TEDx: An Experiment of Sustainable High Performance

Last week, I stood on a TEDx stage and delivered the talk of a lifetime.

I’m ridiculously proud of the talk I shared. I’m also thrilled with my delivery of it. I’ve performed enough in my life to know that it is rare to give the performance you hope to – especially if there’s lots of pressure and you only have one shot at it.

Not only did I give my best performance possible… I didn’t have a burnout relapse afterwards… I’m almost just as excited about that as I am about giving the talk well. I literally gave my best without sacrificing my all. If you’ve been following my journey, you know what a big deal that is for me.

For instance, about a year and a half ago, I gave a short 4-6 min presentation in my public speaking class, and the vulnerability hangover I had from that triggered my burnout symptoms for several days afterwards.

This time, I gave a 10-and-a-half-minute talk with the highest stakes I’ve ever faced. I was expecting to be so drained that I would need a couple of weeks to recover. In the hours after the speech, I was tired. Enough so that I fell asleep on my husband’s shoulder without realizing it. He gently helped me to bed.

When I woke up, however, I felt bright and energized. I expected to feel trashed. I expected to feel the heavy exhaustion that reminds me that my body will no longer tolerate me overextending. But it wasn’t there. I was calm. My head was clear, and I felt ready for more.

How did that happen?

While preparing my big idea, I’ve been trying my best to walk my talk. I believe that there is such a thing as sustainable high performance. That you can give your absolute best without sacrificing yourself on some altar of productivity or busy-ness. I Even-Achieved the process of preparing for the biggest platform I’ve ever shared on, and I’m thrilled with the results.

Below are 4 ways I put Even-Achieving to the test. The goal was to build up my own resources so that I could truly give my best without requiring that I give everything I had. It’s a deep dive into my process and it’s backed by science. I’m thrilled with how well it worked.

Banned the idea that I should “just push through”

“Keep going!” “Hold on a little longer!” “Three more reps!” “Put your head down and just keep pushing through!” “When this is over, then I’ll take a rest.”

Have you heard any of these phrases? Have you used them on yourself? I used to use them all the time. I used them to help myself overextend for deadlines, reach my goals, and to overachieve. It wasn’t until recently that I realized that in using these phrases, I was telling my own body that if I felt tired, it was a motivation issue – not an ability issue. That if I motivated myself properly, I could stay on the treadmill of life without needing to ever step off of it. Sometimes, we do need a hit of motivation, but if we do this all the time, we’re training our minds and our bodies to ignore the real signals that our bodies give us when we need a break. If we keep pushing through when our body needs a break, we are moving towards injury… not towards increasing our capacity.

In preparing for my TEDx talk, I knew I was going to need to grow… and I was going to need to grow a lot. This means, I knew I was going to need to let myself get uncomfortable (because growth is uncomfortable) but at the same time I didn’t want to find myself back in my burnout cycles from the past.

So, anytime I found myself wanting to say, “I’ve just got to push through this” I would pause. It became my trigger phrase to help myself notice and name that I may be pushing past what was sustainable. Sometimes, I did need to keep working a little longer. Most of the time, however, I realized and respected that my body would need a break. When that happened, I would take a targeted time out and do something that would rejuvenate my body so that I could get back in the game and keep moving things forward.

I learned that a well-timed break was far more productive and efficient than pushing through. Pushing through only increased the likelihood of producing poor quality work.

Got physiology on my side

In the past, when I got in the zone of a big project, or a work assignment, I would put the needs of that project above absolutely everything else. I would skip sleep. I would skip workouts. And I would eat fast, convenient, and highly processed foods. I thought I was buying more time to put in more work. What I was actually doing, however, was literally making it harder for myself to perform my level best.

For this journey, I intentionally chose to prioritize the needs of my physiology. Exercising each day was non-negotiable. I didn’t do crazy hard workouts every day, but I did make sure I was at least moving every day in some way. With my food, I was more intentional about the nutrients I was putting in my body, I wasn’t perfect at it (food brings me both comfort and stimulation), but I was more intentional about what nutrients my body needed to be able to carry on with the demands I was putting on it. As for my sleep, I was unabashedly protective of it. I know that for me, good sleep is the foundation for all of my other healthy behaviors.

I also spent time each morning caring for my heart – meaning I spent time practicing my religion, reflecting on the day before and the goals ahead, and I found ways to be creative. I didn’t think of these things as adding more to the demands of my workload. Instead, I saw them as resources for helping me perform my work as efficiently and effectively as possible.

I changed the way I thought about these daily disciplines. I stopped thinking of them as added to-dos on my never-ending list of tasks and instead thought of them as fuel I could add to my tank. If I want to go as far as possible, I can’t skip refueling my tank.

Didn’t try to do it alone

Whether it was me wanting to not bother other people or me trying to protect my own ego, I have been terrible at letting other people help me. I’ve always known that we are interdependent and that we only get to the places we want to go by letting other people help us grow, but that doesn’t mean I’ve been good at relying on others when the stakes are high. I’ve been burned enough times that I can easily convince myself that if I want something done to my exceptionally high standards, then I need to be prepared to be the person who cares the most and does the most. Sometimes, this mindset means I don’t even explore ways capable people can help me reach my goals. I easily assume things need to be done by me.

