

There are two different levels of our brain, the rational brain that holds the beliefs you can articulate. Then there’s a deeper level of belief in our emotional brain that drives behavior because they’re tied in with our emotions. 

Josh: How do they identify this and how do they fix it? 

Josh MM: Usually they show up in tasks you avoid. So we look at patterns in your life. Areas where you not only screw up, but you consistently self-sabotage in predictable patterns, there’s a belief or set of beliefs behind that. 

Another place it shows up often for entrepreneurs is in their negative self-talk.

Perpetual negative self-talk points to strong negative beliefs about yourself that cause patterns of failure or screw-ups. 

Chad: So how do you overcome what you identify?

Josh MM: One of our favorite techniques is the Emotional Freedom Technique. Our system mirrors therapy in a lot of ways, although we aren’t therapy we use a lot of similar practices and techniques. But this technique says that if you can articulate something, you can work to change it. Rapid Transformation Therapy is also something you can work with a coach or therapist to do and it works at the emotional brain level. 

One of our favorite exercises is sentence completion. All you’re going to do is start half a sentence that we give you and fill in the blank with whatever pops into your head. The sentence could start with “I can’t fall asleep because…” and an honest answer will trigger a physical emotion response, which is how you identify the true root. Then you can look back along that belief to find the point in your past when it was true and address the deeper issue. 

Once you find the belief, you then use that Emotional Freedom Technique to dig down and unpack the real problem, the emotional truth behind the fear. 

Chad: So we’ve got the first two. What’s the third driver?

3. Emotion. 

There is a bunch of research showing that emotional resilience is a key skill. And as a skill, it’s something that’s easily trainable and easily developed with a little application. People who are more resilient sell way more than their peers because they don’t let no’s get them off-track. 

On a brain-chemistry level, when you’re feeling happy and positive for whatever reason, you get a brain boost and it makes you temporarily smarter, more present, productive, and centered.

Developing an unshakeable foundation of positive emotion is essential for success. 

Chad: So is this a snowball effect?

Josh MM: Totally. But the time you spend working on this stuff is time you don’t spend growing your business, which is why a lot of business owners and entrepreneurs feel like they can’t justify and do this stuff. But what they don’t realize is that the busier you are, the more essential this becomes. Because it allows you to see the world clearly and not reactively. 

Tim Ferris has a podcast where he has interviewed high performers in every field. And he said that 90% of them have some kind of mindfulness or meditation practice they do every day which trains their mind to be in a positive state. They know it affects their performance at every level. 

Here in the U.S. everyone gets into hysteria really quickly. They lose their emotional intelligence. If you’re a high performer, you’ve got to be guarded with your emotions. You can easily get sucked into this vortex of influence and lose sight of your purpose and vision. Your emotional intelligence is keeping your vision and purpose in front of you. 

These things just compound off each other.

Your purpose and vision get bigger, your belief level increases, and your ability to maintain and handle your emotions surrounds these things. 

Chad: I guess it’s different for everyone, the place they find that brain boost. For me, I found it in a fitness regime that changed my positivity, my beliefs, and behaviors and habits spread like wildfire into everything I do. 

If I could tell my readers one thing, I’d say to find one thing you can commit to win and build competence. Doesn’t matter what it is, it doesn’t have to be work-related, just find it and do it every single day and it’ll change your life.  

4. Focus and Productivity. 

Josh MM: I truly believe we live in the most distracted time in human history. The amount of things available to us at any time has never been larger. Add to that the budget and schedule you’re trying to shuffle, employees who interrupt you when you want to be left alone, and every little thing that makes your work life chaotic. 

Business owners often don’t put up boundaries around their time. They don’t have enough rituals to get focused work done. But small things that pull you off-track add up. It’s a skill, because focus is something you can develop. 

Protecting your focus as an entrepreneur is essential.

The two things that help productivity the most are prioritization and structuring your time to get the best out of it. What is the absolute highest thing on my list that I must do right now? 

When you structure your time and energy, you maximize your time in the hours that you’re most effective every day and you don’t compromise and work on anything low priority during those peak productive hours. 

Manage your energy to get the most out of it. Your day is not a marathon. If you try to go and go and go without a regular pattern of rest, you’re more likely to burnout or grind to a halt. 

Your brain will have diminishing returns after 45 to 90 minutes of focus time, so every 45 minutes to hour and a hlaf, you should be taking a break to allow yourself to reset. Walk around, stretch, do a little exercise, give yourself space away from the work. And when you come back to it, you can have up to a 60% increase in ideas and creativity. 

5. Rituals. 

Rituals is just a fancy word for habits. All of this stuff we’ve talked about can be made into a ritual. 

Laura Whitaker, the CEO of ESP in Athens shared that one of her rituals is to mentally open up someone’s mailbox on her way home from work and put all the unfinished projects and stress from her day into that mailbox. Then on her way into work the next day, she would mentally reopen that mailbox and take everything back out. 

That mental ritual helps her to be present at home with her kids, to leave work at work, and to reduce stress at home. It helps her to shift in and out of work mode. 

I love that example because it’s a totally unconventional ritual that’s helped her so effectively. They don’t have to be physical things that you do, it’s just something that allows you to separate and create the patterns you want in your life. Engineer your own behavior. 

In his book Atomic Habits, James Clear talks about stacking habits. You decide the outcome you need, then look at the habit which will create that. Back it up. What holds you back from creating that habit? How can you trigger the steps that will lead you to your desired end result? 

This is a way to identify your pillar ritual. Like Chad talked about with his fitness habits, you find the one thing that you can use to structure things around and establish that first. The rest will easily follow. What’s the pebble you can throw into the pond to create the ripple effect? 

Josh: Let’s bring it home. How can a listener apply all this we’ve talked about today? 

Josh MM: When you’re looking at going to the next level, start with these five areas.

Chad: I know how impossible this all sounds to start out. But if you can wrap your mind around spending an hour or two on these things every day, you will see exponential returns. You will work less, you will make more money. 

Josh MM: I offer a lot of free training on Facebook and I’m happy to talk to anyone who’s looking for a place to start with all this, just shoot me a message. 

Resources:

“Good to Great,” by Jim Collins

“Atomic Habits,” by James Clear

https://www.learnyourbrain.com/blog/

Follow us on social media!

Instagram:

The Entrepreneur Adventure: @theentrepreneuradventure

Josh Melton @sidegigprophet

Chad Brown @serialcfo

Josh Matthews-Morgan @learnyourbrain

Facebook:

(As Amazon Affiliates, we earn from qualifying purchases.)