The Myths of High Performance, Part 3

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

(Page 3 of 6)

I teach them to think exceptionally - to be quite abnormal by most standards of performance, and to love being so exception-al. Becoming an exceptional thinker is not easy. A few lucky performers seem to switch on exceptional thinking at will. The rest of us have to learn how to do it, though a 12-step program or a series of introspective pencil-and-paper psychological exercises will not do the trick. Most of what passes as "self-improvement" proposes to hand over exactly what you need: one size fits all, a cure. But no one else's roadmap to success will get you there; the myths of high performance will only get in your way.

As an experienced performance psychologist, I can educate you about the ways that top performers use their minds; I can bring you up to date on what science knows about how the brain operates under pressure. But I cannot flip a switch for you that will change how your mind works when you're under the gun. And while I know that to be a top performer you have to be passionately committed to what you're doing and insanely confident about your ability to pull it off, I cannot make you a personal gift of commitment or self-confidence. All the great performers I have worked with are fueled by a personal dream, but how can I give you the kind of feeling that launches you out of bed every morning, incredibly fired up to get to work? No amount of book learning or lectures or even the best graduate education on the planet will make you a great surgeon, business executive, or athlete. We all have to take what we have learned and personally put it to use - formulate it for our solutions, for the direction we want to go.

What I can give you is a model for high performance and the direction to adapt the model in a way that works for you. This book describes how the minds of top performers actually work under pressure and explains the science of the performer's mindset. I will help you learn high-performance thinking and then help you to ingrain it so that when you step into the spotlight, your performer's mindset will always drive the results. That's what this book is for - to provide you with ideas and methods that will allow you to remake your mind to improve your game, no matter what you do. Overachievement is my effort to put the self back into self-improvement.

Underlying my approach are a couple of psychological givens:

• Thinking is a habit, and like any other habit, it can be changed; it just takes effort and repetition.

• Everyone is born with the ability to develop an exception-al mind. You just need to decide to think differently and not care that people will say you're crazy - that is, until they realize that when the game is on the line, you are the one who always delivers.

Before we go any further, you should know that I will never claim to be a guru or "world's leading" anything, and I strongly advise you to stay away from anyone who promises perfection or claims they have "the answer." In fact, in my first lecture every year for my "Psychology of Performance" class at Rice, I put up a slide featuring my academic and professional credentials. I make it absurdly clear to the class that their teacher is someone with an impressive pedigree who knows his stuff. After all, isn't that why they've signed up for my course? Then (in a manner I learned from Bob Rotella), I go around the room, indiscriminately pointing to students: "You there, in the first row - you've got it! You're going to succeed, big time. You over there, you don't have it. You don't either," I say, picking someone else at random. "I know talent, and you don't have it." I point at someone else: "You ought to drop out of school. You ought to think about a different career, maybe even switch majors . . ." As I anoint certain students for fame and fortune and banish others to the bush leagues or a life of boring mediocrity, my students look at me with a combination of amusement and horror. "Look," I point out, "I have made a career of knowing what success looks like, right?"

After I ratchet up the shock significantly, I explain that anyone in the room who thinks I can predict their future has already broken the first rule of my class: Do not look at me as an expert. And that goes for you, too. Why? Because I do not know your specific situation. I certainly do not know anything about your dreams or your motivation, how big your heart is or how tough your fortitude. I can't tell that by looking at you, or even by reading your "file." I don't have a clue how you think under pressure. I have no idea how you handle either success or failure. And while many so-called experts act as if there were some kind of objective psychological profile for success - tall, good-looking extrovert with an Ivy League degree, etc. - no such measure exists. Proof: Look around at the hordes of Ivy League alumni populating middle management throughout corporate America. Then count the college dropouts who have invented the world's most creative projects or are running the most innovative companies.

What I do is a more inductive kind of thing. The extent of my expertise comes from the experience I have in seeing how people deal with pressure, success, and failure, noting how the most successful and enduring performers operate, and then factoring this information into what psychology knows about how the mind works under pressure. When clients come to me and ask, "What should I do to improve?" my answer is always, "I have no idea." I try to startle them to illustrate that the kind of guidance I provide varies depending on the kind of person they might be, how they work, what they want to achieve, and how much they want it. My job is to assess their current modes of thinking - motivation, confidence, focus, response to pressure and adversity, and so forth - compared to how they used to operate, and then help them either (a) get back to their old, high-performing selves or (b) develop ways to think more successfully than they have in the past.

This book will help you make the same assessment and then help you shift your thinking toward consistent overachievement. In Part I, I will take you inside the minds of great performers to see how they think and operate - how they manage to thrive on pressure and confound the critics with their ability not just to talk a great game, but to play it as well. Included in this story are the basic biology and chemistry underlying high performance. We are learning more about the neuroscience of human performance every day. I offer this science not to impress or confuse you but to encourage you. Virtually every self-improvement "guru" out there is offering advice that has no scientific backing. To be sure, Tony Robbins and infomercial hound Brian Tracy, who peddles hundreds of self-help products and books late at night - from 21 Secrets to Success to The Psychology of Selling and Million Dollar Habits - have gotten rich telling people how to get rich. But it is personal advice based only on their experience (or worse, simply an analysis of what people will buy). If it doesn't work for you, you will have no way of knowing why because it has no basis in science. I am offering ways to change how you think and perform that are easy to learn and practice, that are scientifically sustainable, and that will have a measurable impact on how you live and work, because they are based on what we now know about how the human mind fundamentally operates under pressure.

Learning some neuroscience also has a psychological advantage: It's too easy to look at a superstar in your field and conclude that natural-born talents are the only measure of a person's success. But ordinary people accomplish extraordinary things all the time, in every field, just by learning how to exploit the potential of the human mind. Every one of us is wired to succeed to the best of our ability; we humans, for example, are designed not just to cope with pressure but to thrive on it, using it as a psychological energy bar that fuels our daily performances to greater heights. I will show you how and why in Part I.

In Part II, I will offer some tools to help you learn and, more importantly, practice how to access the overachiever's mindset. I will show you how you, too, can consistently achieve the kind of intense focus that marks all the best performers in every field. I will show you how to reshape your thinking so you will be able to trust your skills and experiences and then let 'em rip - to perform so freely and intensely that you will become not just good at what you do, but something of an artist at it.

The practical result is the prospect of finding what you really want to do in life and achieving the kind of commitment and confidence to take on the challenge and make it happen. The only remaining assessment is this: Do you want to be an exceptional performer, an overachiever? Are you willing to make some changes to the way you think? If you are, read on. Take notes in the margins about how each story, illustration, and element of science applies to you and your particular situation. Then put the application into practice. You'll be well on your way to a new level of talent and you'll have a blast getting there, breaking out of old, ineffective habits and tendencies that have been holding you back.

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.