Want to make more time in your day? Use a calendar or some other scheduling tool or app. Use a wall calendar, planner book, free online calendar, or an app that sends you reminders. It doesn’t really matter what form your calendar takes. Just use something!
Schedule your day, your week, your month. Make sure you include the activity you really want to get done but feel you don’t have enough time to get done. Put that activity in your calendar!
Focus and intensity are key components to staying alert when mastering a new skill or learning new information.
Many people think they can engage in an activity for hours on end and stay focused the entire time. Unfortunately, that’s not the way our brains work.
while practicing so you can meet your musical goals. Though many musicians want to practice for hours on end, it’s nearly impossible to remain focused for such a long amount of time.
According to Dianne Dukette and David Cornish in their 2009 book The Essential 20: Twenty Components of an Excellent Health Care Team, most teenagers and adults are unable to sustain attention on one thing for more than about 20 minutes at a time.
Twenty minutes! Think about that. If you’re trying to do something for an hour, you may be zoned out and completely wasting your time after about 20 minutes.
I’ve seen other sources that say 17 minutes is the maximum we humans can hope to really focus on one activity at a time.
So, whether it’s 20 minutes or even shorter, you may need to rethink how you spend your time when you really need to focus.
In this blog, I’ll be posting effective strategies for remaining focused when you need to. They’ll all be under the header “Increase Your Focus” so they’ll be easy to search.
A common piece of financial advice is: “Pay yourself first.” This is a great strategy for building savings you thought you could never build.
Here’s a variation of this sage advice that lets you get something accomplished you never thought you could accomplish:
Put Yourself First
Here’s what this means . . . Whatever activity you really want to do but haven’t taken the time to do will now get done first in your day.
Before doing errands, housework, gardening, cooking dinner, checking email, and all the other activities you engage in, you will make time for the activity you want to do. The beautiful thing about this strategy is that you will still have time to finish all that other stuff. And, you’ll be getting something done that you truly want to do.
Put yourself first. It’s like a miracle strategy for making more time in your day.
What if you could make more time in the day?
We all know that there are only 24 hours in the day. We also know that some people seem to get almost nothing done in those 24 hours, and other people seem to pack two days’ worth of activities and achievements into each day.
If you could get more done each day – whether that was at your job, in your personal relationships, with activities you want to do, or any other aspect of your life – you would feel more fulfilled and could rightly feel proud of yourself. That sense of personal fulfillment is one of the key ingredients for a happy life and something just about all of my clients are trying to experience.
Too many people wait to follow their dreams, pick up a new hobby, or learn a new language because they “don’t have enough time.” They feel they need to make more time in order to go after the things that they want.
I’m going to make a list of how to make more time in your day. You and I both know that you can’t actually manufacture more hours, minutes, and seconds. I’ll give you strategies so you feel like you’ve made more time. There a lot of fantastic strategies to make more time, and you’ll see them here in a series of short, easy-to-try blog posts.
Stay tuned . . .
In every situation in life, we need to consider who are audience is when we talk to them. This is true in business, in your personal life, in conversations, in presentations, pretty much everywhere.
And, the idea of considering your audience’s perspective is crucial, essential, an absolute must in one area in particular: in the media.
If you find yourself in a media interview or if you are sending a written quote that will be used in the media, make sure you think about the listener/reader who will be receiving your message!
When you don’t think about that person, you can easily misspeak, look like a fool, or make a situation worse.
What you say affects your standing in your community, the reputation of your organization, and how both you and your organization are perceived.
As a performance coach, I’m especially troubled when I see or hear company representatives, public servants, politicians, corporate leaders, and others who don’t seem to understand that once they say something, a situation can instantly change for the worst.
With that in mind, I will use my blog to share examples of people saying/writing things that may have inadvertently done them damage and could have been done so much better. By sharing these examples, and giving suggestions of how to improve what they said, I hope to give real-world examples of how to Consider Your Audience whenever you speak.
In my work as a performance coach, I see a lot of speakers and presenters who are primarily concerned with the content of their presentations. They think about their content from one perspective: their own.
I ask them to turn their thinking around and think about the needs of their audience. Whether you’re talking to an audience of one or to an audience of one-thousand, their needs and expectations are more important than yours.
Figuring out the expectations of your audience is the tricky part.
I ran across an interesting Tony Robbins article on recognizing people’s patterns – what he calls “metaprograms.” I believe that you can use Robbins’s idea of pattern recognition to better design your presentations and better deliver your presentations.
With insight into your audience’s needs and expectations, you can deliver a presentation that will be more impactful, persuasive, and memorable.
What does a retired NFL quarterback who’s obsessed with golf – but doesn’t have enough time to practice regularly – have to teach us about performance optimization?
It’s simple: Thinking
That’s right. When you can’t do the activity, think about the activity.
I call this visualization.
This special form of thinking that is visualization looks something like this:
Define your goal. See it happening. Hear the sounds that will be in your environment. Feel what it will be like to take the perfect action. Smell the surroundings. If possible, conjure up the taste in your mouth when doing your activity. (I know, this last one sounds a bit strange, but it can be as simple as the taste of coffee in a meeting or as unsavory as the salty sweat dripping down your face in a heated athletic competition.)
Multi-sensory visualizations just might be the difference between your success and failure.
Here’s more about Steve Young and his thoughts on golf and football.
Great quote from Napoleon Hill, shared by success guru Brian Tracy:
I ran across a terrific article by Tara Parker-Pope in the New York Times on the benefits of spending time with the right people. Turns out that who you spend time with influences nearly every aspect of your life.
I recommend taking control of your personal network so it’s working for your benefit. Spend more time with people who believe in you and your success. Jettison people who bring you down. You’ll be amazed by the results!
Read Parker-Pope’s article now at NYTimes.com.
Steph Curry, star player for the NBA’s Golden State Warriors, has said this about one of his coaches:
” . . . huge, just being there for us.”
” . . . big in helping us through the recovery process and kind of giving us the game plan of how we can get back on the floor.”
” . . . been amazing . . . just kept me sane.”
Who was Curry talking about?
Chelsea Lane, performance therapist for the Warriors who recently left the Bay Area to take the same job in Atlanta. (You can read a great article on performance coach Chelsea Lane on the San Francisco Chronicle website.)
In so many endeavors, physical skills and knowledge are simply not enough to make you insanely great. It takes mental balance, courage, and emotional resilience to lead you to victory, whether that victory is on the basketball court, in a corporate boardroom, or on a stage.
Getting coached on the mental and emotional aspects of your skill set is crucial. Performance coaching is now a vital part of the process of achieving success.
