12 Skills For Life
You Know The Feeling.
The awareness, in the middle of a workday, sometimes in the quiet of a morning, sometimes at the end of a day that should have meant more than it did, that your talent, time, and attention aren't going where they should.
That feeling has a name.
It is the Performance Gap.
The difference between your peak performance and your daily performance, that is the percentage of your talent going to waste every day. And wasted talent is not a minor inconvenience. It is intensely stressful. It manifests as anxiety, depression, panic attacks, and other symptoms of the disease of despair.
If you are sick and tired of that feeling, you are in the right place.
The Performance Gap is not a character flaw. It is not some cruel twist of fate from which there is no escape. It is a framework problem.
And framework problems have framework solutions.
If you spent the next five years making all of the wrong decisions, wasting your talent every day, what would your life look like?
Now this…
If you spent the next five years making all of the right decisions, shrinking the Performance Gap every day, what would your life look like?
The distance between those two destinies is the Adventure of Your Life, your quest to transform all of your talent into skill and peak performance.
The 12 Skills for Life is the framework that gets you there.
And the ones who use it have a name…
Two Questions.
Take A Moment With Each One.
We Are Warriors.
The ones who are sick and tired of feeling their talent go to waste.
The ones who are ready to pick up the journal, build the schedule, and fight the daily battle against the distractions that are wasting our talent, time, and attention.
Your life is a series of days. Each day is a series of decisions. And every decision begins with a question.
So here is the question:
Who is making your decisions?
If you have never sat down to define your authentic, nonnegotiable priorities, then your decisions are being made by default, by resistance to change, by other people's agendas, by a distraction economy that was engineered to monetize your attention and squander your talent.
We take back ownership of our talent and our attention. One decision at a time. One day at a time.
If you insist on peak performance and refuse to allow any of your talent to go to waste, the Never Surrender Performance Institute is your next step, where the Warrior's Path becomes the Hero's Journey.
What Closing the PerformanceGap Looks Like.
“Chris changed my life. That’s not an exaggeration. Through working with Chris over these last few years, I’ve started and maintained a consistent fitness routine, lost 30 pounds, improved my relationships with my family and community, and I’ve discovered the work I want to do to satisfy and live my life’s mission.
Chris is insightful, pragmatic, relentless, patient, and strategic. He has developed and refined a system that has helped me at each stage on my journey, and I am confident that he can help anyone who has a growth mindset and is interested in living a life aligned with their mission and values. And if you don’t know what your mission and values are, Chris will help you figure that out.
I’ve had a project on the back burner for four years, and by working with Chris and peeling back layer by layer of what I’m doing and why I’m doing it, this project catapulted from a side project that was optional and a ‘nice to have’ into the recognition that this is my life mission and it is a must have. I must pursue this and it was through working with Chris that clarity became evident. I highly recommend Chris and appreciate the work that he continues to do with me.”
Here Is How It Works.
Phase One — The Foundational Framework (Free)
Begin with the Language of Peak Performance. The 12 Skills for Life, the philosophy of Heroism, and the Hero's Journey roadmap, the vocabulary that makes the Performance Gap visible and the framework that begins closing it.
Phase Two — Online Membership ($10/month)
The video lessons that make the framework come alive. Each lesson delivers the elevated perspective that produces more effective behaviors, so the journal and the schedule become the most natural expression of who you are becoming.
Your membership includes a digital download of the 12 Skills for Life Premium Field Manual, a $49 value. The complete journaling strategy, scheduling strategy, 22 flow triggers, 5 intrinsic motivators, and the Heroic Heuristics. The daily practice, the journal that anchors your decisions and the schedule that anchors your actions, that closes the Performance Gap consistently, deliberately, and on demand.
Phase Three — The Complete Decision-Making Framework ($99 digital download)
Build your complete, customized decision-making framework, section by section, question by question, in your own voice and around your own authentic, nonnegotiable priorities. This is where the framework stops being something you understand and becomes something you live.
The Credo To Start Your Day
“The function of man is to live not to exist. I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.”
I will live the Adventure of My Life. I will answer the voice that calls me to be my most authentic, most courageous, most extraordinary self. That means transforming all of my talent into skill and peak performance. It means following my conscience, no matter the obstacle and no matter the sacrifice.
The most valuable resources in my life are my talent, my time, and my attention. I will not waste them, because wasted talent leads to regret, resentment, despair, and destruction. I will devote my time and attention to the optimal expression of my talent.
Through my quest for flow, I will find inspiration, meaning, fulfillment, and the unique contribution I can make to my community. I will complete my quest by developing unshakable faith in myself, audacity in the face of uncertainty, and integrity in the face of temptation and distraction.
Before You Decide.
If “the Adventure of Your Life” and the “quest to transform all of your talent into skill and peak performance” sound like a bit much to you, that’s perfectly fine. Before you make close the page, consider one more thing. Say the Credo the opposite way, and see how that feels.
I refuse to live the Adventure of My Life. I will ignore the voice that calls me to be my most authentic, most courageous, most extraordinary self. I don’t need to develop my talent, because skill and peak performance are stupid.
My talent, time, and attention have no value. I will waste them, because I am immune to regret, resentment, despair, and destruction. The optimal expression of my talent is not only insignificant, it is inconsequential.
Inspiration, meaning, fulfillment, and contribution are for suckers, and I ain’t no sucker. I won’t complete my quest, because I refuse to begin my quest. Faith in myself? Audacity? Integrity? No thank you.
Which credo sounds like the one you want to devote your days to?
Meet the Founder
I'm Chris, a peak performance coach. I hold talented people to the standard their talent demands, then I help them build the skills and tools to hold themselves to that standard.
This work is dedicated to that process.
There are 12 Skills you can train and master to close the Performance Gap, the margin between your daily performance and your peak performance. Master the 12 Skills, and you create the conditions for peak performance in your daily life.
I work with two types of people: those sick and tired of feeling their talent go to waste, and those who insist on peak performance because they refuse to allow any of their talent to go to waste.
In February of 2017, I made the decision to live the Adventure of My Life, after decades of ignoring that call. I spent three decades working in corporate environments, under some of the most recognizable logos in America, watching talented people get captured by cultures that valued their compliance over their performance… and letting the same thing happen to me. Wasted talent led to anxiety, depression, and panic attacks. It took all of that despair, plus a vision of deathbed regret and resentment, to wake me up. I don't recommend waiting that long.
The 12 Skills for Life framework is what I built to change that. I've been living it since 2017, and everything I teach, I've tested in my own life first. That's not a marketing claim. It's the foundation of everything that follows.
My clients learn the Language of Peak Performance, the framework that lets you clearly articulate your authentic, nonnegotiable priorities. It has three parts:
Heroic Philosophy — elevates your understanding of human nature
The 12 Skills for Life — elevate your understanding of the dynamics of peak performance
The Hero's Journey Roadmap — divides the quest to master your craft into 8 manageable steps
Mastering the 12 Skills, and mastering your craft, is a complicated process with an indefinite timeline and an uncertain outcome. Our tools exist to simplify the process, accelerate the timeline, and increase your probability of success.
Foundational tools are free. Premium tools come with membership. Custom coaching is worth every penny.
If you can feel your talent going to waste, if you are tired of the distance between who you are and who you know you could be, you are in the right place.
The framework exists. The community is here. The Adventure is waiting.
The Performance Gap Does Not Close on Its Own.
It closes one decision at a time, one day at a time, through a daily practice that begins with a single question:
How much of your talent do you want access to?
If the answer is “All of it,” start here. It costs nothing.