LL #38 | Peak Performance is now the Leadership Lab
Rebranding, Surfing through Life, and the Necessity of Rest
Peak Performance ➡️ The Leadership Lab
I’ve felt the name Peak Performance hasn’t fit for a while now.
I value performance. As an entrepreneur and coach, I need to. To perform at a high level is a must for myself and those that I serve. If we don’t perform, our businesses and livelihoods disappear before our very eyes.
So I am very interested in performance. And I am very much targeting my peak; I want to perform at my absolute best.
The name Peak Performance was originally chosen to explore a question: How does one perform at their best?
There’s just one problem. As I explored that question, several deeper questions emerged:
What do we mean by best?
How might the meaning of best vary based on different phases of life, contexts, and cultures?
How do I relate to myself when I am not at my peak or the best version of myself?
What does best mean when we start to consider groups rather than individuals, and how do we create it?
Colloquially, the term Peak Performance rarely accounts for these questions. It is narrowly focused on the individual. It usually means being the best out of everyone for the sake of winning rather than being the best that one can be for the sake of realizing oneself.
In doing so, it easily paints an ugly picture: one where individuals grind to win races that they aren’t even clear if or why they want to win in the first place.
These problems are exacerbated further when applied to groups and work.
Performance is necessary to any organization, yet we treat it with a similar myopic mindlessness.
We push people to their limits to hit narrowly defined and short-sighted key results. These key results rarely consider what is best over longer time horizon and, paradoxically, often drive worse results, all while compromising the wellbeing and development of the people within those cultures.
This is not the right way. We were not designed to pursue narrowly defined and ill-conceived ideas of performance, hardly at all costs.
The right way is an adaptable way, a way that enables individuals to realize their uniqueness in carefully crafted alignment toward collective goals.
This way is not one that has easy “drag and drop” or playbook solutions. It is a way that calls for creativity and experimentation.
It is a way that demands leadership. It demands someone with a strong vision, not only for where we get to go but how we want to go there, and with a desire to rally and align people to come along for the ride.
Hence, The Leadership Lab, a place to explore ideas that you can experiment with to become a more effective, actualized, and fully expressed person and leader. In doing so, you start the process of creating the same for those that work with and for you.
The leadership lab is mean to be exactly what is claims: a laboratory. A place for intentional experimentation. I don’t claim to know anything, but instead share the best of what’s worked for me and those I serve in the hopes that you can try it and see how it works for you.
As I reset the newsletter, I’d like to provide a few of my thoughts around how to get the most out of it:
Engage with it. The Leadership Lab is designed not only to be read, but to be engaged with. Read it AND work with it. Consider what it would be like to integrate the ideas into your life. Fold the concepts and questions into your journaling, meditation, and other reflective practices.
Approach it with a sense of openness, exploration, experimentation, and evolution. I don’t claim that any ideas are right or wrong for you. Instead, I encourage you to figure that out for yourself. The key is to be open and consider how the ideas included may better your life and leadership. Think of it like a weekly chrysalis to aid you in your development.
Action, experimentation, and behavior change are the end goal. To really create change, you have to be willing to try something new. To get the most out of the newsletter, look how you can try something different out in the real world.
Thanks for being along for the ride so far. I’m excited for the next chapter.
Onto the newsletter.
🏄Surfing through Life
In life and work, you'll go through periods that require you move uncomfortably fast and others that are unpleasantly slow. While these periods can be uncomfortable, we tend to make them worse by resisting them- wishing things were slower or faster than they are.
By adding resistance and narratives of good vs. bad (it's bad things are this fast/slow), you add an unnecessary layer of suffering.
The central skill here is acceptance: acceptance of that which you cannot control. Acceptance so you can stop wasting time and energy on that which cannot be changed and instead focus it on what you can do about it.
Instead of seeking to control everything, learn to surf with the ebb & flow of life.
〰️ The Power of Oscillation
The harder you want to go, the more important it is to create sacred time and space to do the opposite: go incredibly easy.
If you want to operate at a 10, you have to be willing to go down to a 1.
Avoid the simmering 6.
🐦Tweets of the Week
Improve Communication through distillation, not addition
Have a Plan AND Adapt it
Why we Seek self help
Questions
As an individual, what does it mean to perform? To perform at your peak? What is the path and foundational principles and practices to reach the heights of performance? Are all of these specific to you, or do they generalize to you and the people around you?
What does it mean to perform as a group? At a peak? What is the path and foundational principles and practices to reach the heights of group performance?
Where are you resisting something that’s out of your control right now? What about it are you resisting and why? What’s one thing that’s in your control that you can do about it?
What score, out of 100, would you give yourself for your ability to rest when you need it? How can you better practice rest in your life and work? What would that enable for you?
Until next week!