Developing The Habit of Peak Mental Performance
posted in Personal Success, Success Habits |Today I want to talk with you about learning to gain better control over your mental state and how to engage your mental performance supply chain to prepare your brain for the right action. The four main supply elements our brain needs daily for peak performance are:
- Exercise
- Relaxation
- Quality sleep
- Good nutrition
Until it becomes an ingrained habit to supply all four of these elements to our bodies we cannot attain a state of optimised health and wellbeing. We cannot reach a state where our brain is fully equipped to manage our emotions, thoughts and behaviour.
When faced with unexpected demands for fast and clear decision making, we need to engage a clear mental state ‘in the moment’. This means you must restrain your learned emotional response : outburst, fear and panic. The first effect of this response is a physical one, so our control mechanism must also first be physical: Breathe out, slow your mind and your pulse, and pay attention to your heart.
Once you have reached a physical state of calmness, you need to engage your cognitive capability – controlling your thoughts – and focus on some positive element of the situation. Even if this is generic as appreciating the opportunity to find a better way to do something. Focus on what can be learned from this situation. This help you find the silver lining. It also helps you respond calmly and positively.
Evoking this controlled response takes some practice. After all, you are trying to overcome a lifetime of learned response behaviour. So start practising with less challenging situations where you can be more mechanical in adopting your controlled response, just as you would if you were engaging a physical challenge.
One of my favourites is when stuck in traffic. In many of us this evokes a stress response, But instead, see this as a moment in time that you have to yourself and relinquish control. It’s about accepting that there are moments in life you simply cannot control despite your good intentions.
Practicing with interactions with children is another rewarding environment – in fact with any close personal relationship.
The result of this practice is that you develop the emotional flexibility, strength and capacity to respond readily to times of diversity and you quickly learn to recognise how much power you have over the way you feel. For instance if you feel tired, you can dial up a wave of exuberance and passion about the task you are currently working on. If you are irritated and angry in a traffic jam, activate care and compassion. Sit there are try to imagine where all the other people are going. They may have some personal emergency – whereas you are only late for a meeting. I’m not try to suggest this is an easy thing – it takes a very strong will to break a habit that has taken a lifetime to perfect and one that results in a vicious spiral of negative emotion.
The result of this old response is a downward spiral of negative emotions focused on how bad things can get – as if they had already happened. So many of us worry more about what might happen that what is actually happening. A lot of you will know the book – How to Stop Worrying and Start Living. The author talks about living in day tight compartments, visualising the very worst possible outcome, building the resolve to accepting that – then everything better than that is a bonus and not to be stressed over. It really helps put things in perspective.
One of the surprising outcomes of adopting your new mental performance response state is that you start welcoming more challenges, strong challenges that would have sent you into a frenzy of anxiety. You start to appreciate the change in focus and the heightened state of awareness you feel.