High Performance Does Not Mean Giving 100% All the Time

Written by Andrei Costea on October 9, 2026. Posted in Articles, Employee Performance, Organizational Performance

There’s a popular idea about high performance that sounds really good, but it’s actually completely wrong when you look closely: if you want to do your best, you have to do your best.

Every day, every project, every deadline, push harder, stay focused, raise the bar, give 110%. It all sounds so good in theory, and it sounds so disciplined and high-performing and like the mantra of someone who is a cut above the rest.

The rub is that nothing is designed to operate at 100% all day, every day.

Your PC overheats if you leave it at max power for too long
The battery dies if you leave it draining
Your muscles need rest and recovery time
Your motivation needs a boost

Even the most disciplined people have down days, where they aren’t at their best, and their focus and motivation just aren’t there. Yet, somehow, at work, we are often judged as if these aren’t down days. It is almost as if, because you produced your best yesterday, today is no excuse for being less than perfect.

Because you got through that hectic week in May, this week is no excuse to dial things back, and if you’re especially good for a while, people, including yourself, start to expect it to be the norm. We start to expect peak performance, since everything was peak performance for a while. That’s where the rub starts to become really bothersome.

Peak Performance is a Peak, not a Permanent State

We tend to think about performance as a sliding scale. You’re doing 60%, or 80%, or 100%. The more you can push towards 100%, the better.

However, real performance isn’t about getting to 100% and staying there. Some days you can push, sprint, and run at maximum capacity; other days, you need to hold steady, slow down, breathe for a bit, and take stock. It’s a matter of the ebb and flow of performance.

The mistake is seeing peak performance as the maximum and assuming that maximum performance is sustainable. Maximum performance is a peak, just like the name suggests. That doesn’t mean it can’t last long. It just means it can’t last forever.

For example, you may be able to work ten hours straight at an amazingly high level during a crisis, but that doesn’t mean that ten hours of work is now your new standard. You may be able to pull off an amazing presentation after a few nights of poor sleep, but that doesn’t mean sleep deprivation is somehow good for you. You may be able to handle weeks of non-stop deadlines, meetings, and interruptions, but that doesn’t mean your brain can function at peak capacity under those conditions. A peak is valuable, precisely because it’s a peak – it shows you where your ceiling, your upper limit is, when all the conditions are right to achieve it. If everything is a peak, nothing is.

If your company always expects you to have your best week, then eventually your best week will be the week that ruins everything for you. That’s where the myth that high performance comes from high pressure falls apart.

Pressure can create urgency or generate focus. It can help push through challenges when things really matter. What it cannot be is a productivity strategy. It simply doesn’t make for a sustainable workplace. That’s why the research into the effects of work demands and performance is so interesting. Some demanding jobs are energizing when the demands feel meaningful and manageable, but other demands, particularly ones that are unnecessary or obstructive, lead to exhaustion.

That means it’s not a matter of getting rid of all demanding situations, but more so a matter of realizing that more pressure will stop giving you returns at some point. You will eventually reach a point where, instead of pushing you forward, it’s holding you back.

This leads to the problem companies have with high-performance employees: the difference between getting people to work hard and getting people to work beyond sustainable levels. They may look similar on paper, but they’re very different in practice.

Your Workload Is Not a Test of Your Discipline

If performance doesn’t mean operating at 100% all the time, then the next question is obvious:

What is actually getting in the way of sustainable performance?

It is rarely a lack of discipline. It is actually the design of the work required of people.

We tend to measure workload in fairly simple terms: hours worked, deadlines met, tasks completed, targets achieved. That’s the visible part of the workload, but it’s only part of the picture. There is also the invisible workload of constantly deciding what deserves your attention:

Which email needs an answer?
Which meeting matters?
Which project has suddenly become urgent?
Who needs a response?
What can wait?
What did you forget?
What happens if you don’t get to it today?

Additionally, we combine these two parts with the dreaded interruptions: a message arrives while you’re writing, a notification appears while you’re analyzing something, someone asks a “quick question” while you’re trying to solve a complicated problem.

You move from the presentation > email > slack > meeting > presentation.

Technically speaking, you have been working the entire time, but working is not the same as concentrating.

