Unleashing Your Potential
I’d like to share a coaching model that is really three different concepts that flow into each other. Full disclosure, I didn’t create any of these three ideas. I’m happy to shamelessly plug them for their creators and demonstrate how I utilize them if it helps you to break through.
Performance
This concept comes from Tim Galloway’s book, The Inner Game of Tennis, and it’s one I quote often: performance equals potential minus interference.
This is a great concept to utilize for getting a sense of how well an individual believes they are performing, and I often ask my coaching clients how they would rate their performance on a scale of 0 (abysmal) to 10 (absolute peak effectiveness). My follow-up question to their response is always “why didn’t you rate yourself a zero?” The reason I ask this question is because I want to know where people believe that they are winning. You cannot build off failure, you can only build off success.
I have never had someone rate themselves as a ten which means they always have room to grow into their potential. This leads to the next step in the equation, interference, and the ultimate question about performance; “What is preventing you from all-out crushing it?” The first step to removing our obstacles is to identify them and it is often our inability to accurately identify our problems that is the greatest hurdle to achieving peak performance.
Programming
Performance is driven by programming. Your programming is your habits, whether conscious decisions or unconscious impulses, drives, and aversions. T. Harv Eker puts forth a model of programming in his book, Secrets of the Millionaire Mind, that states that programming leads to thoughts, which lead to feelings, which lead to actions, which lead to results, which in turn reinforces programming. This can become a vicious circle if you aren’t paying attention.
Possibility
Your programming is driven by your relationship with what you believe is possible for your. To paraphrase Gary Keller in The Millionaire Real Estate Agent, our actions are always governed by what we deem is possible.
Have you ever wanted something, whether it was a new car, a vacation, a relationship, anything at all that you wanted badly, that you had no idea how you attain, but that you knew in your heart you would get it? That moment of absolute certainty that it’s not a matter of if, but when? When that level of conviction becomes your programming you are going to move right through the barriers to peak performance.
Beyond all Barriers
What is the potential of a human? When humans have circumnavigated the earth, put feet on the moon, and engineered pocket-sized computers, haven’t we seen that it is limitless? What I want you to understand is that your performance is driven by your programming, but your programming is driven by your relationship to possibility. Seek out and surround yourself with others who have already broken through what you believed to be the limits of possibility. If you can’t get into proximity to them, then read their blogs and listen to their podcasts. Redefine your concept of what’s attainable and rip the lid off of your possibility.
