you dive into the chilly depths. You lift lighter before you work your way up to your one‐rep max. Before you jump into anything strenuous, you warm up.
Yet when you're hunting intangible, elusive, innovation‐critical breakthroughs, you throw every warm‐up out the window and think they're just going to appear. You jump right into the game and start throwing desperate half‐court Hail Mary heave‐shots before you even lace up your shoes. It's purely accidental if you hit any of them. More often than not, you just end up depleting yourself and your team of all the energy you need to pump into bringing your breakthroughs to life. It's no mystery why the topic of recovery is just as hot in the corporate world as it is in athletics—we're all burning ourselves out.
You don't want to just have breakthroughs; you want to lead breakthrough days that sustain and boost you (and, of course, the people and projects you care about). You can't get there by doing things the way you've always done them. Status quo is great for just getting by—you need to break through!
Elite athletes wear the evidence of their physical training right out in the open; what's hidden are the equal amounts of mindset training they do. Forget the bulging biceps and the powerful quads; if you could look inside their heads, you'd see the true breakthrough muscle—their brains. No amount of practice and physical finetuning matters if your mind isn't in shape and ready to take on the day.
Athletes constantly train their mind‐body connections. The best NBA players warm up for shooting by connecting to everything—the feel of the ball, the sounds of the court, the blood pumping through their veins. They ignite every one of their senses, because they know they need to bring it all into the game. They make their intangible breakthroughs tactile before they even start playing.
When I started bringing my mindset training into corporations, I was shocked to find cultures with so little emphasis on this crucial mind‐body connection. Sure, many of these elite leaders worked out and ate well, but when they hit the office, they were trying to break through their challenges with brain brute force. Not happening.
Have you ever heard that we only use 10 percent of our brains? People who study MRIs swear that isn't true, but I'm pretty sure it actually is—at least the way most of us operate. Even if all your synapses are firing, if you're not working your brain in concert with your body and all your sensory input, you're only achieving a small portion of your potential. Compartmentalizing your brain from your body and your environment blocks off at least 90 percent of your available breakthroughs!
Most people are taught to think around their senses, but every portion of the Breakthrough Blueprint includes connecting with your senses. Training your brain to soak up all the sensory information you've been leaving on the table can be uncomfortable at first, but it's essential. Bring that wasted 90 percent into your breakthrough efforts—start with making your warm‐up tangible.
When Aristotle ranked our senses, he argued that touch was the least important; I'm here to tell you that Aristotle would have been a terrible shooter. I doubt he even would have been the breakthrough genius we still talk about today if he hadn't spent so much time in Plato's gym! The things we can touch, our tangibles, are what we trust most. To warm up for your breakthrough day and get into the BIOnic (Breakthrough Impact Optimization) mindset, you need to dominate your SENSE:
Stop Solving Problems.
Eliminate Goals.
Navigate the How.
Seize the Formula.
Embrace the Clock.
These five concepts are the keys to your Breakthrough Blueprint. They're simple, but they're also pretty radical shifts from business‐as‐usual. Warm up by getting a sense of SENSE.
STOP SOLVING PROBLEMS
From the court to the boardroom, elite performers are always excited to learn new skills. As a coach, the toughest lessons to teach aren't the things you need to start doing, but what you need to stop doing. It doesn't matter how many awesome skills you learn if you don't quit your worst habits.
This is a big one.
Brainstorming solutions is very tempting. Get a little bit creative to address simple challenges, and you walk away feeling good—but you're rarely tackling the underlying issue. If you think about it, the human body is like a case study on the futility of solving problems. If your hip hurts, your hip probably isn't the problem—it's your hamstring or your quad, it's your desk chair or the way you carry your wallet. Everything is connected. You might be able to solve the hip pain with a quick cortisol shot, but that's only a temporary fix. Until you understand the connections, you're just resolving symptoms.
Take a step back from your challenges, and stop trying to solve problems. Your breakthrough is bigger!
ELIMINATE GOALS
Your drive has been channeled into setting goals and doing whatever it takes to hit them. Who doesn't love the endorphin rush of winning a championship ring, hitting a sales quota, or securing that full ride college scholarship? Let's see some results!
But is securing your goal actually a breakthrough? Are you even sure that you're the one who chose your goals? If you understood more about your larger mission, would you still choose the goal you've set?
When I hear goals like “make a billion dollars,” “shoot the most three‐pointers in the league this season,” or “play a sold‐out stadium tour,” I want to know what's driving them. The more obvious and desirable the goals (“David, who wouldn't want that?”), the more I worry about the breakthrough potential. If you want to create something the world has never seen, you need to think differently and do differently.
Learn more about your mission; get a sense of your breakthrough purpose. Your goals should be serving your breakthrough—useful and actionable guides to the results you alone can reach. Your breakthroughs will be as unique as you are; starting off with goals is like slipping on blinders that keep you narrowly focused on something mediocre that many could achieve, or it leaves you with a target too broad and ineffectual to really innovate on.
NAVIGATE THE HOW
Every breakthrough—big or small, personal or professional—centers on answering a “how” question.
Once an elite performer recognizes that the key to breakthrough results is answering the right “how,” you scramble to find your “how.” Unfortunately, that's a really lousy instinct.
You deserve incredible, innovative, and unique solutions to questions like:
How can we outperform our highest aspirations?
How do we make our relationships more loving?
How do we keep production, motivation, and drive high?
How do we prioritize everything we need to accomplish in a day?
How do we distinguish ourselves from our competition in a disruptive 24/7 environment?
How do we heal from the hardest blows in life?
