Elevate: Push Beyond Your Limits and Unlock Success in Yourself and Others

The book review for this week is Elevate by Robert Glazer

Robert Glazer is a serial entrepreneur who has founded a number of businesses including Acceleration Partners and Brand Cycle. One of his secrets to success is his passion for helping individuals and organizations build their capacity to continuously improve and outperform.

Elevate defines the four life-changing principles that Glazer leverages personally and promotes in the organizations that he runs.

My takeaways from this book are those four principles that he defines as capacities:

1. Spiritual Capacity – This is about understanding who you are, your values and standards.
2. Intellectual Capacity – The capacity to improve your ability to think, learn, plan, and execute with discipline.
3. Physical Capacity – Your health, physical performance, and overall wellbeing.
4. Emotional Capacity – This is how you react to challenging situations, quality of your relationships, and your emotional mindset.

Spiritual Capacity

Glazer defines spiritual capacity outside the context of religion. He is focused on core values and core purpose which, he believes, can ultimately lead you to “the topic sentence” that describes your life purpose.

Therefore, the challenge here is to find this core purpose and stay aligned with it in everything that you do. This alignment provides energy and motivation in all areas of your life.

Intellectual Capacity

If you stop learning you stop growing. When you stop growing you begin the slow decline toward stagnation and irrelevance.

Intellectual capacity is about how you improve your ability to learn, think, plan and execute. The greater your intellectual capacity, the greater your level of achievement with the same or less energy expenditure!

Physical Capacity

Let’s face it. Nothing else really matters if you don’t have your health! Your physical health will either be an accelerant or a drag on your success.

Therefore you need to take care of your physical being through diet, sleep, and exercise so that you are prepared to handle the challenges you face each day.

Emotional Capacity

This is definitely a tough area for all of us during the COVID forced isolation that we faced in 2020 and into 2021.

Developing resilience is a critical component of emotional capacity and it only comes from being pushed outside of your comfort zone and outside what you believe your limits of endurance and performance are.

Everyone needs support to build emotional capacity. Glazer recommends that each of us be part of a focus group or mastermind group. These groups allow us to build relationships with others and to ensure that others know what we are going through and facing. Being open and sharing with others provides the support we need to grow and allows others to assist us in our periods of struggle.

Take Action!

In conclusion, no one should be living up to less than their full potential! We each need to periodically do a self assessment and not be content to be an underachiever.

Commit to living your life to your full potential and bring your whole business along with you!

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