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What makes a high performer? Why do some people achieve greatness and others get left behind?

When I was working with elite athletes at the Australian Institute of Sport and in America, soldiers in the army, some high profile people in the entertainment industry and more recently with high performers in corporate organisations, I noticed some clear characteristics that set high performers apart. The good news is that it is not all about talent, ability and potential, it’s more to do with how they execute on a daily basis.

The most common characteristic that sets high performers apart is their ability to focus deeply on the tasks that they perform in a day.  However as a society we are losing our ability to focus. It seems like the whole world has ADHD. There are three main reasons for this.

1. Attention deficit habit (ADH). ADH is a condition where the habits in our day are sapping our ability to focus. For example most people leave their email open and every time it alerts us to a new email we stop what we are doing and we go off and check it. Also we leave our phone on constantly during the day even when we are writing a report or meeting with someone. These habits actually set ourselves up to be distracted and train us to have poor focus. New research tells us that the average employee in an office environment is interrupted 11 times an hour.  Sounds a lot but when you think about it most people are constantly responding to their email alert, answering the phone, having people come into their office, suddenly remembering things that they should have done and dealing with noise from open plan offices. What’s the fall out of all these interruptions? The fall out is a massive reduction in productivity and creativity.
   
   A study by Basex found that office distractions take up 2.1 hours of the average day (28%) with workers taking an average of five minutes to recover from a distraction and re-focus on the original task. This message is important for the leaders of the business. Due to distractions and interruptions people rarely get the time to think creatively and come up with innovative ideas.
   
   
2. Information Obesity – This is the result of shifting from a physical economy to a digital economy. We are overloaded with information and we have so much information coming at us we don’t have to focus on one thing for too long before something else will come and take our attention away. A recent report released by Proud Foot Consulting said that information overload was responsible for a 10% decrease in productivity.
   
   
3. Multi-tasking - The greatest enemy of focus is this idea of multi-tasking. Multi-tasking suggests that you can focus on many things at once. Reality is multi-tasking is a very inefficient process and in reality all you are doing is focusing poorly on a number of tasks rather than focusing well on one thing. In fact a recent study conducted by The Institute of Psychiatry at King's College London compared the cognitive ability of people who had been multi tasking and people who had just smoked marijuana. Who came out on top? The drug affected workers. The reason is that multi-tasking is incredibly stressful on the brain, it impairs short term memory and concentration. The result is that the brain is left in an impaired state.

So what is the solution and how do we improve our focus? Well there are three simple techniques we can use to have the focus of a high performer.

1. Control Your Environment. Set up your external world to support focus, turn off the email, turn the phone off, and educate your staff on when you are not to be interrupted. Push back on the environment and don’t be a slave to it.
2. Formal Practice. An example of a formal practice is meditation. Years ago I thought that meditation was tree hugging, hippie stuff, however a huge amount of evidence shows that meditation has a beneficial impact on our cognitive ability. In its purest form meditation is about calming the mind and focusing on one task.
3. Be Present. During the day practice focusing your attention on whatever is in front of you. Lose yourself in whatever you are doing. If you are writing a report focus entirely on that report without thinking of the other things you need to do later in the day. Likewise if you are having a conversation with someone totally immerse yourself in that conversation and don’t let your mind drift. So often we have conversations and we are not really present. Business is built on relationships, and the greatest compliment you can give another person is your undivided attention. However we all have a highly tuned BS detector, and we know when people are not truly engaged with us.

Some people believe that being present is the key to team building. Companies spend millions of dollars a year getting people to build better relationships within an organisation. They usually spend this money on personality profiling. Shouldn’t the first step be getting them to engage and be present with each other? In addition some psychologists are now talking about the concept that people are creating fewer and fewer memories. The reason for this is that memories are created in the present and the fact that most people are either obsessing about the past or worrying about the future means that they are not laying down current memories. How sad!

Malcolm Gladwell in his book “Blink” examined the determining factor between surgeons that get sued after they made a mistake and those that didn’t get sued after a similar mistake. The number one factor was how present the doctor was during the consultation. If a surgeon was present in their interaction with a patient they didn’t get sued.

Being present is also essential for leadership. In a large telco I am working with the CEO is universally loved by the staff. When asked about the reason for this admiration the most common response was “because when he talks to me I feel important and I know he is actually interested in what I have to say”.

Being present can also dramatically people’s stress levels. Stress is when we doubt our ability to handle a future event. This triggers a stress response which results in fatigue, negative emotion and poor performance. Craig Hassard from Monash University took a group of medical students in their final year. He measured their stress levels, depression index and anxiety levels. The students then practiced being present at every moment of the day (when studying, spending time with friends and talking to patients) as well as five minutes of meditation in the morning and night. They retested the students two weeks before their final exam (the most stressful time of the year) and found dramatic reductions in stress, depression and anxiety (some of these reduced up to 30%).

In affect the students’ workload was climbing but their stress, depression and anxiety levels were dropping. All it took was a bit of real time practice and five minutes a day. Not a bad return on investment.

This is the first step towards high performance. Go forth and focus!!!

Dr Adam Fraser is one of Australia’s leading educators, researchers and thought leaders in the area of human performance. He’s spoken all around the country for Business Chicks and we love him! Learn more at www.dradamfraser.com.au