7 Characteristics of a Peak Performer

A peak performer is passionate about their goals and abilities, always striving to be their best. Anyone can train to be this way to increase work productivity or crush their goals and live their best lives. Study these seven common characteristics of a peak performer so that you can develop these characteristics for yourself.

Highly Self-Confident and Self-Reliant

Peak performers don’t waste time dwelling on what they can’t do. They understand their abilities and pride themselves on outperforming those around them. They often self-evaluate to build and improve their skills, giving them the confidence, they need to perform.

Zero Fear of Failure or Making Mistakes

Peak performers often step out of their comfort zone because they know that making mistakes and being nervous means, they lack experience. Peak performers know that the more they try new things, the less uncomfortable it feels and the more skills and experience they gain.

Eager to Learn and Improve

They take the time to practice their skills to be better themselves and are always eager to learn new things. The key to being a peak performer is understanding that there is always room to practice and be better.

Clear Vision and Determination to Complete Goals

They always understand what needs to get done and have a clear vision of their goals or aspirations. They don’t second-guess their decisions and are determined to get done what they said they would. They clearly define their goals and create a detailed plan of action to get it done efficiently and effectively.

Organized and Focused

To be successful and crush your goals, you need to be focused and organized. Peak performers start with the organization first because they understand that laziness now only means more work later or leads to shoddy quality work and presentations. Being more organized saves time because the organization ensures all the details that need to be included are covered, increasing your work quality.

Competitive or Passionate for Success

Peak performers get work done because of their drive or burning passion for doing so. They thrive on completing tasks, goals, or being successful in life. Competition is their fuel to get going and go faster.

Honest and Dependable

If they say they are going to do it, you can bet it will get done. Remember to stay positive and don’t dwell on past mistakes. If you desire to perform at your peak, get organized, improve your time management skills, focus on what you’re already good at, and be passionate about your goals and aspirations so that you understand what constitutes the best you can do.

6 Time Management Tips for Achieving Your Goals

Time management is a valuable skill that leads to positive career growth and successful relationships. It’s a trait that managers thrive on and what many people struggle to fix and achieve. Try these six-time management tips to fast track achieving your goals:

Make To-Do-Lists

To-do lists are a wonderful way to motivate you to get your work done. To-do lists are like a plan of action that clearly highlights what important things need to get done. The more your goals are clearly defined, the more comfortable and faster you can get them done. An unclear path can lead to confusion and lost time as you try to organize.

Create Hard Deadlines

Each task you assign should have a clear and hard deadline with a time and date. Don’t allow yourself the opportunity to go over this deadline. Let your peers and others around you know when they should expect it, and then be ready to perform. The more freedom you give yourself, the less likely you are to finish at a reasonable time.

Find Ways to Simplify

Ensure that you are not doing more than you need to complete a task. Be sure each task you outline is vital to your overall goal. If it wastes more time than provides value, you can probably do it at another time or avoid it altogether.

Identify and Eliminate Your Bad Habits

Focus on problem areas first to achieve the best results. Bad habits are often a culprit to a lack of productivity or missing deadlines. Are you always hitting snooze and wake up late? Do you often get distracted by your cell phone when you should be attending to your work? Take notice of these bad habits and create new ones to avoid them. If you ignore them, you will only allow them to manifest.

Use Time Tracking Tools and Other Technology

Utilize technology to make your day and tasks easier to accomplish. Use calendars, organizers, to-do list generators, or project management systems to keep you on track. Free project management programs like Trello not only keep you are track but others on your team as well.

Always Schedule Activities

Keep everything organized and important tasks clear by scheduling them. Even times with friends and family are essential things to schedule, so you always have enough time for work and pleasure.

If time management skills are difficult for you to develop, consider hiring a life coach to help you. If you follow these five time-management tips, you’ll be well on your way to time management success so that you can achieve your goals. If you can’t afford to hire a life coach, see if you can find a mentor dedicated to helping you get more control of your time.

5 Tips for Being More Productive

With social media and technology, it is easier than ever to get distracted and be less productive. It takes practice and determination to get there. However, it is a lot easier than you think to set up your life for productivity. The secret to productivity isn’t more work but smarter work. The idea is to create impact, not merely create busy-work. Try these tactics to make your day more productive.

Make Smaller to Do Lists

Lists can be a wonderful way to organize your day and get you going. However, too much of a good thing can have the opposite effect. A long to-do list can be overwhelming and make you want to look away. Therefore, make smaller to-do lists or more throughout your day. Also, productivity does not mean you need to be busy all day long.

