What is HPC?
HPC (High-Performance Coaching) is the neuroscience & art of unlocking biases to help you perceive more and achieve your greater goals faster.
How it works
There are 3 main areas of excellence that my style of coaching enhances:
Action
Time management
Productivity optimization
Flow state maximization
Information
Critical thinking
Credibility vetting
Decision making
Motivation
Vision building
Roadmap planning
Environment structuring
Productive Action
You already know that “doing a lot” is not the same as “getting a lot done”, don’t you?
Good, because this is critical. How you manage your priorities, time, and flow makes virtually all the difference to your success.
Priorities
Is what you’re doing accomplishing what you want?
And is what you want right now truly beneficial to your goal?
If your answer to both of these isn’t a confident “Yes”, then you may be wasting your limited time while your true goal is being neglected. Do you know what it is?
Time management
How much are you getting done each workday? Do you know?
And how much time are you taking to get it done?
If you’re not happy with your answers to both of these questions, then you have a lot of potential here, because imagine if you were.
Flow state
During work, are you spending most of your time completing tasks, or organizing them?
And when you start working, are you able to jump in and immediately get stuff done, or do you have to find things first?
How much time are you losing because of this? Because what if you could?
Reliable Information
There’s a lot of information out there, and one person can’t know everything.
But, you can use what you’ve learned in ways that outperform the rest, by how you think critically, vet credibility, and make decisions.
Critical thinking
There are people you like, and who you dislike, sources you trust, and ones you distrust. You believe some of them, and reject others, but they all have one thing in common: they have information, and all information is useful in the right context.
In addition to this, there is information you know you have, and information you know you’re missing. But, there is a third type which is even more important: the information you don’t even realize you’re missing
These “unknown unknowns” can be the difference between “luck” and a “black swan event”
Credibility vetting
How do you know if something is true or false, real or fake, natural or scripted? The answer may be surprising: you can’t. No one can. All facts are simply shared (or projected) opinions justified by rationalizations. But, this changes nothing, because people don’t act on information; they act on confidence.
And whether these actions are helpful or harmful depends on the credibility of the information used to decide them. This is impacted by 3 things:
DTR is the number of “translations” a piece of information has undergone, before reaching someone’s conscious mind.
This number can never be 0, because there are always filters information must go through before reaching a conscious mind. At a high level, the two filters that are always present are
- Sensory organs
- Cognitive biases
This means the smallest-possible DTR is 2, and this is achieved via a direct physical observation.
Any attempt to document, communicate, or even recall (from memory) this information immediately increases its DTR, because now this information has been wrapped with interpretations stemming from favouritism, prejudice, and even language itself. This can compound on itself and cause people’s memories & self-perceptions, as well as countries’ histories, to become heavily distorted, biased, or even completely different from reality.
The way to optimize DTR is to reduce the number of interpretations. The best possible DTR is achieved by making a new direct physical observation.
DOS is the scope of any collection of information or data.
A simple example: when someone tells a story, you might automatically believe what they told you is the whole story, and that nothing was left out, when in fact, over 99% of what happened was not shared. You were told only a fraction of a fraction of everything that happened. Even if you directly observed what happened first-hand, because of cognitive biases, you were only able to focus on specific things at specific times, and missed everything else.
Another example: the Internet, with all its servers and datacenters, including the ones on the deep web and the dark web, is believed by some to contain “all of human history and understanding”, but they would be wrong.
The Internet (and all the webs), contains only the information that people or devices have uploaded to it, nothing more. It does not contain the lost history books of the hundreds of ancient civiliations that were utterly destroyed and left nothing behind for archaeologists to recover. It likely does not even contain your grandmother’s chocolate chip cookie recipe. For all the information it contains, there is a lot more it does not contain.
The most important example: Often, people believe that they know a lot about a subject, when in fact they don’t. This is called the The Dunning-Kruger Effect. The reason this happens (in my humble, highly-ignorant opinion) is because when someone knows a small amount of information about a subject, it is much easier for them to understand the small amount of information they have, since they do not have to process very much in order to understand it.
This, combined with what I call the “Self Bias” (a form of selection bias that pertains to the total life experience and memory of a person), limits people’s perception such that they believe the information they posess about a subject is all possible information that can be possessed.