Being Busy Can Look Like Performance

One of the stranger things about modern work is how easy it is to confuse activity with progress.

A full calendar looks productive
A constantly active inbox looks productive
Being available all day looks productive
Answering immediately looks productive
Working late looks productive

None of these things necessarily produce valuable work; in fact, they can make valuable work harder, since deep work requires continuity & focus. Complex problems need enough uninterrupted attention for the brain to build connections, test ideas, build the mental box in which it will work, and hold several pieces of information in mind at once. Every interruption adds another demand on that limited attention, pulling our focus out of the box.

This is why a day filled with meetings, messages, questions, inquiries, and small requests can leave you exhausted without giving you the satisfying feeling that you actually accomplished anything.

You weren’t doing nothing; you were just spending your energy on switching, and switching has a cost. Modern workers often carry several streams of cognitive and emotional work simultaneously while constantly toggling between them. The problem isn’t the number of tasks, but the mental energy required to change priorities and modes of thinking repeatedly.

This is an important difference to keep in mind, because if the problem is workload, the obvious solution is to become more efficient. However, if the problem is fragmented attention, efficiency will not solve it.

You can become extremely efficient at being interrupted. You will still be interrupted.

Your Brain Needs Some Space to Do Its Best Work

This is where deep work becomes more than another productivity trend. If you have important work that requires judgment, creativity, analysis, or sustained concentration, it needs protected space. This isn’t due to some weird ingrained ideas of “fragility”, but because the work itself demands it.

A complicated problem cannot always be solved in the gaps between notifications
A good strategy rarely appears because someone answered 47 emails before lunch
Creative thinking doesn’t necessarily improve when your calendar is full of meetings or bombarded with additional tasks

Sometimes the most productive thing you can do is make yourself temporarily unavailable. That might mean different things to different people: 45 minutes with notifications turned off, a meeting-free morning, closing your inbox while you work on something important, or batching email instead of reacting to it every five minutes.

The exact method matters less than the principle: you don’t have to be available for everyone, every time, all at once.

There is an important detail to add here regarding expectations, because they matter, and every organization differs. Some are better at understanding what expectations are and how to forge them, and some aren’t.

If an organization says it values deep work but rewards instant responses, deep work will lose.
If leaders say people should disconnect but send messages at midnight, people will notice which instruction is real.
If managers say priorities matter but continue adding new priorities without removing old ones, employees eventually learn that everything is urgent.
If an organization says quality matters but consistently rewards whoever delivers fastest, people will learn to optimize for speed.
If leaders say employees are trusted to manage their own workload but constantly monitor when, where, and how they work, autonomy quickly becomes another word for surveillance.

You cannot solve a structural problem with a motivational speech. Actions matter more than words.

When Everything Is Important, Nothing Is Prioritized

Another pressure mechanism hides in plain sight, and is tied to the aforementioned expectations: that people should somehow fit every new demand into the existing workload.

A new client comes in.
- A deadline moves forward.
  - Another meeting is added.
    - A new reporting requirement appears.
      - A project that was already important becomes even more important.

Now what happens to the old work? To the previous task that was the main task up until a moment ago?

Usually, nothing. It simply moves, but not laterally, vertically, or horizontally, but in a list. It gets placed into a list, and it stays there. This creates an impossible equation comprised of 3 variables: more priorities, the same amount of time, and an expectation that performance should remain unchanged.

Eventually, people compensate by extending the workday: they answer messages at night, work through lunch, catch up on weekends, or borrow energy from tomorrow to finish today’s workload.

Since the deadline gets met, the system concludes that the workload was manageable. This is one of the most dangerous feedback loops in high-performance environments, because successful overextension gets mistaken for sustainable capacity.

Example Scenario

Someone stays late and saves the project ➜ the organization learns that the project can be delivered.

Someone answers messages over the weekend and prevents a delay ➜ the organization learns that weekend availability works.

A high performer absorbs three people’s workload for a quarter ➜ the organization learns that one person can apparently handle it.

The same person keeps doing it because they are praised for being “reliable” ➜ exceptional effort becomes part of their reputation.

The next deadline arrives with the same unrealistic timeline ➜ instead of changing the timeline, everyone assumes they will find a way again.

