by Helena Escalante | Collaboration, Growth, Leadership, Mindset, Planning
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes, 37 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: Your Leadership Potential is Tied to Others
— From Equipping 101: What Every Leader Needs to Know by John C. Maxwell
I’m sure you’re familiar with Jim Rohn’s quote, “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” Thus, your leadership potential is tied to other leaders that surround you: not outside or industry leaders and peers, but internal ones—in your business or organization—with whom you spend the most time with.
In Equipping 101, leadership guru John C. Maxwell says, “The greatest leadership principle that I have learned in over thirty years of leadership is that those closest to the leader will determine the success level of that leader.” And he points out that the negative reading of this assertion is true as well: “Those closest to the leader will determine the level of failure for that leader.” In other words, the people with whom you surround yourself make or break you.
“Most leaders have followers around them. They believe the key to leadership is gaining more followers. Few leaders surround themselves with other leaders, but the ones who do bring great value to their organizations. And not only is their burden lightened, but their vision is carried on and enlarged.”
Maxwell goes on to say, “Often, leaders wrongly believe that they must compete with the people closest to them instead of working with them [… but if] you really want to be a successful leader, you must develop and equip other leaders around you.”
Peter Drucker, management guru, famously said, “No executive has ever suffered because his people were strong and effective.” And Maxwell points out that surrounding yourself with other leaders and growing and equipping them to lead helps lift the load in two important ways:
First, other leaders become a sounding board. “Followers tell you what you want to hear. Leaders tell you what you need to hear… An opinion before a decision has potential value. An opinion after the decision has been made is worthless.”
Second, other leaders possess a leadership mind-set. “Fellow leaders do more than work with the leader, they think like the leader… This becomes invaluable in areas such as decision-making, brainstorming, and providing security and direction to others… They can carry on effectively [while the leader is away].”
Finally, to illustrate the points above, Maxwell shares a conversation with his father: he served as the president of a college for 16 years, and told the author that the most expensive workers on campus were not the highest paid but the people who were nonproductive. While leaders indeed were paid more, they were true assets because they were more productive, attracted a higher quality of persons, and added value. Maxwell’s father finished the conversation by saying, “Most people produce only when they feel like it. Leaders produce even when they don’t feel like it.”
ACTION
TODAY: Take a moment to think: Who are the closest people to you in your organization? Are you making the most out of your leadership potential and theirs?
FUTURE: Make sure that you are attracting the right people to your team and equipping them with the ability to lead.
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by Helena Escalante | Accountability, Goals, Growth, Mindset, Opportunity, Planning, Resources, Tools, Wellbeing
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 28 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: The After-Action Review: Backward T
hinking
— From Your Best Year Ever: A 5-Step Plan for Achieving Your Most Important Goals by Michael Hyatt
Nobel Prize laureate Daniel Kahneman and psychologist Dale T. Miller wrote a chapter in the book Heuristics and Biases, where they talk about “the power of backward thinking.” What they mean by this is the importance of using the past as a way to design a better future. “Reasoning flows not only forward, from anticipation and hypothesis to confirmation or revision, but also backward, from the experience to what it reminds us of or makes us think about.”
And in today’s book, Your Best Year Ever, author and leadership guru Michael Hyatt recalls a friend of his telling him: “An experience is not complete until it is remembered.” Thus, Hyatt says, “We can’t complete the past until we acknowledge what we’ve already experienced.”
In terms of looking ahead at the New Year, setting goals and making plans, it’s important to look at the past year (or the past in general) and learn from what didn’t go well, as well as build on top what indeed went well.
For this, Hyatt points us in the direction of the After-Action Review (AAR), an exercise used in the U.S. Army to improve performance.
“After an event, the goal is to understand what happened, why it happened, and how they can improve. Lots of businesses use this process, and we can use it too.”
The After-Action Review has four key stages:
Stage 1: State what you wanted to happen. “For the military, this is pretty straightforward. Think of it as the battle plan or the object of the mission. For us, this could be your list of goals from the prior year… Start by asking yourself how you saw the year going. What were your plans, your dreams, your concrete goals if you had any?”
