How to achieve High Performance and Human Optimization

In my view, high performance and human optimization are a combination of slowing down to speed up.

The “high performance” part is not about getting more done but it’s about slowing down to speed up. It’s about integrating your work into your life and your lifestyle into your work. It’s the work/life bliss state. You achieve a flow state, so you don’t feel like you’re working.

The “human optimization” part I think is what I achieved for myself as well. I use to have really bad migraines, and the doctors told me, “You can’t cure this”. Well, now 95 percent of my migraines are gone. I just don’t have them anymore.

The four pillars to be a high performer

I developed The T.I.M.E. Method which is the framework that I teach my clients to be high performers and reduce their working hours while increasing their income.

The T.I.M.E. Method stands for Time Management, Impactful Leadership, Mindset Mastery, and Energy Efficiency.

If you’re someone who wants to be a high-performer, leave a legacy, and build a meaningful, impactful business, but without having to sacrifice your life for it, then these are the four pillars you want to put in place in order to achieve that.

If you would like to know how I work with my clients, and how I could potentially work with you, keep reading.

Time Management

I feel like time management is a huge umbrella for so many different things.

What I do with my clients is, we go very deep into the 80/20, or even better, into the 95/5.

I want to cut down as much as possible from their plates because really, what we are doing is putting as much as we can on them until we can’t balance all of these tasks anymore and we trip over them.

I usually start by writing out huge task lists of the things they think they would be doing throughout the day or throughout the week, and literally put everything – even if it’s a one-off, a rare task, or a recurring item – on this list.

Then, I’ll tell them which of those tasks are bullshit tasks, which are busy tasks, and which ones are the actual ones they should be doing in order to get the outcome for the business that they want.

They can delegate some of these tasks, and honestly, there are so many that they can just delete. They are unnecessary tasks. They will get them a little bit of an outcome or they may make them feel better about things, but they’re really not necessary.

This is what we should get done first.

And then, without overwhelming them, I teach them how to plan and schedule it within a really tiny amount of time. It can be 20 minutes a week. They can schedule your whole week out, and it doesn’t have to be painful.

This scheduling will give them a lot of certainties, a lot of clarity, and the ability to focus and prioritize without having to wake up every morning like, “Which of these tasks should I be doing first?”, and using all of their mental energy on making the wrong decisions.

The wrong decision would be like “What should I be doing?” The right decision is to know it already and do the hard things, and then, if there is a decision coming up, then they can make it.

Impactful Leadership

There’s being a boss, being a manager, and being a leader.

I don’t want to be a boss. I think that’s totally outdated, and I don’t believe in bossing someone around.

I will be a manager at some point because we’ll always have to manage people in one way or another and that all depends on being able to have great communication skills and people skills.

But, if you’re not a leader, if you don’t show up as a leader and you’re not a leader from the inside out, don’t even try to go out there and have any impact, leave a legacy, or achieve your ultimate potential because who in this world would want to be with someone who is not showing up the way that he expects others to show up?

That’s the leadership part. And, I do include team management training in there, but that’s more of an advanced thing for the last weeks.

Mindset Mastery or Mind Hacking

I call it “mind hacking” because we are in the high-performance space here.

All of my clients have been men so far, and when they came to me, most of them were not receptive to mindset work, energy work, or woo-woo things, which I don’t include much, but they can lead to some of these methods that I use with them.

Mind hacking sounds much better than Mindset to my clients, so that is the word I use.

I really don’t care what you call it, but getting the results is what makes a difference.

So, throughout the work, it will get to the point where they will come to me with “Actually, this is what I believe.” Whether they call them limiting beliefs, roadblocks, or resistance, I don’t care. I don’t use any specific words. I like them to label it first, and then I use what they call it, and then we smash it.

Energy Efficiency

Energy Efficiency is a huge part that I basically weave through all the others.

It’s not a specifically labeled part of my work, but I put it into each of the other steps, and it has a lot to do with habits and routines and keeping your energy high, not being what I was before with a really “high high” and a super “low low”, but keeping a consistent wave of contentment.

How to contain high energy, how to keep yourself around people who have similar energy and who repel toxicity, how to repel toxicity, and how to manage your day-to-day life and make the right decisions for yourself based on whether it adds up for your energy. Do you feel good about it? Do you feel energized about it or not?

The Mind/Body/Spirit connection to achieve goals

I don’t care if you believe in a religion, the universe, angels, crystals, or the Loch Ness Monster. Whatever it is that you believe in, make it your thing.

