Tips & Insights for Top Performance

Have you heard of David Goggins? You can check out his website www.davidgoggins.com. He has an impressive story with an admirable example of drive, focus and determination. Below are some quotes that he shared in his clips that I was inspired by:

The question, “What are your limits?” A great question to stop and think about. What stops you in your tracks? What will you NOT do? What scares you, challenges you or brings up your excuses, defenses or rationalizations? It is a good musing. When I stop and write them down, it brought up more than I want to have. It gives me a different way to look at what hold me back and a focus of what things to “knock off” to minimize those things that might get in my way! What are your limits?

The commitment, “Everything I do is defined by excellence.” Many people live by “good enough”. While I am not perfect and make mistakes, excellence is my standard as well. It is a noteworthy standard and point of personal evaluation. What am I doing that is excellent? What am I doing that is less then excellent? What do I want to do about that?

The statement, “The only easy day was yesterday.” Hum. What a thought. With each new day, what limits am I pushing for myself?

The motto, You “must be a good individual first before you can be a good team player.” This reminds me of putting on your mask on a airplane, before your child’s, or the Thomas Lenard coaching principle to be selfish. If you don’t make sure you are on track first, you will not have what it takes to be a team player or contribute. I took me a while to get this, as I learned to not be selfish, but it is really a refrain that taking care of yourself, developing yourself and “being a good individual” as a foundation block so you are stable and strong to contribute and give to the rest of the world. Where do you need to develop yourself so you can be a better team player?

Ask yourself these questions to consider your “edge”. Check out the David Goggins site and be inspired!

Your AM Power Hour is a planning time that you set aside 30 or 60 minutes to simple get focused and clear for your day. There are many benefits from doing this, the greatest is a clear direction for your day that moves swiftly and productively. Design your own routine. Keep in mind, these are not working on tasks, rather the focus and planning for tasks. Here is a sample:

1. Get focused: read goals, Proverbs 3, prayer and motivation statement
2. Review week/days game plan
3. Review your to-do list and meetings from previous days to recall commitments and promises and needs/actions
4. Brain dump any actions I need to take, plan things to do on the road, projects at desk, put on list of actions, delegate, etc.
5. Systems (set up folders or things you need to operate swiftly for the day)
6. Communication (e-mails, thank yous, proposals, letters, etc)
7. Admin tidbits (Bill, People needs, etc.)
8. E-mail / VM (read, sort, and delegate)
9. Note FROG Project for the day to work on next (book: Eat that Frog)

Give it a shot and draft one for yourself. Block the same time each day and follow your planning list.

It happens to most people I know, including myself! We get swept up with our work and life and before you know it any systems you had set up to help you balance important and urgent tasks that were working, are unintentionally eroded. The systems are gone and have been taken over by the suck of fast paced demands and pulls of the 21st century world we live in.  

In Stephen Coveys book, First Things First, begins to explain what is happening. He says, in the book, “consider whether you look at life through a basic paradigm of ‘urgency’ or ‘importance’?” He explores the effects of urgency addiction” and promotes a new perspective, “more than ‘time management’, it’s a generation of personal leadership. More than doing things right, it’s focused on doing the right things.”

What does this mean and how do you do it? There are many things to say about this but to me one of may favorite and first steps to tackle a life that has been consumed by the race of the urgent is to simply stop and get focused. This is a daily habit or practice that is good to do each day, ideally in an AM or PM routine. Here is how you do it:

1) brain dump everything that is on your mind onto a sheet of paper (please do not think that keeping lists in your head is effective, just like a computer will freeze up when to many windows and programs are running, so will your brain)

2) review your personal values (these are your passions, motivators and what makes you uniquely you)

3) review your big picture focus or goal (what are you aspiring to achieve in their period of your life)

4) select the 3 most important things you need to accomplish in order to move forward and remove the heaviest weight that is burdening you (often what weights on us is not what we do – that is what we procrastinate about – what we do is usually quick, insignificant to-do’s). Write these 3 things on a sticky note and post it where you can see it all day.

5) commit to 30 minutes a day to work on one of the items. Ideally an hour first thing in the AM, but protecting some time to really work on the top 3 each day is a great start.

This is the first step in thinking about your life strategically vs. reactionary. There is much more to balancing all parts of your life, living in line with your values, prioritizing, etc. but at times when we get so overloaded it is good to have a simple approach to remove yourself from the beginning of a crisis cycle and get back to putting first things first.

