Your Drive for Success May Be Destroying Your Health

by John Allen Mollenhauer, Head Coach, Lifestyle Coach—Live a Better Life!
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Why Traditional Healthy Living Will NOT Help You Reach Your Goals, Especially In The Second Half of Life—and WHAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT.  ​As a parent raising kids, a career person simply working their job well (let alone climbing the ladder of promotion), or as an entrepreneur starting and running a business (all ambitious goals), your lifestyle supports you AND what you are up to in the world. And it needs to if you want to achieve your goals and with your health and wellbeing intact. 

That core message is the ethos of my company, Lifestyle Coach—Live a Better Life! a lifestyle coaching and training business founded on a simple premise--your lifestyle is how you achieve your goals. In other words, it's how you approach your life, work, and creative pursuits. 

​Aligned with the sound principles of energy, health, and performance guiding your "lifestyle," you can achieve even your most ambitious goals while living in balance with vibrant health and peace of mind; live a fulfilling, disease-free life. But out of alignment, the struggles with fatigue, weight, health issues always lurk close by. 
 
We help our clients with the essential lifestyle changes they need to make to improve and optimize the way they live. That starts by understanding the principles and the practices that enable you to respond to the stress of life (Selye 1956, 84) in ways that create more energy, better health, and higher performance. 
 
Succeeding and sustaining in life is challenging enough; none of us needs more stress-of-the-wrong-kind, wants energy depletion, poor health, diminished performance, and so forth. 
 
So, you don't want to achieve your goals at the cost of burning out or trading your health for success; yet that is what most people are unknowingly doing. They think their health challenges are just age-related when they are primarily lifestyle related. 
 
Eighty-five to ninety-five percent of chronic disease today is caused by unhealthy lifestyle choices, which are responses to stress that do not support the person and, in turn, what they are up to in the world. 
 
So how we respond to stress is primary in our lives and expressed at the core of our life "styles."
 
Quick story: 
I remember working for a Morristown-based IT infrastructure and networking company in the early 2000s following years of entrepreneurship and running up against burnout that would affect my health and performance despite being adept at nutrition and fitness.
 
When I interviewed for the senior account manager position, the CEO asked me, "how committed are you?" I responded, "as committed as I need to be to succeed on behalf of this company, the only thing I won't do is burn out and trade my health for our mutual success."  
 
I got the job and succeeded wildly, but why is part of the message here. At that time, I knew whether I was working for myself as an entrepreneur or for others; performance was the name of the game. But if I weren't going to burn out like I had many times before, due to overexertion and my responses to stress, I would have to approach things differently, and that's what I did. 
 
I began living albeit a more limited view of what is today referred to as a performance lifestyle—where what I did to take care of myself, my body, and my life; I did so that I could achieve my goals. As a result, I was more productive than any prior period in my adult life, but now, I looked, felt, and performed better with a better quality of life. 
 
That was not traditional healthy living as I had always known it, focused only on eating healthier and exercising, and getting more sleep divorced from what I was up to in my life and career. That never seemed to work, and it never seemed to gel either. 
 
a) It was too limited a view of "lifestyle."
b) There were other essential skills needed
c) Some of those missing skills have nothing to do with yourself or your body; they have everything to do with how you approach what you are achieving. 
 
With this approach, I moved beyond healthy living, and it was now the key to my success, not something I needed to wedge into my schedule simply because "I should" to lower my cholesterol, lose weight, or live longer. 
 
So, over time, I seamlessly built macro and micro routines into my daily life, weekly and annual life. The better I got at them, the better I performed and the more productive I became.
 
The key theme I noticed was that when I remained on an upward spiral, I was inevitably responding to stress in ways that created more energy, better health, and higher performance. 
 
My lifestyle approach included but was certainly not limited to how well I was eating, or moving my body, or even how much sleep I was getting. 
It was all of that and so much more. I strung together all the best practices I was researching and learning for optimal living into one approach, which brings up the central message of this article. 
 
Traditional healthy living is "getting healthy," usually divorced from our drive for success. And that doesn't work for long. 
 
