Peak Performance Newsletter #1 | On Overwhelm, Consistency, and the Growth Equation
Hey all,
Welcome to the 1st edition of the Peak Performance newsletter! I appreciate your interest and hope it proves valuable.
I've been debating resurrecting my writing & email list for sometime, but was uninspired to do so for as aimless a reason as "audience-building". One Friday night it hit me while I was brushing my teeth: What if I just wrote a weekly "what's on my mind" email to clients and other interested parties, much like a CEO might to their employees or a fund manager to their investors?
Thus, a newsletter was born.
Much of this is inspired by my personal work and work with my clients. I view it as an opportunity to share common themes and perspectives between us that might not come up explicitly in session. Please let me know what you think! I want to hone this to be super valuable overtime.
Anyway, here we go...
Some Thoughts
A few weeks ago, I found myself completely overwhelmed. Mentally and emotionally in particular. I'm no stranger to overwhelm, but I found this flavor put me in a unique predicament: I was palpably aware that I was not thinking clearly.
Knowing that you're not thinking clearly is a strange predicament to be in. Mostly because you can't reason your way out of it; your reason is compromised. I found this particularly debilitating as I've found that much of my comparative advantage is in sound judgment and maintaining perspective. These were what drove me to want to be a coach in the first place!
I spent several days in a haze. I tried to find my way through it, but failed over and over as I couldn't reason through the problem effectively.
Finally, one night, I saw the path that I needed.
I was jumping right into solving the overwhelm. I had skipped past asking "what exactly is overwhelming me" to "how can I make this go away". I was drowning in a sea of "solutioning" without clearly outlining the problems I was trying to solve.
And so I stopped. And I asked myself, "what are the questions that I'm wrestling with? What's underneath this all?"
When I did that, I found 6 HUGE questions. Imagine that! Trying to solve 6 huge questions while treating them as one big issue—one conglomerated sense of overwhelm.
Once I uncovered those separate questions, many of the solutions were instantly obvious. My reasoning faculty was restored.
Which makes sense—it was only compromised in the first place because it didn't have clarity on what it was reasoning about.
tl;dr: As trite as it sounds, one of the very best responses to overwhelm can be to step back and ask, "what exactly are the problems that I'm dealing with here?
What are the things that are overwhelming me? This decouples the problems into their independent—and much more solvable—parts.
2 Tweets
These two tweets absolutely destroyed me this week.
I turned this one into a poster to hang on the wall in my office:
I include Brad's reply as I think it adds a hugely valuable piece.
Source:
This one is a thread. I'm only sharing the first tweet for the sake of brevity, but encourage you to click through, especially if you have, are, or aspire to start your own thing.
1 Podcast
I recommended this podcast on the "growth equation" (Stress + Rest = Growth) to several clients this week.
I've been slowly listening through the podcast's "Growth Academy" series. I think it nails a lot of the foundations of sustained performance. This is increasingly on my mind as I work to adopt a longer time horizon in everything I do.
I have a developing hypothesis that long-term thinking unlocks a lot of possibilities that truly are impossibilities without it, but it requires an absurdly patient mindset that is natural to absolutely no one. These podcasts help elucidate how to embody it.
I hope you have a great week and let me know what this inspires!
Justin