Becoming A Business Athlete

Brandon Fluharty

⚡️ Today’s level up ⚡️

Today’s edition deconstructs an empowering Make More Hustle Less Club workshop with Taylor Johnson - a former NFL Performance Coach. It walks you through how to develop a high-performance lifestyle using his powerful model.

Let’s go!

‍Read time: <9 minutes (+ 20 minute video)

‍If you missed last week, read it here.

Are sellers really the athletes of the business world?

“Energy, not time, is the fundamental currency of high performance.” - Jim Loehr

In January 2001, ironically at the same time I was ramping down as an aspiring professional athlete in Europe, Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz wrote a groundbreaking article in Harvard Business Review titled The Making of a Corporate Athlete.

In it, they propose that business professionals can significantly enhance their performance by adopting the training principles of professional athletes. The article challenges traditional notions of corporate performance by emphasizing energy management over time management. The authors argue that sustained high performance in the corporate world requires a holistic approach that addresses physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual energy.

After failing to win a pro contract in Europe and then eventually moving into sales as an Account Manager in 2006, I was keenly aware of these concepts, but thoroughly confused and shocked when I did not see them adopted in the business world.

The presiding mentality was hustle, hustle, hustle and a you can rest when you die attitude. Especially in sales, the focus was wining and dining clients. Performance was less about preserving energy and more about (constantly) expending it. Dinners, bonding over drinks, and 8AM call blitzes (while often sleep deprived or hungover) were the norm.

It took a good decade for me to shed many of these uninspired habits and behaviors, and instead get back to my athletic roots and redesign my work calendar more akin to how a professional athlete manages their lifestyle to reach the summit of their craft. That shift put me in position to deliver bigger impact to my clients and generate outsized revenue and income results compared to my peers.

Here’s just a snippet of the athlete’s approach leveraged in the business world:

→ Athletes spend a lot of time visualizing and writing out their goals and targets for the upcoming season/year so they can connect the dots between their big vision and the small efforts necessary in daily training. I spent time in solitude understanding who I was, what I stood for, and what I wanted out of my life so that my actions became clearly connected and aligned to that Mission.

‍Visualization was a key tool for seeing these things come to life inside my mind.

→ Athletes develop a plan for the upcoming season and understand the main ebbs and flows where high demands will be placed and others where rest and recovery will be prioritized. I did the same by implementing strategic blocks on my calendar - annual strategy, monthly update, weekly organization, and daily execution - and filled in the rest from there.

→ Athletes turn everything into a game. They play the “game within the game,” so that the real scoreboard isn’t how well they’re performing against others, but more so how they are progressing against their own lofty goals and standards. To play my game on my terms, I developed a space I could come to every day to make sense of everything I was doing (beyond just my sales activity) in order to harmonize it, score it, and improve my approach.

→ And of course, athletes have coaches. The best of the best actually have multiple ones to improve the myriad facets and dynamics of their life. That’s because they know to be a top performer at the highest form of their craft, it’s about adopting an integrated, high-performance lifestyle. To improve my overall game, not just my sales skills, I hired a coaching staff the year I broke seven-figure earnings for the first time.

This epitomizes why I am intentional about expanding beyond top sales voices inside Make More Hustle Less Club and take things a step further by inviting leaders in other performance realms to share their voice, wisdom, and frameworks to help you perform at your best in business, and more importantly, life.

In our last monthly session on September 9th, I invited Taylor Johnson on as a special guest to walk us through his High-Performance Lifestyle Model. Taylor is a former NFL Performance Coach and now helps elite teams and individuals in the business world reach their full potential.

Today’s edition will break down the key elements from his workshop. Let’s dive in!

Deconstruction of Taylor’s model

“I never loved football. I spent much of my career coaching elite athletes at D1 Universities and in the NFL. Football was just a game. I cared more about the process and the people playing the game than the game itself.” - Taylor Johnson

*Taylor, in black, as a performance coach with the 49ers, is here on the 50-yard line with pro players he formerly coached at Auburn*

Taylor surprised us with the fact that despite spending so many years in football, he never really loved the game of football. What he fell in love with was:

The competition
Building relationships
Refining his craft as a coach
Learning from the wins and losses
Applying human performance in different contexts
Strategically getting someone in a position to be successful. Repeatedly.

That has led him on an interesting journey where he has applied his training in football, esports, the military, creative arts, and now startup land and business.

The key thread throughout this adventure was (and still is) unlocking a person’s full potential, at both the individual and team level.

To kick off the tactical portion of the session, Taylor shared a Venn diagram with three main pillars of his model:

‍Clarity
‍Confidence
Capacity

Clarity is having the sense of where you want to go. It's also this internal awareness of what is your own operating system.‍

Confidence is the ability to take action and learn. It's also proving to yourself you are the person that you say you are given the evidence that you've accumulated up until this point.

‍Capacity is being better at what you do so you could do it for as long as possible.Whether you realize it or not, these three pillars are constantly interplaying in your life.

To click a degree further, Taylor had us think deeper about the overlap between these three main pillars, of which there are some key distinctions to highlight.

