What I Can Teach You About Getting What You Want
This is the second part in my series on creating positive change in your life. If you missed the first part, please read it before reading this. You can find part one here – Is It Really Possible To Create The Change You Want In Your Life?.
Next up we begin a look at what I’ve learned and become aware of on my own journey to create what I want in my life. There’s a lot to cover here, so I’ve broken this section into two articles, starting with a look at three very vital concepts.
If you haven’t manifested your own desires and want to change your life, take on board what I have to say here, and in the articles that complete this series. I promise it will help you in many ways…
Here Is What I Know So Far
I’ve proactively changed many aspects of my life for the better, especially in the past five years. The key word here is “proactively”, which could be interchanged with the word consciously, or intentionally. The point being that I decided I wanted something and then went to work to create the change necessary to have what I wanted. It wasn’t just hoping, dreaming, or thinking about the change, it was all of those things AND focused action designed to take me there.
The end outcome of achieving what I set out to is usually different to what I expected, and of course as per the universal rules I talked about in the first article in this series, the process, the journey of creating the change turned out to be more valuable than actually arriving at the outcome.
Although we are motivated by changing certain physical circumstances we exist in, often it’s the internal shift, the growth we go through on a personal level, that turns out to be the most valuable outcome. The physical benefits are like having the cake, while the real change is learning how to cook, something you can take with you long after you finish eating the cake.
Although many of the stories I’m about to tell you relate to a personal milestone, event or challenge from my life, the cornerstone of the story is the lesson learned as a result. Luckily for us, I’ve been chronicling many of these lessons by revealing the stories here on this blog, so together we can go on a trip through the last ten years of my life and extract some of the most important and powerful revelations as they apply to creating positive change.
I’ve included a link to the original articles that recount in more detail the situations and the key learnings. I strongly recommend you read these articles too, as they will greatly reinforce the messages of this article series.
This is some of the most powerful content in this blog in terms of helping you change your mindset, increase your own self awareness and achieve what you want. I say this in confidence because they are the benefits I gained by living these experiences.
Here we go…
Why Entrepreneurs Need To Invent Their Own Time Management Systems
This is a guest post by Blog Mastermind graduate student, Francis Wade, who you may recognize as the time management expert with the Jamaican accent from his testimonial video. You can read about Francis and find more of his time management tips at his blog – http://2time-sys.com.
Managing your time = Managing your money
This simple equation has driven entrepreneurs from one time management class to another in search of tips that will transform them into ultra-productive professionals.
Most courses on time management run for two days, where you learn a new system of habits developed by someone who has invented a way to be more productive. The new system works so well for the inventor that he/she decides to package the approach into a detailed prescription to be followed by everyone.
The problem is, why should a time management system that works for the “expert” in their New York corporate world work for your internet business run out of your bedroom in Hawaii? You live a different life, with a need for flexible hours (i.e. midnight shifts included), and you don’t have the luxury of a secretary, IT support and real vacations away from email.
Plus there’s that habit that you have of taking a mid-afternoon nap… which you are sure helps you…to say nothing of the difference between the culture of Honolulu and Wall Street!
Instead of telling you to “follow me,” why can’t they tell you how to do something similar to what they did, so that you can also invent a time management system of your own? Did they follow some kind of method that you could use, and is there a process to follow, or were they just very smart or extremely lucky? You are a different animal, and you know that your habits are different from theirs, so why should you be expected to be successful following their system?
The fact is that most people who take time management courses have a hard time implementing a whole bunch of new, foreign habits all at once. Habits are hard to break, and the 101 new habits and 66 new tips in the new system they are learning are just impossible to learn overnight.
But, you give it a good try and it works – for a while – until the first crisis hits and you do what we all do — go back to what’s familiar. We feel bad, and we wonder how something that seemed so easy in class could be so hard to do in reality.
But in the back of our minds, we still want to be more productive and need to find a way to harness the insights that exist in all the programs out there… but who has time to attend them all?
The Solution
4 Tips For Becoming A More Productive Entrepreneur
These tips will make you a better human being in my opinion, but you have to stay on topic, so let’s focus on business.
Over the past few months I’ve experimented with some lifestyle changes. Not all of these changes were specifically about improving my business or working life, but they have enabled me to become more efficient at what I do during the day with my work. I suspect they will have a similar effect on you if you do them too.
Some of these tips, at least on the surface, might seem a bit dramatic to some people, others will laugh and say they have been doing these things for years. Either way, please read this advice with a mindset of how you could possibly implement them to help your life and your business.
How To Become An Efficient Procrastinator
Everyone is a procrastinator on some level. Some of us are terrible offenders, spending hours doing useless things like browsing facebook or blogs or walking up to see what is in the fridge multiple times a day, all in an effort to avoid the work we know we should be doing.
Over the past few weeks I implemented a method to help get the most from procrastination. This technique means you still procrastinate, in that you do something that is not exactly what you know you should be doing, but you still get results from your activities rather than waste time on idle tasks.
I call this efficient procrastination and here’s how it works.
Your focus needs to be on action. The whole reason I started thinking about this technique in the first place was after writing my article – Are You Drowning, Treading Water or Swimming? – which made me realize as long as the majority of daily activities moved me forward in some way, I could count that day a good one.
Once you realize that action is key, the next step is to isolate actions that lead to results of some kind for you and your business. Generally some tasks require more work than others and some you enjoy more. It’s precisely because of the tasks that you don’t enjoy, yet are critical for your business to move forward (or for you to move forward personally – like say studying for an exam), that you look for ways to procrastinate.
When you are sitting down, working on something you don’t really enjoy or you are tired of and that procrastination urge hits, it’s time to go and do something else, however that something else is still an activity that helps your big picture. You must choose a swimming forward task, not a time waster.
