Getting Up After Downfalls — What High Performers Don’t Tell You

In my last article, I shared my top 5 hacks for improving productivity to stay on track with goals, and improve how satisfied you are at the beginning and end of every day.

That said, it doesn’t mean that you should put harsh expectations on yourself to be a high-performer 24/7, only going up the entire time.

Why?

Even high-performers have down-time, and even high-performers fall down to the very bottom at times.

Over trained and shredded bodybuilders fall off their diet and training schedule, and gain 30 pounds of fat in a few weeks after their competition. Overworked therapists break down and take a personal leave from work to mend their own mental state. The most talented and high paid coders have an off week, submitting code that breaks the app or puts the company at risk of a security breach.

Every one of us falls victim to the same culprit.

You may call it our ego, or naiveness, or inexperience in pacing ourselves. Whatever it is, it’s what drives us to translate our passion and motivation into so much action that we quickly burn-out, usually just before we reach a milestone.

When I burn-out, it usually means that I disappear from my normal activity and spend a day or so on the couch going through 2 phases.

Phase 1: Breaking all of productive Anna’s rules: calendar cleared, forbidden snacks, mindless tv, naps…nothing is out of bounds now. Nothing productive or goal oriented is allowed.

Phase 2: (Still on couch) revisiting goals, asking myself if they are still what I want to achieve. Looking back on my progress, and why I broke out of the hustle streak.

Then what?

Then there’s 2 options:

1. Keep doing what your burned-out self is doing, and convince yourself you can be happy with the status quo, or
2. Get back to your goals and productive self, striving towards something that is important to you, and that you promised yourself you deserved achieving.

No one said it would be easy, just that it would be worth it.

It’s easy to tell yourself after you burn out or fail to reach your next goal that you just aren’t made for the hustle, and that you can’t push yourself so hard. It’s easy to say that the workouts were too difficult or the diet unsustainable. It’s easy to say to yourself that you’d be alright with just your day job, and you don’t really need what you’ve been putting all those extra hours in for.

So, that’s where a lot of people stay.

Most people try to be high performers once, maybe twice, and when they burn out, they go back to how life was before.

But what they don’t know is, high performers burn out too, they fail to reach their goals, except they get back to the hustle every time! (And they don’t wait too long to get back to it).

The only difference between a successful high performer, and anyone else, is that the high performer will get back up with the same level of enthusiasm and passion as they had when they set out on their mission. They don’t just get back on that metaphorical horse, they get back on it with conviction, armed with the experience of having fallen off, and excitement that they brought back to life with their attitude.

Yes, maybe you set yourself back an entire week of work, heck, maybe you even set yourself back to where you started. And that’s why getting back on the metaphorical horse can be so tough, because you already know how much it took to get to where you were last.

But, you know what else? You’ve already done it once before. Which means you can do it again, and in most cases, you’ll be better at it this time.

High performers are not on 100% of the time.

They fail themselves, they feel lost, they question their goals and abilities. But, high performers know what to do when that happens.

They reflect on why they burned-out or failed to meet their goal, then they re-adjust, find that passion, motivation and drive, and push right along for where they want to be.

Don’t give up, Medium friends. When you fall down, remember that you are amazing and part of the awesome club of people that strive to achieve their dreams.

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