Are you living at full capacity?

“People become their habits”, says Vistage speaker Marcus Child. “Whatever they repeatedly do ends up shaping who they become, in terms of what they believe and how capable they are.”

For him, building confidence and self-belief is key to success – both for the individual and for the business they work for. “If you spend your week making good decisions, helping people feel good about themselves, thinking quickly, innovating, trying new things, pushing your boundaries and getting into stretch zones”, he continues, “you might be tired at the end of the week. However, you’ll also be growing your personality, your strengths, your resilience and your resourcefulness.”

It’s this “personal power” that Marcus will be covering in his Vistage event on October 9th. We caught up with Marcus ahead of his session to learn more. 

Increasing your personal power

During his session, Marcus will be sharing a range of tools and techniques designed to allow you to attain and sustain peak performance, set and meet aspirational goals, and to inspire, excite and innovate. 

He’ll be teaching participants about the power of goal-setting – or “destination thinking”, as he calls it. He’ll also be covering tools and techniques that revolve around language and communication. 

“I’m going to speak about the power of having an uplifting self-talk”, he says. “It’s about having a self-enhancing, spirited internal soundtrack. It’s about how you manage the language you use and the suggestions you make to yourself.”

Marcus highlights the notion that if people spoke to their friends the way they spoke to themselves, they wouldn’t have any friends. “People beat themselves up far too much”, he says. “We should be focused on finding new language patterns to enhance our self-esteem, to grow our sense of possibility.”

Using more of your capacity

Over the years, Marcus’ clients have included big names from Coca-Cola to Clarks, Costa to Casio. He asks every single one to build a strategy on a page that will give them the desire, the plan and the numbers they need to make things happen. 

“It’s like running a marathon”, Marcus elaborates. “As soon as you decide you want to do it, you start counting: steps, times at the gym, kilometres run, calories and more. It puts pressure on ourselves but also gives us validation that we’re making progress.”

Similarly, in business, once you start to get faster, better and stronger, this counting enhances the self-talk that you are improving, you are making progress, and you will prevail. 

He cites Gallup research that reveals that, in the UK, just 10% of people are fully engaged. “In other words, 10% of people at work in the UK are rationally and emotionally committed to the business they work in”, he says. “When someone is rationally and emotionally committed you get discretionary effort: they’re putting in extra effort to try new things, just because they can and because they understand the value of innovation. They try to push themselves, because they understand how it’s useful for both the business and themselves.”

Most people, though, are under capacity. Marcus shares wisdom from friends in the Special Forces who he works with. “They say that when you’re absolutely knackered, about to collapse and can’t put another foot forward, that you’re probably at about 60% of capacity and there’s still another 40% you can tap into”, he says. “People tap into that stuff when they’re in trouble, when their family is going through some sort of horror, and don’t understand how they got through it – they surprise themselves.”

Marcus wants people to come to this Vistage event prepared to look for those resources at all times, not just the dark times. “They need to find those resources just because opportunities are there”, he stresses. 

The important thing, though, is to ensure that they have critical mass: that they have enough people in their organisation willing to get closer to full capacity to make a difference. “When you have all these people focused, excited, keen to make a change and just willing to try new things”, he explains, “you have competitive advantage, because you’re playing against many other organisations where the norm is just people coasting through work.”
Those who attend Marcus’ Vistage event, he says, will leave with a greater self-belief, greater ambition and a greater confidence that they can share their learnings and get other people engaged in the same way that they will be. Don’t miss out – register here.

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