raising your performance

3 Ways we lose time and what to do about it*

February 9, 2010 By takethestairs 9 Comments

* This is an excerpt from a live coaching call with one of my clients recently.

What I’ve discovered is that there are 3 primary ways we lose our time. And they are different than most people expect or realize.

A. Not knowing where you’re going next

Don’t waste a second – ever. Don’t let your goals and dreams fall victim to unplanned events. Anything that isn’t a part of your schedule is a distraction and should be minimized at all costs. Don’t be rude to people; just know that you should “always have a meeting to be at” in the next few minutes. There should always be somewhere you’re going next.
Have a written schedule and stick to it relentlessly. Your results are very often the output of your schedule. Do what is on your schedule all the time.

B. Fatigue

Physical – You need at least 6.5 hours of Sleep and if at all possible get 7-8. Vince Lombardi said “fatigue makes cowards of us all.” If you’re not energized you won’t be efficient.
Physical – Get your booty to the gym. Don’t let your body feed you the BS that you’re too tired to work out. Your body recharges from working out. Even if it’s 30 minutes for 3 days a week. Just get there! We see consistently that people who can just get their body into the gym can usually get motivated to do something once they’re there. Do it. Once you are physically there then get yourself amped up to crush it! Dominate your workout and hit it hard. Then go home and go to the next thing.
Emotional – Some of the best managers in the country forget this and they don’t realize that one thing that is holding them back is they never get emotionally recharged. If you’re pouring out into others you need to be refilling your emotional fuel tank. Find what fills you up spiritually and emotionally.
- Positive reading: John Maxwell – 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, Ken Blanchard – One Minute Manager, T Harv Eker – Secrets of the Millionaire Mind, Dale Carnegie – How To Win Friends and Influence People, John Maxwell – Leadership Gold, Jim Collins – Good to Great
- Read the Bible each day – at least 1 chapter.
- Church on Sunday with no excuses. Just go do it.
- Family – I find that spending actual time physically with family is very recharging. Sometimes on the phone it’s not always. Try to get some place that makes you feel like home and especially reconnecting with parents and letting them know how much they mean to you will naturally recharge you.

C. Having focus diverted across too many things

Imbalance is the new balance – The way most people think about balance is absurd. We tend to think of spending an equal amount of time on all different types of activities. Balance is not equal time across equal activities; it’s APPROPRIATE time across critical PRIORITIES. In other words, don’t try to be all things to all activities or try to do everything. Instead figure out what things are most important to you and imbalance your life in those directions.
Keystone Goal – Have 1 overarching goal that ties all your others together. A keystone goal isn’t necessarily the most important; it’s just the one that if you accomplish it, all of the others will happen as a bi-product.
Batching – multi-tasking means juggling lots of priorities; it doesn’t mean doing many tasks at once. Don’t try to be on Facebook while doing paperwork and taking cell phone calls. Doesn’t work. Focus is power. Blitz it hard. Paperwork for paperwork time. Gym for gym time. Family for family time. Pounding the phones during phone time. That simple.

Your results are just a bi-product of your schedule. Don’t worry about what everyone else is doing. You be consistent and relentless about your schedule. Work the system and allow the system to work for you. Put your self-esteem into your work habits and let the rest shake out as it may.

For information on booking motivational speaker and self-discipline strategist Rory Vaden please visit us at www.roryvaden.com

For information on sales coaching, sales training, or sales consulting please visit www.southwesternconsulting.com

Have a college-aged student in your life that you want to introduce to success principles, entrepreneurship, and leadership? Have them check out The Southwestern Company paid internship at www.southwesterninternship.com

Join motivational speaker Rory Vaden’s Take the Stairs Tour:

Click Here

See you in the stairwell,

Rory Vaden
Take the stairs – Success means doing what others won’t.

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Filed Under: Coaching Call Summary, Time Management Tips Tagged With: balance, efficiency tips, Motivational Speaker Rory Vaden, raising your performance, recruiting, Rory Vaden, Self Discipline Strategist, Self-Discipline, Take The Stairs, time management

Working with a Virtual Assistant: Part 2

November 27, 2009 By takethestairs 2 Comments

Remember that a major part of the objective of having a personal assistant is that he or she will hopefully become an extension of you. It’s the closest thing to being able to be in two places at one time. You want to train them to think as much like you as possible and to process things the way that you would process them.