What a stupid way to approach a big goal.

Literally. In trying to prove myself, I was holding myself back. If I truly want the best performance possible, I need to be willing to pull in as many resources as possible – In the past, I wanted my resources to only include things I could control – things like skills, tasks, items, time, and money—but people are some of the most valuable resources available. When used well, you’ll get a better performance than is possible on your own.

For my TEDx journey, I’m so grateful for the coaching and insights I received from the team at Clarity Up, LLC. They patiently worked with me while we whittled all of my research into a clear core message that I was proud to deliver. They gave me great advice on what to expect and where to put my focus so that my overthinking monkey mind wouldn’t spiral me in the wrong direction.

I’m grateful to my friend who didn’t hesitate when I asked her to come and coach me on my delivery. She knew that she was one of the few people I would trust to call me on my crap because I know she would refuse to let me look like an idiot on stage.

I’m grateful to my husband who let me dump all my fears, irrational or not, at his feet and gently helped me process them. He let me take off all my masks – where I could be ugly and vulnerable in front of him—without turning away or making me feel small. In doing so, he made me the most competent and capable I could be.

I know, without any doubt, my performance was only possible because of the people who walked with me on this journey.

Practiced the process of delivery as much as the content of my delivery

Lastly, even after all the preparation I did to make the content of my speech it’s best, I knew that the environment itself of the TEDx event was going to mess with my physiology. I’ve done enough theater and dance in my lifetime to know that you will perform perfectly in rehearsal, but once those stage lights go on and you can feel the heartbeats of people in the seats, there is a whole new level of stress involved. Performing what you practiced at that point becomes rare.

I relied on what I’ve learned from performance psychology to prepare for this part of my experience.

First off, I know that being watched can impact your performance for better or for worse. If you’re completing an easy task, social facilitation will increase your ability to perform well. If you need to perform a difficult task? Being watched will impair your abilities. So, first and foremost, I needed to practice my talk so much that it was “easy behavior.” My coach, Brian Miller told me I needed to run it 100-200 times. He was right. As one professor taught me, “practice doesn’t make perfect. It makes permanent.” When it comes to performing well when being watched, we want permanent.

However, even the most practiced people can choke when the pressure is turned up. Science suggests that choking occurs in 3 scenarios: 1) when someone cares a lot about their self-image, 2) when we get overly focused on the mechanics of a skill that we know well, and 3) when worries distract you and high-jack your working memory resources.

The best way to avoid choking is to practice or train under pressure. I chose to do this by practicing my talk in front of as many different audiences as I could. At first, I was testing my content to see what would land, but later, I was practicing so that I could get used to the feeling of all those emotions and stress hormones flooding my body. I was simulating the pressure of being on the big stage without the stakes of being on the big stage. I’m glad I did.

After the first time I gave my talk in front of friends and family, I had a vulnerability hangover for about a day. Each time after that, the recovery time was shorter. Also, each time I practiced the talk, I found new things that either went right or went wrong. I got more confident in how I was showing up and learned more and more about how I wanted to deliver my talk. In my official rehearsal on the red dot, I had a moment when I felt the temptation to over think what my hands were doing and then I remembered point 2 in the science of choking. I took a deep breath and chose to trust in my practice. In doing so, I stopped the overthinking in its tracks and enjoyed the feeling of being there. For the real thing, I felt confidence and excitement in my delivery… and I am proud of that hard-earned feeling.

If I hadn’t practiced the feeling of being psyched out, I know the quality of my talk would have suffered and the mental gymnastics required to feel good about it afterwards would have required significant recovery time. Instead, I’m at peace with my performance and that feels amazing. “Stressing” myself out in a safe space ahead of time prepared me to perform my best without sacrificing my ability to do my best the next day. This was my own personal proof that the only way to build resilience to stress is by experiencing stress.

In my talk, I shared that too often we treat life like it’s a one-off game where we can give everything and not worry about what comes afterwards. My TEDx talk was in many ways a championship game and if ever there is a time to justify pushing myself into a place of injury, this would be it.  In the past, I definitely would have. In fact, I would have believed that if I wasn’t completely exhausted afterwards, I must not have given my best.

But this isn’t true.

I know I gave my level best. I know that the effort I put in ahead of time prepared me in a more sustainable way. It’s wrong to simply assume that massive amounts of effort at the end of the game somehow qualify a performance as amazing. That’s a measurement rooted in feeling. Not objective performance. Feelings can be helpful… or they can be misleading… I chose to make sure they would be on my side. It was intentional and it was exhilarating. I knew I had run this talk enough times and in front of enough people to know what it feels like when I nailed the delivery… and I nailed it. That feels amazing. Even more so, I’m ready to pick back up and go ahead with whatever is coming next.

Thanks for reading with me today. I hope you find ways to intentionally lean into your next best performance.