The Five Factors of Personal Health & Performance
The following is an excerpt from Module 2 of our digital course. Learn more about the full course and get started now.
We use scorecards full of business metrics to track the health and performance of our companies. In the Founders First System, we use the same structure to track and improve our personal health metrics.
I began tracking my personal health metrics daily in 2017. I started by recording information about anxiety, happiness, and seven specific activities that I wanted to test, so I could see if doing them each day would impact my anxiety or happiness levels. Over the first year, my average daily happiness doubled, and my average daily maximum anxiety level decreased by 30%. I discovered that my mood was still subject to peaks and troughs, so I started tracking how high or low it went every day as well. I started tracking my energy level, and eventually determined that it was a leading indicator to my level of happiness. In fact, I learned that my anxiety and excited mood were often responsible for sapping away massive amounts of my energy.
I started to realize that each of these factors worked together. In total, they held all the things that I wanted to protect and represented the ultimate outcomes I wanted to create for myself. Eventually, this became a list of just five things that I needed to track.
These are the five factors of personal health and performance.
I want to introduce each one from left to right.
First, the energy scale. This one’s really simple. It’s just our energy from day to day. What we’re looking to create over time is consistent energy that doesn’t spike and drop repeatedly day after day.
Next is the calm scale. This is the scale of anxiety on one side, down to calm on the other. So, excitement and activation on the far right and calm and relaxed on the left.
The mood scale has to do with our mood from excitement; from high levels of mania when it gets to the highest, all the way down to depressed mood on the other end of the scale.
Identity hours is the time that you’re spending on yourself. These are things that relate to your personal life or your family life, anything that is important to who you are as a person. Things that serve your identities outside of your identity as a professional person and as an entrepreneur.
The happiness scale is really an outcome for all of these. The more we take care of ourselves, the more we protect ourselves, and the more we make sure that we are prioritizing things in our life to protect our health, the more happiness we create for ourselves over time.
Let’s take a couple minutes to inventory ourselves and think about how we’re doing on these scales, and then I’ll share more about how we use the five factors in the Founders First System going forward.
Next is the calm scale. This is the scale of anxiety on one side, down to calm on the other. So, excitement and activation on the far right and calm and relaxed on the left.
The mood scale has to do with our mood from excitement; from high levels of mania when it gets to the highest, all the way down to depressed mood on the other end of the scale.
Identity hours is the time that you’re spending on yourself. These are things that relate to your personal life or your family life, anything that is important to who you are as a person. Things that serve your identities outside of your identity as a professional person and as an entrepreneur.
The happiness scale is really an outcome for all of these. The more we take care of ourselves, the more we protect ourselves, and the more we make sure that we are prioritizing things in our life to protect our health, the more happiness we create for ourselves over time.
Let’s take a couple minutes to inventory ourselves and think about how we’re doing on these scales, and then I’ll share more about how we use the five factors in the Founders First System in our next blog post.
Join the Community
Founders First is a set of evaluation tools that will improve your business by strengthening its most critical asset: You.
Are You An Entrepreneur Struggling with the Personal Impacts of Stress?
Let us show you a revolutionary program that’s transforming the lives of entrepreneurs just like you.
Join the Community
Founders First is a set of evaluation tools that will improve your business by strengthening its most critical asset: You.
Founders Forum is a live show where we talk about mental health in entrepreneurship and how to build resilience to stay stronger, happier, and be more successful.
