Peak Performance Checklist

Fragments from imaginary dialogues

“If you were to create a peak performance checklist, what would it look like?”

“There’s a lot more peak performance books I want to read, so this can only be a tentative checklist.

The checklist combines two models.

Alan Watkins’s model [<link, medium read]:

Thinking
Feeling
Physiology

People’s brilliance comes from thinking. (Josh Waitzkin)
Feeling (emotions) profoundly influences thinking.
Physiology profoundly influences feeling.

Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz’s model of Full Engagement:

Full engagement requires drawing on 4 separate but related sources of energy: 

Physical – Physically energized
Emotional – Emotionally connected
Mental – Mentally focused
Spiritual – Spiritually aligned with a purpose beyond your immediate self-interest

Thinking in Alan Watkins’s model corresponds to the spiritual and mental energy sources in Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz’s model.
Feeling corresponds to the emotional energy source.
Physiology corresponds to the physical energy source.

If we were to think of this process as activation, the order matters. So it’s an ordered checklist.

Physical comes first. (Breathing, Posture, and Movement)
Emotional second. (state management, accessing the Beautiful State)
Spiritual third. (Purpose, your Why)
Mental last. (Deep Focus)

We can combine the first three into one ritual, so the final checklist looks like this:

Centering
– Movement
– Beautiful State
– Purpose
Deep Focus

The next step is detailing the specific actions at every stage of the process, stress testing it and, in time, gradually condensing the process.”