Lessons Learned Over The Last Year
#LeadandLift | Episode 75 | Chabidaye Jaglal Ramnath
July is a very special month since it is my birth month and also the anniversary of the Lead and Lift podcast. Remembering that I am getting older motivates me to do a little bit more reflection on the things I’ve practiced and the lessons I learned with you that helped me make use of the precious time I was given last year.
As part of my celebration and gratitude, I decided that I would share this framework with you. It is my hope that you’ll be able to take these lessons and use them in your daily life so that you too can live your life to the full.
High-Performance Lifestyle
Last year, I became a certified high-performance coach and that has swayed a lot of my actions and decisions in the past year because I wanted to live the high-performance habits that I teach, I wanted to truly make high-performance my lifestyle.
A high-performance lifestyle is all about succeeding beyond standard norms consistently over the long term while maintaining positive well-being and relationships.
There are a lot of people who are able to reach the top and make their dreams come true. However, not many of those successful people were able to get there unscathed. Many suffer from burnout, emotional exhaustion, and pain, and the worst part is that many of them also suffer from broken relationships.
High performance is all about making it to the top without damaging your relationships and yourself. It’s a lifestyle, an ongoing feeling of full engagement, joy, and confidence that comes from consistently living as your best self.
Here is the framework that helped me live that high-performance life, and the acronym is PERFORMANCE.
Productivity, priority, and protecting your time
Productivity starts by having a focus. Set a priority for each day and make sure to focus on that one thing and get it done before the day ends. That priority must be done no matter what happens. Before a week starts, a good practice would be to create a plan and set a priority for each day of the week. It may be something work-related or about relationships. If a day’s priority is for you to spend it with your family, then focus on spending quality time with your family as you had planned.
One more great practice is to work in 50-minute blocks. I practice this in my own life. I invest my attention and effort into a task for 50 minutes, then I get up. I might walk to get some water or
maybe I would get up just to walk around and breathe. Whenever I do this, it resets my brain and gives my eyes a rest. It also gives me the opportunity to check my energy.
Learn to protect your time. Each one of us get 24 hours in the day. People are awesome, and they always come up with brilliant ideas. Sometimes, they would want to include you in their idea. However, when this happens to you, you have to check in with yourself. Is their idea aligned to your goal? Will it help you progress in your own journey? If not, give it some more thought.
Protect your time, protect your priority. Invest effort and time in building your own dreams. Don’t squander your life by building the dreams of others - unless, that itself is your dream. Don’t let yourself be swayed by the tides. Before you know it, a week would’ve gone past and it’s already Friday.
Education and its effect on your growth
If you want to be world-class in your desired journey, then see to it that you are always growing in your knowledge, experience, and awareness. In my case, I decided that if I wanted to be a world-class coach like Brendon Burchard, I have to keep learning, keep reading, keep going to masterminds, and keep getting coached.
Getting your own coach is essential for growth. We all have limiting beliefs and blind spots, that steer us away from the direction that we want to go. Coaches help with identifying those limiting beliefs and blind spots and they empower you to create new habits and apply them in order to reach continuous growth.
Invest time in yourself by buying books that will help with your growth. The value of reading a lot of books is that you’ll discover many different kinds of perspectives and you’ll have the unique opportunity to create your own perspective that connects and synergies the lessons from many different kinds of books.
Valuing your Relationships
If you have a spouse and a child, they are the most important relationships in your life right now. Your kids will go through different stages of life and will increase in awareness as they grow. There are some crucial stages in their development that you will miss if you are not present in your relationships with your children or if you are not spending quality time with them.
They see the world through their little eyes, they need you as their guide. You are their first coach, and your responsibility as a parent is to apply all that you know and make it so that your precious child will grow up without limiting beliefs. Watch the words that you say, they have a deeper impact than you’ll realize at the moment.
Schedule time in your calendar for your children. Always have a listening ear and be curious about what they like. Spend time with them in a way that’s fun for them. Learn their love language.
Responding to your Fear
Brendon Burchard, during our high-performance coaching about courage, taught us about fear. He says that there are three types of fear:
- Loss-pain. A pain we feel in advance for fear of losing something important to us in the future.
