Why You Should Stress Yourself

Why Stress Yourself?

• It isn’t experience that sets top performers apart from the rest, but the amount of deliberate practice they put in. Practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect.
• Across the board, when great performers are doing serious work (deep work) their bodies and minds are 100 percent there. They are fully engaged in the moment (flow).
• By doing one thing at a time and devoting full attention to that one thing, you’ll be able to many things well.
• For most of us, effective multitasking is nothing more than effective delusional thinking.

Stress Performance Practices:

• Apply the components of deliberate practice each time you set out to do meaningful, deep work:
  • Define a purpose and concrete objectives for each working session.
  • Ask yourself: What do I want to learn or get done?
  • Focus and concentrate deeply, even if doing so isn’t always enjoyable.
  • Single-task: The next time you feel like multitasking, remind yourself that research shows it’s not effective. Keep in mind “one thing at a time.”
  • remember that quality overrides quantity

• Smartphones distract us whether they are on, off, in our pockets, or on a table and they command our attention even when they are not our own. The best solution for preventing smartphone distraction is to remove it from the environment completely.

Flow Performance Practices:

• Identify what interrupts your deep focus (flow). Common invaders, many of which are enabled my smartphones, include: Social Media, IM, Text, Email, Videos, Slack, Phone, etc.
• Remove/turnoff distractions: Remember that only out of site truly leads to out of mind (awareness).
• Alternating between blocks of 50 to 90 minutes of deep work and recovery of 7 to 20 minutes enables people to sustain the physical, mental and emotional energy required of peak performance.

Focus Performance Practices:

• Divide your work into chunks of 50 to 90 minutes (depending on the task). Start even smaller if you find yourself struggling to maintain attention.
• As you develop the strength in area of attention, you’ll likely discover that you can work harder and longer.
• For most activities and most situations, 2 hours should be the upper limit for a time-block.
• The way we think about the world has a extremely profound effect on what we do in it.
• How we view stress weighs heavily on how stress influences us.
• By pushing us towards just manageable challenges and enhancing how we’ll respond to them, the right mindset opens up the possibilities for growth to occur.

Mindset Performance Practices:

• Remember the power of mindset: How you view something fundamentally changes how your body responds to it, i.e., nervous or excited, problem or challenge.
• In situations when you feel the sensation of stress, remind yourself this is your body’s natural way of preparing for a challenge, take a deep breath and channel the energy into the task at hand.
• Challenge yourself to view stress productively, and even to welcome it. You’ll not only perform better, you’ll also improve your health.

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