Adopt the Mindset of An Athlete to Achieve Your Life, Career, or Business Goals Like a Pro

By John Allen Mollenhauer, “JAM” Performance Lifestyle® Coach
It does not matter if you're into sports or even a fitness enthusiast. When someone says you can do something "like a pro," it means performing tasks or activities with the skill and expertise of a professional. It implies high proficiency and mastery in the how-to aspects of accomplishing an outcome or achieving your goals in your chosen industry field. But what most people, even many very successful people, need to learn is that it also implies proficiency in how you achieve your goals. 
  
Like a professional sports athlete, you have to know the game you're playing. Meaning you have to know your industry or "game." But you also need to live in a way that will yield the energy, health, and performance capacities you need to succeed in playing that game well, which is just as important and, in some cases, more.  

There is a saying that "hustle beats talent when talent doesn't hustle," and hustle requires energy. The naturally occurring kind, not the kind that comes from endless cups of coffee… on 6.5 hours of sleep, that destroys your zest and zeal over time. So, if you want to improve your performance, it starts with learning how to manage your energy, like a pro.  

If you've been following along… 
The whole idea of a Performance Lifestyle (PL) started as a concept in the elite sport and fitness industry and is rapidly becoming a central life concept for people who are tired of how they've been living for at least a while because they feel distracted and held back by something that isn't quite right. Still, they can't quite put their finger on it. 

I'm referring to the impact of the default unhealthy lifestyle that envelopes the lives of 57% of the population, or even the typical fitness or healthy lifestyles that are still no great shakes and result in 40% of the people living with mediocre energy health and performance levels. 
​Albeit an improvement over default living, let's just say that eating healthier, exercising more, and getting an extra hour of sleep here and there while faced with relentless demands on your time and energy doesn't exactly unlock your true potential. 
 
But all of that's changing. In the last 10-15 years, biohacking and optimal living have emerged to take people beyond the default and typical fitness and healthy lifestyles that are not delivering stellar outcomes for people. Combined, they've given rise to a new lifestyle called a Performance Lifestyle. 
 
Biohacking predominantly focuses on advanced rejuvenation and recovery technologies, as we offer at REGENUS CENTER. If you want to change and improve, first and foremost, you've got to unlock your body's resilience to bounce back from accumulated stress, pain, and fatigue. 
 
Even the best of us can't improve much when we're tired, stressed, in pain, and suffering from brain fog and fatigue. 
 
What's so good about biohacking is that you focus for the first time in your life on proactively recovering your energy and not relying on minimal sleep alone. And it is a game changer. 
 
It leads to you wanting to go "optimal" on one or more aspects of your lifestyle, not only because you now have the energy to do it, but because you quickly realize that to maintain your now elevated level of energy, you've got to manage your energy better, and that is the crux of a performance lifestyle.  
 
Performance Lifestyle is a mindset and skill set that can be applied to whatever you're up to in your life, career or business, creative pursuits, sports, or ministry.
 
IT WAS UNDEFINED when I discovered the "idea" 20 years ago in elite athletics as an emerging professional health and life coach. And like many people, I thought that pro athletes lived radically different than us mere mortals, and in some ways, they do, such as in how they train, for instance. 
 
Over the years, though, I discovered that most professional athletes rely on genetics, talent, youth, and their skill in the game to achieve their goals like pros, but why they leave the game early after only 3-7 years on average, is because they never learned how to live like a pro; unlike Tom Brady who did, and played for 20 plus years at the top of his game. 
He lived and still lives a performance lifestyle. 
 
Living like a pro implies you are living like a professional athlete. But here's the thing, it's far less about sports and fitness and far more about optimal human performance, regardless of your game and goals. And everyone is learning a lot about this today, including many former pro athletes. 
 
So, don't think you are out of your league to take these big steps forward.
 
Achievers at all levels are learning how to function and perform better in the fast-paced, technologically driven world we currently live in, which can easily wear us down and cause us to cope with stress and fatigue in ways that create more stress and fatigue, not more energy and freedom. 
 
Adopt the Identity of an Athlete and Start Living Your Life Like a Pro to Achieve Your Ambitious Goals. 
 
Calling all athletes… Yes, you. What did you think? Stop laughing — you'll snort coffee all over the paper. You may not be able to nickname or call yourself a professional athlete, but you can declare yourself the star athlete of your one precious life — whatever your waist size, bowling average, or how much you'd rather be sleeping, which is a good thing.
 
Many experts say that establishing an athlete's identity — of any ability — makes it more likely that you will sleep, eat, exercise, and live a healthy life. And that's just for starters. 
 
Think of it as the Lifestyle equivalent of "You are what you eat."
 
"There is a process of forming an identity as an athlete," explains Diane Whaley, associate professor of sport and exercise psychology at the University of Virginia's Curry School of Education.
 
"Buying performance lifestyle apparel, learning the terminology, and hanging out with other participants in a chosen activity; help you form that identity mentally, and when you do, it is more likely that you will live better over time.
 
Improving your performance starts with an identity, a mindset. The Washington Post recently reported in their article, "Do you think of yourself as an athlete or an exerciser? Here's why it matters." Studies showed that those that identified as an athlete exercise way more than those who identified as exercisers. 
 
Of course, that phenomenon could be extrapolated across every aspect of lifestyle, and it's because athletes are the only population that directly links their lifestyle with their success in their sport and life itself. 
 
It's an identity and a mindset, and it's likely why the Washington Post article also advocated that the term "athlete" must be redefined because of the stunning impact this shift in identity can have on performance.
 
The article ends with the following.
 
"While the experts duke it out over the correct definition of an athlete, the easiest way to think of yourself as one is to accept the definition from Bill Bowerman, co-founder of Nike. Nike's mission statement is to "bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete* in the world." The asterisk leads to a phrase added by Bowerman: "If you have a body, you're an athlete."
 
That’s why I recognized the value of living a performance lifestyle was not for elite or professional athletes alone but for everyday people striving to perform better and achieve their ambitious goals without sacrificing their well-being. 
 
If you want to learn more about how to get free of the default unhealthy lifestyle and go beyond the fitness and typical healthy lifestyle, discover the five proven lifestyle strategies for optimizing your performance and achieving your ambitious goals without sacrificing yourself, your body, or the rest of your life; click here.
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John Allen Mollenhauer "JAM" is a pioneering Performance Lifestyle® Coach and entrepreneur who stopped grinding and overachieving at the cost of his energy, health, and performance and got on the path to becoming a healthy high achiever who thrives. You can learn more about him here.