Here are some key processes that will help you create a strong communication system of SOP (standard operating procedure) with your assistant:

Morning Call – Make sure that you talk the first 15 minutes of every day if at all possible. This is especially crucial with your very first assistant and during the first few weeks of working together. They can only accomplish what you direct them to and the more time you spend with them the more apt they are to start thinking and acting like you.
The “Don’t Forget” E-mail – Each morning you should get 1 e-mail with a list of bullets that simply state what times and with whom all of your scheduled and confirmed appointments are at for that day. Sometimes it helps to have your significant other CC’d as well so that they have an understanding of what you’re doing.
Daily Stats (Previous Weekly Stats on Monday) –Each morning you should get 1 e-mail with all of the activity stats of your entire team from the day before. That way you can quickly go through it and identify any “situations.” On Monday mornings there won’t be any stats, of course, so what you want to do is have him or her deliver a statistical recap of the prior week including daily performance, weekly totals, and totals to date for whatever period you are monitoring.
V-mail E-mail – Have your assistant check your voice-mail always and send you a bulleted list of who called and what actions were taken.
Master Travel Itineraries – Have your assistant think through all aspects of a trip when you head out of town including weather, special packing needs, addresses, phone numbers, air transportation, ground transportation, notes on payments that must be made or received upon arrival, etc.

Next is winning at the e-mail battle! One of the main items that your assistant can help you with is managing the flow and control of all of your incoming e-mail. Please read my article called “Don’t be a Digital Pack Rat: Winning the E-mail Battle.” When it comes to e-mail your goal is to get your inbox down to zero each day and you’ll want to do a couple things (this is how my assistant and I process such a large volume of e-mail each day):

Master E-mail (Mid Day Master E-mail) – this is basically 1 email from your assistant that consolidates all of the items that have hit your inbox and what actions have been taken on them. After some training he/she should be able to effectively complete 80% of your e-mails without your explicit instruction and then you will just see the action that was taken on the master e-mail. Typically I’ve requested 1 e-mail per day except when first working together at which time I ask for 2. Also, after time and trust has built you don’t even need to get this e-mail every day from your assistant because you can trust and know they are just taking care of stuff for you and then you would only need one on very high e-mail volume days or days where you’re not in front of a computer at all which may only be once in a while. Remember to forward e-mails to him/her out of your inbox with instructions on how to process each one. It is the #1 METHOD OF TRAINING for a virtual assistant. Give them very detailed instructions and have them catalogue certain types of e-mail instructions as SOP which should one day become a training reference guide for all assistants (you’ll need more as your business grows).

As far as specific types of e-mails, here are some more tips:

Batching weekly e-mails with attachments into one – If you have a bunch of people sending you attachments, have your assistant compile all of those e-mails into 1 e-mail with the necessary attachments you need. Or just have him/her store them and ask for the documents as you need them. (You can send a flip drive once a month to have them backed up and sent back to you).
Deleting multiple strings – It’s amazing how many e-mails we receive that we’re CC’d on with many other people. Have your assistant delete all the back and forth e-mails to a large e-mail group of people with the exception of the most recent one.
Social networking e-mails – He/she can accept all friend requests for you and then include in the master e-mail summary who you’ve connected with.
Calendar appointments – A very large number of e-mail have to do with calendar requests; COMPLETELY OUTSOURCE control of your calendar to your assistant. This empowers him/her to take care and process a majority of these with their own discretion. You simply create SOP for what types of activities should happen during what times of each day and what times of each week. For example, every Wednesday night is private date night with just AJ and I. My assistant knows not to schedule anything in that slot. There are many other protected times like church time, paying bills time, prospecting time, etc.

I know there is a lot here but this one thing alone will improve your efficiency and lower your stress tremendously. T. Harv Eker said in Secrets of the Millionaire Mind that middle class people think in terms of either/or; such as, “I can either make a lot of money and have a successful business OR I can have a great family life.” Rich people ALWAYS think in terms of both; such as, “I can make a ton of money AND have a great family life.” These strategies will help.

For information on booking motivational speaker and self-discipline strategist Rory Vaden please visit us at www.roryvaden.com

For information on sales coaching, sales training, or sales consulting please visit www.southwesternconsulting.com

Join motivational speaker Rory Vaden’s Take the Stairs Tour:

Click Here

See you in the stairwell,

Rory Vaden
Take the stairs – Success means doing what others won’t.

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Filed Under: Time Management Tips Tagged With: efficiency tips, raising your performance, Self Discipline Strategist, Self-Discipline, Take The Stairs, time management, virtual assistants

The 4 Causes of Inaction

September 29, 2009 By takethestairs 12 Comments

Procrastination is something that everyone struggles with; according to Jim Rohn, it is the #1 killer of all success. In my study of self-discipline over the past 9 years, I’ve noticed a more prevalent dynamic than procrastination. It’s one where we don’t deliberately just put things off, or refuse to do them; but rather we mask the activities that we should be doing with ones that are more convenient to do. In other words we allow ourselves to be busy just being busy. The term that I’ve been using in my speeches to describe this phenomena is creative avoidance.

