Professional Coaching Blog

One of the most valuable skills you can learn is speed reading. The reason although self-evident is lost on many professionals and entrepreneurs who struggle to keep up with the demands of their careers and businesses. Preeminence means that your reputation, standing and stature as a source of knowledge, expertise and wisdom precedes you. It’s one of the foundational strategies of Exponential Marketing. However, WHAT you read is as important as how FAST you read it.

I created the Preeminence Pyramid to highlight the evolution of a speed reader as he/she matures to develop his/her preeminence and the skills associated with a ‘higher’ profile persona. Of course you can mix and match your reading serendipitously, but the evolution is suggested in this order to ensure the BASE of the pyramid is as wide and as strong as possible. You know to ascend to the next level in the hierarchy when you’ve more or less saturated yourself in the content and context of that particular level/theme.

This of course is a guideline, not a strict rule. It’s just that without the underlying foundational analysis skills, great biographies are read as great story telling rather than as a revelation of the dynamics at play that intertwine the written passages – they greatest distinctions are unwritten and obtained through osmosis – if you don’t possess the basic skills, you simply can’t decipher the code and lose the most valuable lessons.

Take a cue from elite athletes who know how much to train AND avoid overtraining.

Here are four ways to tell you’re about to hit a performance wall.

Sometimes it’s obvious you need a break, but in most cases you’ll figure it out only once it’s too late. When you work double-digit hours during the week with Saturdays and Sundays no longer a reprieve, feeling overworked, stressed out and fatugued can become the new normal.

Even so, you’ll eventually hit a wall and when that happens it can take days and even weeks to recover the enthusiasm, creativity, and motivation you’ve lost. Not to mention the risk of a breakdown or other physical manifestation.

Fortunately a few of the same techniques endurance athletes use to detect the need for additional recovery can be used to indicate when you need to recharge your work batteries.

Where elite athletes are concerned, chronic overtraining can actually defeat the fitness purpose and result in decreased stamina, power and speed. Sometimes after an inlfection point has been reached, the harder they train the slower and/or weaker they get.

The same thing happens to us when we’re overworked at the office, on the job.

Of course we then put in more hours to compensate and get even less done!

So how can you tell the difference between feeling overworked and really overworking yourself?

Here are 4 ways to ensure you stay at your professional best so that you are in peak performance state.

1. Check your resting heart rate. Every day, before you get out of bed, take your pulse. (There are plenty of free apps that make it easy. Some even log results.) Most of the time your heart rate will stay within a few beats per minute. But when you’re overworked and stressed your body sends more oxygen to your body and brain by increasing your heart rate. (The same thing happens when athletes overtrain and their bodies struggle to recover.) If your heart rate is up in the morning, do whatever it takes to get a little extra rest or sleep that night.
2. Check your emotions. Having a bad day? Feeling irritable and short-tempered? If you can’t put your finger on a specific reason why, chronic stress and fatigue may have triggered a physiological response and sent more cortisol and less dopamine to your brain. Willing yourself to be in a better mood won’t overcome the impact of chemistry. In extreme cases, the only cure is a break, starting with a good night’s sleep!
3. Check your weight. Lose or gain more than one percent of body weight from one day to the next and something’s wrong. Maybe yesterday was incredibly stressful and you failed to notice you didn’t eat and drink enough or maybe you failed to notice just how much you actually ate. Lack of nourishment and hydration can impair higher-level mental functions (which may be why when we’re overworked and feeling stressed we instinctively want to perform routine, less complex tasks.) And eating too much food—well, we all know the impact of that.
4. Check your, um, output. Urine color can indicate a lack of hydration (although sometimes it indicates you created really expensive urine after eating a ton of vitamins your body could not absorb.) The lighter the color the more hydrated you are. Hydration is a good thing. Proper hydration aids the absorption of nutrients and helps increase energy levels. If your urine is darker than usual the cure is simple: Drink a lot of water.

The key is to monitor each of these over a period of time so you develop a feel for what is normal for you.

Pay special attention on weekends and when you take a vacations. If you notice a dramatic change, especially a positive one, that’s a sure sign you need to change your workday routine.

Don’t think this is only for elite athletes. If you want to be the best you can possibly be, no matter what your profession, whenever you slam into the workload wall you are far from our best.