If you don’t believe in anything, then just believe in your own power to achieve something, but make that one thing your driving force, the fuel to your engine.

I grew up Christian, and I don’t resonate with it at all. There’s no other religion that I could resonate with, and the only lifestyle-based spiritual practice I can kind of resonate with is Buddhism, but I’m not a Buddhist, so what I did was to get this connection of body, mind, and spirit by picking pieces that resonate with.

I picked a few pieces from Buddhism that resonated with me. For example, in Buddhism, they teach you to be happy now, to live a contented life now, and to be at peace now, so I do that.

And then, I found out about how we are all energy and we are living on vibrations. This is plain metaphysics. It sounds woo-woo, but it’s not. It’s neurons and atoms – everything that is physical energy.

When I got into the scientific explanation behind it, it made so much sense to me, and suddenly, it wasn’t woo-woo anymore and it wasn’t some manifest or law-of-attraction bullshit, but it was actually physics and metaphysics, and I thought, “This does make sense to me now. We are energy. Water is energy. We are 75 percent water, so, sure, I’m energy. That totally makes sense. How can I calm this energy down when it’s too tense or boiled up when I’m frustrated? How can I align this again with my intentions and my goals?”

This brought me to understand how, for example, going back to the migraines, they were a manifestation or an outcome of me being out of energetic alignment with what I wanted and what I tried to achieve.

Basically, what I do when I work with people on their mind/body/spirit connection is integrate different practices and methods within their morning and evening routines that are not really time-intensive, but do bring everything more into alignment.

Switching your mindset from hustle and grind to Slow down to speed up.

Many times, location-independent entrepreneurs and business owners think about why they start a business.

They are entrepreneurs because they didn’t want to get stuck in the system. They wanted to get off the hamster wheel.

They are still in this rat race that they build for themselves in the business of “I only need to get there,” but what if they get all of the lifestyles first, and it actually gives them so much energy to achieve their business growth and goals faster?

When I work with business owners, a lot of times, they have five-year goals.

For instance, they tell me that in five years they want to have this house and travel twice a year to these places.

I ask them, “What if you get the house now and start traveling next year?” “That’s not possible.” “Why? What’s holding you back?” “I don’t have time.”

But, that’s not true. We do have a lot of time; we just prioritize it wrong.

That’s the first thing.

So, I make the switch with them from “I have to work, work, work” to “First, I have to live the life that I actually want to live when I retire.”

So, live this life right now because just imagine, What if you go out of your house and a bus hits you?

I had this. I can tell you: As a 19-year-old, waking up and asking myself, “Did I actually try to achieve anything?” and having to answer, “Nope,” I really was a shitty person then. I was just a people-pleaser. My life sucked.

Stop thinking “When I am… I will…” and start living the life you want now.

I work really intensively, in the beginning, to make my clients understand this concept of slowing down to speed up and how it works, and prepare them for the fact that it will surely take three to five weeks for them to feel really resistant and frustrated about it. Because the thing is you feel like you’re not doing anything or getting anywhere.
You will feel a lot of resistance, or maybe you’ll feel all the fear, but that’s why I’m here.

I’m not going to sugarcoat it and tell you that the first two weeks will be brilliant and you’ll be feeling amazing.

Actually, I tell you you’re not going to have much fun with me in the first two to four weeks, but that’s why you’re here, and that’s going to be the growth, and that’s why I’m on your side. We’ll get through it, but you need to stick to it and not run away.

If you run away, it’s going to be shit. If you don’t run away, it’s only going to be shit for four weeks, and then the growth is going to come back and you’ll see the results.

So, I think it helps many of them that I do have the scientific approach because this is how I work, and I probably attract people who work similarly to me as well.

If I have a scientific, logical explanation of why they feel how they feel and how we can get through it, they immediately feel relieved and think it makes sense, and then we can work through it. I have the tools and the methods for them, and that’s just a way for them to basically do it.

If you are a busy, overwhelmed entrepreneur or business owner
ready to leave the hustle & grind behind – and step into a new reality of work-life integration I strongly advise you to join THE T.I.M.E. ALCHEMY KOLLEKTIV. You can read all the details here.

This blog post was created based on below Podcast Episode of The Maverik Show where Matt Bowles and I chatted about my journey to becoming The Time Alchemist, my trips around the world, The T.I.M.E. Method framework and how I apply it to my clients. 

You can play it here below. Enjoy it.