Are You a Prospect or a Suspect?

In sports, a talented player who is just starting out in the game is known as a “prospect,” someone who is on the verge of accomplishing great things for his team. But if he doesn’t live up to his promise on the playing field, he soon becomes “suspect,” a person who is failing to live up to his potential. When this happens, his performance must improve or he is off the team.
I watched this happen with J.J. McCleskey when he was a sevenyear veteran with the Arizona Cardinals. When the tremendously talented J.J. was unable to complete the season four years in a row due to nagging injuries, he became suspect. His coach told him, “I don’t know what you’re doing in the off-season to get ready for the game, but whatever it is, you need to change it or you will have to start looking for another team.” I discovered that J.J.’s problem was repetitive hamstring pulls due to overstriding and improper training practices. After working with me during the off-season, J.J. was able to play the entire sixteen-game season. In fact, he was better in the last four games than most guys were in the first games of the season, and he ended up being a Pro Bowl alternate that year.
We all start out in life as a prospect, with a balanced physical, emotional, and mental system. As we age, however, our experiences tend to throw us off balance to varying degrees if we don’t learn to compensate. As the stresses of life and work add up, our health and stamina tend to decrease and we begin to lose the focus necessary for maximum performance levels. Even when we have tremendous experience and knowledge, we can still become suspect.
The following Performance Assessment Questionnaire serves as a tool to help you evaluate where you are now. Read each statement and check “never,” “sometimes,” or “always,” depending on how accurately the statement matches your current lifestyle performance levels. The eventual goal is to check off “always” for most questions. The areas where you check “never” or “sometimes” are the ones that need attention.

Control Your Emotions for Maximum Performance

Being in control of your emotions at all times is another important key to maximum performance. Controlling your emotions is not the same thing as suppressing them. Rather, I’m referring to a technique that will allow your emotions to easily pass through you as they happen so that you will not become so emotionally paralyzed, stressed, or unfocused that you cannot perform properly. If you cannot gain access to your emotions, acknowledge them, and process them, you lose energy because they move below the conscious level and become tied up somewhere inside, creating an energetic short circuit. The result is compromised performance.
In order to keep that short circuit from happening every time you encounter an emotional stressor, utilize an autohypnosis technique:
Squeeze your hand into a fist and release it five times, repeating the word control and consciously letting go of the stressor. Each time you do this, simply feel your emotions and your stress pass through you. Sometimes it helps to visualize your heart in your hand and to see yourself squeezing out the tension and gently releasing it.
Emotional equilibrium is key to achieving high performance.

Manage Your Performance to Go the Distance

One of the keys to delivering maximum performance is being able to manage your energy so that you can go the distance. Every task takes a certain amount of time, and you must maintain enough energy during that time to effectively exercise your skills, talents, judgment, and teamwork long enough so that you can win. Athletes are great role models for energy management. For example, boxers must be able to control their energy expenditures for twelve rounds. It does not matter if you give your opponent the battle of his life for five rounds if you don’t have the stamina to finish the fight. The workplace is no different. To complete a task or a project, you need to be able to go the distance.
The competitive challenge in life as in sports is to maintain your own energy levels while pushing your opponent into a state of overuse and overreaching. On the other hand, wise energy management involves being smart enough to never allow others to maneuver you into a position where you are being forced to overreach, to attempt a task that you know is beyond what you can realistically do. That could automatically set you up for a failure.

• Always perform with integrity. If you have integrity, you will go the distance with your client, even when the chips are down. You will stand by your people, handle and minimize the damage, cut your losses, analyze what went wrong, and create a better plan to help you make a comeback
  
• Never overreach yourself. Managing your energy system is crucial to going the distance. It does not matter how much sheer talent and experience you have if you are overreaching. Whatever amount of energy you are putting out daily on your job, make sure that it is never so much that you are not able to recover.

The upside of the equation is that once you have learned how to manage your energy system, you are almost always going to be able to go the distance and accomplish whatever performance goals you set for yourself.

Don’t Procrastinate – Improve Your Health

What kind of lifestyle changes are best? Those that instill the health habits we teach with The Bragg Healthy Lifestyle! A low-fat, vegetarian diet is crucial for the free and unimpeded flow of blood through your body. Reducing fat in your diet also stimulates weight loss, which, in turn, contributes to reduced blood pressure. Finally, make exercise a fixed part of your daily routine and learn to breathe deeply and relax, freeing yourself of stress while you fill yourself with ample fresh oxygen. Begin today to make this Bragg Healthy Lifestyle a lifelong happy habit! It is bringing miracles to millions.
Please listen to Dr. Claude Lenfant, Director, National Heart, Lung & Blood Institute. He says Lifestyle changes alone can actually reverse the conditions of heart disease. When it comes to making the kind of changes needed for healthy and happy living, the truly important thing is making those changes happen. However, actually doing it, living it, making it happen – this is what counts! So don’t play procrastinating games with yourself! The moment you think, Do I have time to do this right now? is the moment to stop asking and start doing. The moment you think, I want a big steak for dinner, is the time to open up a vegetarian cookbook with pictures and discover healthy, tasty new recipes. Wepromise you will find recipes more delicious, healthy and satisfying than steak. If you do eat meat, limit it to 1 to 3 times a week and be sure it’s hormone-free and organically fed without harmful chemicals.
Millions of successful Bragg students will tell you the same thing: the beginning is the most difficult. The in-between moment after you decide you want to become healthier and before you begin to act on that decision, is the hardest. Example: the moment before you put one leg in front of the other on the first step of your brisk walk is the hardest moment of the exercise.

