The coach smiled and sensed my very real need to be told that someone with my formidable physique could easily do it;

“it’s like everything else. You have to mentally prepare, then you have to really focus on the lift, then warm down and recover. Then you repeat a thousand times, increasing the weights or the reps as you go.”

Prepare. Focus. Warm down. Recover.

Repeat.

Whilst knowledge workers are rarely required to lift physically heavy weights – other than those tricky times when we have to carry a whole tray of lattes across the open plan – we *do* have to lift mentally and emotionally heavy weights.

And there’s good evidence that those same four stages are essential for us too:

🎯 Preparation – enables clarity
💡 Focus – improves quality
🌡 Warm down – helps us to reflect and switch off
🔋 Recovery – restores energy and perspective

Without these stages people feel overwhelmed and stuck.

But with them there’s a sense of control…a weight is lifted.

And this is what a High Performance Routine is. 4 distinct stages which:

🚀 Encapsulate the full range of human performance
💪 Work with our biology not against it
📆  Are sustainable
📈 Create their own momentum
🪄 Enable the extraordinary

If you’re interested in the evidence behind High Performance Routines here’s a link to our research library.

And if you’re interested in creating your own High Performance Routine, take the assessment below or follow me for more posts on the subject.

Next week in this series I will cover the 🎯 Preparation stage – so get ready!