- Process-pain. We are afraid of the pain and effort it would take for us to go through change and transition.
- Outcome-pain. Even when we put a lot of effort to change, it may not always lead to a better outcome. The fear is that you might feel disappointed about the results.
The purpose of learning the three kinds of fear is for us to use this knowledge to identify what we’re feeling in the moment. When we are able to accurately label what we feel inside, we become better equipped to deal with it in a healthy way.
A good application of this is by writing it down in your journal. What kind of fear are you feeling? Write it down and challenge it on paper, not in your head. When things are in your head, they tend to be bigger than they really are. Writing down your fear is like shining a light in the darkness, you don’t have to leave it to your imagination to determine what is it that’s in the dark, you get to see it and confront it head-on.
“By understanding the fear better, I'm able to challenge it in my journal by writing it, and then I'm able to have the courage to take that step.” - Chabidaye Jaglal Ramnath
Becoming an Oasis
In the desert, it’s hot. The sand is coarse, and rough, and it gets everywhere. It’s exhausting and when you look in the horizon, there’s nothing to see but sand. Then, when you stumble into an oasis, it changes the whole atmosphere of the situation.
Suddenly, you can be refreshed, you can rest, you can gather yourself and prepare your body to move forward again in your journey.
How do you want to interact with other people? For me, the answer is that I want to be an oasis to them. The key words to becoming an oasis is compassion, empathy, and respect. By making your presence feel like an oasis, people who meet you will feel refreshed and rejuvenated by your energy.
You know what it’s like to have things going on in your life and sometimes you’ll feel so dry and exhausted, and you need that oasis. This is the value of community, find like-minded people who feel like an oasis for you and provide this for them as well. Become an oasis, listen with your ears and with your heart, and make people feel refreshed and empowered.
Reflection and Rest
Reflection is more effective when it’s done consistently. To apply this, you’ve got to schedule reflection in your calendar.
At the end of each week, pause and look back. Ask yourself questions about how the week went, what went right, and areas that you could improve on. You could also set a reflection time monthly, quarterly, and yearly.
That’s what I do in my own life, I schedule a lot of time into reflection because I know the value that it has in my growth and in my productivity. It keeps me steady in my course, it helps me see the things I could do in order to improve.
By reflecting, you’re able to adjust and be 1% better each time, applying the principle of James Clear’s Atomic Habits.
Also, you have to take your rest seriously. Have a proper amount of sleep every day. Having enough sleep is important for you to maintain your energy and productivity throughout the day. Make it so that you don’t wake up tired, and give yourself enough rest so that you can serve people better.
The purpose of Measures
Measures are extremely important because without measuring the things that are important to us, we won’t be aware if we’re doing it right.
When I joined Brendon Bouchard World back in 2020, I grabbed myself a high-performance planner and in there, you’re measured every weekly and monthly on your habits. In addition, you’ll also be constantly measured on those six key habits of high performance during coaching conversations.
Measures aren’t made to pressure you or to scare you with the thought of how far you are from where you want to be. We establish measures in order to see how far along we’ve gotten and how much progress we’re getting as we go on our journey.
Measures can be very simple, look at the life areas that you have. You have your career, finances, spirituality, health, and any other thing that matters to you. At the end of your week, as you reflect, rate yourself in these areas. Give yourself an honest rating and ask yourself what you can do to take yourself up by one number in the next week.
Celebrating Accomplishments
When we reflect, don’t forget to contemplate and celebrate the big wins that you’ve had. Track these wins each week, and make note of each priority that you were able to focus successfully on throughout the week.
Meeting Brendon Burchard was one of those magical moments for me. Last year, I was on stage with him, getting a picture done with him. I could talk to him, and smile with him, he was right there and every time I think about it I get so excited. I look at that picture and it fills me with joy and happiness. It was like Christmas for me, opening up a gift to find that you’ve received exactly what you were hoping for - a dream come true.
It was amazing to me because I didn’t think it was possible, but it completely changed my perspective on what’s possible in life. You can meet anybody that you want to meet, you can change your entire life if you choose to.
