The 5 Habits Behind Every High Performer We've Met

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1:03Welcome to High Performance, the show that aims to understand the stories, the successes and the struggles of the highest performers. And this is one of our regular shorter episodes where myself and Damien sit and chat and give you our own valuable lessons that we've taken from the show. And so often habits are the bedrock to making change and finding the ability to consistently stick to those habits is absolutely crucial. So we thought we would just do a short episode about habits. What have we learned from our guests? Well, we've picked out five habits of high-performing people to share with you on today's short episode.

1:34So let's get on with this episode. And we're going to hear, first of all, Damien, from Jamie Peacock. How would you sum up Jamie Peacock for people that don't know in 20 seconds?

1:42Jake Humphrey: Jamie Peacock's a titan of a man. And he was a titan of a player. He was a captain of the Great Britain and England rugby league. A man that's won the most ever Super League championships. So being good occasionally is one thing. being good consistently is exceptional and Jamie is certainly that. Wonderful and here is what he told us about the power of habits. People won't know this but I've been quoting you indirectly based on having been lucky enough to work with you and understand your approach to life so I talk about dividing life up into easy and hard decisions and I want to shamelessly say I've stolen that from you so tell us about your decision making and how you divide them up?

2:24Damien, on that, I've stolen a lot of ideas from you. So I think... We're equal then. Yeah, we're equal. It's really nice to say that. Look, I mean, for me, I think in our lives, most moments we get into, we have like an hard or an easy decision. For example, getting off the bus, that's really definite. It's a really definite one. But I think we have lots of those all the time within our lives. A decision that might be a little bit more difficult to do or one that's a little bit easier to do. So for example, one we've been talking about is when I used to go running, I'd always make a decision as a player not to have any music on because I think when I'm playing, no one's playing Rocky to me and no one's making it any easier to me.

3:04So why would I want to run with any music on? Because that's just an easier decision. I'm making it easier for myself. But those little decisions are all around our lives, whether we want to decide to get fast food or not. Say we have a drink, we're on over. Next day, we've always got two decisions. Do we cook something healthy? or do we get on delivery and I think the more decisions in our life that we make hard decisions I think how easier our lives become but I think the more easy decisions we make the harder our lives become on the compound impact of those and I think those decisions are done day to day and I think as well that the bigger chain you build up of hard decisions they almost become easier to make because they just become you as a person along the way.

3:51And I think it's that really thinking to yourself, which is going to be the most beneficial for me, probably the hardest one to do right now, but do this a few times, a few days in a row, then I'll get to the point where this is just a way, it's not even a decision anymore, it just happens. And I think that's the key. Look, Damien, we see that quote quite often pop up across social media, don't we? Easy decisions, hard life, hard decisions, easy life. And it's easy to disregard it until a man who has been voted the man of steel in rugby league turns around and tells us that that's how he lived his life.

4:26So the question is then, why does running without music on, why does making a hard decision about the time you get out of bed or the food that you order or the conversations that you have, why does that hard decision give you in the long run an easier life? Because you sort of imagine you'd live a life of doing hard things.

4:43Jake Humphrey: Yeah, well, think of it like building blocks. Think of it as like laying bricks. What you're doing is you're giving yourself evidence that you're capable of doing hard things. So when the moment comes and you have to remind yourself of I'm capable of this, you've already deliberately created the evidence. You've got the building blocks and the foundation that say I'm capable of doing it. So I'll give you a really quick story where I was on the receiving end of one of Jamie's hard decisions that made life easy for me that I was put opposite in And when I was working for the England Rugby League team, we were in Australia's Gold Coast, and it was almost seen as a bit of an initiation that the coaches put me on tackle pads and asked me to face Jamie.

5:24Jake Humphrey: And everybody stopped what they were doing, and the expectation was he was going to run into me, send me cartwheeling, everyone would laugh at how ridiculous it looked, and then I'd be part of the group. I remember standing there sort of dreading it, and Jamie ran at me full tilt, and literally just when he got within inches of me, he sidestepped me and walked away. so he refused to humiliate me in front of all the others and when I thanked him afterwards that was where he introduced it he said well I'll chalk that up as a hard decision because the easy thing to do would just be do what everybody's paying for make me look daft the hard thing to do was not do that but actually the consequences of it made me feel like I belonged made me feel like a kinship with him made me feel that I was respected that then allowed me to go on and do my job to the best of my ability so this is a guy that's constantly just trotting up easy and hard decisions and the consequences in his life are nine super league uh titles you know captain of his country he's the incredible motivational speaker in his own right the cumulative effect the compound interest he says is there for any of us if we want to divide our days like that and look he had an amazing sporting career right but i kind of think that the magic with this isn't that it gets you to do incredible things, right?