Be strategic!
Christy

Do you ever have those days where you wish you had a different job or life? I always find the sentiment that “you don’t know how good you have it until you lose it” to be true. We grow complacent to the blessings and rich rewards we have in our lives and work. It is easy to get sucked into complaining and looking at what we do not have or how bad things are rather then looking at what we DO HAVE. In this economy where people are laid off every day, the fact that you have a job is a blessing. The fact that you can work is a gift. I know it feels some relationships, bosses, projects, people, customers, situations can all bring a gray cloud over our desirably sunny day… but it is all how you look at it. Try and look at what you do have and what is good about your life today and be thankful for it.

Below is a fun story I read about a tough day at work… enjoy the levity and remember to be thankful for what you have!

Next time you have a bad day at work think of this guy:
Rob is a commercial saturation diver for Global Divers in Louisiana. He performs underwater repairs on offshore drilling rigs. Below is an E-mail he sent to his sister. She then sent it to radio station 103.2 on FM dial in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, who was sponsoring a worst job experience contest. Needless to say, she won!

Hi Sue,
Just another note from your bottom-dwelling brother. Last week I had a bad day at the office. I know you’ve been feeling down lately at work, so I thought I would share my dilemma with you to make you realize it’s not so bad after all. Before I can tell you what happened to me, I first must bore you with a few technicalities of my job. As you know, my office lies at the bottom of the sea. I wear a suit to the office. It’s a wet suit. This time of year the water is quite cool.

So what we do to keep warm is this: We have a diesel powered industrial water heater. This $20,000 piece of equipment sucks the water out of the sea. It heats it to a delightful temperature. It then pumps it down to the diver through a garden hose, which is taped to the air hose. Now this sounds like a darn good plan, and I’ve used it several times with no complaints. What I do, when I get to the bottom and start working, is take the hose and stuff it down the back of my wet suit. This floods my whole suit with warm water. It’s like working in a Jacuzzi.

Everything was going well until all of a sudden, my butt started to itch…

So, of course, I scratched it. This only made things worse. Within a few seconds my butt started to burn. I pulled the hose out from my back, but the damage was done. In agony I realized what had happened. The hot water machine had sucked up a jellyfish and pumped it into my suit.

Now, since I don’t have any hair on my back, the jellyfish couldn’t stick to it. However, the crack of my butt was not as fortunate. When I scratched what I thought was an itch, I was actually grinding the jellyfish into the crack of my butt. I informed the dive supervisor of my dilemma over the communicator. His instructions were unclear due to the fact that he, along with five other divers, were all laughing hysterically.

Needless to say I aborted the dive. I was instructed to make three agonizing in-water decompression stops totaling thirty-five minutes before I could reach the surface to begin my chamber dry decompression. When I arrived at the surface, I was wearing nothing but my brass helmet.

As I climbed out of the water, the medic, with tears of laughter running down his face, handed me a tube of cream and told me to rub it on my butt as soon as I got in the chamber. The cream put the fire out, but I couldn’t poop for two days because my butt was swollen shut.

So, next time you’re having a bad day at work, think about how much worse it would be.
Now whenever you have a bad day, ask yourself, is this a jellyfish bad day?
May you NEVER have a jellyfish bad day!!!!!

Stop for a minute and think:

What is the #1 project that you need to get done, but have been putting off? Every day you try to get to it, but other things just seem to catch your attention first, like answering e-mails  returning phone calls, cleaning, taking care of little to do’s on post it notes… tasks that suck you in and captivate you until you have no time left to work on what you’ve deemed important.

These IMPORTANT things are necessary to do at some point but are not critical or urgent to do right now. IMPORTANT tasks usually involve something a bit more tedious and time consuming, like filing, billing, writing, making follow-up calls, planning, marketing, ect.  Since there is no immediate pressure to get them done, they remain in our mind and on our to-do lists as things we SHOULD do sometime. They absorb our energy as we begrudge the thought of starting the project and they actually eat our time as we subconsciously procrastinate, doing other little things that feel more rewarding first.

What to do?
1) Realize what your procrastination strategies are. What do you do when you have an IMPORTANT project to accomplish? What distracts you from working on it? What things usually get on the to-do list before it? Subconscious procrastination strategies are little and insignificant tasks that take up our time and energy, so we never get to what is really important. Although it feels good to check off 10 little things from the list, the result is that now there is not enough time for that big IMPORTANT project, so it waits another day. This waiting creates stress and the act of procrastination makes us ineffective with our time. Below are links to 50+ ways people distract themselves from what is IMPORTANT.  What are your pet procrastination strategies? When you become aware of your favorite methods you are more likely to recognize them when you start doing them and STOP so you can really focus on and accomplish the IMPORTANT project.

