Week four of the Stay at the Top Summer Reset series focuses on one of the most powerful and overlooked performance tools you have. Your diary.
Most high performers do not struggle with motivation. They struggle with structure. When calendars fill up with meetings, deadlines and external demands, the behaviours that support energy and wellbeing are pushed aside.
This episode is a reminder that what you schedule first shapes how you operate. If you want this year to feel different, it starts by putting what you need and want into your diary before everything else.
In this episode I share:
- Why motivation is rarely the problem for high performers
- How your diary quietly shapes your energy and behaviour
- The cost of leaving meals, movement and breaks to chance
- Why personal commitments need the same respect as work meetings
- How operating reactively drains energy fast
- The role of systems, boundaries and reminders in sustainable performance
- Why everyone needs an operating system, including me
- How this episode builds on earlier resets in the series
- A simple reset task you can apply immediately
Key Quotes
“Your diary tells the truth about what you value.”
“When you deprioritise the break you need, you are deprioritising yourself.”
“You need systems that support the version of you you are trying to become.”
Episode Resources
Jessica Spendlove Website – www.jessicaspendlove.com
Jessica Spendlove Keynotes – JessicaspendloveKeynotes – Jessica Spendlove
The High-Performance Profile Quiz https://jessicaspendlove.com/quiz/
Jess Spendlove Instagram https://www.instagram.com/jess_spendlove_dietitian/?hl=en
Jess Spendlove LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessica-spendlove-64173bb8/
About Your Host
Jessica Spendlove | Wellbeing Speaker & High Performance Strategist
Jess Spendlove is an international wellbeing and high performance speaker, coach, and advisor. With over 15 years of experience across corporate leadership, elite sport and the military she is known for helping ambitious leaders and teams optimise energy, build resilience, and sustain peak performance.
As one of Australia’s leading performance dietitians and a trusted voice in executive wellbeing, Jess delivers science-backed strategies that empower individuals, teams and organisations to thrive under pressure and achieve long-term success.
Episode Transcript
The following transcript has been automatically generated and not checked for accuracy
Jess Spendlove (00:08.994)
Welcome to week four of the summer reset series. By now, you’ve probably spent some time thinking about how you want to feel this year. And likely, it’s a combination of or potentially all of these things. You might want to feel happier. You might want to feel healthier. You might want to feel more balanced, more in control of your energy. But I can almost guarantee your intention has not been, I want to work harder.
and I want to add more pressure to your life. Because if you’re here, if you’re listening to stay at the top, the thing I already know about you is that motivation is very rarely your issue, particularly when it comes to work and your career. So if you want to feel different this year, something needs to shift. And one of the simplest places to start is your diary.
Most people’s calendars, and I have been guilty of this before many times, are overflowing with professional commitments. They’ve got their work meetings, their deadlines, their commitments, everybody else’s priorities. But here is the real question. What are your commitments? What are the things that actually support you to operate at your best?
Jess Spendlove (01:36.312)
So what I’m talking about with this is some of the personal commitments and personal meetings that we need to have with ourself. These are things like what we eat, when we move, when we take our brain breaks, potentially even when we sleep. So I want you to have a look at your diary and I want you to see.
Jess Spendlove (02:00.366)
Do you have your meal break scheduled? Do you have your brain break scheduled? Do you have your training sessions and your exercise and your walking and walking the dog or whatever that might be? Do you have them scheduled in? Do you have your decompression time scheduled in? Do you have your boundaries around the type of work you do and when and when you take calls and when you stop? You might even wanna go as far as blocking out when you sleep. And if you wanna do that,
please by all means go right ahead. Because all of those things that I’ve mentioned there, they are not the optional extras. They are the foundations that determine how you show up. And they cannot be left to chance. They should not be the things that are squeezed in into the leftover minutes of your day or in between meeting with this person and that person. Because when you’re operating like that, what happens is meetings run over.
and then you skip lunch or lunch is at 3 p.m. at your desk. Or you think I’m just gonna answer a couple of meetings before I go and have my lunch break and next minute you’ve been in the inbox for an extra 30 to 60 minutes. Or you might just get stuck scrolling. You might be on LinkedIn or any other social media platform. And then suddenly.
The thing that matters, the break that you needed, the fuel that you needed, the hydration that you required, the movement that you needed, the brain break that you needed to get through your afternoon. The thing that you needed gets pushed back and deprioritized. And that essentially means that you’re deprioritizing yourself. And so if you want this year to feel different, one of the best places and the easiest places to start is with your diary.
You need the reminders, you need the boundaries, you need the systems that support the version of you that you were trying to become. And as I sit here saying this is what you need, I am also saying this to myself and nobody is above this. Everybody needs an operating system so that they can get all of the things done and do it in a way that they’re coming from a place of being proactive and from
Jess Spendlove (04:15.822)
good, consistent, stable energy. Anybody can operate from adrenaline and cortisol and caffeine and rushing and reactively. And anyone can do that for a period of time, but that gets very tiring, very fast, very quickly. And again, I say this from a place of not just helping people with that, but from falling victim to that many, many times in previous versions of myself in years gone by.
And if this is something that you want to dig a little bit deeper into this idea of an operating system, I’d highly encourage you to go back and listen to season four, episode eight, why you need an operating system. It pairs perfectly with what I’m talking about here today. And so this week’s reset is pretty straightforward and simple. Before anybody else or anything else goes into your calendar, have a think about your priorities, the priorities to yourself.
priorities to your health, the priorities to where are you getting joy and happiness from or your hobbies or your downtime. How do you want to operate and move which you’ve identified in a previous episode of the reset series and each of these episodes I’ve deliberately put in an order so that you were building on what you’ve reflected or learned or the tool that you’ve been able to use the week before. And so as I said this week the reset and the reflection is simple.
Think about how you wanna operate. Think about what your diary needs to reflect that and start putting these in there. Doesn’t mean they won’t move, but they at least need to be in there so that the system, so that the reminders, so that the boundaries can try to support the version of you that I know you wanna show up as in 2026. That’s all I’ve got for you this week. I’ll be back again with another reset episode next week. I’ll see you all then.