They do ➜ the organization gets another successful outcome and receives even more evidence that the system is working.

The workload quietly becomes the new normal ➜ what was once exceptional is now simply expected.

Eventually, the person starts taking fewer breaks, working longer hours, and recovering less ➜ their available capacity shrinks.

Since they are still delivering ➜ nobody sees a problem.

Until the performance finally drops, and then the story can become: “What happened to them? They used to be so good.”

The individual may even reinforce the story themselves, internalizing it by thinking, “I can handle it.”

Perhaps they can. For now, at least. However, capacity isn’t infinite simply because someone has demonstrated exceptional capacity once.

This is how the vicious cycle reinforces itself: exceptional effort produces a successful outcome, the successful outcome becomes a new expectation, the new expectation requires more exceptional effort, and eventually the effort that once exceeded capacity becomes the baseline.

Sustainable Performance Requires Pacing

Think about almost any activity where performance matters over time. Take sports for example. Sports don’t work by asking an athlete to sprint at maximum speed from the beginning of the season to the end. Their training, recovery, crunch, and competitions all have cycles. Intensity changes according to the objective. So why should work be expected to look identical every day, too?

Some periods will require extraordinary effort for a major launch. There will be periods when a difficult problem demands intense concentration. There will be moments when the right thing really is to push. The problem comes when the exception becomes the operating model.

A crisis becomes the normal workflow.
A deadline becomes the permanent pace.
The “temporary” late nights become less temporary and more like the expected late nights.
The sprint becomes the marathon.
Eventually, people stop recovering between efforts.

That is when pressure stops being useful and starts consuming the very capacity the organization needs. It is also why sustainable performance isn’t about finding a magical level of effort and holding it forever like a dragon’s hoard. It is about pacing effort intelligently, where some days will be stronger than others & some weeks will produce extraordinary output. In contrast, other periods will be quieter or more focused on maintenance, learning, and recovery.

When we witness this type of variation in the workload, it isn’t evidence that performance has disappeared; rather, it is evidence that performance is human. Organizations that understand this can start designing work differently:

Protecting focus rather than glorifying availability
Clarifying priorities rather than continually adding them
Reducing unnecessary meetings and interruptions rather than expecting employees to “manage their time better“
Creating genuine boundaries around communication
Stop treating recovery as something employees earn after they have finished everything, because they will never finish everything

There will always be another email, another project, another target, another thing to improve. If rest only begins when the work is finished, rest never begins, and without recovery, the organization eventually starts spending tomorrow’s performance to pay for today’s output.

The Best Performers Know When to Push and When to Recover

So, if sustainable performance isn’t about 100%, what is?

The answer isn’t as flashy as it seems, or as some gurus would have you believe. In fact, the people who sustain high performance across years are often not the ones who push relentlessly whatsoever.

They can concentrate intensely when the moment calls for it, disengage when concentration is a liability, balance intensely demanding work with more routine work, have a draining week without every week being draining, and, most importantly, know how to quit.

A lot of people are under the (misguided) impression that quitting is the easiest part. As any high performer will tell you, quitting can sometimes be quite uncomfortable, to the point where you feel it physically, for what is otherwise a mental task.

If doing a good job is a part of your identity, having a less useful self feels like falling short. Yet quitting is not true renunciation, but recovery, and recovery isn’t the opposite of performance – it is its enabler.

There are studies about psychological detachment from work, and large-scale reviews show the benefits of switching off from work: better wellbeing and less exhaustion, linked to improved sleep and work performance. Therefore, recovery can come in without depriving you of performance. Conversely, it can add to your performance.

Recovery Has to Be Part of the Design

This is where organizations get it wrong, since they usually tell people to recover when the work is done.

“Take your holiday after the big project.”, “Rest after the deadline.”, “Switch off after being caught up.”, “Take a breather after we’re done here.”

The problem is work is never done, and there is always another project waiting. Consequently, recovery has to play second fiddle to work and has to be seen as an input rather than an output.

Sleep matters, breaks matter, time away from screens matters, a lunch that isn’t dedicated to answering messages matters, an evening where nobody expects a response from you matters, and even having enough space between demanding tasks for a reset before the next one matters. None of that requires turning the workplace into a wellness retreat, just a recognition that people can’t spend attention and energy endlessly without recharging them.

