3 Big Insights You Discover Before Developing a Performance Lifestyle

By John Allen Mollenhauer JAM, Performance Lifestyle® Coach.
 
A Performance Lifestyle is an optimal approach to achieving your goals because you align the way you live with the fundamentals of energy, health, and performance in a lifestyle you can call your own focused on your success.  
 
It's a giant leap in the evolution away from the typical unhealthy lifestyle, as it takes the popular fitness lifestyle and traditional healthy lifestyle paradigms to a whole new level.

Being fit and healthy is a given when it comes to living a Performance Lifestyle; they are not the goal because neither, alone, especially if you buy into the current paradigms, ensures you'll become a healthy, high-achieving person who flourishes, prospers, and thrives. 

By "Flourish," I mean to grow or develop successfully, "prosper," meaning progress consistently, and "Thrive" to achieve your goals and be financially successful. 
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​It takes more than merely exercising and healthier living to flourish, prosper and thrive, and ultimately perform at the top of your game, climb the proverbial mountain, and sustain the ascent without burning out and wearing yourself out. 

It takes a performance lifestyle. 

So, what are the three big insights you discover before developing a performance lifestyle? 
 
Big Insights #1: You've got to get free of the unhealthy lifestyle as fast as you can. 
Most people do not realize they are living as unhealthy as they are, as they live caught up in a culture that mostly does not support your health. 
 
At this stage, you are tired of hearing from your trainer or doctor that you need to reduce your cholesterol, lose weight, and lower your blood pressure… from what you eat, that you're not exercising and sleep deprived, drinking, smoking, etc. 
 
You start to recognize that it's not only about the fatigue, weight, health complications, and all the lifestyle-induced diseases from diabetes to heart disease and cancer that are crushing your life, any or all of which you desperately want to get free of; it's about getting free of what's distracting and holding you back from achieving your God-Inspired dreams. 
 
Approximately 57% of the population lives a typical unhealthy lifestyle of coping with stress in ways that create more stress and fatigue, not more energy and freedom. This group is challenged by energy, health, and performance issues. 
 
And at some point, when you are part of this group, you realize that's unacceptable anymore. It's time to leave this "whatever, whenever, if-ever lifestyle" of just doing the bare minimum to care for yourself and your body and, for some, life itself because it just doesn't work. 
 
You're tired of being so caught up with simply making a living but not living well, with excessive technology and the endless shiny objects the market dishes up to consume your attention, digestion system, and life force energy, and you want a new approach. 
 
And while you've got a lot of experience wedging in whatever you can from the latest magazine, you finally take a stand. 
 
And what do you do first?  You start working out! 
 
Big Insights #2: You Can Be Fit and Not Be Healthy. 
A fitness lifestyle is a significant step up, so pat yourself. 
 
When you finally come to terms with the fact that your body is taking a beating from life, and you want to look, feel, and perform better, most people realize that it's time to get in shape. 
 
The thing is, it's only a matter of time before you realize that focusing on fitness alone is not exactly the healthiest way to live (not even close) or a solution to living your true potential either, but it's a good step. 
 
40% of the population lives in this paradigm of exercising a lot, improving their diet for fat loss and muscular development, some more than others, and getting an extra hour of sleep here and there. 
 
So, you start working out and eating better but not necessarily a healthy diet. All kinds of diets are designed to help you lose weight and build muscle; they manipulate your body but don't promote health and longevity. 
 
Just look at bodybuilders! 
 
When fitness is the scope of your lifestyle, you can get seriously caught up in unhealthy dietary practices and make intensive goals out of one aspect of your life that is supposed to help you achieve your goals, not become your end game. Chances are you are not a bodybuilder. 
 
But that group influences the fitness lifestyle more than any other. I know this, I was once a competitive bodybuilder, so I lived it. 
 
Nonetheless, even for a while, you can be content with your progress at this stage and start improving as you graduate to a healthy lifestyle. 
 
"You can be fit and not healthy, but you can't be healthy unless you're fit." ~ JAM
 
Big Insights #3: Health Is The Result Of Healthy Living.  
When you get this insight, you realize it's time to move towards what will promote your health and longevity, not your weight and muscle mass alone, both of which are supported if you have a broad enough lifestyle concept.  
 
You can get excited as you discover new ways to live healthier, to recover from the typical unhealthy lifestyle, or from the popular fitness lifestyle itself, where weight loss or muscle-building diets and stress may have left you still unwell, albeit a little better off.  
 
