How to Build High Performance From a Place of Ease

Flow isn’t a feeling — it’s a skill.

In this episode, I coach a high-achieving entrepreneur to rebuild ease in his work.
You’ll learn why performance dips before mastery, and how relaxing on purpose can actually make you more productive.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
If you're struggling to get in touch with this elusive
thing people call flow, then congratulations, you're like just about
everybody else. This is a coaching session with somebody who
is extremely high achieving. But the harder they work, the
more rigid they get. If you'd like to become more
competent and relaxed at the same time, then watch this
video because this is how you create ease. First of all,

(00:20):
I love it when somebody comes on a call and says,
so I'm trying to do a thing and it seems
that I value it, but I'm not doing it because
that's so realistic. Thank you for the evidence based approach.
That's a good place to start. Okay, So, being and

(00:41):
flow or being in a more relaxed state of being
well working, is a skill. It's not a woo woo
concept of I'm going to have a different mindset and
all of a sudden, I'm going to be chill about everything.
It's literally just a skill that you can develop. And
so if we understand that, then we need to start

(01:04):
with what happens anytime you decide to introduce a skill
into what you're doing. Because there's a set of things
that happen when you try to learn a skill. And
the first thing that happens anytime you try to learn
a skill is your performance drops. And this is one
of the hardest things for high performers when they try

(01:25):
to work on getting in flow or being more relaxed
while they're working, is they try it and then they
get worse results. Oh well, they say, I should be relaxed.
And you know somebody who's masterful at something, they're always
in flow. But here I try to relax, and then
my performance drops. And so you're relaxing and then your

(01:46):
performance is going down and you're going, well, not that,
and then you're putting yourself in fight or flight or
getting yourself stressed again, and then pushing the big red
button to make yourself work harder, and then you're getting
a result and then you're like, well that worked. The
first thing in skill development usually is you have to
learn a thing right. And so if you, for example,

(02:09):
don't know what relaxed feels like, then you first have
to just know what it feels like. So let's talk
about how to develop the skill. So if I want
to learn how to flip a pen with my fingers,
and I'm not that good at it, but you know
the Jack Sparrow Pirates of the Caribbean, you know, like

(02:30):
that thing. If I want to get really good at it,
So first I have to learn how to manipulate the
pen across each finger. And in the process of doing this,
I'm going to tense my muscles because I don't know

(02:51):
where things are going, right, and so I don't want
it to fall out of my hand. So I'm pinching
it right, I'm pinching it, and then I'm I'm flexing
this next finger, and then I'm, you know, very careful.
I'm pretty tight right here as I'm turning it around
because I don't know how much pressure is needed, and

(03:13):
so every movement is tension. But if I want to
flip it nicely, which like, I can only do it
so nice because I haven't, you know, spent a lot
of time practicing it, but I can get it some
of the way. I actually have to let go of
my muscles and practice moving it as far as I
can and letting it kind of mess up. So I'm

(03:37):
first carefully manipulating it to see if it works. But
then I'm going, Okay, what happens if I just flick
it on those first couple of fingers. Where do I
get to? Oh, okay, I can kind of get it
through the first two fingers pretty loosely, but then I

(03:57):
kind of fall apart, and so I to figure out
what to do there. Okay, so maybe if i'd just
oh no, I realized I needed a downward motion with
my pinky at the last moment, but I tied it
too too slow. Okay, that was about right. I'm already
starting to train in a little bit more naturalness with it,

(04:19):
and you see there's this like little awkward bit right here.
But you know, if I were to then practice, then
what I would have to do is I'd have to
practice going across these two fingers is with as loose
a grip as possible, and I wouldn't be able to
win by tightening my fingers. I just couldn't. I couldn't
do it. I would have to like, Okay, let me

(04:39):
learn how to flick this really really loosely. Let me
learn how to flick this really really loosely. And then
if I did this, you know, for another hour, I'd
start to learn how to flip a pen fluidly. Another
analogy for this is I was a violent teacher, and
when I taught my violin students, they would always learn

(05:02):
the violin wrong because there's too many variables. And so
one of the first steps to learning the violin is
probably doing something wrong right. Because the goal at the
beginning is to keep child in violin lessons, which means
they need to not have the worst time ever, which

(05:23):
means they need to make a sound the first day.
And for them to make a sound the first day,
they need to do twenty things imperfectly right. And so
one of the first things a child does when they
learn the violin is they learn it wrong, and so
they start to develop some skills. They learn to play
some notes without scratching, they learn to play some notes

(05:47):
in the correct pitch. But if they're going to become
really good at the violin, they then need to like
unlearn those bad habits and learn new habits that are better.
And in order for them to do that, they have
to sound, because they gain a degree of competence doing
the thing that they started with right. And so a

(06:09):
typical one is a child will learn to play the
violin with a wrist that looks like this. They'll hold
the violin kind of like that with a bent wrist. Well,
this feels better because it feels more secure because you
know your parents gave you an expensive violin and said
you're grounded for twenty one weeks if you you know

(06:32):
chip it, and so you want to be careful with
the thing, and it just feels more secure in general.
But the thing is is, now all of your tendons
are super tight, and so if you are to imagine
that your fingers are puppet strings, all of the puppet
strings are kinked, and so you can't move as fast
like this as you can like this, And so a

(06:54):
violinist has to learn to go from here to here, right.
But the thing is is, if you you've learned anything
like this, the moment you go like this, all of
it's wrong and you're going to sound terrible. And so
I would tell my students to sound terrible. I would say,
I want you to follow this specific technique, and it's

(07:17):
going to sound bad, and I want you to do
it because learning this technique is more important than sounding
good in the moment. So if you want to learn
to be and flow while you're at work, if you
want to learn a more relaxed state of being while
being productive. You're actually going to have to be willing

(07:38):
to allow your productivity to decrease temporarily. It doesn't mean
it has to decrease across the board. You can actually
practice this in ten minute sprints. What you can do
is you can practice going, Okay, I'm going to do
a bunch of breath work. I'm going to relax on
a walk for twenty minutes or do whatever the things

(07:59):
are that down regulate me and chill me out. And
then I'm going to a lot ten to twenty minutes
to work where my primary KPI is my state of
being as opposed to my output, which means I then
need to practice doing output while monitoring my state. And

(08:25):
so I'm gonna practice. I'm going to be writing an article,
but if I notice my shoulders titan in response to
a creative thought that I'm trying to get out, I
have to be willing to let go of the creative
thought in order to loosen my shoulders. And I'm doing
this sort of on faith because people told me that

(08:51):
more relaxed humans often can get more done. And I'm
going to temporarily for this, you know, twenty minutes I'm
gonna loosen my shoulders first, let out a sigh, not
worry about the fact that I forgot the creative thought
that I was thinking. Then I'm going to get back
into my body, and then I'm going to think, oh,
what did I really want to think about? And then

(09:14):
maybe you'll think it again, maybe you won't. But if
you keep doing this and you develop this skill, those
creative ideas will actually improve over time because you will
start to tap into the mind body state of creativity
rather than the simple mind state of creativity. Most entrepreneurs

(09:39):
struggle to implement this at the beginning because they have
very clear evidence that every time they relax, they get
the exact opposite of the result that they want. But
when you see the logic behind it, and you see
that it's simply a longer game, and you understand that

(09:59):
it is how you get what you want, and the
way to get what you want requires temporary reduction and performance,
all of a sudden, most people in your shoes are
more than willing to do that because now they see
the point, and now it's simply an exercise. If you'd
like to achieve more balance in your life and get
more ease and accomplishment at the same time. Go to

(10:22):
apply dot Josh cherryplays dot com, or go to the
link below.