When clarity overlaps with confidence, you get direction. When confidence overlaps with capacity, you get execution. And when clarity overlaps with capacity, you get alignment.

If we were to zoom in on this even further, when you think about these intersections (or pedals), it enables you to unlock your full human potential and mastery - the ultimate game we’re playing.

But Taylor continued on, as we don’t stop here. We have the overlap. We know human potential and mastery is what matters in the middle. Now there's three drivers, or accelerators, that contribute to each one of these pillars (nine in total).

Clarity:‍

‍Values - Why do you prioritize the things you do?‍
Vision - What are you trying to bring to life in this world?‍
Goals - How are you going to bring it to life and when?

‍Confidence:

‍Mental game - What frameworks and models will you use to make hard decisions?‍
Learning - How can you use every bit of information as feedback loops for improvement?‍
Action - How do you operationalize your learning so that mistakes and errors are minimized or eliminated and you can ultimately solve problems faster?

‍Capacity:

‍Preparation - How do you get ready for the work ahead of you?‍
Systems - What personal process do you have in place to help with the heavy lifting and repetition of your success (in a way you trust and enjoy)?‍
Recovery - When and how will you rest and recalibrate so that you can maintain peak performance often and for a long time?

Of these nine drivers, Taylor focused on three:

Vision
Learning
Systems

Taylor gave us some key takeaways up front:‍

‍“Self awareness drives high performance.“
“The bigger the base, the higher the peak.”
“Your systems shape the quality of your results.”

‍We started with Vision. Again, this is about your awareness and your understanding of your internal and external stimuli. Said another way, this is a personal Yerkes-Dodson Law Bell curve, and it's basically showing the relationship between low arousal and high stress in your performance.

At this juncture, Taylor did a live coaching session with one of our brave members, Latif. The point of the exercise was to help members self-identify and label both states (under arousal and over stimulation) so that we can clarify what the sweet spot looks like for each one of us.

This becomes your high-performance steady state of operation you’re looking to repeat as often as possible. Taylor shared tools you can use around down regulating yourself (if you’re overstimulated) and amping yourself up (if you’re under-stimulated).

Here’s a sample worksheet highlighting my own states.

The key takeaways we all agreed on as a group was that by labeling our low, high, and optimal arousal states and actually feeling what good performance looks like, we’re empowered to make clearer decisions in our environment to protect and/or sustain the optimal state.

What does this spectrum look like for you? Write it out. Describe in detail what they mean. Feel them.

Next is Learning. For this portion, Taylor shared a personal story around his experience climbing Mount Shasta in Northern California.

In 2017, Taylor climbed this mountain, which is at about 14,000 feet high in elevation, with a bunch of friends and his buddy's dad. He said it was one of the most challenging things he’s ever done (and this coming from a dude that also gave up everything at age 20 to move to Thailand and compete professionally in kickboxing).

Taylor’s key learning lesson: It wasn't so much the climb as it was that he “bonked” (a term used in endurance sports), meaning he didn't do a good job of his nutrition, and thus didn’t have the energy needed for the demands placed on his body and mind. They also had some gear issues and got caught in a whiteout. So it was the perfect storm, quite literally, of zero foot visibility, whiteout, crazy winds, and a lack of gear and enough food.

They made it out okay, but there were a lot of lessons learned in terms of survival, his attitude, his own resiliency, and a lot about preparation. Taylor likened climbing, camping, or frankly anything in nature, as a really great teacher, and it's all about how you learn and adapt to change your behaviors.

So the key question becomes, “How can we accelerate learning?”

To answer this critical question, Taylor helped us define key terms:

‍Knowledge is just a set of facts or information. Skills are acquired through experience or education and information is actually meaningless. It's us who give this information meaning. Things are not inherently “good” or “bad.” They just are. It is us who put a label on these things, and if we label too much, then we can cut ourselves off from acquiring knowledge and using our “failures” to learn.

This could map across in sales. Maybe you're in a certain sales conversation and you get stuck, then you're in a similar sales conversation, you get stuck again. You didn't learn. On the other hand, let's say you did tweak a bit of the script. You're able to navigate it, handle an objection, and able to open up a different part of the conversation. That’s applying knowledge (information) from before to drive to more desired outcomes (learning).

‍Intelligence is simply the rate of learning. How quickly are you able to learn?

For instance, had Taylor gone back to Shasta a second time, a third time and had the same results, then he didn't learn. Bring it home to your own craft. Think of a recent situation for yourself where maybe you’re working with a prospect on a deal that fell apart. What are the pieces of information you can pull from that experience so that you accelerate learning and not repeat the things you don’t want? That’s true intelligence.

"The only true test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life" - Naval Ravikant

Wisdom is then applying that knowledge and experience effectively to make decisions or solve problems. It's not about just knowing what is right, but it's also understanding the context and how to map that across the different situations.It's like understanding the principles of a sales conversation in SaaS, and then maybe changing industries to medical sales. They’re different industries, but the sales conversation, or the principles remain the same.It's also like knowing that a tomato is a fruit, but you don't put it in a fruit salad. Contextually, you understand the concepts and you can map it across different contexts.

