SigmaU Blog

Does it fire you up or frustrate you?

The relationship.

The job.

The hobby.

The course.

F - FACE IT HEAD ON

Often when we’re in survival mode, contemplation mode or busy mode we neglect facing challenging questions or situations head on. The highest performers demonstrate courage more often and get real with their emotions. They recognize that what once served them or made them feel fulfilled now frustrates them and they evaluate if they want to keep the relationship, job, or activity in their lives. They don’t drag out their unhappiness. What situation do you need to tackle head on today with curiosity, clarity, and courage to feel more fulfilled and aligned with your best future self?

I - IGNITE

Perhaps a goal or dream that once created a spark of excitement in you has fizzled. Perhaps the career you thought you should pursue has turned out to be unfulfilling. I have a friend who spent years in school to become a lawyer, who has zero passion for it but continues to go...

The highest performers have an incredible ability to release the negative and move forward.

I was challenged this morning when I woke up to no internet connection. After rebooting and realizing that Wi-Fi today may not happen for me, I immediately jumped into solution mode. What could I accomplish without this thing that is really oxygen to most of our lives. To start, I could write this blog to serve you and I could also spend time on content, strategy and “thinking time” that I had scheduled last week but got too busy to do.

Admittedly, I wasn’t always so quick to find solutions or move forward. I would get stuck in the emotion of frustration and focus on all of what I couldn’t get accomplished during this inconvenience. Then I started thinking about high performers. What would a high performer do in this situation? Of course, they would focus on what they could control and keep moving forward.

The highest achievers are always focusing on agency, what they...

People often associate personal development with mirror affirmations of positive vibes, but High-Performance Coaching™ is all about taking action!

We get a sense of unease when we’re out of alignment because often we’re procrastinating on what we know we need to do.

Eat the Frog!

One of the high-performance pillar habits is productivity. During this session in the curriculum, we uncover amazing productivity hacks and one of those is to eat the frog! Tackle your frog, aka the most important task of the day first thing. Before turning on your email or phone, grab a coffee and map out the strategic plan you’ve been avoiding, or the expense report that is due tomorrow. Tackle it today!

Courageous conversations

Courage is another high performance habit we navigate in coaching with high levels of success and happiness for those who take courageous action. Today I’m going to encourage you to tackle “the talk” you’ve been avoiding. Imagine...

We all want more out of life, we want deeper relationships, we want more money, energy, opportunity, meaning!

To have more, we need to activate our potential by sharpening our edge! How do we go about doing that?

Reflect

Reflecting on past successes, failures and missed opportunities are great ways to think through our patterns. What have we done that works well? Reflecting gives us a chance to strengthen our resolve too! When I work with coaching clients who are in a slump, the first thing I have them do is create a success list of things that they have overcome, successes they have accomplished and challenges they have risen above. This reflection is an important reminder that in the past we have been able to sharpen our edge when it’s necessary to rise. We can sharpen our edge in the future to rise even higher!

Plan

The next powerful step is planning for success. Sharpen your edge by stretching your goal a little bigger than the original target. This stretching will expand...

Change we choose is exciting and exhilarating. Change chosen for us can feel terrifying and destructive, but it doesn't have to be that way.

Change allows us to...

Shift focus

Perhaps change has been dumped on your lap today. Perhaps it’s loss or heartache. Forced change makes it necessary to shift our focus. When I recently suffered loss, it made me shift my focus to deep gratitude for the people around me and shared experiences at a deeper level. I shifted my focus as best I could from grief to deeper connection with the people still around me.

New Growth Opportunities 

Nothing will make us level up faster than necessity. When we're thrown in the deep end of disaster, we figure it out. It always amazes me how masterful we can become at something in a short amount of time when we have no other choice! What growth opportunity have you been avoiding or delaying that you could develop now and choose to change before it's forced on you?

New Beginnings 

Our minds crave...

A determined person pursues their goals and dreams regardless of life’s setbacks. You may have someone in your life who you admire for this very reason. They seem unshakable in their resolve to press on no matter what. Failure is not an option and success for them is a non-negotiable, therefore inevitable.

When I consider someone who is relentlessly pursuing with grit and determination, I often wonder what it is that they do differently. Or more importantly, how they think differently.

Considering this: I’ve thought about times in my own life where I’ve stayed determined in challenging times. Upon reflecting it came down to a definite “WHY”, an acceptance that life is hard, and a brighter vision for the future.

WHY?

Friedrich Nietzsche — 'He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.'

Finding our “why” has been an overused statement over the past few years. Mentioning it can cue a few eye rolls, especially from our...

The days, months and years can slip by in a haze if we’re not intentional about how we approach each day. This can happen during times of extreme stress or change, but it can also creep up on us where we realize that a decade has passed and we’ve been going through the motions.

Here are a few ways we can take deliberate action and be even more intentional and live with purpose.

Set Daily Intentions

Brendon Burchard’s High Performance Planner is an awesome tool to use to set your day up with intention. You start by journaling answers to questions such as how you want to show up that day. What emotions do you want to have that day? Who needs you on your A-Game? Setting intentions about how you want to show up is a fantastic way to increase the way you live with clear intentions. If you have a tough meeting, set intentions about how you want to show up. How would your best self handle conflict?

Have a Kaizen Mindset

Kaizen is an approach to creating continuous...

The other day I was doing a yoga session and the instructor asked us to intentionally lengthen our tailbone. In doing so, I felt a stretch that I had never experienced before, even while doing that same posture which I had done a dozen times before.

It got me thinking, how many times I’ve failed to see the micro-steps and shifts and how much they impact my progress.

I realized that micro steps are a huge part of personal development and high-performance living.

The challenge is that we fail to see the power of micro steps.

We insist that we must have huge stretch goals, from where we are to where we're going to be successful. And that's simply not true. In high performance coaching, we gauge our current circumstances on a scale of one through ten. We don’t coach clients to jump from a three to a nine, instead we ask what would take you from a three to a five. The micro steps help us gain necessary momentum to keep pushing.

There are micro steps we can...

Perhaps the Struggle is the gift!

What if the challenge that you and I are facing is the very thing that we need to develop excellent character?

I’m going to go back a few years to my childhood, the first time I experience a major frustration and struggle. I was probably eleven years old, and I desperately want the new white BMX bike with blue and orange neon splatter, full eighties style!

I went to my stepdad and begged him for it.  Being the smart man that he is, he sat me down and explained the cost.  He then said that I could have it if I was willing to contribute. I didn’t make any money so what did that mean? I got a weekly allowance and that’s how I would chip in. 

You must picture this, he’s the senior auditor at a bank, he pulls me aside each Saturday morning and we go through the ledger of accounts! He shows me how many weeks worth of allowances I’ve contributed and the balance remaining to cover half of the $250 bike.

...

Once of the fastest ways to cure anxiety is to live in alignment with the best of who you could be.

When we're out of alignment with who we want to be, or are striving to be, we feel anxious, unmotivated, and sometimes even helpless.

I've seen this with myself and coaching clients. When there's awareness and action taken to increase discipline, I see an instant shift.

The challenge is that it's easy to stay in a self-destructive rut which leads to anxiety. 

Here are some of the signs that we're out of alignment:

• Not following through on promises we make to ourselves or others (big and small, they matter)
• Not giving our best professionally or personally 
• Leaving loose ends and procrastinating
• Living with less intention and discipline 

How do we know we're in alignment?

• We're clear on our path and purpose and we're living with daily intention to serve that purpose.
• We insulate ourselves from negative forces like the news, social media, and other toxic outlets. We...