But it's here where you can get stuck in a "traditional" healthy lifestyle, and you have to be careful not to let this happen. 
 
Having a BMI (body mass index) under 25, eating "healthy," exercising three times per week, not smoking, or drinking, does not ensure you will get the health results you seek. That's close to the previous two lifestyle paradigms where pseudo-health is the game's name, even though you are progressing. 
 
The big insight is that you must start developing an inherently healthy lifestyle because health results from healthy living, not pseudo-health. 
 
But for most people, this is where the confusion grows. 
 
The typical unhealthy lifestyle has no definition, zero. It's whatever the market serves up; you blindly consume it. 
 
The popular fitness lifestyle, for the most part, is defined because it's based on weight loss and muscle building for the most part, and that gives rise to certain tactics that repeat themselves over and over again with new names and marketing but do not give rise to great health and longevity.
 
Think "Keto diet," for example. 
 
When it comes to health, there are so many definitions of "healthy," you can ironically stay stuck, thinking you're eating and living healthy when you are not. And the lackluster results over time can leave you wondering if it's all worth it. 
 
But you can go beyond traditional healthy living and move to genuinely healthy living. You can learn how to breathe, sleep, eat, move, best utilize the sun, hydrate, and much more. 
 
You can wear a fitness tracker and learn the latest bio-hack or tune into a health optimization strategy that inspires you, but here's the thing, with so much information from so many different points of view, new technology, supplements, mindsets, testing, and more coming at you, it can be overwhelming.
 
And it's here that many people, especially as they age, start to retreat to the typical "whatever, whenever, if ever" lifestyle again, despite upgrading a few healthier habits from fitness to eating that stick for one reason or another.  
 
The reason people don't flourish, prosper, and thrive at any time is always the same.  
They've never learned the fundamentals of energy, health, and performance and likely never made it all a lifestyle. 
 
Now don't take everything I'm saying here as absolute. Many people who are identified as fit and say they live a healthy lifestyle are genuinely eating and living fit and healthy, but that's the exception, especially when you consider the epidemics of constant tiredness, fatigue, and burnout that are so prevalent in our society. 
 
But that does not mean they are flourishing, prospering, and thriving. That requires an energy, health, and performance-supported lifestyle.  
 
When you have that in play in your life, you resolve all the hidden lifestyle challenges that distract and hold you back, and you evolve with the mindset and skillset to live healthy successfully; but now, because you are not just focused on your "health," you're living in the way that enables you to flourish, prosper, and thrive. 
 
The Lifestyle to Flourish, Prosper, and Thrive. 
To develop, progress, and achieve your goals, you need a much broader lifestyle approach that includes but is not limited to fitness, traditional or even genuinely healthy living but is based on advanced rejuvenation and recovery, genuinely healthy living, and the principles of human performance. 
 
Now your lifestyle takes on a whole new meaning. 
 
Your Lifestyle Is Like An Iceberg. 
In the picture above, you can see that energy, health, and performance, like the bulk of the iceberg, are underwater; it's hidden. You can't see your lifestyle other than going to sleep, eating, or exercising, but you know there is much more to it. 
 
When you start paying attention to what's hidden before and after what you can see, you start developing a Performance Lifestyle. 
 
Do you need to go from typical to fitness, to "healthy" to a Performance Lifestyle, or can you start developing a performance lifestyle from the start? 
 
The message of this article is about just that; for most, that is the natural progression, but today, the paradigm for a living has changed, especially as the pace of life has picked up, to such a degree that you are almost forced to go beyond the typical unhealthy lifestyle because it will distract and hold you back from even keeping pace. 
 
But fitness and even a traditional healthy lifestyle alone are not solutions to the full array of challenges people face and can only be faced with a much broader lifestyle concept and approach that starts with living your true potential, based on optimizing your energy, health, and performance. 
 
You can do that starting where you are right now.  Step up and into a Performance Lifestyle. 
 
Download: The Rise of a New Lifestyle 
How to Achieve Your Ambitious Life Goals Without Burning Out While Dramatically Improving Your Energy, Health, Performance, and Longevity
 
Also, take the free masterclass training, by the same title, a webinar that is essentially an on-ramp to developing a Performance Lifestyle you can call your own.  
 
You can learn more here.