Have you ever noticed what happens after you finish a writing challenge? It’s the same thing that happens after you meet a deadline.
You fall into a slump.
You go from amazingly productive—churning out thousands of words every day—to writing almost nothing. Right?
Where did your flow go? What happened to your energy and commitment?
Gone.
Why is that? Why isn’t your high performance sustainable?
Because it wasn’t high performance at all.
High Performance vs. Peak Performance
In fact, what you had during that time was peak performance, not high performance.
What’s the difference?
Peak performance typically is defined as a brief state in which a person gets in the “zone,” has optimal functioning or performance or gets into a flow state. Sometimes it’s called a peak experience.
On the other hand, high performance as nothing to do with short bursts of being at your best. It’s about maintaining that peak state over time. Brendon Burchard defines it as “succeeding above and beyond standard norms over the long-term.”
And those standard norms are yours…not those of some other writer or author.
That means that high performers succeed above and beyond their own typical performance. They level up…all the time…and sustain those levels. Then they level up again.
With high performance, you don’t climb the mountain and plant your “peak performance” flag at the summit…only to hike back down to the bottom and do it again. You hike to the top and then find a new mountain to climb starting from where you stand.
More important, high-performance writers don’t have writing slumps. They know how to avoid them…and how to move out of them an into productivity—fast—if they do experience them for some reason.
The Peak-Performance Writer
When taking a 30-day writing challenge or meeting a publication deadline you experience peak performance. That’s why you don’t keep writing after the challenge or deadline is over. Instead, you fall into a slump.
Peak performance leaves you:
- Tired
- Burned out
- Lacking direction
- Unmotivated
- Lethargic
Here’s why: During that challenge…or, more important, before you took the challenge…you did nothing to ensure you could sustain the clarity, energy, courage, productivity, and influence you needed to meet your deadline. You just pushed through. You used all your resources in one go. Then you had was nothing left.
No wonder you didn’t keep up your writing at that pace.
- You didn’t have the clarity to set a new goal that would inspire you to keep writing at that peak level.
- You didn’t have the energy to sustain that level of writing practice on a consistent basis.
- You didn’t have the courage to make your writing practice maintainable for an unlimited time…because it would require change, including changing your story about your ability to produce work daily.
- You didn’t have the productivity habits, tools, and strategies in place to help you continue churning out words daily…and still keep up with your other commitments.
- And you didn’t have the persuasive skill to influence yourself to keep up the pace, especially with no outside influence like a deadline or challenge.
The High-Performance Writer
If you had decided before—or even during— the challenge to become a high-performance writer, you would have done the following:
- Gained clarity about your goal of sustaining a peak level of writing performance over the long term (not for a month)—and used the 30-day challenge or deadline to help you do so.
- Found ways and reasons to generate the energy necessary to sustain a high level of performance and productivity even after the challenge ended.
- Courageously changed yourself and your life so you could achieve your goal of being a highly productive writer all year long.
- Persuaded yourself to keep going…the day after the challenge ended or you met your deadline (and the day after and the day after and the day after).
- Committed to the same level (or higher) of productivity you achieved during the challenge.
That means you would not have experienced a writing slump. Instead, you would have ended the challenge ready to keep writing at that pace. And you would have been committed and able to do so.
Eliminate the Writing Slump
Here’s the bottom line: You built the steam to propel your writing forward faster during your 30-day writing challenge or up until the point you met your deadline. That means you know how to do it again.
No more excuses.
You proved you could do it. You can be a peak-performance writer managing your schedule, commitments, and projects. You can churn out the words every day and meet your goals.
Now, you just need to turn your peak performance writing into high performance writing. You need to learn how to sustain that level of performance.
If you do so, you will eliminate the slumps from your writing life.
That’s how you will make 2017 your best writing year ever.
Are you ready to do that…to become the writer you have dreamed of becoming and know you can be? Of course, you are.
Click here to find out how to make that dream real.
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Photo copyright: melnyk58 / 123RF Stock Photo
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