Even small interruptions in the cycle can help and are better than nothing: walks in between meetings, ten minutes of no notifications, a real lunch break, a protected block for focused work, an end to the working day. All of these things seem insignificant compared to a quarterly target, but performance is made up of small conditions that repeat over time.

The same holds for the other direction: small amounts of unmanaged pressure repeated every day ultimately add up to a very large amount of exhaustion.

Boundaries Are a Performance Tool

The boundaries between work and life are often seen as just about employee wellbeing. They are, make no mistake, but they are also about performance. If work follows you everywhere, your working day never really ends. You might not be at your desk, but part of your attention is expecting the next notification.

Did the client reply?
Did the manager send something?
Is there another issue waiting?
Should I check email?

All this background monitoring incurs a cost. This is especially taxing for remote and hybrid work, which can make it harder still to create psychological boundaries between work and everything else.

A simple transition ritual can help: shut the laptop, take a walk, change clothes, leave the workspace, and decide the day is over. The ritual itself is not important (it can be anything feasible for you); the separation is. Then, leaders compound this effect.

If the person at the top sends emails at midnight, people notice. If managers work through every holiday, people notice. If someone tells you “you don’t have to respond tonight” but then follows up ten minutes later asking why nobody has responded yet, people are very aware of it.

Culture isn’t what the handbook says; it’s what people learn they are actually expected to do:

If you want people to recover, make it visible
If you want boundaries, be them yourself
If you want deep work, protect it
If you want sustainable performance, stop rewarding people for secretly extracting energy from them

The Organization Has to Stop Spending Tomorrow’s Performance Today

This is ultimately about more than just the individual. An employee can turn off notifications, plan their day, take a walk, and use a focus block. All of that helps, but no productivity tool can compensate for an organization that continually demands more work than the people can handle.

Too many priorities?
- Someone needs to kill some priorities.
Meetings eat the day?
- Some meetings need to vanish.
Is every request urgent?
- The organization needs to learn what actually is urgent.
Not enough people to do the work?
- The organization needs to address the capacity gap instead of expecting existing employees to absorb it.

When a high performer is carrying the workload of three people, telling them to “manage their stress” or “deal with it” is outsourcing a management problem to the person living it. This is why sustainable performance has to become a work-design issue: leaders need to ask better questions.

It is fine for them to ask “How much did we get done?”, but they should also ask “What did it cost us to get it done? Did the team have time to think? Did quality suffer? Did people stop taking breaks? Did decision-making become rushed? Did employees lose patience with each other? Did everyone finish the quarter exhausted? Can we do this again?”

If the answer is no to such questions, what you achieved might have been impressive, but it wasn’t sustainable performance; it was extraction, much like how we’d rapidly deplete an ore mine by mining 24/7, and then wondering what happened when it dried out.

A team that achieved an extraordinary result and then spent the next three months recovering from it won’t have outperformed a team that delivers strong results repeatedly over time.

The first team might have had a higher peak, but the second has a higher baseline, and that wins out in time.

Final Thoughts

High performance doesn’t require relentless, unmitigated pressure; it doesn’t require maximum effort every day, or people to live permanently at their personal peak. That’s not how humans work. People simply don’t function optimally under such circumstances.

Performance has rhythms; there are peaks and troughs, intensely demanding days and days where recovery is needed, days where the brain is sharp and days where it is not, projects that require everything you have and ordinary days where a steady performance is what good performance looks like.

The goal isn’t to remove those fluctuations, but to work with them rather than pretending they don’t exist. That means realistic workloads, protecting attention, reducing unnecessary interruptions, creating space for deep work, setting expectations, making boundaries real, and recovering to enable future performance.

For leaders, it also means resisting a tempting but dangerous equation: more pressure equals more output. Sometimes it does, until it doesn’t. Until someone breaks and the pieces can no longer be put back together, which is how you can easily lose a star employee.

The organization that continually pushes its people towards maximum capacity might win impressive numbers for a while, but the costs will eventually appear elsewhere: poorer decisions, weaker relationships, lower creativity, disengagement, turnover, and exhaustion.

