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June 1, 2017
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August 14, 2017
If you clicked on this video you’re interested in understanding how you can deal with the problem of overwhelm.
There’s a girl I’m coaching at the moment called Angela. When I met with Angela, this was the problem. The problem was that she loved to go to the gym in the morning.
She did that for two hours from 5-7am and then she spent two hours getting to the office and got to the office at 9am and went into meetings by about till about 11 or 12noon, and by about 2pm she’d got no work done.
All of her days were out of control and she felt like she was getting nothing done that was important.
What I’ve been able to do is take her from overwhelmed to building her own personal system so that she can get the right things done when she needs them done.
If you want to understand how I did it with her, stick around I’m going to take you through five principles that help you move from being in overwhelm to having a system.
I’ve spoken about Angela, who when I met her was probably not doing the most important things that she had to do each day in the right time and that was causing her overwhelm.
Where we want her to get to is rather than being overwhelmed and chaotic is for her to get to a point where she has her own personal unique system that allows her to be more calm on most days than not.
If you want that same outcome, these are the five principles that I took her through and I’ll also give you some clues about how you can implement them for yourself.
The five principles are Focus, Eliminate, Sprint, Renewal and Personal First.
So if you firstly focus on Focus, then where she was at was that, at the moment, everything was her.
All projects, all tasks, all opportunities that came in, everything was her, it was all “me”.
Where I got her to was to recognise that there’s actually a small number of things that all of us do really really well.
Theres a guy called Dan Sullivan who calls that “working in your genius”. He says there are things you’re incompetent at, competent at, awesome at, and there’s these two or three things… where we want to move her is to recognise that it can’t be all you.
You need to work in your genius and then delegate or outsource the other things.
The second principle is Eliminate.
At the moment she’s saying “yes” to everything and I’m trying to encourage her to say “no more!”.
You can’t say “no” all the time, because the world’s not just about you, but literally say “no more”…
Taki Moore who I work with who’s a coach marketing guru, he’s got a filter where he says you should apply the three “nots” or the three “nos”: NOT us, NOT me, and NOT now.
If it’s not on mission,if it’s not YOU that should be doing it, and it’s not NOW, just eliminate it, put it in for later on.
Focus: work in genius, and Eliminate: we start to get her to say “no more”.
The third thing is she was always “on”.
She was always working hard at a million miles an hour, both in terms of when she was at work and also when she was out of work and I got her to recognise that there is actually only one part of the day where she’s most creative and got the best energy for work and that for her was in the mornings between the hours of 9 and 11am.
So the question is for you: When are you best able to Sprint?
When are you best able to knock out your best work? Literally write that down.
What we did for her was instead of being always “on”, we scheduled the most important things in her peakenergy periods, which for her was that morning.
The fourth one is there was no Renewal for her, it was just moving moving moving and no rest.
We scheduled in her diary specific downtime and for her that was the gym and so partly I said to her “Look, your best time’s in the morning, why are you going to the gym in the morning?” She’s like…”Because that’s where I want to spend my best time, 5-7am” Hallelujah!
That is renewal, right? Spending some important time for yourself on a daily and weekly basis is critical for you to be able to sprint.
The fifth one is Personal 1st.
Personally, in terms of her family, and all her responsibilities to people she loves, she felt stretched, she felt like work was trying to take more of her than she was able to give and she wasn’t able to give and because of that she wasn’t able to give what she wanted to her family, so she always felt stretched personally and so what I encourage her to do and all the clients I work with is just schedule the top five personal things that you need to get done first.
You would think “Well, how does that make you more productive?”
The reason I’ve worked out that it works is because if you don’t schedule them in and know when you’re going to do them, they take away your focus. They stop you eliminating because you’re always thinking about those personal things that you’re not getting done and you’re always not present in the moment, getting the thing done that you’re working on because you’re worried about the personal thing that you haven’t completed.
So here’s the thing.
If you want to move from chaos to a system, if you’re overwhelmed and you want to be calm…
Focus: Work in your genius.
Eliminate: Say no more.
Sprint: Schedule the most important things when you’re at high peak energy periods.
Renewal: Schedule in some downtime so you can have a rest and be more creative.
Schedule in the top 5 things in your calendar each week that are Personal that will distract you from being completely focussed on your work.
If you do those 5 things I think it’s going to help you get more from your weeks, get more from your quarters, and get more from your years.
What I’ve talked about is the example of how someone can be in a state of overwhelm and how they can move to a state of calm.
I’ve given you five things you can work on, and five principles and I’ve given you a couple of tools that you can use to do this for yourself.
The one rule here is: There is no one system that works for everyone.
Play around with this so that you can get your own unique system, and if you get a moment, leave me a comment below…
Actually, you will get a moment, because you’ll implement these five things and find yourself more time… Leave me a comment: From playing around with this what’s the system that you’ve worked out that’s going to make you calm and make you feel more in control and share that with me.
Talk to you soon.
