Charles Garfield Associate-Professor at the University of California’s Medical College in San Francisco and Head of his own Research Institute – the Peak Performance Centre in Berkeley, has studied 1,500 outstanding achievers in nearly every walk of life. He finds they all have certain traits that are not innate but which can be learnt by anyone.

Here based on Garfield’s research, are seven steps that can lead to peak performance:

1. Lead a well-rounded life.

True or False? High achievers are inevitably hard-driving obsessed people who bring work home and labour over it until bed time. FALSE ! according to Garfield. "Such people tend to peak early", he says, "then go into a decline or level off. They become addicted to work itself, with much less concern for result."

When Garfield interviewed top executives, he found that as high performers they knew how to relax, could leave their work at the office, prized close friends and family life, and spent a healthy amount of time with their children and friends.

2. Select a career you care about. For 30 years Jack has dragged himself out of bed five days a week to work at something he does not care about and which has never produced the hoped-for salary. If Jack had done what he really wanted to do – to edit children’s books – he almost certainly would have been a happier and more successful human being.

Garfield’s data show that when high performers choose work they like , their work is better and their rewards higher.

3. Rehearse each challenging task mentally. Before any difficult or important situation – a board of directors meeting, a public appearance, a key tennis match – most peak performers run through their desired actions in their minds over and over.

 

4. Seek results, not perfection. Many ambitious and hardworking people are so obsessed with perfection that they turn out little work. According to Garfield, high performers are almost always free of the compulsion to be perfect. "They don’t think of their mistakes as failures, instead they learn from them so that they can do better the next time." he says.
5. Be willing to risk. Most people stay in what Garfield calls the "comfort zone"- settling for security even if it means boredom, rather than taking chances. There are many people who have made no effort to think through what might happen if they did fail. High performers, by contrast, are able to take risks because they carefully consider exactly how they would adjust – how they would salvage the situation – if, in fact, they did fail.
6. Don’t underestimate your potential. Most of us think we know our own limits. But much of what we "know" is not knowledge at all but belief – erroneous, self-limiting belief. "And self-limiting "beliefs"says Garfield, "are the biggest obstacle to high level performance."

For many years everyone "knew" that running a mile in less than four minutes was "impossible". Then in 1954, Roger Bannister broke the four-minute barrier. Within two years ten other athletes had followed suit.

The point is: we rarely really know what these limits are. Thus, too many of us too often set our individual limits far below what we could actually achieve.

High performers, on the other hand, concentrate on themselves – on their feelings, on their functioning, on the momentum of their effort and are therefore freer to achieve at peak levels.

7. Compete with yourself, not with others. High performers focus more intently on bettering their own previous efforts than on beating competitors. Because they are interested in doing the best possible job by their own standards, they tend to be "team players" rather than loners. They recognise that groups can solve certain complicated problems better than individuals and are therefore eager to let other people do part of the work.

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