Stage 2: Acknowledge what actually happened. “Ask yourself, What disappointments or regrets did I experience this past year? […] What did you feel you should have been acknowledged for but weren’t? […] What did you accomplish this past year that you were most proud of? Completing the past is not just about processing failures and disappointments. It’s also about acknowledging and celebrating your wins. […] To finish this stage, it’s useful two tease out some themes. What were two or three specific themes that kept recurring? These could be single words, phrases, or even complete sentences.”
Stage 3: Learn from the experience. “What were the major life lessons you learned this past year? […] If you have trouble identifying your key lessons from the year, one way to suss them out is to ask what was missing from your success… Listing these missing ingredients is an effective way to learn what went wrong and what it would take to go right in the future. [Lastly,] to retain these lessons, you’ll want to distill your discoveries into short, pithy statements. That transforms your learning into wisdom to guide your path into the future.”
Stage 4: Adjust your behavior. “If something in your beliefs and behaviors contributed to the gap between what you wanted to happen and what actually happened, something has to change. In fact, that gap will only widen and worsen unless you pivot. It’s not enough to acknowledge the gap. It’s not even enough to learn from the experience. If you don’t change your beliefs and how you act on them, you’re actually worse then when you started.”
And there you have it. The After-Action Review is one of the most powerful backward thinking exercises you can undergo to derive a lesson and move forward.
Happy backward thinking! 😉
ACTION
TODAY: As the year is coming to an end, set aside some time in your calendar to do an After-Action Review of this year. Give yourself half a day in your schedule to do it thoroughly.
FUTURE: Every time you come to the end of a year, a project, a sprint or a certain event, do an After-Action Review so that you can learn and internalize the lessons. They will become invaluable mindset assets for your future.
Know someone who will like this post? Please share it via email, Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, thank you!
by Helena Escalante | Accountability, Celebration, Goals, Growth, Habits, Mindset, Planning, Productivity, Time, Tools
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes, 33 seconds
TODAY’S IDEA: The key to productivity? Forget about annual goals!
— From The 12 Week Year: Get More Done in 12 Weeks than Others Do in 12 Months by Brian Moran and Michael Lennington
As odd as this sounds, “annual goals and plans are often a barrier to high performance,” say Brian P. Moran and Michael Lennington, productivity gurus and authors of the wonderful book The 12 Week Year. The key to productivity, they say, is to discard annual goals.
The authors make the assertion that “there is no question you will do better with annual goals and plans than without any goals or plans.” However, they have found that thinking in yearly increments inherently limits performance.
How is this possible?
It’s actually very simple: we all fall into the trap of annualized thinking. This is the mistaken belief that there’s a lot of time left in the year to do whatever we want and that, at some point, later in the year, “we will experience a significant improvement in results.”
The biggest mistake of all, though, is having an optimistic delusion that we will be able to have much more time later to catch on and do what we haven’t done at this point.
“The fact is that every week counts! Every day counts! Every moment counts! We need to be conscious of the reality that execution happens daily and weekly, not monthly or quarterly.”
Thinking in shorter time frames—12 weeks for example—is a much better way to accomplish your goals. This is the key to productivity: working in sprints.
“The result is a heightened sense of urgency and an increased focus on the critical few, those important core activities that drive success and fulfillment, and the daily executions of those items to guarantee the achievement of your long-term objectives.” By virtue of having the deadline near, you never lose sight of it, and this period is long enough to accomplish things and short enough to have a constant sense of urgency and thus, a bias for action.
And, of course, at the end of every sprint, you have a celebration—just as you would at the end of the year. It may be big or small, but you take some time to enjoy what you’ve just accomplished, reflect on what went well and what didn’t, rest, reenergize, and get ready for the next sprint.
Want to try one of these working sprints out with me? I’m running another one of my Achieve in 90 (90-day sprint program) after the New Year and will be opening registration soon. Sign up here to be notified when it’s open.
