The Myths of High Performance, Part 2

Overachievement: The New Model For Exceptional Performance
by John Eliot, Ph.D.

(Page 2 of 6)

There are no limits. If you really want to find out what you're capable of, you cannot put limits on yourself, and you definitely cannot be cautious.

Setting goals is for couch potatoes. The long-standing practice of goal setting is actually a major obstacle to sustained, vigorous motivation - and to being great.

Hard work is overrated. Superstars know when to stop working at their job and start playing at it. In my research and work with clients, I have discovered that too much practice will turn you into a classic case of the "over-motivated underachiever."

All those eggs belong in one basket. Unlikely accomplishments are borne out of single-minded purposefulness. Future superstars don't get there by keeping part of their heart in reserve.

Arrogant S.O.B.s run the world. A performer can never have too much self-assurance. The best in every field are likely to strike most people as irrationally confident, but that's how they got to the top.

Being a team player may get you a gold star on your annual review, but it won't get you into the corner office. By definition, striving to be exceptional puts you outside the team. If you're a maverick CEO, you're a colorful genius. But if you're a young rogue exec, you're gone. ("Not a team player," reads your evaluation.) The best performers not only think exceptionally, they teach their colleagues to think differently, too.

Legends never say they're sorry. Having a long or frequent memory for mistakes and a short or infrequent memory for successes is a guaranteed way to develop fear of failure. High achievers dwell on what they do well and spend very little time evaluating themselves and their performances.

Risk-reward analysis is for wimps. For exceptional people, risks equal rewards. The challenge of uncertainty is the fun of high performance and where overachievement lies. My counterprescriptions for high performance make some people uncomfortable; they certainly go against the grain. But top performers do not generate fame and fortune - or fervent happiness, for that matter - by following the conventional wisdom or striving to be "normal." They certainly have not reached their heights by reading pop psychology books or going to "personal power" rallies. Can you picture Muhammad Ali or Joe Namath taking notes at a Tony Robbins seminar? Or Warren Buffet or George Soros, never mind such buccaneer entrepreneurs as Ted Turner or Richard Branson?

In fact, most sport psychologists and performance coaches do not know what to make of such strange characters; their ability to succeed stands outside the understanding of mainstream psychology. Largely based on the medical model, the field of psychology has focused its research on health - being well adjusted, normal, mainstream.* Clinicians are schooled in diagnosing psychological "problems." Their training and careers are spent searching for abnormality and removing it. Not surprisingly, they view performance through the same lens. But great performers are, by definition, abnormal; they strive throughout their entire careers to separate themselves from the pack. What this means is that traditional "health" psychology has actually been pushing performers in the wrong direction!

My aim is to push you in the right direction to help you achieve your full potential. Of course, I am not the first person to make such a promise. But I intend to be the first to actually deliver the only book on "peak performance" you will ever need. I know that may strike some as a brash claim. But I also know from years of scientific research, university teaching, and working with top athletes - and heart surgeons, musicians, salesmen, financial experts, business executives of all stripes, even astronauts - that to perform at the top, to be consistently good at what you do when the stakes are high, then get even better over time, requires not a set of psychological techniques or exercises to "fix" your head but a mindset that would strike most people as absolutely certifiable. So count me as "overconfident" and "crazy," and then understand that in this book, I will teach you to be quite abnormal, too.

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I have been fascinated by human performance since I was a little kid mad for sports. My father, Rick Eliot, a coach for the U.S. Olympic Ski team in Squaw Valley in 1960, was a human performance pioneer, always looking for new physical, technical, and psychological ways to make his skiers go faster. An avid competitive cross-country skier and ski jumper, I was an eager guinea pig. At Dartmouth, I played baseball and rugby and spent a lot of time trying out new techniques promoted by "sport psychologists" to improve my performance on the field. The results I got were not so impressive, but I did receive plenty of joking from my college roommate, John Goff, who had a top-notch mental game that contributed to his excellence on the field and court. In my senior year, I began my own research into the psychology of human performance, conducting laboratory and field tests on awareness, concentration, and motor tasks under stressful circumstances. I soon realized that many popular techniques promoted by mainstream psychologists not only failed to give the performance edge they promised, in many cases they actually hindered performance.

I decided to continue my research at the University of Virginia for a doctorate in human performance under Dr. Bob Rotella, one of the few psychologists whose work was cutting against the conventional wisdom. Rotella had been working for years with professional golfers to increase their confidence and concentration under pressure, his success based on his athletic instincts that high-pressure performers should learn how to "trust their swing" - the extraordinary ability that made them champions in the first place.

It was the early 1990s and the buzz in the field was over a widely acclaimed new take on optimal experience that one eminent psychologist had branded "flow" - "a mental state in which nothing seems to matter," where time and space seem to disappear. This sounded like the fabled "Zone" that athletes talked about. Curious to see how this squared with Rotella's practical success and my own research on how far from the psychological norm top performers seemed to be, I decided to go back into the lab and the field to examine the concept of flow as it applied to elite performance in medicine, business, Olympic competition, and other pursuits as diverse as composing music and training astronauts. My results were surprising: This latest theory of high performance did not square any better with how the very best in every business operated under pressure than any of the previous popular explanations I had tested.

For the next four years, while teaching at Virginia and working with elite athletes, surgeons, and executives, I watched in dismay as self-proclaimed "world's leading experts" continued to promote the same techniques and prescriptions I knew didn't hold up in demanding performance settings. They were wearing people out with demands to complete forms describing their psychological states and evaluating their performances. As I did more consulting, I began to notice that performers with the best natural instincts for consistently succeeding under pressure - Dallas Cowboy legend Emmitt Smith and Merrill Lynch V.P. Dean Trindle, to cite two different examples - were inclined to find any excuse they could to be absent the day the psychologist came to speak. When I asked them why, their answer was essentially the same: Whenever they listened to psychologists in the past, they ended up performing worse, not better. I find that many of my new clients seek me out to undo the effects of traditional psychological techniques or self-help books. To improve, they know they need something different.

Copyright © 2005 John Eliot, Ph.D.. All rights reserved. This excerpt, or any parts thereof, may not be reproduced without permission.

About the Author

Dr. teaches business and psychology at Rice University and is adjunct professor at SMU Cox School of Business Leadership Center. He is the former director of Rice's program in sports management and performance enhancement. In 2000, he co-founded The Milestone Group, which provides performance consultation and training to business executives, professional athletes, and corporations nationwide. Clients have included Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, Adidas, NASA, the United States Olympic Committee, The Mayo Clinic, M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, and hundreds of elite individual performers.