Map Your Future Career And Life To Increase Your Motivation And Make Quicker Decisions
February 2, 2017
A Kick-Arse Team Needs These 5 Things
February 27, 2017
Hey there welcome to a new year!
What I’m going to talk about today is whether you need a TUNE UP or not.
One of the things we do is we take cars or musical instruments to the mechanic or to a musical store every now and then for a little tune up and there is a professional that works with them to work out the things that are broken or missing and what they need to fix to make things right again.
Sometimes with the leaders I work with and with people in their careers and also with teams, sometimes they just need a little tune up.
What I’m going to do is teach you a model to use if you want to start the year NOW (or at any other point!) and if you want to move from being a little bit de-motivated and lacking in energy to absolutely motivated and firing you can use this model to tune yourself up, and if you need help you know where to come!
The concept is: Every now and again everyone needs a tune up.
Treat yourself almost like a human instrument.
If you don’t get your own natural operating rhythm right, you can’t expect to be at your best and performing at the level you want to.
Grab a bit of paper and draw two lines in a cross. Consider (at the top of the vertical line) that there are some things that you need to tune up personally. Some things you need to tune up professionally (write this at the bottom of the vertical line). There are some things you might need to do under the hood (to the left) – around you and your own personal stuff. And lastly there are some things to consider around how you perform for others (to the right) – this is literally tuning up your engine, and it’s how you perform when you’re in front of other people: what you do and what you say.
When I start coaching with anyone when I meet them for the first time usually they sit down and talk to me about where they’re at one of the things I’m looking for is: How close are they to their natural operating rhythm? The rhythm that, when they’re in it, produces their best.
There are two ways you can uncover what this rhythm is, and we’ll use one of them with you in a minute…
There’s one where I can say “OK, tell me when you work at your BEST”. But the problem with often with the people I coach, they’ve been so far from their best for so long that they can’t really answer the question.
So what I often do is say “Alright, when it comes to your performance or the way you’re working, what’s most BROKEN or missing?”
What I want you to do, given that concept, is think of the things for you PERSONALLY, UNDER THE HOOD, what is most broken or what most needs fixing when it comes to your daily rhythm or daily performance?
Let me give you an example… if you firstly take this quadrant (PERSONAL/UNDER THE HOOD). If I think about one of the clients I work with, when I first met him the challenge he most had PERSONALLY/UNDER THE HOOD, was confidence. What I mean by that is that his confidence was undermined because he kept telling himself that he was an imposter and that he shouldn’t be there and he wasn’t worthy. So we worked on his thinking. (I’ll save that teaching for another day).
UNDER THE HOOD/PROFESSIONALLY the thing that was most broken was his priorities. He wasn’t really working on the right things in his months or quarters, he didn’t have his 3 or 4 most important things identified and his weeks were all over the place. So there I gave him my basic planning system and we started to get his big picture and his small picture all lined up.
Up in the PERSONAL/WORKING FOR OTHERS the thing that was most broken for him was spending time with family. He was spending too much time in the office and wasn’t doing the things that were most important. So a really simple thing we did there was we got him to try and get home for three dinners a week with his family. The thing that’s most important to make that happen is putting it in the calendar so that every week it’s there saying “You better be home!”.
PROFESSIONALLY/PERFORMING FOR OTHERS, that wasn’t broken. That was all good, in fact that was probably one of the things that he was spending too much time on and it was impacting on all the rest!
For you, I want you to write these down on a bit of paper – professionally, personally, under the hood and performing for others, what are the things that are most broken or missing and write down for yourself what might be 3 or 4 things for you to work on.
How do you apply this? What can you do next?
Once you’ve thought about yourself like an instrument, or a car and you’ve thought about where you need to be tuned up, think of ONE THING you can do in the next month to build these foundations into your natural operating rhythm so that you can be a finely tuned instrument.
If you need help doing that send me a private message if you’re on social media, or get in contact with me and we can have a chat about how that works.
