In this week's episode, you'll hear all the secrets to becoming a peak performer in both your personal and professional life. Alex is going to be giving you all the tools you need to set goals for yourself, manage each and every one of your days, and combat the inner voices that might be saying: "you can't do it."
Do you ever wonder how the most successful people manage their day to day lives to set themselves up for big wins? There are steps to follow in order to become a peak performer, and on today’s episode of No Bullshit with Alex Willis, you’ll be guided on how best to incorporate some of these steps into your own life.
Life is a marathon, not a sprint. And as the race goes on, more and more people fall to the wayside while the most committed and disciplined lead the pack, living the best lives they can. Regardless of how you feel about your life now or up to this point, Alex is here to tell you that you have full control over what comes next. This week, you’ll hear what it takes in order to shift your routines, mentally and physically, in order to best prioritize the things you want most.
What to look out for in today’s episode:
In our final segment, The Frame Out, Alex will help you in combating those voices in your head that tell you “you can’t do it!” He will also arm you with more strategies you can utilize to maintain a positive outlook on and off the jobsite.
Be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts as well as the YouTube channel to watch full video episodes and be notified as soon as the next episode is live.
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[00:00:00] Alex: All right, my friends. Hey. Welcome to the Frame it Out, where we frame it out on how you do all of the things that we said and things that you have to overcome ultimately to be a peak performer. And to be your best self every single day at work as well as at home. And so, uh, a couple concepts you have to understand that I wanna frame out for you.
[00:00:27] Alex: And the first one is this. You have to understand the power of st seeing the voices in your head. So you're saying, Alex, do I talk to you? Do I talk to myself? Yeah. The fact that you ask yourself that question, yes. You talk to yourself. We all do though, my friends, and usually, usually hear me out. Usually there are three voices.
[00:00:45] Alex: That we hear in our head that if we're gonna be peak performers, you have to dominate and overcome these voices. And those three voices are the critic, the warrior, and the victim. And understand usually one of those voices and they resonate loudly in your head. Let me give you an example for Alex. It's the critic.
[00:01:04] Alex: Well, what does the critic voice sound like? Well, it's always challenging you in saying what you did was not good enough. You could have did better, right? You don't know how many times I've recorded these segments because the critic in me is saying, oh, that was okay. We need to get better. My team is phenomenal.
[00:01:20] Alex: Dude, shut up. You're good. We're good. You have to talk to yourself sometimes with the critic and I, for Alex, I've adopted this new saying, shut up in the cheap seats. We're working out here. Quiet in the peanut gallery, right? So I have to tell my critic that so that I can really begin to move forward.
[00:01:35] Alex: Right? So what's the next one? The warrior. The Warrior's Always worrying that. The worst is going to happen, and you're never comfortable. You're never satisfied. You're never able to move forward because you're always walking on eggshells because you're so worried. Well, what if this happens? What if that happens?
[00:01:51] Alex: What if this happens? What if that happens? And what you have to do to silence the warriors? This, you have to do what Michael Goggin says, which is like dig in your cookie jar to pull back things that you've bounced back from to show yourself that you are resilient, right? So you quiet the warrior down by.
[00:02:09] Alex: Reminding yourself of challenging times that you've gone through and how you've been resilient, how you bounced back. And if something should happen, you remind yourself, I'm damn good enough to make sure we can get through this. Right? And the last one is the victim. The victim role. Well, what's the victim role?
[00:02:25] Alex: The victim role is the war is me. Oh. If life had only not done this to me, oh, I keep falling in these situations and these people keep doing this to me and this keeps happening to me. In order to silence the victim voice, you have to take responsibility. And here's the crazy part, my friends, I started taking responsibility for everything that goes on in my life.
[00:02:49] Alex: When my family does something, if they mess up, if somebody on my team messes up. Instead of chewing them out, Hey, listen, my bad, I apologize. Maybe I didn't explain it clear enough. Or maybe I need to do a better job of doing this. By doing that, I begin to take responsibility for myself and for my actions, and it quiets that victim in my head.
