THE RULES: Advice for Elite Performers (and their Coaches & Parents)

This is a powerful framework for top achievers who want to become outstanding leaders — on their own terms.

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I’ve helped thousands of Elite Performers (of all ages):

🎯 Find & follow their passions with integrity (in a world often out-of-integrity);

🎯 Tap their hidden inner potential for greatness, anytime they want;

🎯 Be outstanding influences on themselves, others, and the world… on their own terms.


The rules are: I’m going to give no explanations.
Just listen to me.

Great Parents are Great Leaders

The sign of a truly outstanding leader is… they produce other great leaders around them. And the same is true for the best parents.

The most influential leadership role in existence, for better or worse, is that of “Parent.” You have within you the power to guide and persuade.

The point is: Success… and failure… leave clues.

How were the most successful people in the world raised? And is there a pattern?

Put simply: YES!

The pattern is what I call “i3 Leadership Outstanding Outcome Model” — or i3L.O.O.M. (see what I did there?! 😉)

The model follows a blueprint which the most successful people use to navigate through their world creating Win-Win scenarios — they get to win as they make the world around them a better place.

This is true for the greatest leaders in history, as well as the best parents you know. It’s also how they scale to leave their signature mark — a leader who creates other leaders.

The i3 model shows three distinct elements: Integrity, Impact, Influence.

The best leaders (and parents) in the world not only model this framework in their own lives, but they facilitate it in those around them.

More on this below ⬇️!

The Mother & Father of All Success Patterns

Impact

Where Integrity may be defined as “what you do when nobody else is watching,” Impact would follow as “what you do when everybody is watching.”

There are three main qualities of Impact:

  1. “The Zone”

  2. Net Positive Impact

  3. Situational Mastery

First, high impact leaders know how to shine when the stakes are highest, how to get into, and stay in, “The Zone,” “Flow,” “Peak Performance,” otherwise known as states of high efficiency, productiveness, and compound effectiveness. Consistently being in “The Zone” is built on the foundation of Deep Practice and integrity habits, but new qualities and previously unseen competencies begin to emerge as the Elite Performer works to apply those practice habits to higher pressure, real life, big game scenarios. When a person is deeply integrated with their vehicle, they know precisely how to start it up, warm it up, speed it up, slow it down, and shut it down. “The Zone,” then, is a state of consciousness that exists somewhere between unconscious and conscious, and is the result of Deep Practice plunges of the conscious into the subconscious.

Net Positive Impact is the concept that we all have a hidden inner scorecard we measure ourselves against, with the tallies marked as positive, neutral, and negative impact. Some metrics may be moving toward a goal or vision, performing some action(s) within our calling or purpose, minimizing harm, helping others, growth, contribution, etc. Simple, but powerful, and it works hand-in-hand with integrity practices. Did I do the right thing today? Win or lose, did I try my best?

Situational Mastery is the skill set involved with facing our day-to-day challenges with presence and poise. “Flow” expert Dr. Steven Kotler points out that achieving optimal states of performance occurs when we hit a “sweet spot” where we perceive a task to be about 4 percent more difficult than our present skill level. Higher challenge increases anxiety, lower challenge increases boredom, but a slight challenge is the spot where people will give their full attention to the task. This state of full attention stimulates the brain to release dopamine, which goes on to heighten attention and pattern recognition so we may experience accelerated learning.

An important note on the relationship between Integrity and Impact: they both require the embrace of uncertainty — not the rejection of it — as an agent of positive transformation. Action in the face of uncertainty is a hallmark of courageous leaders.

Influence

Influence is leadership; leadership is service. Built on a foundation of Integrity and Impact, the most influential people in history garner the authority and social proof to make the people around them better. A mark of any leader worth his/her salt is that they create high quality leaders around them.

Some years ago I had an opportunity to coach a young hockey player named Michael Valdez. He was perhaps the most gifted defensive forward I have ever worked with, yet he was always worried he wasn’t helping out enough on offense. I assured him he had a bright future, because he was an absolute standout every time he was on the ice, and he cared deeply about taking care of his team and teammates. In fact, I usually put the weakest defensive players on the ice with him, and not only did he not complain about playing with the guys who struggled in the defensive end, he made that line so good I often used them extra when we were holding a lead at the end of tight games against the other teams’ top lines.