Although creative avoidance may appear in many forms there are really 4 main causes of our inaction towards what we really need to be doing to be productive. These 4 concepts apply to people across all different professions, ages, or endeavors. You show me a person who is not achieving life at the level they want to be and I’ll show you 1 of these 4 diagnosis.

The 3 Battles of Daily Discipline: Mind, Mouth, and Movement

September 18, 2009 By takethestairs Leave a Comment

For most of us self-discipline is a passive concept. It’s not one we very often think about, and when we do it’s often because we feel guilty about some bad decision we’ve made, or were lamenting to a friend about why we need more of it. Unfortunately it’s that in-deliberate attitude that usually leads to our lack of self-discipline. Many of us think of discipline as hard and we don’t understand the Pain Paradox. Discipline doesn’t have to always be difficult, brutal, or painful as long as it’s perpetually intentional and consistent.

There are 3 primary battles of self-discipline that need to be won each and every day by all of us. They are 3 things that we have absolute control over and that regardless of our profession, age, or income we must deal with. Avoiding these areas is not an option because as I mentioned on my Twitter page, you are either consciously forming good habits or you are unconsciously forming bad ones. The battles I’m referring to are
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Filed Under: Standard Lessons Tagged With: accountability, discipline, focus, forming good habits, master your emotions, Motivational Speaker, performance expert, raising your performance, sales performance, Self-Discipline, Take The Stairs

Composure, Clarity, Control

August 17, 2009 By takethestairs 1 Comment

This blog post comes straight from one of my coaching clients from our Top Producer’s Edge program. She is an extraordinary woman and she’s beginning to get big results in her life and for her company as we’ve been working together for a few months. As is customary we send a recap of each conversation we have with our clients after the call. This one seemed very relevant to a lot of the problems that we are all facing today so I included it here exactly how it appeared in the personal email I sent to her.

“Kind of ironic how the sessions I always send you are right in line with what’s going on in your life. From the Schedule concepts when we first started to the positive affirmations a few weeks ago, to the introduction and questioning techniques for finding pain before selling, using LinkedIn for referrals and recruiting and then today with problem solving.

“Remember what I said… one of the highest levels of discipline is to be a master of your emotions.

“The key to problem solving is IMMEDIATELY channeling your emotion into a positive direction and keeping your cool. People want to follow a strong leader who always has a game plan (or at least looks like they do ) to overcome any challenging situation. Here is my 3 step formula for channeling that energy: Composure, Clarity, Control

“First is Composure. Remember things are often not as good as they seem or as bad as they sound. Resist the urge to flip out in the very first moment you hear of bad news. (You can flip out later when you’re by yourself all you want) Your initial reaction to a problem sets the tone and mood for the way that you and those around you respond to the situation. And also it forms a habit for all of you about how you will deal with problems in the future. So have DISCIPLINE and begin to start channeling your emotions and staying composed. Remember my man Carl from the old TV Show Family Matters: ‘3,2,1…1,2,3…what the heck is bothering me…breathe.’ :) That is, to this day, my favorite affirmation in tough times.

“Second is Clarity. DISCIPLINE yourself to not just start taking control and yanking things around in every which direction. Instead ask questions of yourself and of those involved in the situation to make sure that you CLARIFY exactly what the challenge is, what factually happened, and to identify what limitations are legitimately on the situation. You’ll be amazed that when you take the emotional energy out of tough situations there is almost always a clear actionable game plan that reveals itself. The trick once again is learning to view things through a logical lens rather than an emotional one.

“Then Control. Not take control necessarily; but control the things you can control. Don’t focus on what is wrong with the situation. Focus only on what you can do about it. Control the controllables, execute, and take immediate action on what you can to influence things in a positive direction. One thing I’ve seen to be true in dire business and personal situations is that even in times of complete hopelessness, if you just focus on taking the step that is immediately in front of you, then the next one appears more clearly, and then the next, and the next. Which is exactly how you climb the CN Tower with 144 flights of stairs.

“That’s how you ‘Take the Stairs’ in the face of adversity. You are a champion. It’s an honor to be partnering with you as your coach to get you and your team to the next level. I’m thrilled that business has picked up since we started working together in the last few months. It’s a testimony to your own self-discipline, your willingness to change, and the result of your intense focus. Keep it up because we’re just getting started.”