[00:03:08] Alex: So I wanna challenge you. What voice do you hear? That's the loudest in your head? Because if you're going to live this heaven all lifestyle and be a peak performer, you have to overcome this. This is something they teach you quite frequently in sports. Hey, listen, those voices in your head, you have to silence them.
[00:03:23] Alex: And even if it means you talking out loud to them to get them to be quiet, it's very, very important, right? So as we continue framing it out, what's the next concept I need you to do to frame this thing out? As leaders, you have to begin to celebrate small wins. And that's hard, man. That's hard for people listening to this podcast because you are grinders and typically you go from mountain to mountain top to say, well, Finish this 10 million job.
[00:03:51] Alex: Well, let's go to this next 50 million job and you never take a break to pause. Celebrate yourself and celebrate the team. Peak performers understand the power of celebrating. Now understand, I'm not saying you stay there forever, but you have to take a small little break to celebrate what you've done, what you've gone through, so that ultimately you can be successful doing that, right?
[00:04:13] Alex: The next step that you need to do in this, this frame out is understand the power of team. You need to build a solid, phenomenal team around you, because most times the goals that we set cannot be done by ourselves. We need support. We need fans. We need cheerleaders. We need coaches. We need mentors. You need to understand the power of teamwork, embrace that concept, and really begin to surround yourself with different people who can push you.
[00:04:43] Alex: Who can challenge you, who may rub you wrong at different times, but who ultimately want the best for you right now in doing that, you begin to do what I like to call fall in love with the process because understand, to have it all embody balance, being in business, to be a pick performer, there's gonna be a lot of shit that's difficult.
[00:05:08] Alex: A lot of shit that hurts tired. Frustrated, but you gotta fall in love with the process, right? So what do I mean? Well, two things. Number one, it requires you not just looking at the end destination, but understanding that this thing of greatness is a journey. You gotta be open to that, my friends, right? And falling in love with the process.
[00:05:31] Alex: I had one leader, uh, from a construction company. It was a phenomenal question. The guy came up to me after speaking at a keynote. He said, Alex, I hear what you're saying, but dude, how do you fall in love with the process when it's a task that you hate? How the hell do you do that? And he stomped me for a second.
[00:05:46] Alex: I'm like, Ooh, shit. That's a good one, dude. How do you do that? But man, I was able to bounce back and think about and dig deeper. And here's how you do it, my friends. You fall in love with the process, even with a task that you hate. By digging deeper down into the task and understanding the foundational skill that that task is going to help you become better with, to ultimately tie back to your goal.
[00:06:11] Alex: Right? So, so understand, lemme give you a perfect example. Perfect example here. So my 10 year old Aubrey. Uh, she's doing standardized testing right now. Understand this, Alex. I grew up in Jacksonville, Florida, in the inner city, and so I have all kind of crazy, wild, what we call hood stories. So my daughter loves to hear my hood story.
[00:06:30] Alex: She's like, dad, gimme another hood story. What happened? Tell me when you jumped off the bus and tell me when this kid did this and what happened with this. So she loves these wild action packed stories that we get to tell. Well, my friends, as they're doing standardized testing, she came home and said, dad, These stories suck.
[00:06:48] Alex: They're boring. I can't even concentrate on they're horrible stories. And I'm like, yeah, babe, I know they're not hood stories. I wish they would give you a hood story for a standardized test. That would be awesome, right? But, uh, so she said, dad, how do I do it? And I told her this. I said, Hey, Aubrey, here's what you do.
[00:07:03] Alex: Understand this. We're gonna really begin to practice some skills that you need to do some of the things that you want to do. Aubrey's a phenomenal basketball player. She's understanding the power of mental toughness, especially when it comes to when she's tired in the fourth corner. When other girls around her are tired, how does she continually push on?