The smarter question isn’t “how do we get everyone to perform at 100%,” but “how do we create the conditions in which people can perform well, recover, and do it again tomorrow?“

A 100% effort might win a sprint, but business is rarely a sprint, and sustainable excellence doesn’t come from staying at the peak but knowing when to climb, when to push, when to slow down, and most importantly, when to recover so you can climb again.

How To Engage Your Emotional Intelligence To Adapt To Different Work Environments

Written by Contributor on November 14, 2022. Posted in Articles, Personal performance

Image Source: Pexels | ROMAN ODINTSOV

Editor’s Note: This article is written by Justine McGrath, ProACTive Coaching’s owner and EBW System assessment and training facilitator. “How To Engage Your Emotional Intelligence To Adapt To Different Work Environments” is originally published in the 23rd PERFORMANCE Magazine – Printed Edition.

In 2020 the world of work changed forever. Companies with adaptable managers and leaders survived and, in some cases, thrived. Those who didn’t suffered.

In a survey done by the Whitaker Institute at NUI Galway in 2022, a staggering 95% of respondents said working remotely makes life easier. Thirty percent of respondents said they would change job – even if it meant taking a pay cut — if their employers did not take into account their remote working preferences.

It was not all plain sailing for those working from home. It only took a few weeks before we saw the toll it was taking on some, as the lines blurred between work and home. For working parents, having to balance your job with trying to homeschool was extremely challenging.

There are emotional challenges for employees with all three types of working. According to a Microsoft Report in 2021, 54% of remote workers feel overworked and 39% feel exhausted. Zoom Fatigue is also a factor with many meetings running consecutively.

For those who have returned to the office full time, the daily commute is a reminder of a way of life they would rather avoid every day. Employees have to grapple with higher levels of stress, and this affects their ability to regulate their emotions.

Emotional Intelligence is the ability to understand how our emotions and behaviours impact firstly on ourselves and then on others. In order to adapt to these new ways of working, employees need to be aware of how to best manage their emotions to ensure they can continue to perform at their best.

How Leaders Build Trust and Accountability

Employers need two traits if they want their team to adapt to new ways of working: trust and accountability. This is especially important if you have certain people in the team working from home and some in the office. Employees need to feel they are part of the team and have a shared sense of responsibility. This gives them a sense of autonomy, which builds trust.

Psychological safety is paramount. Give people an opportunity to air their views, grievances, and fears. Managers may see this as a threat to their role or as being too soft, whereas nothing could be further from the truth.

You need to be aware of what will enable peak performance from your employees. If you want to ensure success in the workplace, building trust and accountability is essential.

To build trust and accountability, develop your self-awareness. How? Understand your style of leadership and whether or not it is effective. Get regular feedback from a trusted source.

Self-regulation is how you manage yourself in the workplace. It is vital to understand your own emotions and behaviors so that you can adapt and improve where necessary. Do you have any blind spots in this area? How do people respond to you? This is the intrapersonal aspect of EI – managing the self.

When it comes to managing others – the interpersonal aspect of EI – social awareness is key. Who are the best communicators in your team? Is there someone who is struggling and could use a little empathy right now? Put yourself in their situation and see it from their point of view. Using EI to deal with your own emotions and behaviors and to understand those of others will propel you from a good leader to an excellent one.

Emotional Intelligence for Employees

In the same way that the manager or leader has to be fully aware of how their emotions and behaviors impact both themselves and others, the same holds true for any employee.

This is particularly important if they are feeling apprehensive about the options available in the workplace. They need to feel safe to voice their concerns.

The most important aspect of developing self-awareness is understanding what it is about your job that motivates you. If going back to the office de-motivates you, why is that? Could you express those issues/concerns to your manager? If you are going to move to a hybrid work model, have you prepared yourself mentally for that change? What are the advantages and disadvantages, and how do they affect you?

Image Source: ebw.online.com | Business Emotional Intelligence

EBW model of Business Emotional Intelligence is about the ability to use your intrapersonal and interpersonal intelligence to focus on the critical emotions and underlying behavioural traits that predict occupational performance.

Be Proactive

Any good manager will appreciate an employee who takes the initiative on issues that arise. Try to find a potential solution before you talk to management. It’s about building trust, communicating openly, and not being afraid to stand up for what you need.

