️ ️⚡ Today’s level up ⚡

Today’s edition deconstructs an empowering group workshop with Taylor Johnson—a former NFL Performance Coach. It walks you through how to develop a high-performance lifestyle using his powerful model.

Let’s go!

Are sellers really the athletes of the business world?

In January 2001, ironically at the same time I was ramping down as an aspiring professional athlete in Europe, Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz wrote a groundbreaking article in Harvard Business Review titled The Making of a Corporate Athlete.

In it, they propose that business professionals can significantly enhance their performance by adopting the training principles of professional athletes. The article challenges traditional notions of corporate performance by emphasizing energy management over time management. The authors argue that sustained high performance in the corporate world requires a holistic approach that addresses physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual energy.

After failing to win a pro contract in Europe and eventually moving into sales as an Account Manager in 2006, I was keenly aware of these concepts but thoroughly confused and shocked when I did not see them adopted in the business world.

The presiding mentality was hustle, hustle, hustle, and a you can rest when you die attitude. Especially in sales, the focus was wining and dining clients. Performance was less about preserving energy and more about (constantly) expending it. Dinners, bonding over drinks, and 8 AM call blitzes (while often sleep-deprived or hungover) were the norm.

It took a good decade for me to shed many of these uninspired habits and behaviors, and instead, get back to my athletic roots and redesign my work calendar more akin to how a professional athlete manages their lifestyle to reach the summit of their craft. That shift put me in a position to deliver a more significant impact to my clients and generate outsized revenue and income results compared to my peers.

Here’s a snippet of the athlete’s approach leveraged in the business world:

→ Athletes spend a lot of time visualizing and writing out their goals and targets for the upcoming season/year so they can connect the dots between their big vision and the small efforts necessary in daily training. I spent time in solitude, understanding who I was, what I stood for, and what I wanted out of my life so that my actions became connected and aligned with that Mission. Visualization was a key tool for seeing these things come to life inside my mind.

→ Athletes develop a plan for the upcoming season and understand the main ebbs and flows, during which high demands will be placed and others, during which rest and recovery will be prioritized. I did the same by implementing strategic blocks on my calendar—an annual strategy, a monthly update, weekly organization, and daily execution—and filling in the rest from there.

→ Athletes turn everything into a game. They play the “game within the game” so that the real scoreboard isn’t how well they’re performing against others but how they are progressing against their lofty goals and standards. To play my game on my terms, I developed a space to come to every day to make sense of everything I was doing (beyond just my sales activity) to harmonize it, score it, and improve my approach.

→ And, of course, athletes have coaches. The best of the best have multiple ones to improve the myriad facets and dynamics of their life. That’s because they know to be a top performer at the highest form of their craft; it’s about adopting an integrated, high-performance lifestyle. To improve my overall game, not just my sales skills, I hired a coaching staff the year I broke seven-figure earnings for the first time.

This epitomizes why I am intentional about expanding beyond top sales voices inside Make More Hustle Less Club (transforming to The Performance Hive in April 2025) and taking things a step further by inviting leaders in other performance realms to share their voice, wisdom, and frameworks to help you perform at your best in business, and more importantly, life.

In a session that ran on September 9th, I invited Taylor Johnson as a special guest to discuss his High-Performance Lifestyle Model. Taylor is a former NFL Performance Coach who helps elite teams and individuals in the business world reach their full potential.

Today’s edition will break down the key elements from his workshop. Let’s dive in!

Deconstruction of Taylor’s model

Taylor surprised us with the fact that despite spending so many years in football, he never really loved the game of football. What he fell in love with was:

⇢ The competition

⇢ Building relationships

⇢ Refining his craft as a coach

⇢ Learning from the wins and losses

⇢ Applying human performance in different contexts

⇢ Strategically getting someone in a position to be successful. Repeatedly.

That has led him on a fascinating journey where he has applied his training in football, esports, the military, creative arts, and currently in startup land and business.

The key thread throughout this adventure was (and still is) unlocking a person’s full potential at both the individual and team levels.

To kick off the tactical portion of the session, Taylor shared a Venn diagram with three main pillars of his model:

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