Michael didn’t have any idea what a profoundly powerful force he could be, but he put the team first and his servant leadership won us games. He made everyone around him their best — the sign of a true leader. He is now on a full ride scholarship to Colorado College and has made a career out of being the guy you want on your team no matter what his stats say.

Conclusion

When someone finds a passion and pursues it with all their heart and mind, they naturally start to fall into a pattern of:

Integrity ➡️ Impact ➡️ Influence

This pattern can be found anywhere anyone is doing anything with excellence, from calculus to mowing the lawn to winning Stanley Cups.

The power that is revealed through iteration and repetition of this pattern in any domain, and in multiple domains, is the power that fuels history’s most influential leaders: Insight.

Insight is developed in Deep Practice, in between continuously challenging yourself in making positive impact in the world around you. The exercise of transferring your light and leadership to those around you comes with a new ability to refine the complex into the simple. The power of Insight is the same power that makes the impossible, possible. It unifies the person receiving it, and anyone who they can land it with. As human beings we will never know the full truth — but we can have insights which can guide us and bring us to the upper limits of our potential, and maybe even beyond.

After working with Elite Performers and their families closely over the last 25+ years — in high-level hockey, youth sports directing, executive leadership consulting, and as a former Div. I student-athlete myself — this is everything I know to be true:

Authentic Integrity
⬇️ (yields) ⬇️
Positive Impact
⬇️ (yields) ⬇️
Positive Influence

-And-

False Integrity
⬇️ (yields) ⬇️
Neutral/Negative Impact
⬇️ (yields) ⬇️
Neutral/Negative Influence

So, what does this mean?

It means that a person’s level of leadership ability — influence over themselves and others — is a result of their consistent level of integrity and impact.

Integrity

People who are highly successful in any domain — from business to sports to meditation — do the work. They get into the weeds. They allow themselves to set up shop inside that domain, and they live there. They want to understand how things work; they want to live and breathe inside that world so that ultimately, they may understand it, develop themselves inside it, and even transform that world for the better.

There are three critical components for authentic integrity:

  1. Deep Practice

  2. Self-Awareness

  3. Self-Approval

Deep Practice is a term I borrow from The Talent Code, by Dan Coyle. When a young musician can be overheard playing the same nine notes over and over again, because there is a squeak on that ninth note, you’re witnessing Deep Practice. The child will repeat the sequence, stop on the mistake, take a breath, slow down, practice their fingering on the instrument, and repeat until they get it right… and when they do, they have a little moment of celebration with themselves, and then they move on to integrate that sequence into the next one. Deep Practice is slowing down around the part that is out of harmony until we get it right and harmony is created or restored.

Self-Awareness is that part of Deep Practice in which we become conscious that something is off — out of integrity with the rest of the system. We use the power of our conscious mind to investigate the problem, which is usually in some subconscious program or routine. When we locate the flaw, we slow down and address how to best change or smooth out the routine, until we get the desired outcome. Then we integrate the change until it’s smooth, and we move on until we become aware that something else is out of integrity.

Self-Approval is when a person is internally aligned with what they want. They know what outcome they want, and their thoughts, emotions, and actions are in alignment with that outcome — they approve of their inner world as it meets with their outer world. People in integrity — self-approval — don’t need to seek other people’s approval. They already have a sense that they are solid.

False Integrity happens when someone avoids or denies the pain in some area of their life by either muting/suppressing it or distracting their mind from it. We all do this and judging it only adds to the problem. Some examples of this may be overeating, overexercising, overworking, over-screening, etc., to avoid a negative emotion by way of doing things which we know will bring immediate positive emotions. This is almost completely unconscious, save for a moment or two between bites, binges, barbells. But over time, even those positive reward systems will yield diminishing results for the underlying, now growing, problem.

Remember, integrity means “wholeness.” Healthy people with sound mental/emotional structures will naturally come up with the solution for the problems in their lives. Deep Practice, Self-Awareness, and Self-Approval are the mental habits of a person who continuously works to be in integrity, with a sense of wholeness, in an ever-changing world around them.

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“All great things begin on the inside.”

JIM KWIK