Basically, when someone understands the information they have, and also believes they have all possible information, then they will naturally believe that they know everything. This leads to them overestimating their knowledge, simply because they are unaware of the information they are missing.
The way to optimize DOS is to explore as many as possible different sources of information.
For example, if you support a cause or a community, then you can increase your DOS by hearing what the opposition or naysayers of that cause or community are saying, and collecting this information. You can further increase your DOS by researching completely unrelated subjects to your cause or community, such as the composition of solar systems, or how to build an IKEA couch, but finding ways to relate this information to your cause’s purpose, your community’s people and situations, and even the opposition’s purpose, people, and situations, to better understand them.
All information, with enough of it, creates patterns. Through recognizing these patterns, you can understand the intentions, goals, and expertise (or lack thereof) of any person, company, or community; or the history, past, and potential future of a person’s life, a company’s revenue, or a country’s development (or destruction).
If you have a lot of credible information, and you are aware of the patterns emerging from this information, and are acting based on these patterns, then you are on the right path. The more credible information you have, the more patterns you will see, and the more effective you become.
Understanding these, or working with someone who does, helps you identify gaps before they become issues, as well as reveal opportunities, and adjust to take full advantage of them.
Decision making
How do you make your big decisions?
What about your small ones?
Did you realize that you make them both exactly the same way, because everything you do is a decision. The only difference is the consequences of the decision, the context to which it applies. The cognitive process of making the decision is the same.
Understanding and optimizing the mental micro-steps you take to make decisions, or working with someone who does, helps you increase confidence in your decisions, recognize when a decision is no longer beneficial, and adapt quicker.
Limitless Motivation
Sometimes, even thinking about doing something is draining, even if we know what to do, and know that it’s helpful. This is a problem, and it has a solution.
Motivation is the visibility of the connection between what we’re doing and what we want.
If we can’t see how the things we’re doing give us what we want, then we don’t have motivation. The clearer we can see this connection, the more motivation we have.
The 3 critical aspects to seeing this are
- A detailed vision
- A clear roadmap
- A helpful environment
Vision building
What do you want the most in life, for yourself and others?
What does having this look like, sound like, and feel like both within you and around you?
If you don’t have an instant, confident, and detailed answer to this, then this is why you’re not motivated. This is your top priority.
When you take the time to answer these questions fully, either on your own or with guidance, you gain immeasurable clarity, direction, and fulfillment for every decision you make and every thing you do, and this gives you infinite energy.
Roadmap defining
You know what you want, but do you know how to reach it?
What steps will bring you to it?
If you don’t know what to do in order to reach your vision, then you are going nowhere fast, while fooling yourself into thinking you’re making progress.
In order to reach your goal, you need a clear path to get there. This is done by mentally taking one step back from your goal and asking “What needs to happen in order to get here?”, and noting down your answer. Then, you take another step back, and ask the same question from here. You repeat this until you’ve stepped all the way back to your current situation in life.
Once you have this entire roadmap defined, put it somewhere you see every single day and use it as your GPS navigator. Doing this focuses you on doing what brings you closer to your vision with every step you take, faster and better.
Environment structuring
Are the things and people around you helping you realize & achieve your goals, or are they disheartening or distracting you from them?
Is where you are located providing you with the resources you need to move forward and grow, or is it limiting you?
Your environment is where you operate. It controls how easily you can move, and how much you can grow. If your current environment is not doing these things for you, then you are wasting energy fighting for progress, when you could be riding towards it.
Imagine if everything and everyone around you supports you, is available for you, and helps you achieve your goals. How much easier would everything be? This is how you can structure your environment.
How we get started
1. Getting to know each other as people
We’ll have an open conversation, sharing and learning about each other, to know if we’re aligned and would be comfortable and happy working together. With enough alignment, we may even jump into step 2 right away
2. Understanding your situation and goals
We’ll talk about the current state of your business and/or life, to know exactly where you are and where you want to be
3. Exploring pathways to your goal
We’ll brainstorm possible ways to achieve your goal that create real value for you, your business, and/or your relationships
4. Deciding how to work together
Depending on the pathway, you might want to do some parts yourself or work together in some areas, because at the end of the day, what matters is having your goal accomplished