Get yourself into the right mindset. If there are obstacles in your way or you feel unsupported, how could you change that?

Being aware of both the intrapersonal traits and the interpersonal traits of EI will enhance your career prospects. Use self-awareness to take your own personal audit of how the new way of working is going to affect you. Use social awareness to see if it will impact how you relate to both your manager and your colleagues to ensure clear communication going forward.

To conclude, both employers and employees need to take stock at this time of change. If we can develop our EI to communicate clearly, build trust and accountability, and nurture both the self and each other, the future looks bright.

About the author

Justine McGrath is an executive coach and trainer who specializes in Emotional Intelligence. She is the owner of ProACTive Coaching and is a facilitator of the EBW System of assessments and training.

Remote Work Employees: How to Monitor Productivity at Home

Written by Andreea Vintila on June 3, 2022. Posted in Articles, Personal performance

Image Source: Burst | Pexels

People have been working from home even before the pandemic, but their number significantly increased when the health crisis led to lockdowns and travel restrictions. Companies were forced to send their employees home to work remotely to comply with social distancing measures and keep the workforce healthy. Statista shows that before the pandemic, only 17% of US employees worked remotely for five days or more weekly. However, the number grew to 44% during the outbreak in 2020.

When the pandemic subsided and governments eased travel restrictions, some companies asked their workforce to return to the office while others offered the hybrid set-up. However, most employees still prefer remote work.

A poll conducted by Pew Research Center with 5,889 workers in America in January 2022 found that 61% of those who work from home said they avoid going to work by choice and 38% claim their office is closed. It represents a shift from October 2020, when 64% of people worked from home because their office was closed and 36% did so voluntarily.

In spite of that, 50% of leaders in information worker roles want to pursue getting employees back to the office full-time next year, based on Microsoft’s Work Trend Index 2022 report. Still, 52% of respondents say they highly consider becoming remote or hybrid in the year ahead and 80% claim that since remote or hybrid work arrangements were implemented, their productivity has increased.

How Remote Workers Can Be More Productive

According to the popular job site Flexjobs, one of the benefits of working from home is it increases “productivity and performance” as employees encounter fewer interruptions, have a quieter work environment, and have increased workplace comfort, resulting in more focused time.

In a research conducted in Latin America, they explored the relationship between remote work, work stress, and work-life during pandemic times. Researchers found out that by having flexible work schedules, the employees’ engagement and productivity levels increased because they could work at their most productive time. Privacy also plays a big role in employees’ efficiency. However, the productivity level is negatively affected when the worker is constantly interrupted by children or adults that need assistance.

A case study published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine investigated the impact of family-work conflict, social isolation, distracting environment, job autonomy, and self-leadership on employees’ productiveness, work engagement, and stress experienced when working from home during the pandemic. The authors discovered that excellent self-leadership skills and autonomy positively impact the time assessment in a WFH scenario.

Results from a qualitative study by Danielle Tinneveld of Radboud University also show that productivity tracking facilitates the identification of process bottlenecks. The affected staff gets less anxious and annoyed when these difficulties are resolved, and overall production efficiency improves.

How Employees Can Track Their Productivity at Home

On a remote workday, people have to manage work and non-work-related tasks. To be productive, they have to master the art of time planning. Effective time management involves planning each activity in a time frame, considering priorities such as urgent work tasks and eating breaks. Individuals should fit their activities into 16 hours to get 8 hours of sleep each day to achieve great productivity. By monitoring the duration of their tasks, they can observe which actions can be improved.

To see if their time management strategy is effective, remote workers can use key performance indicators (KPIs). Some KPIs they can consider are:

% To do list tasks achieved as planned
% Time spent working
% Time spent walking
% Time spent relaxing
% Time spent reading (non-work)
% Time spent preparing food
% Time spent eating
% Time spent doing housework

By monitoring the percentage of tasks performed as planned, individuals can see if they reached their target or not. By knowing the percentage of time spent working, people have insights into the free time left for non-work-related tasks, such as going on a walk, relaxing, cooking, eating, and other housework activities (washing clothes and dishes, drying clothes, cleaning floors).

