Mental Disciplines for Leading and Winning from the World’s Top Performers. Embark on a journey of self-discovery and unparalleled achievement with ‘Learned Excellence’. This book is a beacon of inspiration and practical wisdom, guiding readers through the mental disciplines that hallmark the world’s top performers. From the Navy SEALs to corporate boardrooms, the strategies within these pages are proven to foster resilience, focus, and peak performance.
Are you ready to elevate your performance and achieve your dreams? Dive into the depths of ‘Learned Excellence’ and emerge with the mental toolkit of champions. Continue reading to transform your potential into reality.
Table of Contents
Genres
Motivation, Inspiration, Personal Development, Management, Leadership, Career Success, Self-Help, Psychology, Business, Coaching, Performance, Strategy
Learned Excellence is a compelling guide that distills decades of experience and research into five core mental disciplines: Values & Goals, Mindset, Process, Adversity Tolerance, and Balance & Recovery. The book is co-authored by Eric Potterat, a performance psychologist who developed the mental toughness curriculum for the Navy SEALs, and Alan Eagle, a former Google executive. Together, they provide a roadmap for excellence that applies to various fields, from sports to business.
Review
Learned Excellence is an exceptional resource that stands out for its actionable insights and relatable anecdotes. The authors’ expertise shines through each chapter, making complex psychological concepts accessible to all readers.
The book’s emphasis on learned skills over innate talent is particularly empowering, offering hope and direction to anyone aspiring to improve their performance in any area of life. Its applicability to both personal and professional growth makes it a valuable addition to any reader’s library. The book has received positive reviews for its comprehensive approach and practical advice, impacting a wide range of individuals, including elite athletes and business leaders.
Introduction: Learn the secret to achieving excellence and becoming a peak performer
Learned Excellence (2024) offers a comprehensive guide to the five mental disciplines necessary for peak performance. It provides principles and practices used by top athletes, military personnel, and business executives to attain excellence – professionally and personally.
In today’s fast-paced world, where the pursuit of success often leads to burnout, mastering specific mental disciplines is critical if you want to achieve sustained excellence. Whether you’re an athlete aiming for the Olympics, a CEO steering a multinational company, or someone simply trying to excel as a parent, partner, or student, understanding and applying these disciplines can transform your approach to challenges, leading you to remarkable achievements and personal fulfillment.
Excellence doesn’t just come down to hard work; it’s about working smart with a deep understanding of yourself, and taking a strategic approach to life’s demands. In this Blink, you’ll learn about the five crucial mental disciplines that form the backbone of peak performance: identifying and aligning with your core values and goals; choosing and cultivating a productive mindset; meticulously planning and refining your process; developing a tolerance for adversity; and embracing the principles of balance and recovery. Each discipline builds upon the previous, creating a comprehensive framework for not only achieving success but also for sustaining it. These tried-and-true practices will guide you from self-awareness to resilience, paving the way for a balanced and fulfilling journey towards peak performance.
Ready to excel? Let’s dive in!
Discipline One: Values and goals
The foundation of peak performance rests upon a deep understanding of your values and goals. It may sound obvious, but we must first become aware of what matters to us before we can start chasing it.
A great place to kick things off is with the introspective process of crafting a personal credo – a clear statement that encapsulates your core values. This short, curated maxim acts as a compass, guiding decisions and actions, ensuring they are aligned with what truly matters to you. That’s why a credo is more than just a vision statement; it’s a declaration of your identity and how you want to live your life. Take some time to reflect, then see if you can fashion a ten-word sentence that sums up the performer you seek to embody.
To bring your new-found understanding into practical application, set short- and long-term goals across various aspects of your life. By establishing objectives for your career, relationships, health, spirituality, hobbies, and legacy over one-, three-, and six-month intervals, you create a roadmap for your journey. These goals aren’t just checkpoints; they are stepping stones towards a fuller, more rounded existence.
At this point, it can be helpful to identify your “engine” – the passions that drive you forward. Defining these passions requires a deliberate reflection on what fuels your ambition and how these motivators intertwine with your core values. This exercise isn’t just about pinpointing what excites you; it’s about understanding the why behind your drive, thus giving purpose and direction to your pursuits.