Feel the Difference between Arousal and Relaxation

In her book The High Performance Mind: Mastering Brainwaves for Insight, Healing, and Creativity, Anna Wise offers some simple exercises to help you become aware of the difference between feeling aroused, ready to fight or to flee, and feeling relaxed and in control of the situation.
When a person experiences feelings of worry, excitement, fear, anger, exhilaration, nervousness, panic, increased heart rate, faster breathing, and/or anxiety, the sympathetic nervous system is activated. When a person feels a sense of relaxation, tranquility, calmness, serenity, lightness, centeredness, clarity and/or a feeling of being in control, the parasympathetic system is activated.
Wise suggests that you can achieve greater awareness of when you are stressed and when you are relaxed by performing the following exercises and observing your biofeedback—how your body feels.

• Hyperventilate by breathing heavily for a few seconds. (Please be careful not to overdo it. If you start to feel faint, stop immediately.) [Stop. Close your eyes. Notice what your body feels like. Make a mental note of all the sensations.]
• Run in place for a minute or two.
• Think about something very upsetting.
• Think about something very exciting.

After each one of these, stop and notice what is happening inside of your body.
The physical state of arousal you are in while doing these exercises will be similar to how your body responds when exposed to stress.
Next notice how your body feels when completely relaxed:

Close your eyes and exhale deeply. Let your shoulders drop.
Rotate your head gently and loosely until you find a comfortable
balanced position for your head, neck, and shoulders. Let
your jaw relax and hang loose. Relax your lips, tongue, and
throat. Exhale deeply again and let go. Continue to breathe
easily, slowly, evenly, and deeply for one or two minutes.

Stop. Notice what your body feels like. Make a mental note of all of the sensations. Compare these to the sensations you noted when you did the arousal exercises.
Wise goes on to explain, “Arousal is not inherently better than relaxation, or vice versa. Both states are important at certain times. What is optimum is to be able to choose the level of relaxation or arousal that you want and to be able to produce that at will.”

Healthy Lifestyle Eating Habits

You need to learn not only what to keep out of your diet, but also, just as importantly, what you should put into it. You will find that you can nourish your body without sacrificing meal-time enjoyment once you understand the basic principles of proper nourishment. These principles will supply you with the knowledge your body needs to build, develop and live healthy, as it was meant to do naturally. Healthful organic foods packed with vital nutrients are abundant worldwide.
The first step, of course, is to get into the habit of eating for health. Such a habit is not difficult to form. Our instinctive natural sense of food selection has been overwhelmed by all of the advertising of popular, fast, junk foods, etc. You have to be strong minded! Like any other ability or skill, Only by using this natural health instinct and desire can we revive and strengthen our health!
America’s former Surgeon General, said this in his famous 1988 landmark report on nutrition and health in America. People don’t die of infectious conditions as such, but of malnutrition that allows the germs to get a foothold in sickly bodies. Also, bad nutrition is usually the main cause of noninfectious, fatal or degenerative conditions. When the body has its full vitamin and mineral quota, including precious potassium, it’s almost impossible for germs to get a foothold in a healthy, powerful bloodstream and tissues!

Exercise Promotes Health & Youthfulness

We know that healthy living with proper exercise can produce a new breed of men and women who will enjoy more strength to carry out their daily work and have sufficient energy left for after-work interests, family and hobbies. They can retain the prime of life for 20 to 40 years longer than the person who is lazy and will not exercise. Example: Jack LaLanne, Clint Eastwood and Paul Newman; all ageless, healthy and fit.

All external characteristics of health (such as powerful Nerve Force) are but the result of the healthy functioning of your vital internal organs and glands. These are what keep you going. Exercise actually reaches into your body and brings about specific miracle improvements in certain internal parts such as your nervous system, your heart, liver, lungs, kidneys, entire digestive tract, colon and thyroid gland among others. To attain these benefits you should follow a regular program of exercise.

age a hinderance to daily exercise? The answer is unequivocally, “No!” In fact, age is no excuse for not exercising! Our good friend Roy D. White at 106 years young walks 3 to 8 miles daily! No one is too old to continue safe exercise! Conrad Hilton jogged daily to almost 100.
To rest is to rust! It is far better to wear out than to rust out. you go outdoors and take a brisk, invigorating walk. Say out loud while walking: Health! Peace! Joy! Love for Eternity! You will feel great and your trillions of cells will rejoice with circulation!