Part 2 of this podcast is featured here.

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There was an article yesterday in the Wall Street Journal that spoke about high performance and the scientific need for 7 to 8 hours of sleep. You talk about this in your 8 Steps to High Performance.

“It was interesting how conclusive the science is around sleep. And what's interesting about the article you mentioned yesterday is we also need to think of sleep in terms of both quality and quantity - and lack of each of those affects us in different ways. So we can dig into that. But yeah, what we found was that sleep is really the foundation to high performance. All the other eight steps that I talk about in the book are going to be far less effective if you don't have the right quality of sleep.”

I love that there’s actual science around the idea of ‘faking it till you make it.’

“High performers are always trying to understand how do they best apply themselves and the analogy I use is, and I write about this in the book, high performers are really like chameleons. They are going to understand and adapt to their surroundings. The other option, if you're not a chameleon, is you're a bit of a bull. A bull just charges into a room and says, ‘Hey, I'm here, I’m the bull. It's me. I'm not going to change.’ Science is very clear. High performers are going to be chameleons and adapt and part of that might be fundamentally faking a behavior that you're not comfortable with and it's really putting on that actor space and saying in a situation where I might naturally feel very uncomfortable engaging in a behavior that I know will make me a higher performer, I might need to fake that behavior and that might be something like being really nice to your boss.”

You write about the science involved with feedback and how the best feedback is in the moment.

“So think of you as Google. Map yourself from one place to the next Google maps. When we think about feedback, sometimes we think, oh well someone's gonna be in my ear all the time. No, it's just the right information at the right time. Hey, exit coming up in two miles. Oh cool. Thanks. Now I know about the exit. It's not annoying. It's helpful. How can you structure feedback in that exact same way? So if you know that one of your direct reports is going into a big meeting and you're pretty sure you know a piece of advice that will help them, give them that feedback. Hey, I know you're going into a meeting with Susie. Hey, one thing Susie really cares about is x. So we want to make sure that you focus on x in the meeting, just give enough information at the right time to help sustain and grow high performance.”

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