[00:07:22] Alex: I said, Aubrey, it's gonna require you to have mental toughness and focus right now. You're gonna start practicing having that mental toughness and focus on standardized testing. You're going to allow your mind not to wonder. You're gonna talk to yourself through it and say, no, no. Stay focused right now.
[00:07:38] Alex: No, no. Stay disciplined right now. As you're reading those stories that may not be interesting to you, you're gonna practice mental toughness and staying focused. Now, I let her know that same skill that you're practicing on this standardized test is going to translate and carry over. When you're in the fourth quarter and you, you're tight and you begin to put your hands on your knees, you're gonna be able to tell yourself, no, no.
[00:07:59] Alex: Get up. Stay focused right now. You can do this. You're not tough, you're not tired. You're better than everyone else out here. And she began to understand the concept. I tell you this, my friends, she came home the next day, blown away like that. It worked. It was awesome, man. I was mentally focused. I was tough.
[00:08:15] Alex: Come forth, quarter, I'm going to be ready, right? Why? Because she fell in love with the process, but she understood the task. A little differently when we showed her the skill that tied to what she really wanted to do. So anytime you are having that challenge, I wanna challenge you to do that, right? The next thing I need you to do as we talk a little bit about framing it out, is understand the power of reviewing yourself and reviewing the tape.
[00:08:40] Alex: Every athlete knows this, that every game that you play, every practice, especially from college on up to the pros is recorded. We tell 'em, the bird in the sky does not lie. Coaches are watching everything that you do from running route to making blocks to everything and understand. You make quick adjustments in sports because you're watching the film.
[00:09:00] Alex: But oftentimes in our career with our families, with ourselves as leaders on job sites, we don't review the film and we're not watching it to say, how do I make corrections? So I wanna challenge you to spend time in your week at least 15 minutes a week thinking about, Hey, listen, how am I doing in my leadership skills?
[00:09:18] Alex: Review the film, review the tape so that you can see where you may need to adjust, make those adjustments so that you can make those adjustments and come out better as a leader. Right? Understand this. Peak performers truly understand that the most valuable thing that they have in life, my friends, is not money.
[00:09:38] Alex: And truth be told, it's not time. Oftentimes we say, well, time is the most valuable thing you have. Bullshit. No, it's not. The most valuable thing you have in life is your energy. Understand this. If I gave you all the money in the world, all the time in the world, but you didn't have energy to get up and do anything, you would still so, so peak performers understand the value and the power of.
[00:09:58] Alex: Managing their energy level to understand how to manage that energy so that they can be their best self. And so, uh, if you are watching, you can get a chance to see Alex's energy cycle. If not, I'm gonna try my best to explain it to you. So I want you to map out a 12 hour period for yourself. And I want you to, for the next several weeks, track your energy.
[00:10:19] Alex: Understand, if you look at my chart, Alex, I'm off the chart, like I told you before in our last segment from four 30 in the morning to about eight, my energy levels are so high. My friend and I began to have my best ideas there. My most efficient times there now, but after eight, from eight to 10, I go on a low.
[00:10:38] Alex: From 10 to about one. I'm back up again from one to about two. I'm down from two to about four. I'm back up, right and then I have as low from about, oh, about four to about thick, and I have one more peak right now. Hear me out on this. What I begin to do is really begin to map my toughest, difficult task to when I have the highest energy in the day, and it was a game changer.
[00:11:05] Alex: Research shows this. When you have a difficult task that requires you to focus and think, and you do it on a low energy level, time in your day is as if you're doing that task under the influence. Ever thought about those tasks that take forever to get done? A proposal, right? A estimate. You're like, shit, man.
[00:11:24] Alex: Why is this taking so long? Oftentimes it's because you haven't mapped it out to when you're at your best, at your highest energy peak level. I wanna challenge you to over the next several weeks, spend some time mapping out when you are at your best with your peak levels, and then really begin to identify those 20% of activities that we talked about before that give you your best results and pair those up when you have high energy.
