Ever get frustrated with where you’re at in life or business?

I’m talking about those moments where we turn around, look at our selves with unusual honesty and realise that we’re not living up to our full potential.

Ever feel like you could have done better, tried a little harder or made more of a commitment?

I get these moments all the time – especially on those days where I don’t have meetings or client consultations… Those days, in other words, where I have total freedom over how I spend (or waste) my time.

No one ever plays the game of life at 100% and this article reveals the psychological reasons why.

Additionally, you’ll learn a proven and simple technique that consistently increases your performance – the easy way… even if you’ve never genuinely given anything “your all” before.

The Background…

For the last few years, I’ve run a (offline) coaching programme called “Peak Potential Plus”. It’s a solution for busy entrepreneurs who need a regular (monthly) sounding board and Jedi mind tricks expert to keep ‘em at peak performance.

Fortunately, being “that guy” put me in a position where I could learn from some super successful entrepreneurs – in exchange for tweaking their thinking for maximum effectiveness.

One of the most useful discoveries from this collaboration was a breakthrough in the psychology of “potential”.

“You should stay away from your potential, you know. It’s a lot like your bank balance – you always have a lot less than you think.”

- Irish Comedian Dylan Moran

Working with my entrepreneur clients and pals meant being a sideline spectator to many exciting business ventures.

I provided pearls of psychological wisdom while my clients did things like:

• Launch a new national television service
• Dealing with a 120 million dollar corporate takeover
• Starting a micro niche therapy practice
• Sharing the secrets of ancient Indian medical wisdom online
• Open a new flagship retail store

Massive diversity between clients, in other words, but also identical in one critical area:

Effort

Each person heading these revolutionary projects was forced to harness every scrap of their potential. They had to attempt to play a 110% game – all the time.

And guess what…

They failed.

Not a single one of these folks (including serial entrepreneurs with a track record of massive success) was able to consistently kick ass, day in, day out.

Any attempt resulted in the following:

An initial 12 – 48(max) hours of total, extreme performance

Followed by :

3 – 5 days of half-baked effort

OR

On going, overwhelming action but zero productivity

OR

Total “emergency vacation” burnout

It seemed that playing a “110% game” was not a long term option. The most common result was the 2nd one – loads of work hours (16+ per day) but very little useful action or productivity.

Why do we do this to ourselves

When we get fed up with our current performance or we decide we really want something, many people make a decision to go nuts… they invest enormous action and energy in a very short space of time.

They believe this will turn their life (or business) around.

They keep it up for a day or two, before going back to their old habits of procrastination… or worse, they burn themselves out and have to take a complete break.

The solution

The folks I was working with figured out that their new projects were doomed to failure if they kept up their old patterns of thinking and behaviour.

So we set out to create a smarter, sustainable approach to “getting stuff done” and “changing your life” that my clients field tested each day for six months.

The “Daily 1%” principal

Instead of “maximum performance” we committed to minimum performance!

Each day for the six month period, each client (and me too) would identify one area of our lives where we could take a tiny action to improve things.

The rules were simple: The proposed action must be SO tiny that it was effortlessly easy to accomplish – almost without noticing.

The only catch was this: Once we made the tiny change, we had to keep it…. Each and every day, forever.

This made everyone be very, very careful about each day’s new commitment.

“You don’t want to find out that the most you could possibly achieve, if you gave it your all, if you harvested every screed of energy within you, and devoted yourself to improving yourself, that all you would get to, would be maybe eating less cheesy snacks.”

- Dylan Moran

The trick to it was exactly that – committing to eating less cheesy snacks. We can all make a tiny change and keep it for ever.

In fact, we can all make a tiny, tiny change… every single day (and keep them for ever).

In the real world, this resulted in:

The TV entrepreneur broke his to-do list into teeny, tiny micro steps and started off only achieving one (a single email written) the first day. On the second day, he did two tasks and three on the third. Rinse and repeat.

The therapist committing to jogging either 1 minute longer (or 100 metres more, but in the same time) than the previous day. Every, single day.

The Indian life-science internet entrepreneur committed to things like posting a comment each day (for SEO value).

One client made one cold call on day 1… then two the next day, three calls on the 3rd day and so on. By the time he got to 100 days, he had enough cash flow in his business to hire a full time telemarketer!

Slow and steady incremental success

The real value of the Daily 1% strategy is the mathematics of “exponential” performance.

Instead of jumping to the top of the 110% game and burning out, we can slowly, incrementally work our way up to serious levels of performance… proving ourselves and practicing consistency along each step of the way.

The possibilities are endless here. Imagine working your way up (over 75 days) to 75% performance in some area… like your fitness, or cold calling for your business.

Imagine how easy it would then be to go to 76% (make just one more call…. run just one more minute).

Suddenly 80% isn’t so far away.

The real magic

The big point here is that the Daily 1% continues every day of your life – or at a minimum, 5 days per week.

The value of consistency (in cold calling, exercise or simply checking off the “to-do” list) is absolutely enormous.

Business empires are not built on 355 days of half-baked effort interspersed with 10 days of random, manic enthusiasm.

My clients and I personally discovered that true value of consistency.

The Daily 1% principal forces you to systematically increase your true potential.This opens up a whole new capacity for extraordinarily powerful stamina.

By committing to Daily 1%, you’ll be able to comfortably play a bigger and better game.

Imagine what that will feel like – when you look back 6 months, to the day when you committed to just trying a tiny bit harder and doing 1% more.

What are the areas in your life where you’re frustrated with your efforts?

For me (at time of writing), it has to be exercise and promoting my online business (I need to think less and do more).

What Daily 1% could you commit to, to improve things?

Let me know by leaving a comment below.

Here’s a very simple yet effective technique for narrowing the gap between planning and action.

Everyone makes plans, to-do lists and brainstorms… very few of us tick off as many tasks as we’d like. Personally, I scribbled massive to-do lists in my handy notebook for years without getting much action to happen.

I made a real big breakthrough when I learnt how to increase my instantly increase my action-taking abilities. Here’s how you can do it too…

The secret that bridges the gap between planning and action is simple: Plan to take action

What do I mean by that?

Most people make a really common mistake with their to-do lists: They write huge, significant tasks like “build a website” or “make 5 sales”. They do this because it feels good to “plan” for such big achievements.

The big (important) stuff seldom gets ticked off because huge goals appear overwhelming and become too easy to procrastinate.

The solution is to break your massive, important tasks into bite-sized, achieveable action steps.

I would take:

“Make 5 Sales”

and turn it into:

“Select 100 prospects from database”

“Make 100 calls”

“Set 20 Appointments”

“Make 5 Sales”

The secret, in this example, is the first task. Selecting names from a database is super easy for any sales person. It is an action step that can happen well within their comfort zone, at their desk. No effort required.

By beginning the list with something so simple and easy, it becomes easy and simple to take immediate action.

What easy, simple actions (that get you started on major goals) can you take today? Post your reply in the comment section below…