The Practice of Relaxed Performance

You’ve got some ambitions. You also want to enjoy your own health. So what gives? How do you achieve the balance?

I work with people who are incredibly hard working, ambitious and caring about their pursuits. Executives, lawyers, doctors, artists, therapists, and parents. Everyone’s work matters to them, yet each of them care about their own well-being to!

So much advice around stress is about managing it. Minimizing it. Even avoiding it. What about when the stress can’t be avoided? Parents for example, are they supposed to return the kid?

When you can’t avoid the stress but you want to feel better you’ve got another option. Grow your capacity to handle the stress. Improve how you respond to it. Take care of yourself so you can even grow from it.

How do you do all of those things? With a personal practice. A practice that helps you to work well not just work hard.

This practice is what I call relaxed performance. It’s a way of being in the doing. Get the job done while maintaining a sense of peace. You can have both.

The model below is a way to develop a well rounded practice. It includes everything that I’ve found to be essential to maintain your sense of peace within your performance.

Now, if you’re rolling your eyes thinking this is a long to-do list, I get it. The health industry has made it a full time job just to feel well.

This is not about having 6 more things to worry about. It’s about finding the ones that will bring you the biggest returns on your effort.

In the above image you can see the 6 spokes of relaxed performance. Represented as a wheel, each spoke ideally holds an equal amount of tension.

When the tension is dispersed the wheel is balanced and functions well. This is relaxed performance.

The wheel is not so relaxed that it’s flat or floppy. There is still tension, but it’s is shared enough that there is no strain.

If one spoke weakens the others are left to pick up the slack. The result? A bumpy and stressful ride.

Each of these 6 spokes are essential to an effective practice to achieve relaxed performance.

A good practice is not about obsessing over each of these. Instead, identifying the one that needs attention in order to bring more balance to the whole wheel.

In my years of attempting relaxed performance, for myself and others, these are the essentials that help us get there.

If you’re curious to hear more about each of the spokes, stay tuned to my newsletter (subscribe below). I’ll be sharing about each of them, and the role they play, one at a time.