When your approach to achieving your goals and succeeding is not aligned with the lifestyle fundamentals of managing your energy, health, and performance, your drive for success can destroy your health. And consequently, it prevents you from achieving your goals at the level you want. 
 
So, what do you do about this? 
 
First, no one naturally wakes up to be balanced and healthy; they wake up to succeed. So, your approach to achieving (your lifestyle) needs to change and improve just like mine had to. 
 
The old model of waking up in an all-out effort on your goals, and then when negative symptoms arise, try to wedge in other ways of living to restore your energy and health (a fragmented fitness program here, a diet program there, sleep program over there), is seriously outdated. 
 
To move beyond that, you want to start developing your lifestyle, so your drive for success in whatever you do is supported. 
 
I'll show you how below. 
 
What's Your Lifestyle Like? 
 
It may or may not take you a little while to arrive at the lifestyle mindset and a skill set, I'm referring to above. But if you get on the path to making the essential lifestyle changes, one by one, and you are actively engaged in improving and optimizing the way you live as the foundation of your development, you will. 
 
It starts with a basic assessment of your lifestyle.

1. Are you focused primarily on what you are up to, but you are just doing whatever, whenever, to take care of yourself and your body?
2. Are you making progress in sleeping, eating, and moving, for example, but want to get more proficient and skilled, plus learn the other aspects of lifestyle that enable you to live healthy successfully? 
3. Are you achieving your goals with solid energy, health, and performance but want to take it to the next level? 

 
Ultimately, we want to help you dial in all the lifestyle fundamentals wholly aligned with your goals. Still, you'll need to arrive at that, so you want to start where you are, and we're here to help you live a better life. 
 
The Path from Whatever, Whenever and Beyond Traditional Healthy Living to a Healthy, High-Performance Lifestyle. 
 
If you have had the experience I've had, respond to stress in ways that create more stress, not more energy, and no longer want to be trading your health for success, there are five lifestyle strategies. 
 
First, the typical lifestyle is a strategy; most people employ it. Hopefully, you want to move away from it because every lifestyle-induced disease, from fatigue to cancer, is the result. 
 
From there you can move to fitness and a healthy lifestyle. 20-40% of the population engage in a fitness lifestyle, and as low as 3% in a healthy lifestyle. However, a much more significant percentage are on the path towards that more beneficial way of life. 
 
All of that is awesome and good progress, but where you want to get to is dialing in a healthy performance lifestyle where you've got all essential aspects of lifestyle supporting you and what you are up to in the world. 
 
And it's like if you take the above step, you may want to go even farther and get into the High-Performance Lifestyle, which leverages technology to help you get even better results, starting with brain coherence. 
 
You can take it as far as you want to go at LifestyleCoach.com.
 
We've put together a series of offerings to help you go beyond the old, outdated model and traditional healthy living, of eating less, exercising more, and trying to get more sleep, to now developing an optimal lifestyle. 
 
From low-cost fractionalized coaching to live courses and a year-round members academy and community, we help you upgrade your lifestyle. 
 
I want to show you how to achieve your goals at a much higher level by living a better lifestyle. 
 
The dawn of 2022 is upon us; this is the time to make a shift in your thinking and your approach to success. 
 
What I'm talking about here doesn't promise to deliver the best year of your life, but it will be the year that you begin living better than ever as you:
•master your responses to stress
•keep yourself free of fatigue
•break through limiting mindsets
•reduce or eliminate distractions
•take your health and performance to heights you've only imagined. 
 
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I'm the Founder and Head Coach of Lifestyle Coach—Live a Better Life!  I'm not a former "elite athlete," "celebrity trainer," or "bestselling author" turned coach. I am an in-the-game entrepreneur and a working parent of two who's faced the intense challenges of being always-on.
 
I know the feeling of struggling with a powerful desire to achieve something, requiring determination and hard work that outpaces your energy and other capacities to sustain. I also know how hard it can be to meet your own needs amidst the hustle if you don't have the right mindset, a complete lifestyle skillset, excellent habits, and dialed-in routines. 
 
The realization that there had to be a better way to lead an ambitious life without burning out or trading one's health for success drove the development of Lifestyle Coach.
 
I look forward to Lifestyle Coach helping you live a better life!