You can work for thirty minutes a day and still be a very productive person. Look at your list, be honest with yourself, and be sure each task you write down leads to something useful. If it doesn’t, then simply put, you don’t need to do it. Remember, being busy doesn’t equal productivity. You can be busy all day long and still not get anything worthwhile done.

Avoid Multi-tasking

Unfortunately, humans, no matter how much they try, are not wired for multi-tasking. You may think you are getting a lot done, but your brain can only do one thing at a time, scientifically. Going in and out of tasks is only wasting time as your brain tries to adjust.

Use Positive and Productive Self-Talk

The more you tell yourself you can’t do something or feel overwhelmed about a specific task, the more likely you will fail or waste time. Use positive and productive self-talk as motivation to keep you going.

Create Organization Habits

Organization is key to being productive. Establish essential organization habits early to save time and frustration. Organization can make repetitive tasks turn automatic and others more straightforward and more comfortable to accomplish.

Follow The 80/20 Rule

An idea created by Vilfredo Pareto states that only twenty percent of the work you do creates eighty percent of the overall outcome, which means that most of what you do throughout your day has hardly any value to your overall goal. Identify what those tasks are and only focus your time and energy to save time and use your energy only where needed.

Add these tactics to your daily routine to increase your productivity. High productivity is about providing more value than doing more work.

6 Steadfast Ways to Motivate Yourself at Work

The 9-to-5 cubicle life gets old after a while. So does clocking in and clocking out. And working from home in your pajamas. The thing is: Work is work. Sometimes it gets dull, and you can’t seem to channel the inner motivation that you had when you started. The answer is not, “Quit your job,” nor is it “Give up.” In fact, there are multiple ways to motivate yourself at work – here are 6 of them.

• Ask Yourself, “What am I Learning?”

If your mind is getting bored, you’re getting bored. You may feel like you’ve learned all that you can learn, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth. There is always a new project that you can get your hands on – you just need to seek it. Look for new ways to learn and grow in your career.

• Welcome Feedback

You probably started out with a lot of learning opportunities – with constant feedback from your manager and coworkers. If that feedback has petered out, rekindle it. Talk to your manager about receiving more feedback on how you can improve. Be honest – bring up the fact that you feel like your self-motivation levels are dwindling, and you don’t want to continue that trajectory.

• Start up the “If-Then” Mentality

Obstacles may arise, and you may need a back-up plan. If that’s the case, then come up with one. See? It’s not that hard!

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5 Tips to Get Self-Motivated When You Really Don’t Want to Do Something

• You’re always playing hide-and-seek with self-motivation. It’s a game that you hate playing when you’re the loser, but you love playing it when you’re the winner. You know it’s somewhere in there (you generated that motivation all on your own, remember?), but when you really don’t want to do something, it flees from your sight before you can even process it. The next time you’re faced with something that you’re dreading, try out one (or all) of these tips to get that self-motivation back up.
• Reframe the Way You Look at it

If you view it as hard work or something you utterly despise doing, you’ll hate every second of doing it. What if, instead, you look at this task as a step along the path of your big-picture goals?

• Make Sure it Matters

You’re sewing a blanket of big dreams, and you get wrapped up in a thread of something that doesn’t matter anymore…What do you do? You take a step back and look at everything from a birds-eye view. If you’re focusing time and energy on a task that doesn’t matter anymore (even if it did at one point), you should put it on the backburner. If it matters down the road, come back around to it.

Why Self-Motivation is So Important for a Successful Life

Happiness? Check. Successful career? Check. Great family life? Check. Sounds like you’re doing fantastic! 

You’re missing a check, though – motivation.

None of these boxes would be checked without a healthy sense of self-motivation, so whether you realize it or not, you’re probably pretty driven. Self-motivation is so important in life – here are a few reasons why.

• Self-Motivation Renders Self-Confidence

That voice in your head that used to say, “I think I can” is now saying “I know I can.” The more goals you set and attain for yourself, the more confident you will be regarding your capabilities.

• You Are Who You Surround Yourself With

People tend to pick their friends based on certain characteristics they have in common. Few people would like to spend time with self-deprecating people who complain and pity themselves all the time. The self-confidence you generate is contagious and can lead you to rewarding, motivational friendships.

• Self-Motivation Creates Goals

Sure, you’ve probably reached goals set by your superior – wowed your manager at a performance review or surpassed your client’s expectations. That’s wonderful, but what about your own goals? Self-motivation is goal-setting (and reaching!) from start to finish. It means coming up with goals for yourself, setting clear parameters and metrics for success, and then reaching those goals....

