Welcome to Lesson 3 of The Clarity Challenge inside The Purposeful Performer.

Taking time to reflect (inspired by a framework developed by former NFL Performance coach, Taylor Johnson) is essential to accelerating your results in the year ahead.

By intentionally slowing down to reflect on the past year, you can make better decisions, clear obstacles, and build sustainable momentum toward developing your high-performance operating rhythm.

We’ve been purposefully easing into the Clarity Challenge with Lesson 1 and Lesson 2.

By this juncture, you should have:

This week, we’re engaging in a guided reflection, a portion of a powerful process created by Taylor Johnson designed to unlock clarity and focus for your journey ahead.

This exercise involves reflecting on your past successes and struggles so you can take the most appropriate actions to propel you forward. Think of it as stepping back to launch forward with greater power.

Taylor has run several powerful workshops with our community focused on helping members Become A Business Athlete. He’s a trusted resource for anyone looking to unlock their full potential in mindset and process performance—a part of a broad ecosystem of subject matter experts whom you’ll be introduced to as you continue your journey through The Purposeful Performer.

In fact, all Inner Circle Members don’t just work with me, they have hired a coaching staff to support their path to architecting autonomy using tech sales—something I’ll be writing more about.

In the fast-paced world of strategic tech sales, it’s tempting to plow ahead without pausing for reflection. But skipping this step often leads to reactive decision-making, missed opportunities, and burnout.

This structured reflection exercise helps you build clarity, which further feeds your confidence and expands your capacity (the three key “pedals” for driving high performance as a Business Athlete). This is so you can operate at the highest level of your craft for as long as you want while remaining aligned with your long-term vision of financial freedom and 100% calendar ownership.

On paper, I had no “advantage” to earn $1.2M in commissions in a single year.

The small strategic account team I was on—we all had the same number of accounts given to us (50), and they were all evenly distributed (North America) across our core verticals (Retail, Financial Services, Travel, Telco, Healthcare, and Tech). Additionally, we all had around the same base salary (although I found out I was making less than a couple of others) and the exact same comp plan.

Further, I had never worked on deals of this caliber before, knew nothing about the contact center space (our key use case), and had no college degree (when most of my prospective executive Mobilizers were accustomed to working with Harvard MBA grads at McKinsey, Accenture, IBM, and Deloitte).

But I was highly purposeful. It turned out to be my leading edge.

In the last lesson, I shared a screenshot of that monster year and mentioned I moved fast out of the gates when my peers were slow. But the key insight to emphasize here: I was slow and deliberate about accelerating my learning and shaping my distinct point of view before engaging with prospects. That was the foundation I needed to jump high and then sprint fast out of the gates.

Then, after having the team-leading year in my first year (2018), I went on to have that monster $1.5M total earnings year (2019). It was possible (and super fun) because I got even more purposeful about how I’d perform going into the year.

As you learned in Lesson 1, my theme going into 2019 literally was “slow down to speed up.” It was also my mantra for my persona (Diamond), where I developed my Diamond Hunter Framework (which is deconstructed in a future lesson).

It could have been a different story had I not taken time to reflect.

After coming off that MVP year, I was straight into the action with developing a deal with United Airlines. Luckily, I had a good leader in Sean Burke, and while we were visiting United in Chicago, we had a frank discussion.

Up to that point, he had seen the best of me and the not-so-great in me. He was on the front lines with the prospects and me. Coming off such a strong year, I thought I could win every deal I pursued. My mentality was say “yes” to everything that came across my desk.

But he observed how good I was with accounts that I cared about and how flat I was with accounts that didn’t have meaning to me. Saying yes to every opportunity would have put me in a position for a lower win rate that year.

But taking the opportunity to step away and reevaluate my approach, adopt the “slower, but better” theme, and focusing in on my diamonds (which were really just an embodiment of my motivations and strengths), changed everything … and the year went by in a flash, and I skyrocketed my W2 earnings from $183K → $1.5M.

Create a quiet space and give yourself at least half an hour to complete this exercise.

The Purposeful Reflection is comprised of five components:

The key is to report on the information, not judge it.

BONUS: Review your photos from last year (a fun exercise in and of itself) and choose your favorite that embodies your theme for this year—one you can glance at in times of need to remember why you’re working so hard.