6:39It's that when the hard times come, and inevitably for all of us, hard times come, whether that's through physical hardship, financial hardship, emotional hardship, the fact that you've been doing hard things, as you said, gives you the evidence that, right, there's going to be some tough months and some tough times ahead. But I know from the evidence I've built on my own life that I can do hard things and I can cope with them. And you know, there's been a lot of research, and this is normally your area of expertise, into the anterior mid-singulate cortex, which is a part of the brain which only grows when you do things that you actively don't want to do, like when you actively make the hard decision.

7:16And you know that scientists have studied the brains of people who are centurions and have lived beyond 100, and they find that almost every single time they've got a larger-than-normal AMCC brain. So they actually think that doing hard things doesn't just give you an easier life, it gives you a longer life. They think that doing hard things is one of the secrets

7:34Jake Humphrey: to longevity isn't that incredible it is isn't it because then that that fits into that idea of that growth mindset as opposed to the fixed mindset of believing that we are who we are there's nothing we can do to change it as opposed to well let's do hard things and let's stretch our capabilities and our comfort zone that give us better experiences and memories and opportunities right let's hear from another guest someone who really is a master of not just creating habits but stick into those habits as well. The author of Atomic Habits, the brilliant James Clear. This is what he told us. I heard a phrase one time, grit is fit.

8:12And their point is like, when you are well suited to an environment, when you are perfectly fit for the task that you're working on, then yeah, you're really gritty because it's the kind of thing that you're genuinely interested in that plays to your strengths, that addresses your natural curiosities. And so in a lot of ways, that's kind of the first big hurdle, the maybe the most enormous thing to try to figure out is what is something that is naturally aligned with what I really want to do or the way that I'm encoded, the way that I'm, you know, put together. And if you can find yourself a situation like that, then you're in a place where you're going to find like endless ways to improve because you're just naturally interested in it.

8:54You'll always be unearthing and discovering new little things that you could tweak. if you're in a situation where you're not that well suited to it or you're doing it just because other people are telling you you should or you kind of are being like nudged into it even the obvious improvements are going to feel like a hassle so that's another question that i really like asking which is what's the version of this habit that would be the most fun for me but what's the version of this habit that feels like it's the best fit for my style and my personality there's not like infinite ways to do things in life but there's almost always more than one way.

9:28And so you should choose the version of that habit that feels best suited to you and your style and your personality. And if you do that, you're in a much better place to improve.

9:38Jake Humphrey: Oh, you loved that interview with James, didn't you? Absolutely. So what was it that really resonated when you think back to it? Well, I think actually picking up on the thing that he just mentioned there, which is the power of finding the thing that you love in life. You know, we've just heard from Jamie Peacock talking about doing hard things. And that plays really nicely into James clear saying it's not just hard things but it's hard things in an area that you love to do them and i think we often get this wrong we feel like the stuff that's going to deliver the greatest results has to be the stuff that's the most difficult to do right and that isn't the case the stuff that delivers the greatest results is the stuff that plays to what we love to do the most and i think society says well if you love it it can't be hard work if you love it it can't lead you to greatness if you love it it can't be what you do for a living because we've almost been conditioned to think that you either have your work life or your fun life yeah there's a clear difference between work and joy and the joy comes at the weekends or on holidays what James Clear is saying there is if you the true magic in life is to find what you love because then optimizing that to the absolute nth degree is joyful and it doesn't just have to be work either Damien you You know, like think of the joy you get from optimising your relationship with Geraldine.

10:54Jake Humphrey: Yeah, yeah. Because that's the place that you want to be. You know, it's not hard to find the joy in your marriage because you're compelled to do it. And I think sometimes we make the mistake of thinking that the hard stuff has to be what we spend our time doing. But it's so much harder to find the joy in the hard stuff. I think you're right. I mean, I read a stat recently where it said that, like, kids laugh on average about 385 times a day. adults laugh around 15 times in the same period and the point in the article I was reading about was that most of what we learn in life happens when we're kids when we're laughing more when we're just induced to find the fun in things and then as adults we tend to then take things seriously and believe it's got to have a game face on we've got to grind our way to it when the reality is finding the joy finding the fun and the laughter is where real learning can happen and habits can then become encoded.

