Three times more actually 2! The more you ask and share your ideas. The more people become familiar and comfortable with what you are asking for and the more they warm up to the idea. Start by asking questions about what they think, want, need and feel. People support what they create.

They want to back the ideas they helped create, so include them in the process. Carefully consider the problems people face.

Give suggestions, resources and connections. You can also gain influence by offering sincere appreciation for those you seek to influence. Offer gratitude. Become their champion and cheer on their good ideas.

Praise them in public when they do well. Trust them. Give them autonomy to make decisions. Bravery is not the absence of fear but what you do when you feel afraid.

Courage is demonstrated when you act with fear in a positive direction. Those who demonstrate courage tend to have the other five high performance habits of clarity, energy, necessity, productivity and influence. All six habits work together. Courage is often the cornerstone upon which the others are built because of that fear factor.

Fear is so often the thing that holds us back. You may call it anxiety, doubt, or a lack of confidence.

Those scary thoughts and feelings prevent us from taking action. This is when courage is needed. After being passed over for the principal position she wanted to audition across the country to further her career.

She even paused in the airport en route to an audition, was overcome by fear, and turned around to go home. By developing her skills to distance from the fearful thoughts and feelings, accepting them as they were without believing them, she began to take courageous steps.

First she filmed her playing and gave it to coaches for feedback despite the fear of their criticism while her mind relentlessly criticized her. This success fed her other habits as she focused on her goal to be the best professional she could be. She improved sleep habits to increase energy.

As it was later in her career, she put helpful pressure on herself to take risks now before her retirement. She was complimentary of her peers, building influence.

She intensified her deliberate practice habits to improve skills and build confidence. Her fear is still there. It just no longer controls her as she demonstrates courage in the face of it. Are you an injured athlete, training for a major competition in a new way despite the uncertainty of your healing timeline?

Are you a social activist fighting for a cause you believe in, expressing opinions that you know will be challenged? The first is an attitude of superiority. When you are outperforming others, it is easy to get a big head.

Do you think some of the people you work with are idiots and dismiss their ideas? You might be inching closer to an attitude of superiority that will hurt your performance. The second is dissatisfaction. Remember that high performers are happier than most people. It does mean to take stock in your accomplishments and enjoy the process along the way.

Finally, neglect can creep up on you. As you relentlessly pursue your goals, you might end up ignoring other areas of life: family, friends, health, recreation, recovery. In time, these areas fight back for attention. While you may not find a work-life balance, you can achieve harmony more on how here.

The key is to remain aware and listen to the feedback your spouse, children, friends and body may be giving you before it is too late.

If we wanted to break it all down to the 1 thing it takes to be a high performer, it would be confidence. To be confident, Burchard found that high performers thought about things that gave them more confidence, did things that build confidence, and avoided things that drained confidence.

Build your confidence and connect with and learn from others as we develop high performance habits in our Success Stories Community. I look forward to helping you achieve consistent excellence in your field and achieve the sense of satisfaction that only comes from when we are at our best.

Flynn, E. Kenrick, N. Braver Eds. Six degrees of social influence: Science, application, and the psychology of Robert Cialdini pp. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

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Find clarity in your social sphere. You can have good relationships only when you are intentional about how you treat others. Helpful questions to ask before interacting are: How can I be a good person or leader in this situation?

What will the other person need? What kind of mood and tone do I want to set? So let me share with you this sobering information to motivate you to take action to generate energy if you are lacking it now … Lower energy correlates with lower overall high performance scores.

So here are a couple ways to increase it: Improve your sleep quality and duration. This brief yet comprehensive workshop will have you identify and overcome the barriers interfering with your recovery and help you build a nighttime routine that will have you sleep better tonight so you can perform better tomorrow.

The research is clear. Besides increasing physical energy, exercise helps you learn faster, remember more, and improves overall brain function. Exercise decreases stress, which kills mental performance. Exercise enables you to perform general tasks more quickly and efficiently.

It boosts working memory, elevates mood, increases your attention span, and makes you more alert, all of which increases your performance. The previous two forces are internal, the next two are external. Now we get into the social habits. Underperformers frequently fail to ask.

High performers report the following attitudes that increase courage: They love mastering challenges They see themselves as assertive and confident They see themselves as high performers and more successful than their peers They are happy with their life overall.

The biggest factor, however, is in the action you take. Then she performed in front of peers, again courageously open to their feedback.

Now, she is fully engaged in auditioning at some of the best orchestras in the U. How can you demonstrate courage? High Performance Traps Burchard warns of three traps that will undermine these high performance habits. The Most Important Thing If we wanted to break it all down to the 1 thing it takes to be a high performer, it would be confidence.

He also realized that that was about how long it took him to get acclimated to new behaviors in his own life. Data is not the plural of anecdote. In a study published in the European Journal of Social Psychology ,researchers from University College London tracked 96 people as they tried to form a new habit related to eating, drinking, or some other specific activity.

Some people took just 18 days to form a new habit while others took over Since that study, habits have been researched and written about with increasing frequency—and for good reason. We really are creatures of habit.

Much of what we do, we do without thinking. Much of human behavior follows a predictable cycle : trigger, behavior,reward. A simple example is exercise. For behaviors that you want to do, the goal is to make triggers salient, the behavior easy, and the reward as immediate and satisfying as possible.

This cycle can be applied to just about anything: define what you want to do or cease doing , and pair it with triggers and rewards or remove them. The work of Michelle Segar, director of the Sport, Health, and Activity Research and Policy Center at the University of Michigan, shows that habits last longer when the rewards are internal.

Research shows that relying on willpower alone to start a new behavior is an uphill battle. Constantly fighting temptations drains your energy. If you want to get to the gym early in the morning, prepack your gym bag and work clothes, so all you need to do is wake up and go.

Studies show that everything from your body weight to your fitness level to whether you smoke is heavily determined by the people around you. Motivation is contagious. Community also helps with accountability. And they know this. Habits build upon themselves, according B.

Fogg , a researcher who studies human behavior at Stanford University. But if you gradually increase the challenge over time, what was hard last week will seem easier today. Consistency compounds.