“In me celebrating this accomplishment, I want to share with you that if you have dreams in your heart and you start working towards them, the doors will open up. The universe will align. You’re going to achieve those goals and dreams.” - Chabidaye Jaglal Ramnath
Upgrading your Network
There is a quote that says that you are the five people that you spend the most time with. Years ago, I looked at the circle of people that I surrounded myself with and it was full of only corporate people who were always complaining and thought everything was bad.
I knew I had to get out of that space because if I wanted to grow, and I wanted to change my life, I have to do different things and so I needed to find a new group of people to surround myself with.
That’s when I found a new set of friends who also wanted to become business owners in the digital industry. As I explored further, I was able to upgrade that network with the John Maxwell team. Then I joined Brendon Burchard coaching, and I now have a coaching network where I can grow and develop my skills. Eventually, I became an author and gained access to a network of authors.
You can get motivated by having the right people around you who are also on a similar journey of growth. The right kind of people are those that will support you in your journey as you also support them. From them, you’ll hear empowering words and new perspectives instead of negativity and grumbling.
Surround yourself with the people that you want to become.
Congruency and alignment
Last year, before I went to the Coaching Summit, I was struggling. I was an entrepreneur but also a consultant in corporate part-time. As a project manager, I was struggling with the fact that I didn’t like what I was doing. Then I became a certified coach, and I grew in that side of my identity.
Sometimes you’ll get a feeling of unhappiness with how things are going. One night, I was lying in bed and it just hit me. The reason why I was feeling unhappy, why I was struggling, was that
my identity was not in being a project manager anymore, I was a coach. Whenever I was doing my project management job, I felt that it didn’t align with who I was. The joy and the happiness that I felt came whenever I was with my coaching clients.
Anything outside of coaching didn’t feel congruent to me, it didn’t feel like that’s who I was.
I was really happy when I figured that out because then I was able to fully step into my identity and align myself completely with what I really wanted to do which was to be a coach.
If you’re in a point of transition right now, maybe you got laid off or you’re starting something new, then search your feelings for that pull on your identity. This is where clarity sessions and high performance are able to help out.
Through coaching, I was able to dig deeper into that side of my identity and it gave me the resources I needed in order to consistently check with myself if I’m being congruent to my values and to what I want in life.
Managing your Energy
Energy is the number one productivity secret.
Think about it. If you have to do a report, PowerPoint, or document for your executive, and you do it first thing in the morning when you’re full of energy, you’ll probably get it done in about an hour and a half. But if you leave that for late at night after work, you might work on it for three or four hours and you might not even finish after that.
Energy plays an important part because knowing when you’re most energized in the work that you’re doing helps you produce something that’s way better. Being able to maintain your energy throughout the day helps you not crash and burn at three o’clock when you’ll have to reach for chocolate or coffee because your energy has dropped.
When we show up in a meeting room, we take energy with us and people feel the energy that we bring. Nobody wants to be in a meeting room full of people with low energy where nothing gets done and the team isn’t able to move forward. You’ll feel it in the atmosphere when everybody just wants to go home. One person yawns and the rest of the people yawn along with them.
The effect is just as powerful when flipped on the positive side. When you show up with high energy, it uplifts the energy of that room, and people start mimicking that high energy. When they leave the meeting to go to the rest of their day, they have this extra boost of energy with them because of this.
Energy, when you're aware of it, changes the way you see things. It changes your perspective. It uplifts people and increases productivity not only for you but for the people that you influence.
Gift For YOU!
Do you feel you’re being as productive, influential and successful as you want to?
Are you struggling to stay focused, to get ahead, or to better influence your team or customers?
Have you reached a plateau in your progress and struggled to breakthrough to the next level of joy, power and achievement? I can help!
Sign up now for a gift of 60 minutes of High Performance Coaching where we cover the six principles of high performance you can use to better master your body, mind and ability to be more productive and persuasive.
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Chabidaye Jaglal Ramnath
Coach
Hi! I'm Chabidaye Jaglal Ramnath, your Certified High Performance Coach. You know when high achieving moms in leadership desire more joy, fulfillment and confidence in their personal life and business? I deliver that through high performance coaching. I am so happy that our paths have crossed!
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