2) “Eat your frog” first. Brian Tracey has a great book, Eat That Frog, which illustrates the basic concept of prioritizing. Tracy describes the most IMPORTANT task as your “FROG”. He supposes if the worse thing you have to do all day is eat a frog, the rest of the day will be much better. Likewise, if you do the thing you dislike and avoid first, the rest of your day will be great. You will find that you have more energy because you feel charged that you already got “IT” off your plate. You will have more time; because you are encouraged by your success and are motivated to do more important things that really matter. You are more efficient, because you have a clear mind without nagging toleration’s of things you SHOULD be doing.

How do you “eat your frog”?

A) Identify what is IMPORTANT. Important things are items that need to be done, but will not kill you if they are not done immediately. Note: this is in contrast to urgent.  Urgent are things that MUST BE DONE immediately.  Often people get in a cycle of making everything urgent.  If everything is urgent in your life one of two things has happened: you are mislabeling, or (more commonly): you have let the IMPORTANT projects go too long until they’ve become urgent.  The problem with always working in urgent mode is this quadrant does not maximize productivity or give long term solutions, just short term fixes. It might feel good and seem productive as you run around putting out fires, but internally it causes you to feel stressed confused, frustrated and overwhelmed. In contrast, when you stay on top of the IMPORTANT projects, you will amazingly have more energy, more time and be more efficient in dealing with everything else that comes up. Really, I challenge you to try it out.

B) Do it FIRST. Before you go to bed, pick your frog for the next day (or do it the last thing before you go to bed, so you already have a head start on your next day, if you are a night owl!). Then when you get up, before you do anything else on your to-do list (including urgent things – unless it is a real emergency), eat your frog. Block time in your schedule for uninterrupted focused time. No phone calls, e-mails or talking, until your frog is eaten. Know how much time your frog will take to eat, so you can consume it before interruptions are unavoidable.  By creating an hour of “no interruption” time, you will be most focused, productive, and effective in eating your frog.

Actions:

* Make a “to do” list nightly

* Prioritize your “to dos”

* Item #1 is your frog. Complete it before you do any other projects.

* Plan for FIRST THING, uninterrupted time.

* Know and be aware of your personal, subconscious procrastination strategies

* Make it your goal to complete the next 5 top priorities before moving on to other things on the list.

Do you find yourself amazed at how quickly the months pass? Do you find yourself in a small panic over all you know you have to do and how little you feel you are actually accomplishing? Join the crowd! We live in a busy world where our time, priorities and energy are constantly challenged. The reality is that there is simply not time for everything and we don’t have enough energy to complete everything. Bummer, I know! If only God had created the world with 8 days in a week or 30 hours in a day…. sounds good? Maybe, but really we would just quickly absorb that time too and be in the same spot.

What can we do? There are 5 simple steps to create greater success by managing our time and getting things done in business and life that are important.

1. EVALUATE. What do I really want? Where am I headed? What am I doing now?
2. GET REAL. What is really important that will impact and support your long term goals the best? What is not important? What is distracting me? What is not really supporting my long term goal?
3. PLAN. What do I need to do to accomplish my goal? What are the KEY action steps? How will I do this? What schedule or strategy will keep me focused?
4. FOCUS. Who do you need to be and what structures do you need to have to accomplish this (mindset, attitude, accountability)?
5. MONITOR/EVALUATE. Am I doing little, unimportant things? Am I procrastinating? What is working/ what is not? How could I streamline what I am doing?

What happens with good intentions and goals…

Plans begin as ideas in our head; we desire to have or do something. The key to the success of the idea is a plan. You know the saying, “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” Sometime our ideas will make it to paper in the form of a SMART goal and sometime not. If we do write a goal people sometimes we will create some action steps, but rarely do they take the time to thoroughly think through what actions are actually needed at each stage to accomplish the goal completely. Sometimes people will start planning and get overwhelmed at how much work it will actually take or get overwhelmed with the process and give up.  Often our goals remain our dreams because we fail to carve out time to make them reality. A management tip is to create a plan from start to finish. With this plan, decide if you have the time, energy, resources and desire to bring it to completion. Next, estimate HOW LONG each task will actually take. It is common to underestimate how much time each step will take and therefore it never gets done.  Remember, if you are going to add something to your schedule, you must also plan to say “No!” to something else to make time to accomplish your goal.