[00:11:49] Alex: You'll be amazed, my friends, at how time begins to stand still and you begin to dominate and you begin to do what we like to call, get into the flow of things and into the zone that you begin to dominate work. When you can begin to match that up with your energy levels, it's as if you're in a zone.
[00:12:05] Alex: Similar to athletes, when they can't miss a shot, they can't strike out. They can't not catch that pass. Why? Because they're in the zone. When you pair those most important tasks, With your energy levels, you become in the zone. Right? The final two concepts I need you thinking about is how do you know if you won or lost a day?
[00:12:27] Alex: Most people, my friends in our industry, they don't. They're just fighting to get through the day in order to be very, very, very successful. Peak performers, top producers. Have a way of knowing if they won or lost. How did they do it in sports? Well, we have this little thing called a scoreboard. Just look up at the scoreboard.
[00:12:46] Alex: You can look at the scoreboard and see who's winning and who's losing. So I wanna challenge you as leaders. It's important for you, my friends, to create your own personal scoreboard, right? So, so what does that look like? Well, a scoreboard is identifying those tasks at home in your personal life as well as in your, in your professional life that you wanna accomplish within your day.
[00:13:05] Alex: Also within your week. And what you're doing is you're going and checking those things off to see how you're doing so that you can go back and look at the scoreboard and say, Hey, wait a minute. How did I do? Did I do a great job? Did I not? What do I need to focus on? And, and by doing that, you can ultimately be super, super, super successful.
[00:13:21] Alex: I'm gonna send a couple samples in our show notes so that you can kind of see what this looked like as a scoreboard for you to see how you can, you really begin to create this in your own life. For Alex, this has been phenomenal. It has allowed me to focus in on my wife, Sabrina. My daughter's, Alexis and Aubrey, as well as business with construction companies writing more content and more material.
[00:13:43] Alex: It has allowed me to do things like this, a podcast simply because I'm able to keep score, keep score, put it on my calendar, know when I'm doing it, identify that 20% so that ultimately I can be successful. Alright, so, so understand this if you're ever gonna be successful, I love, love, love, love, love this quote by Stephen Coven.
[00:14:01] Alex: Stephen says this, he says this. To achieve something you have never achieved before, you must become someone you have never been. That's a tough concept to achieve something you've never achieved before, you must become someone you have never been. The only way I can give you a visual of that is when I knew I was going to walk on at the University of Florida.
[00:14:22] Alex: Understand it's high school, I was slow as shit, man, and I knew. My 11th and 12th grade year, I had to join the track team and become a track runner that day. So I had to become a track runner so that one day I could become an NFL wide receiver. What do you need to become today so that you can ultimately be who you want to be tomorrow?
[00:14:45] Alex: By doing that, my friends, it will make you a rockstar. You'll become a peak performer. Performing at high levels that you never imagined possible, doing things that you never thought that could be done. Ultimately being your best self at work as well as at home. So with that being said, my friends, I wanna thank you for tuning in today.
[00:15:03] Alex: You are rock stars. Understand. You have the power to be your best self. If you implement these things, you can ultimately be the best that you can be, right? Remember, my name is Alex Willis, c e o of Leadership Search. Thank you so, so much for tuning in to No Bullshit with Alex Willis, the go-to source for leadership development in the construction industry.
[00:15:21] Alex: Hey, I wanna challenge you and remind you if you are watching on YouTube, to subscribe on YouTube or your favorite podcasting platform, as well as if you have comments. Man, I wanna hear from you. What do you think about the show? What do you think about where we are so far, as well as what do you need done?
[00:15:38] Alex: My friends, listen, I'm here for you. No bullshit. You write in, you send something to us, we're gonna research and we'll talk about how to get it done. How do you make it happen? Because ultimately what we're trying to do is. Make your life better, both at work as well as at home, right? I want you to understand that right there, that we are here for you.
[00:15:58] Alex: So remember Alex Willis, no bullshit. We are here for you. We want to hear from you. Tune in to our next show. We're outta here, my friends. Thanks for tuning in again. See you soon.