Embrace Change and Re-Invent Yourself

In our youth, we have many milestones which help define our short-term future: graduating secondary school and going to university, graduating university and getting our first job, getting married, and having a baby.

During each of these changes we have an opportunity to re-invent ourselves. We can redefine who we are, explore areas of personal development and wash away bad habits and start new.

But as we get on in our careers and as we pass many of these milestones in our lives, the frequency with which we re-invent ourselves dwindles. We get get stuck in a job we don’t like. We lose vibrancy, lose energy, and sometimes lose a sense of purpose. There is no school system or social system to tell us what is the next step in our lives. Even though the motivation to reinvent ourselves decreases, the need to re-invent ourselves increases.

For you, it may mean re-inventing your career, re-inventing your personal relationships, or re-inventing how you define yourself.

It is scary to make change. But, the world is changing quickly around us without our control, and it’s scarier to think what you might become if you don’t change.

Trust your instincts. Instigate change for your personal development. Embrace change with optimism and a positive attitude and you will bring vibrancy and energy to your life.

In mechanics, a flywheel is a rotating device which begins spinning when an initial energy force is applied to it. It keeps spinning and maintains its momentum, also known as rotational inertia.

Flywheels are critical components of machines which help them perform with high efficiency. They enable engines to run smoothly during the production of power, and they can deliver energy at rates beyond that of a continuous energy source. Flywheels can also store energy and then release it for high intensity activities.

Now, imagine if human beings had flywheels in their bodies. Imagine that you could go for a jog in the morning, and when you were finished, your body would still produce energy, keeping your body running very efficiently throughout the day. Imagine that you could eat a certain type of food where the energy isn’t consumed immediately, but rationed out to you through- out the day. Imagine you could settle a dispute at work or come up with the answer to a difficult question simply by taking a moment of pause, enabling your personal battery to recharge with energy.

We can do all of that. These functions that I described are exactly what our metabolic system, digestive system, nervous system and other systems in the human body are designed to do. But as busy professionals, we often face obstacles which prevent these systems from performing at their best. If we identify and address these obstacles, then we will enable our minds and our bodies to achieve peak performance.

Performance Cycles

We all experience performance cycles. Sometimes we reach a peak where everything seems to being going right. We have high levels of energy, our minds are sharp, our attitudes are positive, and we’re in a productive groove at work. But sometimes we enter a valley where we feel sluggish, negative and a bit dull, despite our best attempts to move forward. Unfortunately, many of us find ourselves in the valley more often than at the peak.

These cycles are natural and unavoidable, but they are certainly manageable.

We can learn techniques to assess when we are about to enter a valley, utilize tools to actively climb out of the valley and adopt new rituals to increase the time spent at our peak. The Triple A FlywheelTM (Figure 1) is a personal performance framework designed to do exactly that. The framework consists of three phases:

Phase 1: ASSESS.

Reflective questions to determine your current position (e.g. peak or valley), your trajectory and what percentage of your top priority goals you have achieved

Phase 2: ACTIVATE.

Physical and mental exercises to accelerate your pace towards your peak (e.g. nutritious food, fitness, deep breathing, meditation)

Phase 3: ADOPT.

Ritual-building tips and techniques to keep your trajectory pointing towards your peak

In the context of executive health, the Triple A Flywheel™ is a mechanism of continuous improvement. By first adopting a single, healthy activity into your routine and leveraging its benefits, you will find it incrementally easier and more efficient to add subsequent healthy activities. It’s called ‘the flywheel effect.’

Once you build up a consistent routine of healthy activities, you will gain tremendous healthy momentum. Your performance will be high, and it will be relatively easy to keep it high. A stressful week in the office, a long business trip or a minor compromise to your healthy eating routine won’t derail your performance plans. You may slow down a bit, or you may lose sight of your work-life goals and priorities momentarily. But, if that happens, rotate your Triple A Flywheel™, and you will be on a fast path to your peak once again.

When trying to improve our physical or mental performance, we sometimes bite off much more than we can chew. Meat lovers dive into a plant-based diet program, or fitness novices commit to a personal trainer three times per week. In these cases, we are trying to spin a heavy flywheel from a stand still position to full speed, instantly. This approach is bound to fail or be a very painful and non-enjoyable process. We must learn to crawl and walk before we can run.

Let’s start the flywheel spinning.

The above post is an excerpt from Chapter 2 of Edwin’s book: “Fit for the Corner Office: An Executive Health Guidebook to Achieve Peak Performance at Work and in Life.”