In essence, the journey towards peak performance is rooted in self-awareness. By articulating your values through a personal credo, setting specific, time-bound goals, and understanding your passions, you lay the groundwork for sustained excellence. This deep self-knowledge equips you to navigate life’s challenges with purpose and resilience, setting the stage for the second discipline: mindset – harnessing the power of thought to further amplify your potential.
Discipline Two: Mindset
When it comes to mindset, there’s one important truth to acknowledge. Your mindset isn’t merely a personality trait; it’s a deliberate choice. Understanding this lies at the heart of achieving peak performance. And by recognizing this, you can significantly influence your chances of success across various aspects of your life.
This selection process involves identifying and adopting mindset traits conducive to your distinct roles. For example, your professional persona might benefit from being aggressive and risk-taking, while your personal persona – as a parent and spouse, for instance – might need you to be more compassionate and conservative. There’s no one-size-fits-all here, but making these distinctions and delineations is critical.
Related is a concept known as staying in the circle – or focusing on the three sole elements within your control: attitude, effort, and behavior.
By closely monitoring and adjusting your attitude, you can foster a positive, rational self-dialogue, replacing any negative or irrational thoughts that may hinder your progress. In turn, this active self-engagement encourages a relentless pursuit of effort, pushing you to consistently prioritize productivity over idleness. You can think of this as increasing your effort quotient – how often you choose actions that propel you forward rather than hold you back. The final piece of this puzzle is embodying the chosen mindset through behavior, which involves establishing routines and daily habits that reflect your desired mindset, ensuring that both your internal dialogue and outward expressions are aligned. Surrounding yourself with like-minded individuals further reinforces this mindset, creating an environment that facilitates growth and achievement.
Lastly, stepping outside your comfort zone and embracing risk is essential for practicing and solidifying an adaptable and resilient mindset. Such experiences provide valuable lessons in handling failure, learning from it, and bouncing back stronger.
As you scale the lofty heights of peak performance, it’s vital to remain cognizant of the mindset that paved the way. This awareness helps combat the natural tendency to become defensive or complacent, ensuring that the drive towards excellence stays undiminished.
This understanding of mindset as a deliberate choice and constant practice sets the stage for the third mental discipline of peak performance: committing to and refining the process. If mindset shapes our approach to challenges, it’s process that provides the roadmap for navigating them, promising continuous improvement and achievement. And this is what will carry you towards excellence.
Discipline Three: Process
Mastering peak performance hinges on meticulously cultivating your process – your curated, consistent approach to performance. Amateurs focus on results; peak performers on process.
This mental discipline centers on maximizing your most precious resource – time – and advocates for an intentional planning strategy. A solid place to start is with your calendar. Allocate an activity for every waking hour, two days a week. Then, color-code each task green, yellow, or red, depending on importance and flexibility. There are a range of time-management tools out there, but if you find this one works for you, gradually increase the number of days you schedule and color-code until you reach six or seven. This practice may sound simple, but you’ll be surprised at how effectively it carries you forward to success.
A second critical element of refining your process is carefully selecting information sources. The quality of input you receive – whether from family, friends, co-workers, or the media – directly influences your output. Therefore, you must vet your inputs for their reliability and validate the evidence they provide. Specifically, this involves periodically reassessing your go-to sources for their loyalty, honesty, willingness to challenge, and understanding of your unique characteristics. When you filter out noise and concentrate on credible feedback, you ensure that your process runs on high-quality fuel.
Of course, your process will need to evolve as your performance does, but make adjustments cautiously and deliberately. Base any changes solely on the information sources you have pre-vetted and validated. It’s also wise to make modifications incrementally – altering one or two factors at a time rather than starting from ground zero. That way, you can more accurately gauge the impact of these changes. Such a systematic approach allows for careful assessment and ensures that each adjustment contributes positively to your overall process.
To sum up, process provides you with a framework that increases your chances of success by emphasizing the significance of consistency and quality. A strong foundation in process also sets the stage for the fourth mental discipline: adversity tolerance. As you become proficient in navigating your process, the ability to withstand and thrive amid challenges becomes the next frontier in your quest for excellence.
Discipline Four: Adversity tolerance
Mental toughness is pivotal in managing stress responses during demanding situations. Developing this resilience, known as adversity tolerance, involves a set of practices designed to prepare the mind and body for the challenges ahead, ensuring that you’re not just ready to face hardships but that you can also learn from them and grow stronger.