ACTION
TODAY: As the New Year approaches, think about a goal that you could accomplish in a sprint. Set the time in your calendar and try it out. (Spoiler alert: You’ll never want to come back to annualized thinking after that!)
FUTURE: Set the habit of working in sprints. While 12 weeks is fantastic, sometimes you may need just a month instead, depending on your goal: you set the timeframe and deadlines. It works incredibly well and you’ll love it.
Know someone who would like today’s idea? Please share this post via email, Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, thank you!
by Helena Escalante | Accountability, Goals, Growth, Habits, Mindset, Planning, Productivity, Tools
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes, 26 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: The Link Between Purpose, Priority, and Productivity
— From The ONE Thing: The surprisingly simple truth behind extraordinary results by Gary Keller with Jay Papasan (watch the book trailer)
Today’s post expands on yesterday’s idea of asking the one question—The Focusing Question—when we want to concentrate on the critical steps that we must take to achieve our goals.
Gary Keller and Jay Papasan, authors of The ONE Thing, say, there’s a simple formula for implementing the ONE thing and achieving extraordinary results: purpose, priority, and productivity. “Bound together, these three are forever connected and continually confirming each other’s existence in our lives. Their link leads to the two areas where you’ll apply the ONE Thing—one big and one small.”
“Your big ONE Thing is your purpose and your small ONE Thing is the priority you take action on to achieve it. The most productive people start with purpose and use it like a compass. They allow purpose to be the guiding force in determining the priority that drives their actions. This is the straightest path to extraordinary results.”
To wrap our heads around this, the authors suggest thinking of purpose, priority, and productivity as three parts of an iceberg: bottom, middle, and tip, respectively. The first two are underwater and the last one is above the water line. My husband and I recently traveled to Iceland and learned that the tip of an iceberg—what you can see—is only 10% of the total mass of ice that is floating (!).* And the authors say the same thing: what you can see—productivity—is only the tip. Purpose and priority are below the surface and never seen, but they indeed drive productivity. Thus, the formula for your personal iceberg is:
45% Purpose + 45% Priority + 10% Productivity =
100% Extraordinary Results
“The more productive people are, the more purpose and priority are pushing and driving them. With the additional outcome of profit, it’s the same for business. What’s visible to the public—productivity and profit—is always buoyed by the substance that serves as the company’s foundation—purpose and priority.”
Connecting purpose, priority, and productivity may seem obvious at first (so obvious that we tend to take it for granted). Yet once we realize how deeply entrenched that connection is, and the extraordinary results that they produce when linked together, we realize that it’s in our best interest to let our purpose and priority guide our productivity. And no better way than making this happen by creating the habit of frequently asking, “What’s the ONE Thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?”
What is your purpose? And what is your priority? How will you focus your productivity to reach your goals?
ACTION
TODAY: Ask, ask, ask, and ask again many times throughout the day, “What’s the ONE Thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?”
FUTURE: Create the habit of asking this question in many areas of your life: it can only improve for the better!
Know someone who would like to read this post? Please share it with them via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. Thanks!
*The featured image in today’s post is one that I took from the glacier lagoon we visited: what you see there is only 10% of what is below, whoa!
by Helena Escalante | Accountability, Goals, Growth, Mindset, Productivity, Time, Tools
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes, 6 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: One Question You Must Ask to Use Your Time Optimally
— From The ONE Thing: The surprisingly simple truth behind extraordinary results by Gary Keller with Jay Papasan (watch the book trailer)
“The way to get the most out of your work and your life is to go as small as possible,” say Gary Keller and JayPapasan, authors of The One Thing.
“Going small,” they continue, “is ignoring all the things you could do and doing what you should do. It’s recognizing that not all things matter equally and finding the things that matter most. It’s a tighter way to connect what you do with what you want. It’s realizing that extraordinary results are directly determined by how narrow you can make your focus.”
Because we only have so much time and energy, if we try to do too much we’ll end up spreading ourselves too thin. Thus, Keller and Papasan offer the following one question—which they call The Focusing Question—to get us laser focused on obtaining extraordinary results:
“What’s the ONE Thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?”