It’s a different story for employees whose companies have return-to-office schemes. Their organizations should rethink their performance management system to consider the new ways of working that employees gained during the pandemic. Evaluating the relevance of KPIs has become important now more than ever. To better understand KPIs, its nature, characteristics, and implementation, enroll now to The KPI Institute’s Certified KPI Professional and Practitioner course.

Exploring Self-Love: Affection Towards Self Before Others

Written by Syadza Andini on February 14, 2022. Posted in Articles, Personal performance

Image Source: Content Pixie | Unsplash

People are more inclined to be open to expressing love during special occasions like Valentine’s day. Normally associated with romantic love, others celebrate the day by showing affection towards their family and friends. Ideally, people should not wait for a special occasion or event to show love. It is good to express your feelings to your loved ones, but it is also important to practice self-love, too. After all, you can only love someone as much as you love yourself.

“Self-love” is a term that’s been thrown around, but most are not aware of what it really means. People have the misconception that practicing self-love means treating themselves to nice things, but it’s not just that; everything about ourselves grows from a foundation of self-love. It stems from many acts of love we do for ourselves that promote our physical, psychological, and spiritual development, as well as our happiness and wellness. This, in turn, is also an act of kindness toward others since the practice of loving oneself helps to love others in the same manner.

The importance and practice of self-love

Self-love is critical in life because it influences a person’s decision on the people they surround themselves with, the way they present themselves publicly, how they deal with challenges in life, and their overall lifestyle. It provides self-assurance and confidence in every decision or choice that an individual would have. It also brings happiness and tranquillity, helping one to avoid toxic relationships and choose someone who sees and respects them for who they are instead.

Self-love is a fluid concept. It develops as a result of an individual’s actions, guiding them to make choices that foster their wellbeing and serve them in life. Similar to how people express love to one another, there’s no need to wait for a day like Valentine’s Day to do some self-love. Here are a few things you can try to explore and practice self-love every day.

Be mindful. Your thoughts, feelings, and desires influence how you act and behave toward yourself and others. Try to pay more attention to what you’re thinking and how you feel in a certain situation and how you react based on those thoughts and feelings. People with self-love are more aware of these factors and act on this knowledge rather than on what others expect from them.
Focus on your needs rather than your wants. The key to happiness is realizing your physical, emotional, interpersonal, and spiritual needs. Be sentient of what is essential and necessary for you compared to what you would like to have but do not really need. Make a self-assessment to figure out what you need in each aspect of your life and distinguish that from what you think you want.
Practicing self-care. Once a person learns how to take better care of their basic needs, that is when they will start to love themselves more. People who have a high level of self-love nurture themselves on a daily basis by engaging in healthy activities such as good eating, exercise, adequate sleep, intimacy, and positive social connections.
Set boundaries. Learn how to say no to things that can possibly deplete or damage you physically, emotionally, spiritually, or even negatively impact your character. This may include taking part in activities that you do not like, hanging out with people who do not respect you, working for a job that you hate, or simply rejecting someone’s affection that you know you cannot reciprocate. Setting these limits will help you protect and love yourself more in the long run.
Schedule a “me time” session. Regardless of your relationship status – single, in a relationship, engaged, or married – it is important to still make time for yourself to do the activities you enjoy. This will allow you to appreciate the things you enjoy alone and love yourself better.
Forgive yourself. Taking responsibility for your actions has the possible drawback of making you unforgiving yourself. People punish themselves far too hard for the mistakes they make as they grow and learn. Accepting your limitations and being kinder to yourself when making a mistake is a good habit to develop. Remember, there are no failures in mistakes, only lessons learned.

Practicing self-love might not be as easy as it sounds. Begin by treating yourself with kindness, patience, gentleness, and compassion, just as you would someone you care about. Make an effort to work on it on a regular basis. Over time, this will help change your ability to accept and love yourself.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Intelligence

Written by jesika.juliana on February 10, 2022. Posted in Articles, Personal performance

Photo Source: Carlos Esteves | Unsplash

Do you know someone who has high intelligence but seems to always make bad decisions? Maybe you felt some insecurity towards a colleague that seems smarter and it makes you wonder if you are smart enough to do the same task as they are doing. You probably have heard of the terms “book smart” and “street smart”, but you are not sure how to label yourself between those two types. People usually associate intelligence with having a high IQ score, but what does it mean?

