Poor Health = Poor Performance

The concept of high performance often conjures up ideas of skill acquisition, repetitive practice, and focus on the craft. What often doesn’t immediately spring to mind is the health status of the person doing the performing.

But good health is a prerequisite for good performance.

Skill acquisition, practice, and implementation are vital to high performance, but without good health our ability to apply these skills is limited. We struggle with the ability to reach our potential in a certain task, and definitely struggle to reach it consistently over the long term.

Good health improves our energy, our ability to focus, our endurance, our capacity to put our foot down when we need to. In short we’ve got more ability to reach the peak and to stay there for longer.

Think of athletes we admire (or hate depending on which team we support), the ones like Serena Williams, Roger Federer, Tom Brady, and Brad Thorn. These athletes have been at the top of their various games for decades. Yes they have remarkably polished skill sets that often blow viewers minds, but the work they put into their health has been just as large. They know that the difference between great and average is the investment in their health. No matter how good their skills, if they don’t have the vehicle to apply those skills their performance suffers.

It doesn’t matter what aspect of life we are looking to perform in, parenting, partnering, friending, working, running a business, changing the world with our ideas, if we want to do a good job then our health needs to be one of the first things we invest in.

Where do you want to perform? And where do you need to improve your health to do so?