11:50And I would just remind our audience that it's not necessarily easy if you're at a point in your life where you've got a mortgage and you've got kids and you've got responsibilities, right? But it is absolutely old ideas and outdated thinking to believe that the thing that you spend most of your life doing, which is your job, shouldn't be fun. You shouldn't be in flow. It shouldn't be joyful. Like it absolutely should. You know, we're entering what Daniel Priestley on High Performance referred to as the entrepreneur revolution, which is where the lines are blurred between work and play and I would encourage everyone listening to this to just think carefully like is there an opportunity to put more play into my life including the place where I'm working I love that and that leads us to our next

12:29Jake Humphrey: clip that we're going to talk about when we sat down in front of a live audience with Emily Maitlis she shared with us a tip that any of us can incorporate because it involves it doesn't cost us anything other than just a few moments of what she calls golden time. The one thing I would say is that a good interview is made in the five minute silence that you spend on your own before it. And I think that is golden time. For me, it's golden time. And what do I mean by that? That as soon as you're shown into a room, particularly an overroaring room, like a Buckingham Palace ballroom, which was where we were.

13:18Everything starts. You know, there's people kind of checking makeup. There's lights. There's somebody micing you up. There's people coming to shake hands. There's somebody who introduces themselves. There's like, do you want to teach? They're all lovely. It's all helpful. But you lose your silence, right? And actually, at that point, you've got your game face on. And you go, oh, hello, lovely to meet. Oh, no, oh, that's kind of you. Oh, no, I would. No, sugar. You know, you're starting to be somebody that is sort of playing the social game, right? And I suddenly realised that I just wasn't ready.

13:48I just wanted five minutes on my own. So I excused myself and I just, I said, you know, is there a lady's, I mean, it's not, you know, a lady's, it's a Buckingham Palace Lou. I mean, it's sort of amazing. And I just locked the door and I remember just sort of sitting in the corner going, right where's my head well that's a pretty powerful lesson for two people who spend their time interviewing people isn't it yeah definitely and again there's there's research that says it

14:17Jake Humphrey: it's almost like the sympathetic system of your brain responds well to having just some time and space to do a little bit of deep breathing maybe contemplating what's my intention of this interview what am i trying to get out of it how do i want to show up am i going to be empathetic or antagonistic whatever an interviewer's brand is going to be but I think we can all spend five minutes before whether it's we wake up in the morning whether it's we're going into a meeting whether it's we're thinking about reading a bedtime story to our kids just that five minutes golden time to start take a few deep breaths is a simple habit that any of us can use but the benefits from it uh infinitesimally high for us you know i used to do it um when i first started out in formula one but i didn't realize that it was golden time right so obviously hosting that when i was in my late 20s early 30s was like that was me right at my sort of physical and mental limits to try and host that stuff without getting overwhelmed by it all yeah and i remember just when the pa who's the person that counts down to the start of the show when she used to say right one minute to on air there's no point having a conversation with anyone at that point about what you're going to talk about, what's the plan for the show, all that should have been done a long time ago.

15:30So you're kind of like, you're very isolated at that point. So you're standing, although you're in a busy pit lane, your pundits might be near you, you're kind of on your own in your own thoughts. And my thought process at that point always was, you're only here because you failed your A-levels, right? And the reason why that was quite important to me was because it was a really grounding moment where rather than getting overwhelmed about doing a good job, I kind of let go of trying to control the moment and just said, look, you're only here because you messed up your A-levels, which led to some work experience, which got you a job in telly.

16:00Therefore, let go a bit. And I think that, you know, Emily's idea of golden time is really powerful because I think it brings us freedom as much as anything else. But I also think that this is not exclusive to people that do interviews for a living. A question I would always ask myself before I went on air, you know, you and I are recording this in the high-performance studio. I always ask myself before we do an interview, like, what am I bringing to this conversation? Why should it be me? because when you're a TV presenter especially, if you don't ask yourself that, well, they might as well go and hire somebody else.

