Four anchors for peak performance and lasting fulfilment – by learning how to meet any moment with clarity, and grow through it.
If you’re like most high performers I work with, you’ve built a successful career by constantly raising the bar. You’re driven, resilient, and ambitious. But there’s a hidden cost that often comes with that: a sense of restlessness, overidentification with outcomes, and the pressure to be unshakeable in every situation.
Even the most capable people at work are feeling it – the constant pressure, the endless noise, the creeping sense that they’re succeeding on the outside… but losing something on the inside. They’re reacting fast, delivering results, keeping up appearances – but inside, it’s foggy. Draining. Disconnected.
Through my personal journey, and my work with high performers and leaders, I can assure you there’s a better way to work – and live.
So, how do you keep growing – faster, deeper, and more effectively – without sacrificing your sense of peace, clarity, and contentment?
That’s where The Four Unlocks come in.
These are four simple, powerful mindset shifts that act like anchors in the moments that matter most. They’re not lofty ideals or abstract concepts. They’re practical mental postures you can use to meet real-world challenges – feedback, pressure, comparison, failure, change – with the kind of clarity and steadiness that lets you grow through them.
But these Unlocks don’t come from motivational theory or positive thinking. They rest on two timeless truths you can observe in your own experience – not as blind beliefs, but as realities you can learn to see for yourself.
Observable Truth #1: Everything Is Always Changing
Nothing stays fixed. Not your thoughts. Not your body. Not your emotions. Not your role. Not your relationships. Even your sense of self is shifting – just think of the version of you from last year, last month, or even five minutes ago. That version doesn’t exist anymore.
And it’s not just you. Everything is changing. Mountains are constantly changing shape. The ocean is moving, along with continents. Even the building you’re in – if left alone long enough – would crack, dry out, and turn to dust.
Every object in your environment is in quiet motion. Nothing is exempt. Change isn’t a disruption to the system – it is the system.
This is why you’re not a fixed self in the middle of a shifting world. You are that shifting world too. You’re not separate from it. The universe is always changing and you are something the universe is doing – just as waves are something the ocean is doing. When you start to see yourself and others this way, the idea of being “stuck” no longer makes sense. You’re in motion. You always have been.
Observable Truth #2: Nothing Arises in Isolation – Everything is Interconnected
Nothing arises on its own. Not a single moment in your day, not a thought, not a decision, not a slip of the tongue or stroke of brilliance. Every single thing that happens is the result of countless threads weaving together. You didn’t just wake up frustrated or inspired or tired. That moment was shaped by the meal you ate, the tone of an email, the story you’re telling yourself, the weather, the week before, the year before. It’s all in the mix.
And it doesn’t stop with us. Everything in the world is “co-arising”. Trees don’t grow in isolation. Rain needs clouds, and clouds need heat, and heat needs sunlight. Markets shift because of psychology and history and algorithms and fear. Even an executive’s angry tone in a meeting is the tip of an iceberg stemming from stress, historic conditioning, culture, and constraints.
We tend to look for causes like a detective looking for a single culprit. But life isn’t linear like that. It’s more like an ecosystem or a jazz ensemble. Things don’t happen alone. They happen together.
The Four Unlocks
When you begin to live in contact with these two observable truths, not just intellectually, but viscerally, a shift begins. The Four Unlocks are how that shift shows up.
What follows is a practical introduction to the Four Unlocks – each rooted in the two timeless truths we explored above. At the end, you’ll also find a method for putting them into practice in your everyday work and life.
Unlock #1: Take Nothing Personally
People’s perception is theirs – shaped by causes we don’t know or control.
In high-performance environments, people often mistake feedback or tension for a personal attack. An executive I’m currently coaching used to freeze every time his CEO challenged an idea. He took it as a judgement of his worth. But over time, he’s begun to zoom out and see the wider system. That moment wasn’t born in isolation. The CEO’s sharp tone had roots – perceptions from previous experiences, pressure from the board, the market, an urgent deadline, even a sleepless night.
Why this works: When you start to experience how nothing arises in isolation, you loosen your grip on taking things personally. You realise that most of what others say or do is a reflection of them, not a definition of you. That doesn’t mean you’re unaffected. It means you’re not the cause. Anchoring in this truth, you stop defending your identity and start responding with composure.
Unlock #2: Work With What Is
Every moment arises out of more than we can see – hold space with presence, not resistance.
