Tips & Insights for Top Performance

Brian Tracey has a great book, Eat That Frog. This book is awesome for illustrating the basic concept of prioritizing. In order for you to get your plate empty you will have to stop and assess what is the most important thing for you to get done. Our to-do lists do not usually include unimportant things to do. Everything is important. (The urgent things don’t even make the list, they just take up time so we don’t even get to the lists). Then, when we just start chipping away at to-do lists, we often eat desert first. We do what feels good but is not really most essential to our performance.

Tracy’s concept is to get the most important thing you need to get done first; this is your frog. Do it before you do anything else (including urgent things – unless it is a real emergency). Your frog is the #1 thing on your to do list. As you get that done, you will have more energy for everything else on your list and will be able to accomplish more in your day in addition to having greater results as you take care of the most important things first.

Action:

• Make a “to do” list nightly.
• Prioritize the list.
• The #1 item is your frog. Complete it before you do any other projects.
• Make it your goal to complete the next 5 top priorities before moving on to anything else on the list.

5. Stuck? Do a mental purge. List or tell someone everything that is on your mind. What is holding you back? What is consuming your mental hard drive space?

4. Overwhelmed? What is MOST important? Look at your list. Which one thing if you completed it would make the biggest difference? Discipline yourself to complete it before doing anything else.

3. Exhausted? What wakes you up and gets you energized? A workout? Music? Reading inspirational works? A motivation poster? Make sure your magic pill is easily available in your environment.

2. Negative? Watch www.thesecret.tv. You attract what you think and say.

1. Unproductive? You are focused on the urgent and reacting. Stop. Evaluate. Do one important item before the urgent. Remember, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results. If you never break the cycle of reaction, your day will always be like this.

Strategies for living our purpose and expanding awareness for life, people and the opportunities of each day:

1. Evaluate your gifts and talents: What gifts and talents do you have that you enjoy using? These are things that you rarely mind doing, where you find yourself engaged, motivated and inspired at just the thought of it. Everyone has several of these and they come in many forms. i.e. listening, hospitality, service, brainstorming, creativity, analysis, compassion, logical assessments, music, kids, big picture perspective, implementer, task driver, laborer, specific skills, etc. List 5 gifts and talents you have. For a fun exercise, there is a FREE “Discovering My Spiritual Gift” assessment tool at www.treeoflifenc.org (under Resources).
2. Evaluate the opportunities you have today: What is going on in the near future where you can put those gifts and talents into action? How can you share those with others and be an encouragement for them? What would you love to do that would actually give you more energy by being involved and using you gifts? List 3 ways you can use your gifts and talents in the next week.
3. Stop doing things that do not work. What do you know that you are doing that you want to stop? Stop smoking, stop eating too much, stop cutting yourself down, stop complaining, stop needing, stop over-promising, stop worrying. Whatever you are doing that feels uncomfortable for you that you know you should stop should be halted. This will increase your attractiveness and consequently boost your confidence!
4. Do something that is radical for you. This is a process of breaking out of a rut. People are very attracted to people who are always innovating and continually doing new and different things. Play around with ideas and identify something fun that you can start doing that will support you in trying something new and different.
5. Stop comparing yourself to others. Identify the standards that are important for your life. Use these to benchmark yourself. If you are constantly comparing yourself to others, you will always feel inadequate and miss the great gifts you have to offer.

Have you ever noticed what a leech we can be when we are feeling in the pit? When our self-confidence is low, we often look to others for affirmation, strength and building up. We all experience highs and lows through what we are doing and even the best of the best have low days when their confidence wavers. The question of impact and how successful we will be depends on how we handle these lows. Often people fall in the trap of needing to get the boost from others around us. When others are too busy, don’t get it or worse, say something insensitive or critical; we can get even more discouraged.

Here is the trick. Shift your mindset to a bigger picture. In the book The Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren, the first line is, “It’s not about you.” When we are focused on ourselves we are limited to what is inside us. The point in Warren’s book is we are here on earth for God’s purpose, a GREATER purpose than ourselves. As we think about others, serving others and living for the purpose in which we were born, there is a much greater fulfillment than when we are simply focused on ourselves. The result is we have an expanded perspective and a great richness for life, people and the opportunities of each day. This then becomes a motivator… ‘I AM HERE for a reason and I better get to work! I have no reason to feel negative or bad about myself! THE PRESENT IS PERFECT! I am going to live for what I have been called to do!’ When we focus on that and use our gifts and talents to serve others our energy shifts and our slumps disappear.