Step 1: EVALUATE…

To create an effective plan, begin with a careful evaluation. Most people are constantly evaluating their present state without much problem. We are constantly assessing, “What do I really want right now?” We look at things around us and talk about what we would like to be different in our life. We talk about our goals, New Year’s Resolutions, current intentions, etc. We often state them as fact and sincerely intend to accomplish those in our life. We see how they would make a positive difference and desire for them to happen. There is a small percentage of people who also evaluate the questions, “Where am I headed?” and “What will it take for me to get there?” Evaluation is a tool that allows you to anchor where you are now, determine where you want to go and create markers along the way to ensure you stay on course.  Without a longer term vision, we tend to react to current situations, “I need to make more money, I need to lose weight, I need to get this business off the ground, etc.”  This leads to wandering through life without focus or purpose. Evaluate the present and then also evaluate the future and what it would take to get there.

Step 2: GET REAL…

Then, get real. Does this fit in with where you are headed with your long term goals in your life? What is doing this going to get you? What is the cost (consider time, money, energy, emotional, etc.) Are you willing to pay it? If you do really want this, what is going to be important that you do? What is distracting you from making this happen?

Identify Key Result Items:

· Write exactly where you are headed and what this is going to get you.

· Identify what you will have to do and write that down.

· Identify what you will have to say “no” to and commit to 3 things you will have to stop to make this happen. Identify what this will “cost” and write down how you will “pay” for it. (This is not just financial, it may be something intangible like – COST: time with the family, PAYMENT: work later during week, but home Friday for dinner and family day all Saturday.)

· Identify 5 main distractions and how you can eliminate those.

Step 3: PLAN…

Next, plan what it will take to make this happen. You already have some Key Result Items from your Get Real Exercise. Take those and add to the list other ideas of what you know you will need to do to accomplish your goal. What are specific action steps you will need to take? Stop a minute and in your mind focus on your long term goal. See it in full and complete form. What is there? What are you doing? What do you notice about yourself and your actions? Now, in your mind walk backwards what did you do to get there? For example, if part of my long term goal is to have a thriving independent business, I may visualize myself in an office with the flexibility to be remote. Part of what I would need to do is establish an office, design portable systems, have a virtual assistant, have tools and resources for office work, etc. This becomes one Key Result Area: A functional Office. Then I walk backwards and plan steps I would have taken to create this functional office. Put dates on each broken-down action step and estimate what it will take to make each step happen (time, cost, etc.).  Allocate completion targets accordingly.

Step 4: FOCUS…

Now that you have your plan flushed out and in place, who do you need to be to accomplish this? Going back to your vision of your completed goal, what mindset and attitude did you have throughout the project? How did you do this? What schedule or strategy kept you focused? What systems of accountability did you have in place? What kept you on track and focused? One of the most common errors people make is IF they get their plan complete, they begin work and get caught up in the rush of life again and start reacting and forget about their plan. When you created your plan you were looking at the big picture. When you are working in the trenches of life, you are limited to see what is in front of you, unless you stick to the plan. There is nothing wrong with evaluating and refining your plan as you go, but only when you are looking at it in perspective of the whole picture and not the short term moment. The story is told about the caravan crossing the Sahara desert. The desert was barren and large. Many parties got lost crossing the great plains as they could not see their destination over the horizon. A team went in and put in markers for travelers to focus on as they crossed so they would use each marker as a point of reference until they could see the city. This allows many parties to cross the treacherous desert in the most direct and efficient path. This is your plan. Plan it well, establish milestones to focus on, trust them and stay the course!

Step 5: Monitor…

Step back occasionally and evaluate what you are doing. Go back to step one. How are you doing? What is working what is not? Are you on track or off course? Make adjustments to get on track, re-design what is not working to new solutions and refine the plan in area that would increase efficiency or results toward your goal. Keep your long-term goal in mind and check to make sure your short term goals are supporting the long term goals. Notice your behavior. Accomplishing big goals is hard work. Plan first and keep your eyes on the pre-set short term goal that position you to reach your bigger vision.

Bottom line…

None of these strategies are rocket science. The challenge is to maintain the discipline, focus and clarity to implement these basic strategies. Evaluate your long term goal, be realistic, plan, set structures for focus and have check points to monitor. Invest your time in your plan and maintain the course once it is set. If you are serious about these goals, take action today. Insure your success by developing an accountably system for yourself. Hire a coach as your strategic partner to run with you. Find a buddy in a similar situation. Whatever it is, build environments to support your vision. Take the time to plan and design structures for success and you will see a difference! Here’s to you and your success! Have fun!