Strategies & Tactics to Prepare for Peak Performance

For anyone who has had that big event looming in the future – a competition, speech, business meeting or event – you have surely experienced the stress, anxiety and intensity in those days and weeks leading up to showtime. We want to do our absolute best when the moment to shine arrives. We want to experience Peak Performance – in perfect rhythm and flow.

In this post we will layout the key strategies you can deploy to optimize your preparation for your peak performance event.

The question for many then becomes, where do I focus my time and energy leading up to the event to have the biggest positive impact on my performance?

With the annual lead up to the Crossfit Qualifiers and World Games, I was inspired to share some perspectives I have been sharing anecdotally with athletes as they prepare for their big events.

Where to invest?

This conversation is all about resource allocation/time. Where do we choose to place our limited energy, attention and focus in the time we have leading up to our event.

Consider a couple of simple questions:

1. How much can you improve your tactical skills or fitness between now and your peak performance event?

My hypothesis is that as our event draws closer, the improvements that can be realized from a purely skill or fitness development perspective dramatically decrease. Whether it’s practicing a speech for the 101st time or working on a specific athletic move.

What’s more, the harder you push those physical and tactical skills, eager to squeeze out the final gains before your peak performance window, the more likely you are to get seriously injured, sick, burnt out, or overtax your central nervous system – at a direct cost of achieving peak performance when it counts most.

Yes, this happens just as much in business as it does in sport.

2. How much can you improve your mental, emotional and energy management capacity in the time leading up to your event?

While I would argue that mental, emotional and energy performance always has an important role to play in achieving peak performance, as the time to event draws closer the potential positive lift provided dramatically increases.

Here is another way to think about it – as your event approaches the impact of investing time in mental training and energy management will exceed additional time spent on physical, skill or tactical modalities.

A Daily Mental Preparation Ritual

1. Daily Meditation

Protocol

30 breathes or up to 5 minutes per day.

Practice

Comfortable seated or laying position. Focus on taking slow, long deep breathes. I like a 1:2 ratio (double your exhale count). Count each inhale and exhale.

Purpose

While this ritual seems simplistic, as anyone who has tried meditating knows, it is anything but. We are practising the art of intentional focus and attention management. How does this apply and translate to peak performance, you may ask?

Well, my guess is in the weeks and days leading up to your event you may find yourself worrying, panicking, even losing complete nights of sleep due as you think about all the event coming up in the future.

You are mentally time travelling to a future that doesn’t exist.

This is your conscious and subconscious mind’s inability to direct its units of focus and attention intentionally. In other words, you are spending your valuable energy focused on a future that may or may not ever exist – this energy is being directly sucked out of something that it can be invested towards in the present moment, like training, practice or recovering.

Furthermore, as anyone who has experienced the crippling stress and anxiety that results from this mental time travel knows, this also often times becomes the groundwork for destructive negative self talk and self sabotaging stories that can snowball and cascade over the course of days, weeks and months.

Meditation is a tool that allows us to reclaim ownership of our attention and focus.

2. Daily Visualization

Protocol

3 to 5 minutes per day

Practice

Comfortable seated or laying position. Focusing on specific peak performance scenarios that will unfold on your event day.

Purpose

There is now an overwhelming body of research and study showing that our brains can actually develop real neural pathways translating to real world performance improvement simply based on visualizing our execution of the given task or skill we want to improve.

This is the art of visualization.

And there absolutely is a spectrum of how to do it right.

My recommendation after spending the last 25 years with a regular visualization practice is to combine your visualization practice directly after your meditation. Visualization in its most effective state accesses your subconscious brain which is more accessible and active after going through a meditation process where we are naturally calming our central nervous system into a parasympathetic state.

Before you start your meditation and visualization process, have a clear plan for the scenario you wan to visualize. This intentional plans ensures that we avoid and mitigate the unintentional anxiety inducing mental time travel we discussed above. Visualization is in many ways the opposite of this – productive mental time travel that both contributes to real-world skill development and builds that muscle of ownership over our attention and focus.

The focus of your visualization scenario can be anything you like. It could be your mental and emotional state in the minutes before your event, it may be practising a specific move, technique or play, executing with flawlessness perfection. It could be you successful practicing your techniques to stay focused and qwell the nerves you know you will experience. You could give your central nervous system the all out throttle without physically taxing it.

The holy grail of effective visualization is immersion.

Whatever your plan, your goal is to fully immerse yourself the mental experience. The more conscious effort you can apply to living and experiencing the exact peak performance event the more translation to the real-world is created. You can go as far as engaging all of your senses; what will it feel like, what will it smell like, what sounds will you hear, what will be going through your mind in the moment.

3. Build Your Plan

I have learned through painful experience that often times the most disruptive dynamic to realizing your peak performance is when your plan goes awry and you end up scrambling in the minutes before your event. This immediately hijacks much of the hard work you may have done in the weeks leading up as your entire system gets hijacks by Fight or Flight (sympathetic nervous system).

Fail to Plan…

There is so much that is within our control and I am continuously surprised at the lack of planning and foresight that elite athletes have in the weeks and months leading up to that event.

Do not fall victim to this entirely avoidable pitfall.

Instead, find 2 to 3 hours on a day well before your event, sit down, and begin to map out your plan.

What goes into the plan?

A good place to start is designing your logistical plan, ask yourself:

• do you need to travel anywhere?
• what clothes and gear do you need to have on hand?
• what is your meal plan going to look like before hand question?
• what does your work and life schedule look like leading up to those events? How can you make sure to optimize your schedule so that you are not run down or racing from one thing to the next?
• are there any major events in and around your event that could mentally or emotionally derail your focus?

You can go as far as to begin to map out things like what clothes or gear you’re going to be wearing, what your preparation or warm up plan will be, how you will get most comfortable in your performance environment, etc.

A Plan and 10 Minutes a Day

If this is the first time you are integrating a mental Peak Performance plan into the build up to your event, here is what I recommend:

• keep it simple. No more than 10 minutes of work a day (you can do this)
• start 30 days out from your peak performance event (again, you can keep this ritual up for 30 days).
• stay committed and compliant – this is a practice that culminates from consistency and repetition – do not be discouraged if you don’t “feel anything” in the first few days and weeks – stay the course.

Support at the Next Level

If you’re a leader, entrepreneur or athlete looking to learn more about Peak Performance and developing your mental game and set of performance tools – you’re welcome to take our Human Performance Baseline Assessment or learn more about the Human Performance Lab 30 Day Program.