The Secret High-performance Skill Nobody Practices

Summary

What if one of the key differences between the good and the great was a secret practice that costs nothing but has a proven impact on your performance? In this video, I share how the key to high performance is providing your mind the ability to rest & recover.

Transcript

What if one of the key difference between the good and a great was a secret practice that costs nothing but has a proven effect on your performance? Let's get to it.

[INTRO] Hey, I'm Leon Castillo, founder of Selfmastered, which is a High Performance training company that helps entrepreneurs scale their businesses by solving their salad bottling, their own performance, were transformed the unproductive, overwhelming and focus entrepreneurs into laser focused business athletes that can achieve in one day, what they previously achieved in one week.

So today, I want to talk about something that not many people do yet provides massive benefits and is a practice that I like to call the secret practice because it is often overlooked. And I'm talking about stillness about the practice of not doing anything about pausing during today, so that you give your mind time to rest and recover because your mind did not evolve for being focused during long stretches of time, but to be on for a few hours, and then completely off so that it has time to rest and recover.

The problem is that modern time assume that we can be on all times and deeds has massive detrimental effects on your performance. When you do not rest enough, you start making unnecessary mistakes, you start paying attention to things that are urgent and non important. And over time, you allow your stress and anxiety levels to go up.

If on the other hand, you give yourself enough time to rest on recovering during the day in macro and micro moments, not only you will be able to encode what you learn much better you will reduce your stress, you will hone your intuition. And you will access a more creative part of the brain. All of this is research based. So you need to pay close attention because I'm going to give you a proven protocol that you can use tomorrow to drive more output and up your performance.

If I had to summarize this in like in just very quick image you need to you as a knowledge worker need to think of yourself as an athlete and athletes are not working or running or jumping or swimming every single hour of their days. They work through ebbs and flows in which are fully on training and then fully off resting and they even have seasons during the year in which they go all in, and others in which they are all out. And you need to think of your work as a knowledge worker in the same way they think about their work fully and fully out. no middle ground, because middle ground is what geo paradise is the quality of your work shoots your stress levels, and overall make you very an effective knowledge worker.

Now before we get into the specific protocol, remember to LIKE subscribe and hit the bell because we're giving out free courses and practice and performance worth 1000s of dollars that can definitely help you get more out of your day.

So the protocol that I'm going to share with you is very simple, but it's insanely effective. And in any given week you do it on three level, the macro level is the 10 Minute pause. And this is very important because every time you need to make a decision, every time someone cuts you off in traffic or something unexpected happens around you anything and everything that may curtail your normal thought process that triggers a reaction putting a 10 second pause before your reaction is a surefire way of preventing unnecessary mistakes.

This is in essence what the estoy recommended what the markets already the emperor said is always better to pause and choose the reaction to and the stimulus. So after an a stimulus that is taking you outside of your performance, taking you outside of a long bout of focus that you may be in instead of reacting pause for 10 seconds, and then choose the best possible reaction you can ideally based on the identity that you're willing to build at.

If you think about it at each Crossroads over the road. You already know what you should be doing. But you just don't do it. Why? Well that's something you need to ask yourself but the ability of thinking what is the best possible route at any moment is sitting within you. So every time something happened that gets you out of a normal state that elicits an emotional response, learn to pause for 10 seconds and then choose the best response and this is a such a massively underrated tip and has incredible consequences.

Now, step number two is on a mental level. So within a day you should be working in stretches for up to 90 to 120 minutes and then rest for 15 to 20 minutes and do so at several times during the day because this is how you keep your mind fresh. This is how you actually become crazy effective during the day someone that is able to focus for 10 hours every single day does not have those 10 hours one after the other because that's against human nature. That person does it by having five two hour slots that followed by 15 to 20 minutes of rest. And this is so important. These breaks need to be outside of a screen and need to be ideally in a certain setting that relax you and lowers your stress level. So level number three is active rest during the weekend.

This is very important because a vast majority of knowledge workers takes work from the weekdays to the weekend, and therefore never really fully disconnect from the work and this is no good. And because this will lead to a build up of your stress level.

What you need to do on a weekend is to fully disengage and practice active recovering. Ideally, get outside, do some sport, meet with people, but don't look at screen. Don't think about work and more importantly, do not try to catch up with the previous week.

Always think of your weekdays as a closed system. And anything and everything that you didn't finish this week should be done. The following week, do not compromise your rest and recovery because you need it. It is what's actually going to allow you to be crazy effective for years on end is not about burning the midnight oil is about being a strategic and how you segment your days to extract as much output as you can.

So as a recap, there's essentially three levels of pause or stillness that you can implement in your week. One is the 10 second pause every time something crosses your mind or interrupts your workflow that elicits an emotional response pause for 10 seconds and choose the best response choose the master level is having 15 to 20 even 30 minutes of break in between two hour long sessions that in the semester mythology we call them ringfence sessions in order to fully disengage from the task fully disengage from screens and give yourself the ability to rest and recover.

And finally, the last one the macro level is the weekend you need to fully rest and recover ideally in an active setting. So that doesn't mean watching TV. It means going outside playing sports climbing a mountain doing stuff that separates you from your work persona and allows your mind to wander to encode everything that had learned during the week and prep you for one more week of high performance the week later. So I hope this was useful. This tip is massively underrated, so please use it.