Don’t even think you don’t have the time to take a short break or get a little more sleep. You can’t afford NOT TO.

If you don’t monitor your workload (and stress), eventually your mind and your body will hit a wall and force you to take a much longer break than you can really afford…

So why not avoid the collision in the first place?!?!

I have mixed feelings about willpower and it’s importance in goal setting and achievement. The main reason is that if you have a clearly articulated goal, outcome or dream you want to achieve that really excites you, you don’t need any willpower to get it done.

Willpower to me is an excuse for impotent goal setters.

Without exciting goals you would need willpower to get motivated.

For example, I don’t smoke. It takes no willpower for me to avoid picking up a cigarette, cigar or pipe. The same is true for overeating. I value my vitality, health and wellbeing so much that I don’t overeat or abuse alcohol or other ‘substances’.

If you’re struggling with willpower and are trying to harness more of it – you’re probably heading in the wrong direction.

Focus on your goals, dreams and aspirations instead.

When you do, you’ll find an unquenchable thirst for achievement that will create relentless enthusiasm within you and you’ll be of the same point of view that willpower has no place in genuine and authentic achievement that is congruent with your life’s purpose.

Give it some serious thought the next time you think you’re lacking in willpower – or when you see someone with very little of it.

Share these thoughts with them because that’s what someone did with me when I was a teenager and it changed my life and perspective forever.

Back in the days before the Internet, there was a time management concept I heard about called the “1 Touch Rule”. Simply stated, it meant that when a paper came into your IN Tray (or on your desk), you were supposed to deal with it the FIRST time you touched it, hence the name – 1 Touch Rule.

I totally understand that at first, it’s much easier said than done, but with practice it gets easier. In fact, you’ll quickly reach a point where you simply won’t touch anything UNLESS you can deal with it in 1 TOUCH.

One of my pet peeves is people not managing their emails. They open them, skim and close them WITHOUT DOING ANYTHING other than wasting time. The next time they go to that email is the SECOND TIME = another waste of time.

The 1 Touch Rule led me to create a concept I call Gap Management. In simple terms, it means using the gaps that occur in all our lives. For example, if I got a message to call a client, I would do it when I knew I would get his/her voicemail. I would leave a FULL message so he/she could deal with the issue BEFORE they called me back – avoiding telephone tag and another multi-touch scenario.

I teach these strategies in my Platinum Program. All I can really do in a blog is introduce the concept and let you know there is a better way to get more more things done in less time. At my workshops, over several hours, I can explain and show you how it’s done with real case studies and examples as well as answer your specific questions. Contact us if you’re keen to learn how to get a lot more done in less time.

Personal development and peak performance principles often are a combination of dilemmas and conundrums wrapped up in paradoxes.

On the one hand you want and should aim to get the best result with the least amount of effort and yet to grow, you need to stop cutting corners when seeking shortcuts.

How can you tell the difference between the two?

I don’t know a sure fire way except that “you know in your gut” – intuitively – when you’re being lazy versus being efficient.

I recently had a client ask me the following question:

After recording an interview with a specialist, how he could leverage it beyond using it as a new employee training tool?

If he gave it a serious effort role playing a final exam question whereby 70% of his grade depended on the list he could create in 3 minutes or less, chances are he would come up with 80 to 90% of the list that I would propose.

But he didn’t.

Was it because he’s lazy?

Yes.

The challenge we all have is to catch ourselves when we are being intellectually lazy. Like any other muscle, the brain (intellect) needs to be exercised to grow stronger, more capable. We can only do that through mental exercise.

This was an ideal opportunity. A missed opportunity.

As his mentor, I responded with this blog post AND the suggestion to do as suggested above. It would have been quicker and easier for me to give him a to do list, but that would create a dependency that I don’t want to initiate.

I believe in the Socratic method of guiding, mentoring and coaching leveraging an Exponential MasterMind Experience to embolden and enrich the sensations and associations whenever possible (I shared this blog post with other Platinum Program Members months ago).

The next time you’re gut tells you you’re cutting corners, use the opportunity to step up to another level and ask yourself the question “I know I don’t know, but if I did know…”

You might just surprise yourself!