The Divine Machine and the Quest for Peak Performance

Coaching is a way to look at your life from the outside in and unveil key roadblocks that are holding you back from realising your full human potential. Imagine yourself as a perfect divine machine. Let’s assume that all your basic needs are satisfied. You have a shelter, food, a partner, and a decent job. Your key resource is your time. You want to convert this time into things that are important and valuable to you, such as memorable experiences, fulfilling connections, happiness and joy, paintings, music, poetry, money, and so on. What are the opportunities to improve the output of your machine?

This model of the ‘divine machine’ is based on a well-known manufacturing concept called Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE). OEE framework measures the efficiency of a machine by breaking it down into three components: Availability, Performance, and Quality. By applying this same logic to ourselves, we can identify areas for personal improvement and work towards optimising our own ‘machine’.

The first component, Availability, measures the time the machine is operational and ready to produce. For a human, this refers to the time we are physically and mentally available for productive work or activity. Availability losses are anything that causes downtime: illness, lack of sleep, burnout, or even distractions that pull us away from our goals. To maximise this metric, we must prioritise self-care, rest, nutrition, and mental health practices that keep our divine machine running without interruption. Just as a factory machine requires scheduled maintenance, so too do we need to schedule time for holidays and recovery to ensure our long-term availability.

Next, Performance measures how fast the machine is working compared to its maximum potential. For a human, this isn’t just about speed, but about focus and efficiency. Performance losses occur when we are available but not operating at our best—multitasking, experiencing cognitive fatigue, or simply working without a clear plan. To improve this, we can focus on techniques like deep work, setting clear and achievable goals, and eliminating minor distractions that cause micro-stops. By concentrating our energy on one task at a time and working at our ideal cycle time for that task, we can dramatically increase our output during our available hours.

Finally, Quality assesses the percentage of good output from the total output. In the context of a divine machine, this is the most profound metric. Quality losses are mistakes or poor work that must be redone. It is the measure of our work’s integrity and a reflection of our commitment to excellence. For a student, a quality loss might be a poorly written essay that requires significant revision. For an athlete, it’s a flawed technique that leads to a missed shot. To improve quality, we must commit to deliberate practice, seek feedback, and refuse to settle for subpar work. It is the final check, ensuring that our output is not just abundant, but truly worthwhile.

Now imagine your machine is up and running with maximum Availability, Performance, and Quality, but the product is not what you were born to make.

Maybe you spent many years building a successful career while deprioritising relationships. Maybe you dreamt of a different destiny in your childhood, or maybe you live in a system of limiting beliefs that are holding you back from being true to yourself. In this case, even a perfect machine producing irrelevant output would be wasting time and other resources. Possibly, in this case we need to start with a master production plan to align your life goals and your divine purpose with your actions.

In conclusion, maximum human performance is not about pushing ourselves to the point of collapse, but about a holistic and systematic optimisation of our being, with the aim of living a purposeful and highly effective life.

This is where coaching becomes essential. A coach acts as your personal ‘master production planner,’ and ‘operations excellence consultant’, providing the safe space and objective questions needed to examine your own ‘divine machine.’ Through this process, a coach helps you identify and address the specific losses in Availability, Performance, and Quality that are holding you back. More importantly, coaching challenges you to define your master production plan—your ultimate purpose—and ensures that your efforts are directed towards producing an output that is not just efficient, but deeply meaningful and aligned with your truest self.

By optimising your machine’s operation and aligning it with your purpose, coaching helps you achieve truly maximum and fulfilling human performance.