16:30Jake Humphrey: Yeah. Right? You'd have to have an idea of what you're going to bring to it. But I think for our audience listening to this, what am I bringing to this conversation with my kids? What am I bringing to this office today? What am I bringing to the conversation around the meal table? What am I bringing to this phone call with my parents? What am I bringing to this attempt to build bridges with some friends I've not spoken to for a while? Like it's a really good thought process. And these golden time ideas should probably happen multiple times in any given day. Do you know what I mean? Just whip to the bathroom before you do something and just say to yourself, what's the plan here?

17:02Yeah, yeah. What's the approach?

17:03Jake Humphrey: Yeah, I remember reading about the Italian football coach Marcello Lippi in the World Cup final in 2006 when they went to penalties against France. And you can imagine like the maelstrom of emotions. And he would ask each one of his players going up, what is your intention? the question forced his players to go i'm going to put it in the top left corner i'm going to go down low to his right and he just cut through all the other thoughts all the other emotions going on there and gave them a singular focus for what they were going to do which is what they went on to win so that golden time if we can incorporate it with that what you just said being clear about our intentions what am i bringing here what do i want out of this it gives us all the opportunity to, again, develop these healthy habits.

17:51Jake Humphrey: Intentionality is so important. We could probably do a whole other episode on that, couldn't we? Yeah, probably will do. But actually, this idea of taking a moment to yourself plays really nicely into when we were joined by the author and the inspiring American Mel Robbins, who joined us on High Performance. And she spoke to us about the five-second rule, and I think we should hear from her at this point. But see, I know the secret to high performance. It's not expecting to feel motivated. It's realizing that there will always be resistance. There will always be fear. There will always be a moment of anxiety, particularly in those moments when you're doing something new or you're uncertain about how it's gonna go.

18:29And the secret is always just pushing through that temporary moment. And I think it's important for everybody to know that I invented the five second rule by sheer luck during one of the worst moments of my life 13 years ago. It was a Tuesday morning in February 2008 outside of Boston, Massachusetts. 13 years later, I still have to use the five second rule 54321 to drag my ass out of bed every morning. You know, I know that habit research suggests that anywhere from 21 days to 67 days of repeating a behavior will carve the new neural pathways in your mind and make it a subconscious habit. I think that's only true if you like doing the thing.

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22:13Jake Humphrey: So, I mean, that's a great example. Emily Maitlis talks about five minutes. For those that are still pushed for that, Mel's giving us the five-second rule, and it's almost the idea of getting out of our own way. Stop making excuses. and actually if we've decided what the route of action we're going to take is, sometimes we just need to give ourselves a countdown and remove the resistance. So again, you know, I think it was Spencer Johnson wrote the book called Eat That Frog. Do the thing that you don't want to do. Put it at the top of your list. Eat the frog and then you can enjoy the rest of the food that's been served up to you before that.

22:49Jake Humphrey: Mel's version of it is the same thing of just the idea of we can all just count down to five seconds and just take action i think the other thing that mel did really well there was explained to us that life isn't easy and in flow and simple for people that are achieving great things like i think it's a it's a myth to think oh i'm the sort of person that has to have the five second rule or i have to have a bit of golden time or i have to you know work out a special system to try and achieve great things like everyone is doing that you know heart people who we put on a pedestal and who we celebrate they haven't stumbled into high performance all of these things the things that they're doing every day the trick is they're consistently doing them and I think that that is a really important point that we have to make during this you know pretty short conversation is that you can't just have this idea and by next Friday have forgotten about it and in a year's time accidentally this episode pops up on your feed again and you listen again oh god I forgot about doing that like I honestly believe that high performance people are masters of optimizing their lives the time they wake up in the morning the supplementation that they take the time that they stop to have a drink the amount of time they spend writing down their intention for the day the time they allocate in the evening to working out whether the day's gone well the effort they put into personal relationships and communicating with people the space they give themselves to come up with big ideas and have grand plans like they're doing all of that and they're doing it consistently and they're making time in their diary for it and they're holding themselves to account and they know they're judged by the decisions they make when no one's watching not in the big glorious moments of success and i just think i just want to point that out because sometimes we dismiss this kind of stuff because it's too simple and too easy but it's also the bedrock for many many thousands of people's high-performing high achieving happy lives yeah yeah definitely it's like if you think of like use the analogy of think about two rail tracks that are going alongside each other if you just move them to one degree apart 10 miles down the road they're already a mile apart go further the the gap grows and i think these are all little one percenters these are all small things that we can stitch into our daily lives our daily routines but the compound interest that jamie Peacock reference in the first clip pays us back in dividends.

