The 5 Habits Behind Every High Performer We've Met

**Jake Humphrey** (0:02)
Welcome to High Performance, the show that aims to understand the stories, the successes and the struggles of the highest performers. And this is one of our regular shorter episodes where myself and Damian sit and chat and give you our own valuable lessons that we've taken from the show.
So often habits, so the bedrock to making change and finding the ability to consistently stick to those habits is absolutely crucial. So we thought we would just do a short episode about habits. What have we learned from our guests? Well, we've picked out five habits of high performing people to share with you on today's short episode. So let's go on with this episode and we're going to hear, first of all, Damian, from Jamie Peacock. How would you sum up Jamie Peacock for people that don't know in 20 seconds?

**Damian Hughes** (0:40)
Jamie Peacock is a titan of a man and he was a titan of a player, he was a captain of the Great Britain and England Mugby League, a man that's won the most ever Super League championship. So being good occasionally is one thing, being good consistently is exceptional and Jamie is certainly that.

**Jake Humphrey** (0:57)
Wonderful and here is what he told us about the power of habits.

**Damian Hughes** (1:03)
People won't know this but I've been quoting you indirectly based on having been lucky enough to work with you and understand your approach to life. So I talk about dividing life up into easy and hard decisions and I want to shamelessly say I've stolen that from you. So tell us about your decision making and how you divide them up.

**Jamie Peacock** (1:23)
So Damian on that I've stolen a lot of ideas from you. So I think all equal. Yeah, you were equal. I really, it's really nice to say that. Look, I mean, for me, I think in our lives, most moments we get into we have like an hard or an easy decision.
For example, getting getting off the bus, that's really definite. It's a really definite one. But I think we have lots of those all the time within our lives. Those are the ones with a decision that might be a little bit more difficult to do. I want it a little bit easier to do. So for example, one we've been talking about is when I used to go running, I'd always make a decision as a player not to have any music on. Of course, I think when I'm playing, no one's playing rock it to me and no one's making it any easier to me. So why would I want to run with any music on? Because that's just an easy decision. I'm making it easier for myself. But those little decisions are all around our lives. You know, whether we want to decide to get fast food or not. Say we have a drink, we're hungover. Next day, we've always got two decisions. Do we cook something healthy or do we get on delivery? And I think the more decisions in our life that we make hard decisions, I think easier our lives become. But I think the more easy decisions we make, the harder our lives become on the compound impact of those.
And I think those decisions are done day to day. And I think as well that the bigger chain you build up of hard decisions, they almost become easier to make because they just become you as a person along the way. And I think it's that really thinking to yourself, right, which is going to be the most beneficial for me, probably the hardest one to do right now, but do this a few times, few days in a row, then I'll get to the point where this is just a way, it's not even a decision anymore, it just happens. And I think that's the key.

**Jake Humphrey** (3:10)
Look, Damian, we see that quote quite often pop up across social media, don't we? Easy decisions, hard life, hard decisions, easy life. And it's easy to disregard it until a man who has been voted the man of steel in Rugby League turns around and tells us that that's how he lived his life. So the question is then, why does running without music on, why does making a hard decision about the time you get out of bed or the food that you order or the conversations that you have, why does that hard decision give you in the long run an easy life? Because you sort of imagine what you'd live a life of doing hard things.

**Damian Hughes** (3:41)
Yeah. Well, think of it like building blocks. Think of it as like laying bricks. That what you're doing is you're giving yourself evidence that you're capable of doing hard things. So when the moment comes and you have to remind yourself of, I'm capable of this, you've already deliberately created the evidence, you've got the building blocks in the foundation that say, I'm capable of doing it. So I'll give you a really quick story where I was on the receiving end of one of Jamie's hard decisions that made life easy for me. That I was put opposite him when I was working for the England Rugby League team, we were in Australia's Gold Coast. And it was almost seen as a bit of an initiation that the coaches put me on tackle pads and asked me to face Jamie.