Before moving on, I’d like to make one small note about performance. While the term definitely connotes performance of the physical sort, it is critical not to overlook the mental, emotional, and spiritual pieces, which comprise the larger puzzle of performance. All four elements—physical, mental, emotional, spiritual—contribute to one’s daily living, how he or she feels, and, ultimately, how he or she performs. Varying levels of each are called upon based on the task at hand, but the capacity of each still exists.
No matter your objectives, goals, or pursuits, the mental piece is what sets the wheels in motion to execute or to pursue said goals; it is what encapsulates intent, which is the essential building block to thought, emotion, and behavior.
The Mental Piece
While I could write another book on mental toughness alone, that’s not what this next section is about. The purpose of the next section is to share with you specific aspects of mental toughness that helped me navigate uncertainty. While this is certainly not the end-all-be-all list for finding solutions, it is what has worked for me and what I’ll share with you.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, in his bestselling book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Performance, says that to achieve optimal performance, one must merge behavior with intent. Doing so undoubtedly requires a laser-like focus that not many people choose or know how to employ. Common office distractions such as calendar reminders, cell phones, background noise, and that annoying email inbox chime all serve as momentary distractions that divert your attention away from the task at hand and, as a result, make your output sub-optimal. To sustain superior performance, you need a mental gear shift of intent and focus. This gives you the awareness to know when to downshift to first gear or even “park,” and when to put the pedal to the metal and shift into high gear.
How PAL© Works
Before sport science became a widely known field of study, athletes and coaches trained in a linear fashion. In the old way of thinking, the belief was that, in order to become better, an athlete just needed to improve his or her physical capacity by working harder, putting in longer hours, honing their technique, and competing more often.
Over the years, however, discoveries in human performance were made that suggested that the opposite was actually true: too much focus on one particular “silo” of training led to faster athlete burnout and actually inhibited performance.
What sport science discovered was this: for an athlete to perform optimally, he or she requires a multidimensional training regimen. That is, the physical performance associated with top-tier athletes entails not just role-specific training (i.e. sprinters sprinting, weight lifters lifting) but also nutrition, mental fortitude, sport psychology, biomechanics, economy of motion, and rest and recovery. If an athlete only has one piece of this so-called “performance puzzle,” then his or her overall performance will never reach an optimal state. To perform optimally physically, one must also possess the proper faculties to face hardship, endure difficulty, become motivated, and ceaselessly pursue a higher purpose that drives him or her to continually improve.
Now, if we take this sport-specific example of multidimensionality and apply it to one’s everyday life, team, or company, what changes?
Nothing. The same multifaceted approach to performance—the balance of physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual capacities—still exists, and it is the basis of performance.
The “P” in PAL: Performance
For the PAL Model©, I consider Performance to encompass four life capacities, referred to hereafter as “the four pillars,” that constitute human output: physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. Collectively, the four pillars all comprise the full makeup of one’s being and are critical to navigating chaos when chaos arrives—as it always will.
In the PAL Model©, performance corresponds to the shoot component of shoot, move, communicate. The physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual aspects that go into squeezing that trigger and ensuring that the bullet finds its intended target are critical, but so are the internal and external awareness that the shooter must have to ensure his bullet finds the right home. Believe it or not, sending a one-inch projectile across three hundred yards is no easy feat, let alone eight hundred yards or one thousand. There are significant steps one must take to get and stay “in the zone,” and that’s what the performance section will cover.
There are many points of performance when it comes to shooting, which is why performance is the foundation upon which PAL© is built. The physical positioning of the shooter is key as his (or her) body is the foundation that affords the greater certainty that serves as the foundation of a solid shot. The mental aspect of focus and concentration supersedes all else because without mental focus all else—the discomforts of life—pour into the mind and overwhelm it. Every distraction in nature wants to throw your bullet off its intended path, and the amount of mental focus it takes to ignore those seemingly tiny disturbances is significant—but no more significant than what it takes to perform optimally in business.
Next is the emotional piece, which is the feeling of comfort, control and acceptance that one must have before and after taking the shot. There can be no second-guessing, no hesitancy, only the willingness to look (and move) forward to the next objective.
Finally, the spiritual piece is where purpose and passion play in, as they are what provide fulfillment and meaning to your actions. Being spiritually content enables you to continue taking more shots and never doubt or second-guess yourself. The convergence of these four elements is where certainty lies. The key, obviously, is learning how to balance the four amongst a world of constant change and disruption.
The “A” in PAL: Adaptability
The need to adapt comes from the uncertainty of a situation that is both a challenge and an opportunity. The uncertainty that springs up out of nowhere acts as a defining moment to test your skill and will, your spirit and motivation. What separates those who stay relevant from those who don’t is their willingness to adapt.
Adaptability allows you to respond immediately and intelligently to constant change so as to seize opportunity where others might see obstruction. Adaptive capacity also facilitates forward momentum because it lessens the need to have to stop what you’re doing to review what happened. Instead, you’re in a fluid, dynamic state that continually “reads and reacts” to problems as they arise.
The late Warren Bennis, widely considered a pioneer of the study of leadership, once described people with adaptive capacity as individuals who:
…may struggle in the crucibles they encounter, but they don’t become stuck in or defined by them. They learn important lessons, including new skills that allow them to move on to new levels of achievement and new levels of learning. This ongoing process of challenge, adaptation, and learning prepares the individual for the next crucible, where the process is repeated. Whenever significant new problems are encountered and dealt with adaptively, new levels of competence are achieved, better preparing the individual for the next challenge.
Adaptability refers to an organism’s ability to stay relevant amidst change; to adjust to new conditions based on a compelling impetus to do so. To stay current—to do away with the old and adapt to the new—requires the skill and will to do so, and this change stems from performance-based criteria mentioned above. In the scientific world, adaptability depends on two things: self-renewal and self-organization.
Self-renewal refers to your skill and will to reexamine and ultimately reset any emotional “hiccups” that may have caused your values and subsequent behavior to derail. It is your ability to both learn and unlearn.
Self-organization refers to individual and/or group behavior without direction from external authorities. For instance, when an eighth grade teacher leaves her classroom, the students have two choices: they can incite chaos and behave poorly, or they can maintain their