Visualization plays a central role in this preparation. Visualization involves mentally rehearsing upcoming performances using all five senses, thus making the actual moment of performance feel familiar, reducing your anxiety, and improving execution. Visualization is an effective pre-performance routine – a physical practice priming the mind and body for the task at hand – but can be employed post-performance too. Post-performance visualization offers an invaluable opportunity to reflect, learn, and note adjustments to make in the future.
Similarly, a comprehensive contingency plan for potential challenges ensures readiness for any situation. Practicing these plans to the point of automaticity enables swift and correct actions under pressure, bypassing the need for distracting deliberation in the heat of the moment.
But things will inevitably go wrong, and when faced with unforeseen challenges during a performance, the “black box” technique can be a lifesaver. This approach encourages you to move on from mistakes – temporarily setting them aside for post-performance analysis – and return your focus to the only thing you can control: the present moment. Then, after your performance, you can unpack the “black box” to objectively review events and the subsequent emotions. This practice does several things: it keeps your performance on track when it counts, helps you better understand what occurred and why, and then develop specific strategies to bypass similar setbacks in the future.
Building adversity tolerance through these practices helps you to withstand challenges and, crucially, to thrive amid them. This resilience fosters continuous growth and learning, preparing you for the fifth and final discipline: mastering balance and recovery – essential elements of sustainable peak performance.
Discipline Five: Balance and recovery
At this stage in your journey of learning excellence, a crucial point must be emphasized: peak performance is not solely about the relentless push forward. Balance and recovery matter too. This dual approach is essential to ensuring success not just in the short term but over time as well.
Embracing balance involves equitable investment across the six life domains – career, relationships, health, spirituality, hobbies, and legacy – while recovery focuses on replenishing your physical and mental reserves post-performance.
When it comes to balance across all life domains, it’s vital to acknowledge that it’s not always possible to maintain perfect equilibrium, so give yourself some grace if you need to temporarily underinvest in an area or two. The key lies in recognizing this imbalance and strategizing a return to harmony when you can. This adaptive approach allows for short bursts of focused intensity, as and when needed, without losing sight of your overall well-being.
To support recovery, the “4444” controlled breathing technique is a simple yet effective method for recentering and restoring yourself. By inhaling for four seconds, holding for four to six seconds, and exhaling for four seconds over four minutes, you can significantly reduce stress and enhance mental clarity. What’s great about this practice is that it’s free and always available – you can do it wherever, whenever.
Taking recovery a step further, prioritize incorporating more extensive activities into your schedule that regularly restore and rejuvenate. Quality sleep, regular exercise, expressions of gratitude, immersion in nature, yoga or meditation, and even engaging in activities outside your skill set are all tried-and-true options. These practices not only aid physical recuperation but also promote psychological resilience, enriching your capacity for handling future challenges.
Incorporating these disciplines of balance and recovery into your routine is essential to realizing your potential – professionally and personally. It’s a recognition that peak performance is a holistic endeavor, requiring attention not just to the task at hand but to the broader spectrum of life’s demands. By fostering an environment conducive to both rigorous challenge and profound rest, you can ensure your achievements aren’t just momentary flashes of brilliance but milestones in a sustained journey of excellence.
Conclusion
No one is born with the peak performance mindset. It has to be learned and earned.
The good news is that by honing the mental disciplines of values and goals, mindset, process, adversity tolerance, and balance and recovery, anyone can achieve excellence. The less desirable news is it takes conscious, constant work, day in, day out. That’s what makes excellence so impressive.
But what could possibly be more rewarding than dedicating yourself to realizing your true potential, professionally and personally? Indeed, it’s the things we didn’t try or only half-heartedly tried that we’ll most regret on our deathbeds, not that we strove to give our all. By following the five disciplines framework, you can create a life that’s as meaningful as it is spectacular.
Eric Potterat, PhD, is a leading performance psychologist. He has extensive experience working with professionals in high-stress careers, including Red Bull athletes, the US women’s soccer team, and the US Navy SEALs, for whom he developed the BUD/S mental toughness curriculum. Previously, Potterat served 20 years in the US Navy, which he retired from as a commander.
Alan Eagle is an author and executive communications consultant. His books include How Google Works and Trillion Dollar Coach, both of which he co-authored with Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg. His 16-year tenure at Google established him as an expert in helping leaders and companies articulate their narratives effectively.