4 Sure-Fire Ways to Motivate Yourself to Accomplish Your Long-Term Goals

Running a marathon is a classic example of accomplishing a long-term goal. We’re not born to run 26.2 miles in a day; we train for that. All the events and moments that lead up to that marathon are steps in the process of training your body and your mind, because, believe it or not, our minds aren’t wired to conjure up that much motivation. There’s a plan for every long-term goal and a strategy in every goal-setter’s mind. In order to motivate yourself, try out these four tactics:

• Make Lemonade Out of Your Lemons

Take your negative situation and flip it around to something positive. When you get stuck, see it as a learning opportunity. When you have a bad day, look forward to the good day likely right around the corner. When you can’t get any work done, make note of what derailed your motivation. You get the picture. Dwelling on the negativity won’t get you anywhere.

• Work Hard, Play Hard

Another cliché but so true! Hard work deserves rewards because without enjoying the fun in life, you’ll get stressed and burned out quicker than you can imagine. If you want to love your work, you need to love yourself also. Take a break when you need to or turn your computer off for the weekend. Everyone goes about this idea a different way, so make it your own and stick to it!

5 Ways to Remain Self-Motivated After a Setback

You did it! You figured out how to be self-motivated. It was no small feat, but now you’re done…right?

Not so fast. Just because you learned how to be motivated from within doesn’t mean the chase is over, and you’ve won the game.

Just as life has its ebbs and flows, people have their own ups and downs. You may have a setback (or two or three), and in that case, you have no idea how your mindset could change.

That may sound daunting, but it’s important to be realistic. If you’ve gotten this far as a self-motivated individual, you’ve likely had to be realistic with yourself in the past. It’s not game over – you’ve just started a new level, a new phase of life that you’ll have to conquer. Check out these 5 ways to keep up the self-motivation after facing a setback.

• Redefine Your Approach

If you did the same things for your entire life and never made changes to your approaches, you probably wouldn’t make much progress. When you feel like you hit a roadblock, view it as a chance to figure out a new way around it.

• Spend Time with People Who Make You Feel Good

Not everyone makes you feel great. Whether it’s a personality conflict or someone who brings you down, if you feel like you’re leaving a social situation with more negative feelings than positive ones, it might be a good idea to check out of it altogether. Those people definitely won’t lift you up and help you get back on your feet....

5 Tips for Cultivating Self-Motivation

You may love what you do, but continuously having the motivation to do it is a completely different thing. When things become repetitive, or you’re having a hard time paying attention to your work, the only person who can truly motivate you is you.

Work ethic is closely tied to self-motivation; without it, you’d never be able to achieve lofty goals for yourself. Self-motivation takes practice, so here are a few tips to help you stay driven when you feel like you’re stuck on the day-to-day responsibilities.

• Exchange Your To-Do List for a Done List

To-do lists certainly keep people on top of their responsibilities, but sometimes it feels like you’re suffocating under an endless pile of unchecked boxes.  Every once in awhile, take some time to write down all of the things you’ve done – and keep this separate from the things you need to get done. It helps to have a visual representation of what you have accomplished thus far, and it helps you stay motivated to keep going.

• Eat the Frog

Originally published in 2001, Eat That Frog is a self-help book that encourages readers to stop procrastinating and be more efficient with their time. It centers on “eating the frog” that you really don’t want to eat – in other words, doing whatever you dread the most and getting it done earlier rather than later. In the context of self-motivation, it means telling yourself to stop juggling and multi-tasking and instead, focusing on one thing to allocate your time and energy toward.....

5 Success Strategies for Remaining Self-Motivated

One day, you’re full of energy – ready to take on whatever the world throws your way. The next, you feel drained, and you’re ready to give up. These ebbs and flows in motivation are normal. The good news is they are surmountable, so don’t throw in the towel just yet. Here are 5 success strategies to help you remain self-motivated.

• Figure Out Your Own Schedule

You are not expected to perform at your maximum potential every hour of the day. Humans aren’t wired that way. Try to keep track of when you have the most energy in the day and when you’re the most inspired to work hard. You’re probably most motivated when you are communicating clearly and often, feeling extra creative, and working with purpose. Once you nail down this timeframe, use it to your advantage by taking on more work during these hours of the day.

• Set Goals for Yourself

If you don’t know which way you’re going, it will be hard to know if you ever get there. Sounds confusing, but it’s pretty simple. When you take time to set goals for yourself, you are making a promise to yourself and taking on a certain level of accountability. When you see yourself making progress towards a goal, it keeps you motivated to stay the course.....