By Bobby Kipper
Most of us think that performance has to do with activities with clear external standards, such as sports, education, and employment.
But in order for Performance-Driven Thinking to become a reality in our lives, it must begin within us at a personal level. In fact, personal Performance-Driven Thinking can be an even greater challenge, because there are no easy external standards to measure our performance.
Personal Performance Driven Thinking requires us to measure our personal growth and success ratio according to our own internal standards.
We all have personal areas in our lives that are critically important to each of us. They include 1) personal health, 2) personal goals, 3) personal relationships, and 4) personal finance.
This week we discuss personal health and personal goals. Next week’s newsletter will focus on personal relationships and finance.
Performance Driven Thinking and Your Health
Performance-Driven Thinking relates to your health just as much as it relates to your professional life.
Our personal health depends greatly on our personal attention to the details within our control to live a healthy and balanced lifestyle.
During the last decade, through advances in medical science and prevention messaging, we all already know a number of things we could do to make ourselves healthier.
The question of performance comes in when we look at our society and ask, “Why do some people work to live a healthy lifestyle, while others do not?”
Performance in terms of a healthy lifestyle is not just for those who participate in athletic competition. It is clearly something all of us should desire. When you go to work, you will recognize and be informed of the risk factors that can get you into trouble in your job.
How much more do we need to know the risk factors that will lead us toward disease and perhaps an unnecessarily early death?
Many individuals in our society, who overemphasize performance in external activities such as work, school, or sports, may not realize the importance of Performance-Driven Thinking in their personal life, which means their overall health and physical capability to perform will suffer.
Ignoring the importance of performance in our personal lives within the area of health would be similar to going into an athletic event without the right equipment.
Your personal performance is greatly tied to your ability to take care of yourself. Some of you reading this book need to revisit your personal health decisions, which will only lead to better performance in every area of your life.
Smoking, overeating, and unhealthy addictions are just a few of the factors that interfere with Performance-Driven Thinking.
The way we take care of ourselves is clearly a matter of personal choice and performance.
Performance Driven Thinking and Personal Goals
The next area we will examine in the context of Performance-Driven Thinking is personal goal setting.
What exactly do we mean by personal goals?
When you were born, your parents had a number of personal goals for you.
They began with your first steps, when everyone waited with baited breath for you to finally stop crawling and learn to walk.
From there, the goal was learning to speak. Parents and grandparents alike could not wait for you to say your first words.
From that point on, you were put on an automatic goal-setting pattern to journey up what could be called the educational mountain.
This goal-setting pattern existed because in each grade you attended in school, you had to achieve certain standards in order to succeed. This continued until you completed the final step in your formal education—whether it was high school, college, graduate school, or any other level of higher education, and decided what you were going to do with your talents and abilities in the world.
This is when Performance-Driven Thinking becomes extremely important.
You Choose Your Goals
Up to this point, your institution of learning and its leadership had set your performance goals for you. But after you achieve those educational performance goals, it’s time to move toward the personal goals you must set for yourself.
While trusted individuals and coaches, both in life and in work, can encourage and guide you in setting your personal goals, the responsibility is clearly your own.
So Performance-Driven Thinking becomes most relevant to our personal lives when we realize that goal setting is not just intended for education or work.
Long-term successful performance can be clearly tied to an individual’s ability to set personal performance goals within their own lives without an outside mandate.
Many of us have had ideas about things that we can do within our own lives to increase our personal performance. But what tends to hold us back is the inability to set specific goals and initiatives that will help improve that personal performance.
For example, many individuals after retirement age decide to go back to school for some kind of formal education. Clearly these individuals do not need this specific degree or certification as a work requirement. They decided to pursue a degree of higher learning to satisfy a personal, not a professional goal.
This is clearly a result of Performance-Driven Thinking. These individuals, many of whom have retired and are on Social Security, wanted to achieve this particular goal for personal reasons, and they found the time, money, and energy to complete this goal.
Personal goals and Performance-Driven Thinking go hand in hand, due to the mere fact that once you become an adult, no one can force you to set personal goals.
But what we do know is that in order to achieve peak personal performance, setting specific personal goals must be a vital part of who we are and how we operate.
Some individuals don’t set personal goals simply because they fear not meeting them.
If you find yourself avoiding goal setting out of the fear of failure, then it’s time to make failure your ally!
You can truly become a Performance-Driven Thinker by setting some form of personal goal outside of your work requirements.
True Performance-Driven Thinkers embrace personal goal setting and enjoy the satisfaction of reaching beyond their current state and growing in their personal lives.
So, when you are thinking about performing at a high level, remember to be aware of your personal health and your personal goals also.
Reaching your goals in these two areas of your life can help you perform at a higher level and reach your overall goals faster.