Hello, everyone. Welcome to Your SuperPowered Mind. I’m Kristin Maxwell, and in this show, we explore the process of transformation and give you tools and strategies that you can use to transform your own life. Today, I am excited to be talking to Eric Partaker about the roadmap to peak performance.
Eric Partaker is a high-performance expert who combines his knowledge of behavioral science with techniques from elite sports and the military to help leaders, entrepreneurs, and others scale their performance and improve their wellbeing. Eric has received a number of awards including CEO of the year at the 2019 UK Business Excellence Awards, one of the top 30 entrepreneurs in the UK 35 and under by Startups Magazine, and Britain’s most disruptive entrepreneurs by the Telegraph, among others. I’m really excited to talk to Eric because high performance is I think something that many, many, many people want and yet is scary to almost claim as that’s the road that they’re taking. So, anyway, welcome Eric to Your SuperPowered Mind.
Thank you, Kristin. Yeah, really excited to be here and hope that I can offer a few nuggets that can have a positive impact on all the people listening. Thanks very much.
Thank you. Yes. My first question is always what superpower did you discover as the result of mastering your mind?
That quite simply is just remembering what I always used to do as a kid, which was changing to different superheroes. When we’re growing up, right, we can all remember the days when we would make-believe and pretend that we were this, whether it was an impenetrable fortress or this flying person or this person capable of doing all wonderful things, and somewhere along the way, we lose that sense to believe and imagine and we become so conditioned with our life experiences that that sense of power disappears. I remembered it about 10 years ago. I had had an event that really prompted me to reflect on life, and as a result of that, I ended up choosing three identities in the three areas of life that I see as mattering most, so our health, our work, and our relationships, and they are simply my superheroes.
They are my guardian angels, my dream team. They assemble every day to aid me in what I need to do on any given day, and they are my health identity as a world fitness champion, not that I am one, but that’s who shows up in the gym. It’s that mentality, that person, and it changes the way I both walk out to do my workout. It changed the way I actually behave in the gym during the workout. Another identity that I created for work was the world’s best coach, just to remind me how does that version of me shows up and behaves in the world, how decisive, inspiring and reliable that version of me is. The real game-changer for me was the identity that I chose to power the evening part of my day, so 6:30 PM and that’s the world’s best husband and father.
What I mean by that last part about power in the evening part of my day is I actually took each of these three identities and I turned them into alarms on my phone. At 6:30 AM, because you could change the name of an alarm on your phone, at 6:30 AM, it actually says world fitness champion. At 9 AM, it actually says the world’s best coach on my phone, and at 6:30 PM, the world’s best husband and father, just to remind me, well, how would the world’s best husband and father walk through that door right now. So that’s definitely been my superpower, changing into those identities in those key areas.
Yes, I love, first of all, a couple of things about this are first of all, that you are talking about peak performance and high performance not just in work, not just in one aspect of who you are, but across all of the areas that are going to help actually make us balanced and happy, and this idea of an identity that we put on to become because it almost gives you, I like what you said, sort of a sense of power to pull that on, instead of like, “Here I am inside of me being just regular old me,” if that makes sense.
Yeah. 100% makes sense because again, think back to childhood, when you turned into Wonder Woman or Superman or whoever the character was, it changed your behavior. You suddenly started doing things that you weren’t doing maybe just before in that play session, and that works in the same way as adults. When we change our identity, when we step into that champion version of ourselves in the areas of life that matter most, it shapes how we behave, it shapes how we perform, and you’re totally right about it not being one dimensional because true peak performance or high performance, operating at your fullest potential is essentially what we’re talking about, top of the pyramid of Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, self-actualization. That’s what this is all about.
By kind of reaching your full potential isn’t one-dimensional. It’s not just working. It’s also health and relationships, and the three of those, provide the stability and meaning that life needs. It’s that three-legged stool that we ultimately most care about and most need.
Yeah. I love this. So we do need to go to a break quickly, but before we do, can you let people know where they can learn about you and your work?
Absolutely. Yeah. So I’ve just released a new book. It’s going to be out on Amazon by September 30th. It’s called The 3 Alarms, and it will take people through the entire system of how to both choose your identity, set your alarms, but then even on top of that, also arm you with some peak performance principles that you can use across all three domains in life, your health, your work, and your relationships. If you just head over to ericpartaker.com, you’ll find a link where you can pick up some goodies related to the book.
Great. We will definitely include the link in our show notes. Stick around because I am going to go more deeply into what do you do when your life is not at peak performance and it feels a bit overwhelming? How do you get started? So hang on, we’ll be right back.
To listen to the entire show click on the player above or go to the SuperPower Up! podcast on iTunes.
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