Here's the big idea Taylor stressed: “If wisdom is what we're going for, we're trying to accelerate our learning, gain more wisdom, to be able to map that across the different situations. The bigger the base, the more wisdom we have, and as a result, the higher level our performance. Because life is really just about solving problems and creating a structure to be able to do that more effectively and do it faster with each try.”

Here's an effective and simple tool you can use to accelerate learning: After Action Review (AAR).

It's a way to take a situation or an event in time, on the other end of that, deconstruct it, and figure out what actually happened. Understand the lessons and the insights, reconstitute the team, and then move on to the next mission, goal, whatever it may be, but carry through those learnings.

Here's a simple framework for a good AAR:

‍→ What did we want to do in terms of the planning strategy?

→ What did we actually do in terms of the execution and why?

→ What can we do better and what's the progression?

‍Try this after every call, every workday, every week, every meeting. AARs work for a reason (just look at the Military), so it’s an effective and simple way to measure your progress and accelerate your learning as an individual and a team.

Last up is Systems. This is in the area of capacity. Your systems shape the quality of your results.

"We do not rise to the level of our goals. We fall to the level of our systems." - James Clear

If we want better results in our lives, whether it's money, impact, or freedom, we need to examine the quality of our systems. And more specifically, the inputs that drive the system. So if we're not getting the output we want, we have to look upstream.

Okay, “what’s the input” you ask? Taylor mentions he hears this pretty frequently: "I'm grinding, I'm doing the same thing day in, day out, but I get the same results. I feel stuck." Sound familiar? We’ve all been there (myself and Taylor included).

Taylor explained this phenomenon like this: “What happens is you reach a certain level of success and you realize that what got you here is not going to get you to that next level. It takes reimagining yourself and your infrastructure to be able to really up level your game. Cause if you don't, what happens is you either stall out, fall out, or burn out.”

‍He goes on further to explain: “Stalling out is you hit a plateau. The momentum fades and you basically just get stuck. Burning out is you've pushed so hard for so long that your fatigue catches up to you and that drive, it now just drains you. And fallout is the pressures, the expectations, distractions. It literally pulls you off course.”

“First we have to appreciate that we are a system of systems. So a system is just a group of parts that work together. We're made up of a number of different parts. Our system is ancient, complex, and it's extraordinary.”

The question becomes “How do we assess, optimize, and evolve our systems?”

Taylor stresses that when asking this question we need to get granular on what we are optimizing for? What qualities do we want to develop? What standards do we measure our progress and success?

Taylor shared the EPM elite performance model. It was created by his mentor, and arguably one of the best performance coaches in the world, Dr. Andy Walsh. He was at Red Bull High Performance for over ten years. He was at DARPA. He coached Team USA in skiing and snowboarding and took Shaun White to gold. It's saying, let's place you in the center, a very human-centric approach, and let's ask the right questions.

What are all the critical factors needed to have you be at your very best of whatever given field or industry or whatever staging phase that you're in? So for the best business athlete, creating this elite performance model, it's really to think about this holistic investment in optimal performance.

It’s a tool to raise awareness around the factors to up level performance and extend longevity. Taylor stressed that it's an iterative cycle. So the first model we build, it's likely not the right model. That doesn't mean it's wrong. It's just not right because it takes a couple cycles to pressure test it.

This is just a generic model, by the way. When Taylor works with individuals, it's all custom based on the sport or business.

Let’s use an example from the workshop. Say you have physical and technology as areas you want to focus on improving. Those are really big buckets. You would say, “Okay what are the sub factors? What are the qualities that I/we want to develop?”

Using an example outside of sales: Running a marathon. Step one is identifying the main component you need to be at peak performance for your goal, which is the physical component. Step two is to identify the sub-factors that go into the physicality, like balance, strength, power, aerobic conditioning, anaerobic conditioning, flexibility, etc.

You can think of these as the behaviors that need to get developed in order to fill up that main cog (or critical factor).

Taylor then pointed out that comparison, to the right standards, is a good way to benchmark ourselves in each of these critical factors. On one hand you can compare yourself to another sales executive. Let’s say decision-making is one of your critical factors. If you compare yourself to someone in sales, you may be an 8 out of 10, but if you compare yourself to, let's say someone like Steve Jobs or Oprah, you might be a 2 out of 10.

The point being with this exercise is when we think about acquiring wisdom and mapping across different learnings, and you think of standards in this way, it creates space and areas of opportunity to learn from other high-performing individuals in other areas.

Dive deeper

This is just the tip of the iceberg. If you made it this far, you’re a part of the 54% of readers who actually read my breakdowns in full.

To help bring these concepts to life, I’ve created a highlights reel of the workshop.

To get access to the full video, including the live coaching breakouts, the worksheet, and additional resources, just go to your MMHL Hub page and go to session #30. If you’re not a member, you can sign up here and get instant access.

That’s a wrap! See you next week.

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