Extraordinary results do not happen in a vacuum. They happen as a result of the choices we make and the actions we take, at all levels. And while tremendously simple at first glance, we shouldn’t underestimate the power of this one question, because it can lead us to answer…
“Not only ‘big picture’questions (Where am I going? What target should I aim for) but also ‘small focus’ ones as well (What must I do right now to be in the path to getting the big picture? Where’s the bulls-eye?). It tells you not only what your basket should be, but also the first step toward getting it. It shows you how big your life can be and just how small you must go to get there. It’s both a map for the big picture and a compass for your smallest next move. […] It leads you to the first domino.”
Let me, then, close this post by asking you: What’s the ONE Thing you can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?
ACTION
TODAY: Ask The Focusing Question again and again. The answer, each time, will be your priority.
FUTURE: Keep asking again and again. If you focus on whatever the answer is (your priority at the moment), you will be working towards your goals and knowing that you are going in the right direction.
Know someone who would benefit from asking this one question to get laser-focused on his or her goals? Please share this post via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. Thanks!
by Helena Escalante | Goals, Growth, Mindset, Planning, Productivity, Time, Tools, Wellbeing
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 4 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: How to Cure a Productivity Hangover
— From Laura Vanderkam’s email series “Just a minute” sent December 1, 2018: How to Cure a Productivity Hangover
As I’ve been immersing myself in productivity and goal-setting topics in preparation for the New Year, I received this great newsletter from Laura Vanderkam.
The race to the end of the year is a sprint, and many of us are putting things aside to clear the way and finish our goals with a bang.
And sometimes what happens is that, “You’ve been working hard. You’ve hurtled toward a huge deadline. You made it happen. Now it’s time to deal with everything else in life that you put off. But you just…can’t.”
This is what Vanderkam calls a productivity hangover. And just as a regular hangover, the only cures are time and sleep.
“But if a vacation isn’t possible right now,” says Vanderkam, “a few other strategies can help.” And she offers the following activities with a preceding note: “You don’t need to feel motivated to get stuff done. Inspiration is like Santa Claus. Nice to believe in, but at a certain point you learn to make other plans.”
So, here are those other plans:
Make a list. “You’re not committing to actually doing anything. You’re just listing out the things you need to do at some point. I find that list-making takes less energy and produces less resistance than the actual work itself, and sometimes seeing obligations in black and white makes them seem less overwhelming.”
Work on something you like. “Surely something on your list is reasonably enjoyable (if not, you’ve got a bigger problem than a productivity hangover!). Tackle this task first. But…
Set a time limit. Yes, even with work you like! Assign yourself 20 minutes of this first task. That’s it. This strict limit has two upsides: first, you might accomplish more than you think you will, but just as important, after 20 minutes, you’ll be able to cross an item off your to-do list. You did exactly what you set out to do. This sense of success is highly motivational, and progress creates its own momentum.”
Pace yourself. “Study your list of obligations. It’s unlikely everything needs to be done today. So assign yourself three items a day (or so) over the next few days. Knowing when something will get done can help you relax, and getting through three things doesn’t seem too hard. No need to work yourself into a pity party over that. Continue to set time limits (an hour per item, max).”
Reward yourself. “Once you tackle your three assignments, celebrate. Go for a walk. Go buy (or make yourself) a cup of coffee. Read those articles you keep saying you’re going to read. Go chat with a work friend — well, as long as she’s not hurtling toward a deadline herself.”
Have you ever had to work when you did not feel motivated to do so? How did you find the energy? What did you think or tell yourself that made you do it? I’m very curious, please let me know in the comments here.
ACTION
TODAY: If you are sprinting towards the end of the year, you may have to put aside a few things to get other ones accomplished. Make a list of several things that truly motivate you, so that if you get a productivity hangover, you can fall back on those things that help you bounce back up faster.
FUTURE: Whether it’s a sprint in December or some other project that leaves you depleted throughout the year, go back to your motivation list and come back to this post to put Vanderkam’s suggestions into practice.
Know someone who would like this post? Please share it with your circles via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, thanks!