25:11Right. Improve or optimise your day by 1 % every single day. By the end of the year, that's a 365 % improvement. That's 30 times better than it was a year before.

25:22Jake Humphrey: But I think the last clip, though, is something as well that I think we need to talk about, which is the idea of we need to give ourselves a pat on the back occasionally. We need to reward ourselves. If we're going to do these habits and we're going to look at implementing them into our lives. We also need to take time to reward ourselves when we do them and we do them well. And I think there's nobody that explains that better than the billion, number 10, Dan Carter. I'd also set goals for the week. You know, be really decisive in your decision-making this week or, you know, be, you know, actually just enjoy the week.

26:01Something really simple, just a goal, and then I'd have three or four really key messages, making sure you're present at work and present at home, making sure that you be nice to people this week. So when I'm writing, and then the last piece was the gratitude that I'd write each night. I was constantly reminding myself of my goals, behaviours that I wanted to act like throughout the week and then I'd get to the end of the week and obviously I didn't have a game of rugby to play but I felt like I was able to earn my beer, earn my weekend and really sort of enjoy those moments because if I don't have that structure in my life, I just cruise and drift through life and that's not high performance.

26:49It's a great clip, isn't it? Because I think sometimes we're, particularly in the modern world and actually particularly people that listen to podcasts like High Performance, right? they think that every minute of every day has to be optimized but what is the point of optimizing every minute of every day if you're optimizing it for optimizing its sake like what's the reason for

27:08Jake Humphrey: all this well it has to be for the joy right yeah definitely and i think i mean that's a brilliant catchphrase that i've incorporated in my life just it's not about the alcohol you don't need to have a beer but it's just some kind of tangible reward that you've given yourself what do those rewards What does it look like then for you? For me, it's about making time to take my dog Teddy for a walk and just have that time on a Saturday afternoon, me and him just walking for miles and not with anything in my ears, just enjoying my own thoughts and enjoying watching him run around. Or it might be, you know, going out with the family for Sunday lunch and making sure that we sort of have a nice end to a week together and have that time.

27:49Jake Humphrey: Simple things, but they're my reward for hopefully doing the right thing during the week. Well, I think it's really important. And I think it's so important that we incorporate it, obviously, here at High Performance, right? So on a Friday, here's a bit of info for you listening at home. We have a WhatsApp group with every member of the High Performance team is on it. And on a Friday, we have wins of the week. And actually, we've done it in a really kind of like spit and sawdust way. Like at Whisper, my production business, it's a lovely email with photos and it's a much bigger team. It goes around to, you know, all 300 odd people.

28:21whereas on high performance it's just a voice note and a different member of the team leaves the voice note so at the end of the week just to stop and go these are the wins this week it reminds people of how well we're doing but I think also you could you know you can become so siloed in your own area so if you work on partnerships you become obsessed with it if it's guests you're obsessed with it I think it's important to hear the wins of other people to realize that actually you're part of something much bigger and I'd encourage anyone listening to this who works in a team or even in their family unit to sit down and talk about wins of

28:49Jake Humphrey: the week at the end of the week you know again it's an idea that if people want to go back in the archive listen to james timpson told us about they do a good newsletter across the whole of the timpsons group where they celebrate the things that they're proudest of you know great coaches talk about the idea of we start with what we've done really well and then we look at how we can improve secondary so this isn't a twee idea that you think well who else is doing this this is you You're seeing it across high-performing teams and cultures and leaders of celebrating those moments. And again, well, who else is doing this?

29:25Jake Humphrey: This is you're seeing it across high-performing teams and cultures and leaders of celebrating those moments. And again, your brain responds to whatever the reward that you set it. So if you set yourself a big goal or you set yourself a small goal, it releases the same amount of dopamine in response to you achieving that small goal as it would do for a big one so yeah so celebrating wins however big however small it is and doing it consistently as a habit your brain then releases the dopamine that allows it to create momentum and make sure that these habits become a regular part of your life wonderful i'm glad you're a regular part of my life you too thanks a lot mate thanks mate look thank you so much for listening don't forget if you can hit follow it makes such a difference to us the more people that subscribe the bigger the show becomes and the greater the guests that we can invite for these kinds of high performance conversations remain humble curious and empathetic and we'll see you next time on high performance

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