do you really understand elite business performance?
You hear the term performance all the time but do you really understand what performance is? More importantly, do you know what to do to really improve your performance and the results you achieve? Do you know how to take your peak performance and performance capacity to another level?
Working with hundreds of elite performers in sport, business, the military, performing arts and education we developed The KPA Elite Performance Eco System™. This is a simple, yet powerful way of understanding performance and how to perform like the elite do; in a sustainable manner.
The basis of the The KPA Elite Performance Eco System™ is that your performance is made up of six key factors:
Performance Culture
The performance environment that you create for yourself and that is created around you by others e.g. your business environment, friends, and family.
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Physical Skills
The physical needs required to support performance like sleep, wellness, nutrition and appropriate exercise.
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​Mental Skills
The mental toughness and mentality required to excel in your role such as resilience, confidence, focus and motivation.
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Technical Skills
Learning the skills required for your role/position, for example, IT, Finance, Sales, Management, etc.
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Tactical Skills
Understanding the ‘X’s and O’s’ of your role and knowing what to deliver, when and how.
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Lifestyle Skillsfestyle Skills
The ability to achieve balance and manage the demands of family life, personal and spiritual needs with appropriate business requirements.
How well you are able to execute each these skills has a direct relationship to the outcomes or results you achieve. Put simply, the quality of your technical, tactical, mental, physical and lifestyle skills combined with the quality of your performance culture will dictate success or failure!
This model is represented visually below.
The KPA Elite Performance Eco System™
1. These are skills!
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Firstly, these six performance components or interconnected cogs are skills. That means they can be learned, developed and nurtured like any skill. They are not, “gifts”. They are not something you’ve either got or not, nor are they set in stone. They can be improved.
2. Elite performance is interconnected
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These six skills do not live in a vacuum, they impact and influence each other. They are like interconnected cogs in a highly tuned machine. Turn one cog and it affects others. If one of the cogs is defective, it affects other cogs.
The bottom line here is that performance, the stuff you do that gets your results, is holistic and your performance skills are integrated. Your technical and tactical skills do not live in a separate universe devoid of any influence from your lifestyle, mind and body.
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3. Focus on mental, physical and lifestyle aspects of performance
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Not enough time in the business arena is spent on developing the areas that allow performers to be truly elite and perform at a consistent and sustainable level – the physical, mental and lifestyle skills cogs of performance. These cogs drive the technical and tactical skills cogs.
Elite sports performers and military performers, for example, work hard on areas like relaxation, sleep, regeneration, mindfulness, mental preparation, food and hydration for performance, personal management, wellness and physical preparation and capacity.
4. We all have individual performance needs
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One size fits all, just doesn’t work. For example, one performer may need to hone in on improving lifestyle skills areas like work life balance and sleep. Another performer may need to work on mental skills areas such as resilience or confidence, while yet other performers may need to work on physical skills like nutrition and exercise whilst another may need to focus on sleep from a physical, mental and lifestsyle perspective . One size certainly does not fit all when it comes to elite performance!
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5. Performance Culture is huge
As you will see in the model, culture is the overriding performance component or cog that drives all the other cogs. If you don’t get your personal performance culture right or if the culture in which you perform is rotten, this will have a huge negative effect on your ability to be a truly elite performer. Culture is where the motivation for change, development and improvement comes from and without it, performance cannot flourish or be sustained.