You Don't Have to Change Who You Are To Succeed

"To become successful, you don't have to change who you are, you just have to become more of who you are at your best."

- Sally Hogshead

 

This quote stopped me in my tracks. There is a whole industry revolving around self-development and the focus on transforming you and me into this new person.

 

I know one thing - it scares me and it scares most people. 

"You mean I have to change who I am to be successful?" 

"That is a tall order, a big mountain to climb and I'm not so sure I am willing to do all that work and become someone I'm not."

I don't think I have the commitment to do that.

 

I think Sally is on to something here. I think back and look at the people I have helped take their business to the next level and move down the Continuum of Success, and they did not transform who they were, they simply developed a new skill. They blocked their week to ensure they were spending more time at their best. Working on the Right Things, Essential Things, Deep Work, Rocks. There - I used all the acronyms except working more on their business not always just in it.

 

So once again it seems there is a process that is perfect for the results we are currently getting. If we don't like the results and want them to improve, then we must change the process. Not who we are, but how we plan our week and what we focus on doing. That is much easier and is a proven way to be at your best more of the time.

 

I read the top half of this post to 3 clients today to get their thoughts on this topic. All said it was right on point. These 3 clients have gone from bouncing off the walls, putting out fires all day to embracing and committing to the concept of Deep Work, Rocks, Essentialism and blocking time to focus on these "Right Things". Once they committed to this new process of blocking time to work on the Essential -  the little things (the pebbles), the nonessential, shallow work that used to stress them out and wear them out lost their importance. 

 

Each of these clients have transformed their companies and their work lives without changing who they are.

 

Want to know how to do it yourself?

 

The following is the introduction to the first Lesson in my upcoming online coaching course. Stay tuned as I will be offering you a sneak peek soon:

 

Do The Right Work. You are about to change the way the you lead your business, being your best more of the time. This will require developing and executing a new process. To succeed you must develop the skills to provide yourself with the time to focus on first, learning these new processes and then executing them. You can't attempt to  "fit this stuff in" each week. You must learn and then implement a process of blocking time each week to focus on the Essential, the Deep Work, the Rocks, working "on" your business, not "in" it all the time.

You must learn to work differently, being your best more of the time. The knowledge and tools to do this are in the following Lesson.

 

More to come....

P.S. Last week I offered you a chance to see where you are on the Success Continuum - this is your second chance to score yourself - have fun. Click here.

Success - Where Are You?

How do we/you define success?

It is definitely a personal thing but I believe there is a continuum of success that we can chart and zero in on where we are on that continuum. I believe there are 4 simple questions you can ask yourself. I have created a tool to chart your personal level of Success and Happiness based on those 4 questions.

Those 4 questions can be found here and a simple chart in which you can score yourself and a graphical continuum for each question to allow you will "see" where you are on your path to Success.

Simply click here and score yourself from a business point of view. 

You can then think about it in your personal life, it works equally well there too.

It takes 2 minutes and it is just for you - I'm not capturing your answers.

Be honest with yourself and find out where you and your business are on the path to success. 

All the Events You Weren't There to Control

"Great coaches consistently get the most 

out of their people, because they consistently put the most 

in to their people."

- Brian Souza

 

 

From Seth Godin:

All the events you weren't there to control...

Yesterday, thousands of people got married. Just about every one of these weddings went beautifully. Amazingly, you weren't there, on-site, making sure everything was perfect.

Last week, a letter to investors went out from the CFO of a hot public company. It was well received. Yes, it's true, you didn't review it first, but it still worked.

And just the other day, someone was talking about the product you created, but she didn't ask you about it first. That's okay, because the conversation went fine.

When we're in the room, it's really difficult to sit back and let other people do their work, because we know we can make it better, we know the stakes are incredibly high, we know that we care more than anyone else. More often than not, we give in to temptation and wrest away control. And often, we make things better. In the short run.

Caring matters. Your contribution makes things better. But when the need for control starts to get in the way of your people doing their best work, caring about their craft and scaling their efforts, and when the need for control starts to make you crazy, it might be worth thinking about that wedding in Baton Rouge that went just fine without you.

 

My Solution
 

Hint: Begin having Weekly Coaching Conversations with your people (15 minutes) and use an individual Weekly Coaching Dashboard to ensure you get agreement on their "number", the one or two areas they are going to improve this quarter, the 2-3 Rocks (the projects we talk about above that you need to delegate) and your core values.

Want the template? I'm surveying the business world to find out more about what is on your mind so I'll trade you... take my 3 question survey and I'll send you the template. Fair?