Halfway through a team culture programme for an Exco in the finance sector, the COO told me, “This quarter was a mess. It wasn’t meant to unfold like this.” He was stuck in a loop of frustration, unable to access the clarity he needed to respond. But here’s the shift that changed everything: the moment he stopped demanding that reality match his expectation, he started seeing what was in front of him – and what was possible from there.
Why this works: This Unlock builds on the realisation that every moment is the result of an ocean of causes and conditions. When you resist the present, you’re resisting reality itself. But when you see it clearly – not as a mistake, but as the next starting point – you gain your power back.
Like a skilled sailor adjusting to the wind rather than shouting at it – or a seasoned golfer switching clubs when the wind carries the ball off course – you don’t resist the moment. You work with it.
Unlock #3: Focus on Effort and Method
Our performance doesn’t define us – it reflects our input, which grows with practice.
In performance reviews, I see this often: people collapse their identity into their results. But performance is just a reflection of input – effort, method, environment, timing.
After delivering a keynote on growth mindset at a conference, a senior leader approached me for a chat. She shared how she had spent years asking herself, “Am I good enough?” But everything changed when she began asking, “What can I improve in my approach?” Her results improved – and so did her sleep.
Why this works: When you grasp that everything is always changing (including you), you realise your skills, mindset, and approach aren’t set in stone – they’re evolving.
And when you understand that nothing arises in isolation, you stop mistaking the result for a verdict on your worth. Results are shaped by context. What you can shape – and grow – is your input. That’s where your power is. This is the true essence of a growth mindset.
Unlock #4: Let This Moment Be Enough
This moment couldn’t be otherwise – wanting it different obscures our inner peace.
Many high performers I work with carry a subtle ache – a feeling that this isn’t quite it yet. There’s always another milestone, another metric, another version of success, another version of who you should be. But what if the sense that something is missing is the very thing obscuring the fulfilment and wholeness already present?
So many executives I work with speak of a persistent restlessness – even in moments that should have felt like victories. Towards the end of one programme, a CFO described a shift he had experienced. It came when he stopped seeing the moment as a stepping stone to somewhere else, and instead recognised it as the living result of everything that had come before. He realised: this moment couldn’t be otherwise. There was nothing more to crave, and nothing to resist. His ambition became rooted in peace.
Why this works: This Unlock is the synthesis of both truths. When you see that everything is always changing, the suffering that comes from clinging to the impermanent begins to fall away. And when you see that nothing arises in isolation, you stop blaming. From that place, the need for the moment to be something else begins to dissolve.
This Unlock also embraces a somewhat paradox of growth: you don’t need to reject where you are to evolve. Growth doesn’t need to come from a sense of lack – it can emerge from a sense of alignment. Just as a tree grows taller not because it’s inadequate, but because it’s in season, you can evolve not because you are broken, but because you are alive. Growth, when it comes from this place of clarity, isn’t frantic striving – it’s a natural unfolding. It’s not a desperate pursuit of wholeness. It’s what wholeness looks like in motion.
Performance and Peace
Each of these Four Unlocks is an empowering response to reality – not as you wish it were, but as it is. They are not theories. They’re tools. They’re how you grow fast and stay anchored, how you perform at your best without losing yourself.
And when you practise them, your growth stops feeling like strain. It starts to feel like alignment.
A Simple Way to Remember the Four Unlocks
Think of them as the 4 Ps:
- Personal – Take nothing personally, because nothing arises in isolation.
- Presence – Work with what is, not against it.
- Practice – Your performance reflects your input, which grows with method and effort.
- Peace – Let this moment be enough; inner peace is already available when you stop resisting what is and see how everything’s already whole.
This simple mental anchor makes it easier to remember and apply each Unlock when it matters most.
Turning Insight into Embodiment
Concepts are not enough to create lasting change. It’s one thing to understand an idea in theory – and something else entirely to embody it.
Our science-backed Mindset Training Exercises (MTEs) bridge that gap. These are immersive, guided audio experiences designed to help you directly perceive the two observable truths and practise each of the Four Unlocks in real time.
Through practice, they stop being concepts and start becoming your natural reflexes – so that, under pressure, in uncertainty, when it counts most – you respond from clarity, grow with intention, and live with peace that endures, even as you keep rising.
If you’d like to go deeper into this practice, reach out. This is the inner foundation that sustains outer performance.
Remember – you’re not stuck. You’re just one mindset unlock away.
