How are you showing up? What the heck’s that mean, right? I’m fascinated with performance, obviously, and looking at what elite performers do, whether it’s athletics, entertainment, surgeon, CEOs, right, is that when I look at what made them great, I look at some key skills. However, this is actually what fascinates me, is why do some of those peak performers are not able to transfer it into different roles in their life? What do I mean by roles?
Roles is that we are sometimes parents. We are spouses. We are in the community. We have our career. Maybe we’re part of a religious organization, and we have different roles that we’re juggling throughout our lives. I think what’s happening in our life, everything’s becoming condensed, and those roles are not as defined as they should be, but what I’m talking about is that people who are great in one area, and yet they’re not doing that in other areas, so that athlete who now doesn’t have a great marriage, or does not give back to the community and not as part of that, that to me is a problem.
To me, we have a lot of these roles that we’re playing. It just makes sense to try to be the best that you can in these roles. When you look at the role, first off, let’s identify what are roles that you’re playing right now in your life? Two, what’s the intention behind that? If you’re a parent, how do you want to show up as a parent? What’s the intention of the outcome? We have a lot of responsibility as parents, and part of that is what behaviors do I want to be and show as a parent? Behaviors could be I want to be listening.
I want to be understanding. I also want to be a disciplinarian. I want to be able to be a role model. There may be different behaviors, but I don’t think people look at each role enough to one, identify what the heck it is, what they want to get out of that, how they’re going to show up in those roles, because now once you start to identify your intention, you can focus a lot better. Elite performers, focus is their number one skill, but if you haven’t defined what you want, you can’t really focus on anything.
This now leads the first question is, how do you show up, which is, what’s the optimal state for you to be in that role? For instance, as a parent of three kids, sometimes I am in a role of a parent where I’m happy go lucky, and let’s play, and then other times I’m a disciplinarian, and I have to communicate that, and other times I have to be a sympathetic ear if one of my children has a tough day. That requires a lot of attention to what’s happening in the moment, but part of a role as a parent, there’s many, many, many things that, to be a great parent, I believe that you have to show up with. When you start to clarify your roles, whether it’s in your career, whether it’s as a spouse, whether it’s as a parent or in the community, those require different behaviors that are related to, what’s your intention in the first place? Why is this role important to you? Now we start opening up a conversation about values, but basically our values run us, so what is important to you about those roles? How do you want to show up to fulfill that value?
I think when we can start to look at these elite level performers, and start to apply their skills to every single role, the focus, the optimal state, the resilience, the energy, all those things can be done on a role by role basis. Today, I want you to start to identify your roles, understand why those are so important to you, start looking at what behaviors do you want to show up with now a little bit, and be able to be in an optimal state on a moment by moment basis. Roles, there’s a lot of them, but in order to perform for success, we need to have clear intentions of each one of those roles.