Personal Growth: Should You Take a Leap of Faith?
I’ve been on a bit of a self-help kick in my writing lately. And given the strong response from my last post about regret, I figured I would continue my personal-growth jones and write about another topic that might be of interest to readers. Living the life you want often means making some big changes […]
Read MorePersonal Growth: Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda
What is the worst emotion you can imagine feeling? In my work, I see people express many different emotions. Yes, some are wonderful such as joy, excitement, pride, and inspiration. But others I see, not surprisingly, are less positive including fear, frustration, anger, and sadness. Yet, the one emotion that lies along the continuum of […]
Read MoreCycling: Prime Cycling Pyramid
As I discussed in my first post, Prime Cycling is defined as “riding at a consistently high level under the most challenging training and race conditions.” Prime Cycling is a goal toward which everyone in the cycling world should strive, the result of which is to maximize your riding efforts and enable you to achieve […]
Read MorePrime Business Alert!: Don’t Go “Caveman” in a Crisis
Research has shown that when we experience a crisis, we regress back to our primitive ancestors; we go caveman! We fall back on most deeply ingrained instincts and habits that have served us well for eons by ensuring our survival, namely, by triggering the “fight-or-flight” response. This primal reaction produces intense physiological changes that increase our strength, heighten our senses, and bolster our endurance, all in the name of enabling us to fight more ferociously or run faster and longer. When confronted by a saber-toothed tiger or a rival tribesman, our ancestors had two basic options and we instinctively chose the one that we believed would maximize our chances of survival. Unfortunately, this ancient reaction that worked hundreds of thousands of years ago in the face of a crisis, won’t work with the crises that we experience in the business world in the 21st century. For example, if you have a conflict with a co-worker, hitting or running from them is not likely a winning strategy that will effectively resolve it. To the contrary, such a response will probably decrease your chances of survival in that jungle known as corporate life. Yet these primitive drives propel us to fall back on the instincts and habits of our forbearers. In fact, is there any more important situation when you need to have all of your most highly evolved capabilities running on all cylinders than during crises in today’s business world? That’s when you have to respond in ways that go against millions of years of instincts. In a crisis, you need to be at our most evolved best, using your all of the extensive powers that your cerebral cortex can offer you. You must stay calm and rational. You need to be able to think methodically, flexibly, and creatively to discover solutions where the old rules and practices often won’t work. You must reason and problem solve. You need to think through options and make effective decisions.
Read MorePersonal Growth: Align Your Values and Your Life
In my last post, I described the essential role that values play in the life you lead. I also showed how you can deconstruct values so you can really understand what values are driving your life. But it is one thing to recognize what values you possess and to admit that some (or all) of […]
Read MorePrime Sport Alert!: Prime Training: It’s All about Quality
Despite what many athletes and coaches believe, competitions aren’t won on the day of the competition, just before the competition, or even during the competition. Rather, they are won in training in the weeks and months leading up to the competition. What you do in training will determine how you perform and the ultimate outcome of the competition. Training is where the development of Prime Sport begins. It’s the place where all of the physical, technical, tactical, and mental requirements of sport are established. Despite this importance, I’m constantly amazed by the poor quality of training that I see athletes engage in, even at the world-class and professional levels. I see poor effort, ineffective focus, and little intensity. Yet these athletes expect to perform their best in competition. That’s unlikely to happen because they’re not engaging in prime training. Prime training involves maintaining the highest level of effort, focus, and intensity consistently throughout a practice session. Without prime training, Prime Sport will never be achieved. Too often, I see athletes begin training without any clear idea of what they’re doing there. They have nothing in particular they’re working on to improve. When this happens, athletes are not only not improving, they’re also making it more difficult to improve because they’re further ingraining old and ineffective skills, which makes it harder to learn new skills.
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