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

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