This note will mostly be a summary of the book and some cursory personal thoughts. I intend to dive more in depth w.r.t. how these framework applies to my personal performance journey through linked notes, as that's a long and on-going journey and not necessarily relevant to anyone just wanting to know about the book for themselves.
If you’re personally looking for coaching, I have to say that having a book to read beforehand that details the framework being used is incredibly powerful. Giving a client the language up front streamlines the communication process. You’re able to use the concepts explicitly with understanding between both parties. Even if you don’t agree with the framework, you get to “play jazz” with the framework to find what works with you and your coach. Considering these types of services are incredibly expensive, you can see it as a large time (read as money) saver.
Intro to me finding the book
I was sent a book from a high school friend (Hi Joe!) that I was reaquainted to through social media (??) that ended up being an executive coach (speculation here on him fishing for potential clients, good for him if he did). The book was his coaching firm’s guidebook, Novus Global, that describes their practice and philosophy. It’s called
Beyond High Performance: What Great Coaches Know About How the Best Get Better
by Jason Jaggard. Seeing as at the time I happen to be shopping for an exective coach to help me through my feelings of stagnation and underperformance in my current position at the IFT, I’ve gone through it and have found it to be quite useful. Let’s talk about it!
General book outline and thoughts
Starting out, I recommend this book to anyone looking to find an easy to understand and reasonable framework to get past their blockades in personal development. It’s a short read (I read it in two days or so during some off time) and has actionable advice without being too prescriptive in what you should do. I generally like the idea of asking good questions to push people into a correct mindset, and this book does this well. In addition, it isn’t crazy with it’s advice. Hard work is still required.
The idea of their firm and their goal is to get clients to express the words “I didn’t know I could do that” after working with them. In other words, to get them to see beyond the limits they artificially put on themselves, which is reasonable for a professional coaching firm. It is sectioned into two main parts: “The Meta-Performing Mind” and “Go Live - The Multidox Approach”. The first introduces the idea of “Meta Performance,” which is what he says is the stage beyond being a “high performer,” which is the typical type of client. This can be summarized by the transtion in asking yourself “How can I be the best?” at whatever you’re striving for vs “What am I capable of?” The second part of the book goes through the main value system they use as dimensions in their basis set representation of meta performance (always love expressing things in linear algebra terms, sorry). I’ll go through each of these in detail later, but it spells the acronym GO LIVE (pronounced like “give” and not like a “live concert”. Despite this being explicitly stated in the book, I still say the latter in my head).
As expected in any coaching recruiting literature, it is peppered with successful examples from their practice of highly successful and well known people/organizations that the reader should be impressed with. I mean, come on, they’ve had success and should relay the level of that success somehow. The examples are certainly impressive and appropriately illustrative of their respective context. I can’t help but always wonder how much the positive is embellished vs the reality. I have no doubt they’ve had some serious wins and these are true stories, but I didn’t see any of the failures of the organization’s practice. It discusses failure as a requirement for growth, but doesn’t go into many examples of how they’ve leveraged failure for their betterment, only some content on how that should be “designed” into someone’s approach.
Meta-Performance
The book starts by detailing how people differentiate themselves in how they relate to their work in any given moment, giving three main personas and adding an additional fourth that they feel is optimal: Prisoner, Mercenary, Missionary, and then they Athlete. I’ll let the reader here guess how each persona relates to their work, it’s somewhat obvious. That being said, I really like the idea of the Athlete as the optimum choice for a number of choices:
- They put in work to hone their craft constantly, and most of it is not seen
- They are not alone and work as a team
- They have coaches and guidance
An interesting additional point made in the beginning is how much you will work in your life in hours, and how that relates to the 10,000 hour concept popularized by Malcolm Gladwell. The answer is around 100,000 hours. So the real question is “What do you do after you’ve acheived expertise?” Those additional 90,000 hours?
Next comes the introduction of performance and their associated personas:
- under-performance
- performance
- high-performance
- meta-performance
Most people attempt to attain the high-performance category, but the book details a number of downfalls of this category that lead to stagnation and burn-out. I think the term that I attached to most was the “It would be faster if I just do it myself” and all that’s wrapped up into that statement. The “I vs them” mentality, the disappointment and “shoulder being” mentality that drags you down. Meta-performance, as stated in the beginning, is shifting yoru mentality of the high-performer from “How can I be the best?” to “What am I capable of?”
The next section then explains the obvious conclusion of that mentality shift, and that is that you need a team to acheive the things you’re capable of. You are already on a bunch of teams today (family, friends, who you work for, who works for you, etc). How you work with them (bettet yet, for them) dictates how far you can go. This book is about trying to help you figure that out. Once again, trying to get people to exclaim “I didn’t know I could do that!”
And the end of the first part of the book details that how you influence a team to go far is through culture. A proper culture within a team allows them to make correct choices themselves that move in the direction everyone wants to go. I think this is an incredibly important part. It is also hard work to influence culture and set it correctly.
GO LIVE
The second part of the book goes through their acronym, but not in the order of how the acronym is said. Each word of their GO LIVE value system is:
- Growth
- Ownership
- Love
- Integrity
- Vision
- Energy
Let’s put down some thoughts on each one.
Growth
Ownership
Love
Integrity
I loved this one in it’s simplicity yet power. Integrity is what works. Do what you say, when you say you’re going to do it. That’s it. It’s an incredibly powerful way to increase your satisfaction as a large portion of your burn-out comes from the work you do “covering your ass.” It feels good to get things done that you said do, this gives energy and doesn’t take it away. The more you are pushing things off and making excuses, the more you are feeling overburdened and negative.
The book does a better job of explaining it, of course, but that’s the jist.
Vision
Energy
Typo Notes
pg 204: has the word “could” doubled on the second to last paragraph.