Productivity Without Busyness

This is a post by Michael Neill that caught my eye. It incorporates Deep Work, Essentialism, Focus and Results into one blog post. Good stuff. Take special note of Simon Cowell's mantra -make one good decision a day! 

One Good Decision A Day

by Michael Neill | May 2, 2016

Last year, I was chatting with the uber-author Jack Canfield in preparation for the Hay House World Summit and I asked him if he was busy at the moment. He took a few moments to consider his reply. "I've got a lot on," he said, "but I'm not particularly busy."

That conversation came to mind this week while preparing the launch for my newest book, The Space Within. Whereas past launches have obsessed my thinking and monopolized both my time and that of the team of willfully invisible elves who cobble the shoe leather of my writing into beautifully presented blogs and books, this year the whole process has been remarkably low key.

I've already read a chapter of Cal Newport's Deep Work (more on that in a moment), and before my fingers are done for the day they'll have written this blog, a newsletter, several new pages for my website, half a dozen emails, and copy for the book launch that will go out tomorrow.

But even though I've got a lot on, I'm not feeling particularly busy - just productive. And this points to one of the key points in Cal Newport's book - busyness is a proxy for productivity. In other words, according to Professor Newport, one of the reason we spend so much time on email, social media, and "available" to interruption is because it creates the experience that we're continually engaged in activity, leading us to the false conclusion that if we're always busy, we must be being productive.

Yet a more practical definition of "personal productivity" is this: Your ability to produce results

Notice this has nothing to do with our level of activity, busyness, efficiency, effort, or stress. If we consistently produce quality results over time, we are productive; if we don't, no matter how much time and effort we are putting into the job, we aren't.

One of the most interesting examples of this I have come across is the music executive and television producer Simon Cowell. In an interview where Simon was asked to share the secret of his success, he didn't point to his clearly well-developed work ethic, network, PR team, or any kind of personal genius. He simply said that he tried to make one really good decision each day. If he pulled it off even 100 days of the year, he knew that his career and companies would grow exponentially over time.

In order to cultivate his decision making ability, he tries to stay seriously underemployed when not actively engaged in the necessary activities of running multiple companies and appearing on television hundreds of times a year. So while it may appear that his productivity has led to his ability to "live the good life", living the good life is one of the keys to his astounding productivity.

Now on the off chance that chartering yachts in the South of France or taking a week off each year to think about stuff a la Bill Gates is outside of your current financial capacity, how can we mere mortals take advantage of this lower key approach to higher productivity?

In business, this translates to keeping your eye on the results you and your team are producing, not all the things you think you have to do (or even all the things you're doing) to produce them. This runs counter to the management approach that tracks activity instead of results, counting sales calls vs. sales and hours worked vs. results produced. The difficulty in tracking the intangibles that lead to high level results mean that work ethic often gets elevated above productivity. Which is kind of like rewarding the hare for running three times as many miles as the tortoise in the process of losing the race.

The simple rule of thumb for higher productivity is this: You get more of what you focus on.

Focus on your to-do list and watch it grow; focus on results and watch them happen.

One caveat:

None of this is to say that if you want to be productive at a high level, you won't have to put in the hours. I don't know anyone who consistently produces quality results over time who doesn't. But whether those hours are experienced as hard work or even busyness is nothing more than a reflection of your state of mind.

The same teenager who struggles to focus on school work for more than ten minutes at a time can lose themselves for hours in online gaming, making music, doodling in a notebook or traveling through time and space in the pages of an epic novel. The problem is almost never in their brain but rather in the way they're using their mind.

So here are a few reflective questions to get you started on the road to less busyness and more productivity. By looking in the direction they're pointing, you're likely to get some insights for yourself into how you can get more done with less unnecessary effort and struggle:

1. Think about some times in your life where your effort was disproportionate to your results - either you put in a ton of work to no avail or you felt like you barely did anything and the results came pouring in. What do you make of that discrepancy? Were they random flukes or could there be a larger principle at work?
    
2. How is your experience of work different when you are fully engaged to when you are distracted? How could you cultivate the experience of full engagement? (It's sometimes easier to answer that question by first answering "How could I cultivate the experience of being more distracted while I work?")
    
3. If my productivity were the result of making higher quality decisions (i.e. "one good decision a day"), how might I design my day differently? What states of mind would be of higher value to me? How can I cultivate those higher quality states of mind?

Have fun, learn heaps, and happy exploring!