THE CHARTER
The Personal Performance Charter is a single-page written definition of your performance identity: what you believe about performance, the values you perform by, who you are at your best, and the standard you set for yourself. It is the starting point, and it comes before goals and before any planning system, because it answers the question most frameworks never ask: what does operating at your best actually look like for you? The Charter is designed to answer that in a structured, permanent format.
What is a performance charter?
A performance charter is a deliberate, written definition of your performance identity. Not your goals: your identity as a performer. The distinction matters because identity precedes behaviour. Fogg’s work on behaviour design suggests that behaviours attached to identity last longer than behaviours attached to goals or intentions alone. When a person defines who they are as a performer and acts from that definition, the behaviour is self-reinforcing. When they act from goals alone, every setback requires a fresh motivational effort.
Hays et al. (2009) found that elite performers who performed consistently under pressure had one characteristic in common above all others: they had a clear, stable sense of their performance identity. They knew who they were at their best, and that knowledge was available to them under pressure as an anchor, not something they had to construct in the moment.
Why does it cost £1.20?
The Charter is priced at £1.20 deliberately. It is the most accessible entry point into the Performance Thoughts range, not because the content is less valuable than the other tools, but because it is the right starting point for everyone and the barrier to starting should be as low as possible. For many people it will be the first thing they complete. For others it will be the thing they return to after completing the Notion Performance Planner or the Mindset Toolkit, having developed a clearer sense of who they are as a performer.
What changes when you have one?
How do you use it?
The Charter comes with a five-page research-backed completion guide that walks through each of the four sections, explains the research behind it, and provides prompts to help you answer each question honestly rather than aspirationally. The guide is as important as the Charter itself: the questions are straightforward, but answering them well requires more thought than they first appear to demand.
Once completed, the Charter is designed to be kept somewhere visible and referenced regularly, particularly before significant performances and as part of any pre-performance routine. It should be revisited and updated as your performance identity develops. Completing it once a year, or after a significant period of development, tends to produce a meaningfully different document as your self-knowledge deepens.
“You cannot build a consistent performance on an unclear foundation. The Charter is that foundation: a single page that tells you who you are when you are at your best.”
Performance Thoughts
Download the Personal Performance Charter here (£1.20). For the research behind performance identity and why it matters under pressure, read our articles on what makes a goal really yours and what a performance mindset actually is. For the next step after completing the Charter, the Notion Performance Planner builds the complete planning system on the foundations it establishes.
References
Fogg, B. J. (2019). Tiny habits: The small changes that change everything. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Hays, K., Thomas, O., Maynard, I., & Bawden, M. (2009). The role of confidence in world-class sport performance. Journal of Sports Sciences, 27(11), 1185–1199.