Critical Habits of High Performance in Today's New Normal with Mark Cunningham

**SPEAKER_2** (0:04)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection, and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:17)
Hello, and welcome back to the show. As a reminder, Tuesdays, we do our deep dive into a topic. Wednesdays, we have our 10-minute Empathy Expansion Kit Series. And today, Thursdays, we dive into a topic with our guests. Today, we are talking about Critical Habits of High Performance.
I'm Stephen Sakach here once again with Mike Liwski from our team, Mike, introduce our guests for today's show.

**Mike Liwski** (0:43)
Yes. Thank you, Stephen. And I do welcome back everyone to the Bliss Business Podcast. So today we have a truly inspiring guest, Mr. Mark Cunningham. For our followers who might not know Mark, he's the founder and CEO of the Achieve Institute. He's the visionary behind the Achieve System, a customizable and scalable performance and productivity system that has been instrumental in transforming some of the largest and well-known corporations in the US. So you might be curious, Mark's journey is nothing short of remarkable. With over 25 years in performance consulting, he's transitioned from being an elite athlete to a business coach and entrepreneur. Mark, in fact, was training to compete in the Olympics in the decathlon when an injury led him to rethink his approach to maximum performance. This pivotal moment inspired him to develop the Achieve System, a comprehensive set of productivity tools designed to help organizations innovate, define and drive strategy, lead through change and then strengthen employee engagement.
Before the age of 30, Mark was already coaching senior executives to help them enhance their performance.
He founded the Achieve Institute to share those insights and the tools with a broader audience, helping teams and organizations achieve their highest potential for over the last 20 years. Mark's the perfect guest for this episode as his unique blend of athletic discipline and business acumen offer the invaluable insights into achieving peak performance and fostering a supportive high-performing workplace, which I know many of you are very interested in.
So to get us ready in this episode, we'll explore Mark's unique approach to performance improvement, the critical habits that high performers have to have, and how organizations can balance high performance with empathy and human connection, because that's really what we're about. We'll also delve into practical steps for creating supportive workplace environments without compromising on productivity. So let's get right into it, Stephen, and welcome the extraordinary Mark Cunningham to the podcast.

**Stephen Sakach** (3:04)
Hey, Mark. Can you start, and Mike covered this a little bit, but tell us what led you to create the Achieve Institute?

**Mark Cunningham** (3:13)
Yeah, it's a great question, and it really was by accident.
It was through major frustration as we were sharing there. I was training at the elite level, and I was getting frustrated because I was good one day and not the next, and I couldn't get this consistency that I was looking for, and then you get more and more frustrated because you're like, wait, I know I can do this, but it's not happening at the level I think it should be. And ultimately, the Achieve Institute and the Achieve System came from my biggest failure, which was trying to make the Olympics and I am getting hurt and everything that comes with that. So it was really from really getting underneath what were the things I did right, but more importantly, what were the things I was not doing right that would have yielded a better outcome, and what are those little secrets to high performance? So the Achieve Institute, ironically, and the Achieve System came from a failure and disappointment, and I wanted to get underneath why it happened, and just for my own sanity and my own sense of weight, I want to understand what's going on here, and ironically, when I was learning from it, I talked to other people, and what I went through was very similar to other people, so it was pretty universal.

**Mike Liwski** (4:31)
That's really interesting. So Mark, I'm really curious, are there some critical habits that you've identified within top performers, you know, other habits that might even surprise some of our listeners of top performers?

**Mark Cunningham** (4:47)
Yeah, it's interesting. There's a few things that, where when I look at high performance, one of the things I recognize that, one is you have to make a commitment to it. It doesn't happen automatically.
And a lot of times, without knowing it, like when I was doing what I was doing, you're all in, there isn't like a part-time, half-time thing. It's not a dabbling endeavor.