Why You Attack Monday And Crumble By Friday

**Jake** (0:03)
Hi there, welcome along to another episode of High Performance. This is one of our regular weekly episodes with myself and Damian. Hey Damian.

**Damian** (0:10)
Hey Jake.

**Jake** (0:10)
We just sit and talk about some of the biggest lessons that we've learned after seven years of bringing you this podcast, over 400 episodes. Thank you so much for your continued support and love for the show. Please make sure that wherever you're watching or listening, you hit subscribe, you hit follow, or you just reach out and send us a message. We're going to read some of your messages at the end of the show. But on today's episode, we're asking, why do you feel ready to attack the world on a Monday and you're struggling by the time Friday comes around? It's a conversation really about productivity and overwhelm. Because it turns out that overwhelm is not a personality flaw, it's quite simply a maths problem. So the reason why we feel good sometimes and then bad at other times is all to do with capacity. So it's sleep, it's energy, it's confidence, it's clarity, it's control. Those are all the things that are moving in our life.
And it isn't necessarily the workload. So I hope that by the end of today's pretty short episode, you will feel fully equipped to be able to attack your workload regardless of what else is happening in your life. I think it's an important conversation actually to have for anyone who listens to our show.

**Damian** (1:12)
I think it's a really powerful topic. I think for many of us, you know, if it's a time of year where we're going back to school or we're coming back off holidays or, you know, we've just got new tasks that are dominating our agenda, we can often feel squeezed and then we feel that it becomes impossible. And it leads to paralysis by analysis where we do nothing to actually change the situation.

**Jake** (1:34)
Paralysis by analysis. There we go. Dropping the gold very early on. Before we move further, is this something that you struggle with?

**Damian** (1:43)
Yeah, sometimes. I go through periods and what I've found really helpful is to recognize that there's often three questions, if you think of it like a psychological cage, that your ability sits in the middle of it, your ability to deal with the task, to have a difficult conversation, to be able to deliver against a target, that sits in the middle of it, but it gets squeezed either by the weight of expectations or the consequences of not doing it. And when those two things get heavier, it squeezes our ability to actually just get on with the job and perform somewhere close to our capacity. So we've seen it from so many of our guests, where it might be a Premier League footballer and the noise or the expectation of a new signing and the fans demand that they're going to be revolutionary. Or it might be, you know, sometimes the Formula One drivers were spoken to, the consequences of defeat might end their career.
So when those two things start to get heavy, their ability to actually just drive to their capacity or play football to their ability starts to become diminished. So if we can understand how we can deal with it, it gives us the ability to be able to perform under pressure more frequently.

**Jake** (2:53)
And when we were talking about this episode, your face lit up when I said, I reckon the very first clip that we play for people today should come from?

**Damian** (3:01)
Professor Steve Peters. One of your heroes. Yeah, well, Steve's almost popularized the whole idea of understanding ourselves and our brains better. And if we can understand that and the software that we're working with, I was going to say many of us, but the reason I hesitated is because I wanted to pay respect to those that may be the neurological diversity. But I think for most of us, in terms of what Steve talks about, is understanding the mechanisms of our brain. And he summarizes it in three parts.

**Jake** (3:34)
We'll be right back after a quick word from our partners.

**Damian** (3:39)
So he's taken a model called the triune brain system and basically given it the metaphor of the chimp, the computer and the human. So for those people that are not familiar with Steve's work, the idea is that the chimp is the limbic part of your brain. It's the same part of your brain that we share with every other living animal on the planet. And the idea is the limbic system does three things. It gives us a sex drive, a desire to procreate. It gives us a desire to stay alive. And it also then gives us a desire to hunt and hang around with people like us.