Defining what intelligence is

To understand the meaning of intelligence, we must first grasp what it is. From the time of Greek philosophers to the time of psychologists and neuroscientists, the notion of intelligence has been regularly challenged. For example, Plato defined it as the desire to study and the eagerness in finding truth. Thomas Hobbes had a different idea, defining it as having a quick mind with the capacity to understand similarities and contrasts between comparable objects.

Alfred Binet created the standardized intelligence evaluation or the Intelligence Quotient (IQ) test, a tool that is still extensively utilized today. Concentration, memory, reasoning, abstraction, and the ability to cope well with the world are all included in Binet’s aspects of it. David Wechsler also believed that it is a person’s ability to act purposefully, think reasonably, and react efficiently with their surroundings.

Research about intelligence and how it is developed is still a point of discussion today. Currently, intelligence has no absolute definition; instead, it is an abstract construct with multiple aspects. Two people can be described as having a high intelligence yet share relatively few characteristics, they might resemble the parameters of intelligence among various definitions.

Categories of intelligence

According to Howard Gardner, the founder of the theory on multiple intelligence, there are eight types of intelligence:

Verbal-linguistic intelligence refers to a person’s skill to communicate through words and languages.
Logical-mathematical intelligence indicates a person’s ability to sense, recognize abstract patterns, and perform numerical computations.
Spatial intelligence is attributed to how well a person can imagine an object well and retain a visual recollection.
Body kinesthetic intelligence specifies the athletic capabilities of a person.
Musical intelligence is a person’s sensitivity towards sounds and having the ability to perceive and produce patterns of rhythm
Natural intelligence is attributed to a person’s sensitivity towards nature.
Interpersonal intelligence is defined as an individual’s awareness of the emotions of others and their capacity to function as part of a team.
intrapersonal intelligence points to a person’s self-awareness and competence in comprehending their feelings, goals, and intentions.

Meanwhile, Cattell has a different way of categorizing intelligence, dividing it into two categories:

Fluid intelligence refers to the ability to solve abstract problems in novel situations.
Crystallized intelligence represents knowledge and skills acquired through education and experience.

With these two, he believes that humans can develop crystallized intelligence through practice and experience of fluid intelligence.

Does the IQ Test work?

After knowing that the definition of intelligence is not absolute and there are many types to it, you might be wondering whether the IQ test being used today really measures intelligence. Maybe you know someone that has an erratic way of thinking or behaving despite having a high IQ score. A general myth that is widespread in society is that IQ scores express a fixed score of inherited brilliance. In reality, an IQ score is simply a measurement of how well a person can do certain tasks at a certain time in comparison with other people of the same age.

It might measure convergent thinking or academic intelligence which is usually associated with “book smart”, however, it does not go hand-in-hand with other essential aspects of “street smart” such as creativity, adaptability, tacit knowledge, and social skills. It only measures three categories in the theory of multiple intelligences. Therefore, IQ testing might measure intelligence, but the IQ score does not necessarily guarantee success in everyday life.

Enhancing your intelligence

Even though intelligence is a widely abstract concept, you can enhance your intelligence. Typically, environmental factors that may enhance your intelligence include having a good circle of people around you such as family and mentors. There is also a range of noncognitive or affective factors that can play a part in this such as motivation, persistence, attitude, self-concept, confidence, and personal values.

Based on those factors, there are a few ways you can enhance your intelligence. First, you can enhance your intelligence through instruction which can be done within an academic or corporate setting, as well as through forums, workshops, and other instructional training available. You can do certain activities that can give you a mental workout like reading, playing games like sudoku or chess, and enrolling in a program based on your interest. Another way you could enhance your intelligence is by doing proper physical self-care like having a balanced diet, doing daily physical exercise, and practicing meditation.

While intelligence is an abstract concept, it is something that everyone can improve on. One secret of increasing intelligence is to embrace your limitations. Do not beat yourself up and try to accept your strengths and flaws while actively training your brain; this way, you may develop a growth mindset, have confidence, and enhance better personal values which are extremely valuable in life.