Dave Guerra: How to Become a Superperformer

Optimism is essential to maximizing your potential and avoiding a ride on the unemployment train. On “Total Career Success”, Dave Guerra, a business consultant, corporate culture expert and the author of Superperformance, talked about how the right habits, attitude and approach to your job can improve your staying power in the “employed” status by enabling you to become a “superperformer.”

The Habits of a Superperformer

Guerra emphasizes that there is a superperformer inside everyone, and people inherently want to tap into that potential in order to maximize their skills and succeed. Easier said than done. What challenges our capacity to outperform is often the rigid, mechanistic worldview that circulates in our society. According to Guerra, organizations often operate on numbers and statistics and dismiss the human factor, even though the human element is the heart of all business enterprises. “Machine science” traps the passionate, emotional superperformer inside of us and prevents us from maximizing our potential. However, organizations that acknowledge emotions and spirit as integral components of operational success habitually outperform those who overlook the human aspects of individual and organizational performance. These companies recognize the potential in each individual and encourage individuals to tap into it.

So when a mechanistic worldview predominates, how do you go against the grain and awaken your hidden superperformer? Recognize that superperformance is a state of being, so it is constantly moving and never static. Superperformers are always resolving tension and balancing opposites, such as order and disorder, to create circumstances that facilitate performance optimization. Organizations that unite the systems and procedures of process with the passion and spirit of human culture operate like living organisms instead of command-control machines. They recognize that people and organizations need to feel, grow, evolve, connect and self-organize. These organizations focus on managing and controlling work and process, not individuals. Uniting process and culture is Guerra’s simple formula for inspiring superperformance and ensuring an organization’s sustainability. He notes that in superperforming organizations individuals focus on continual improvement, simplicity, self-management and pattern seeking, and leaders strive to develop traits like inspiration, empathy, empowerment, creativity, and integrity.

Superperformance is the Ultimate Leverage in Tough Times

Optimizing your performance at work, especially in tough economic times, gives you leverage in your career and can virtually guarantee that you will not be among those packing up your desk if your company has to lay off anyone. Superperformance is also pivotal in job searches. If you follow an integrated job search method, like The Total System, and outperform every step of the way – from writing your resume and letters to negotiating a job offer – you will catapult yourself far ahead of your competition. Visualize your goals and your strategy for achieving them, keep your resume current and your network active and tap into your success network of family and friends for inspiration along the way. It is easy to become depressed in a depressed economy, but when you opt for optimism you will become more effective as a self-marketer and superperformer.

Employment statistics aside, your inner superperformer is always there, and people of any and all career levels can become superperformers. They rise above negative circumstances and maximize their talents and skills to succeed in job searches, their careers and lives.

For more from Dave Guerra, listen to the entire show below.

To jumpstart your job search and career advancement today, visit www.betterjobbetterlife.org.