ReliabilityX

Category: Mission

  • Self Ownership Part 2

    Self Ownership Part 2

    A good mental framework to have is that instead of you pushing towards accomplishing goals, you think about what things you have to “pull” to get to the end game. The subtle shift in the thinking will position you to find more creative solutions to problems. A very frequent problem with management who doesn’t really know how to solve problems is saying things like “work harder”. If we just turn up the Hard Work Dial to 11, then the problems will go away, obviously. Instead if we looked at what is stopping the success and actively worked on removing those problems, we’d be able to remove the stress of failure without having to break the Hard Work Dial.

    Just these examples show the difference in ownership versus direction, but it’s important for us to talk about the distinction between responsibility and fault, because this is an area that many people start to get stuck and spin their wheels.

    Responsibility and fault are very frequently used almost interchangeably in daily language, but we need to separate the two here. Fault is the blame that comes from being the cause of the failure in question. Responsibility is knowing who’s job is to solve or prevent the failures in the first place. Here’s a quick story to illustrate.

    Megan the waitress turned a corner with a giant tray of drinks and food in the air and ran head first into Drunk Dan, and nachos and Tall Boys cover Megan.

    If you are looking for who’s at fault, it’s mostly Dan, for being inebriated to the point that he didn’t hear a waitress coming around the corner and being too slow to avoid knocking the waitress over.

    It’s also partially Megan’s fault, because she should have known that this corner usually has a few patrons, and she should have walked around it in a way to make sure it was clear beforehand.

    But who’s responsible?

    In my personal opinion, it’s the character who’s not even mentioned: the restaurant manager.

    I’ve worked in restaurants for years and know that there’s things that happen once, and problems that keep happening.

    Is this a corner that frequently has trouble? Then why not add a mirror for wait staff to see around the corner? Why are patrons allowed near it at all? Why was a patron so overserved (by my staff) that they drunkenly ran into one of my employees? Am I trying to save money by not hiring a food expeditor to help wait staff carry their food to their tables, would that have allowed Megan to avoid knocking the tray over?

    These are just four places that the manager of the restaurant could have prevented this incident and saved dozens of plates of nachos in the process. This mindset of finding and solving problems before they happen is one of the core components of self-ownership.

    Restaurant managers have to do this with dozens of situations daily, but everyone has the ability to take this mental framework and apply it to the self-ownership of their life, both professionally and personally.

    Is your son constantly forgetting to complete his homework? As anyone who’s been to school knows, Mom and Dad saying for the 32nd time “do your homework” falls on deaf ears when the Xbox is in focus.

    What if you took that self-ownership mindset and applied it to this situation? What if you made a new routine instead of just yelling, again, to do the homework?

    Side note: If you read about self-discipline, you’ll recognize first that you’re taking the lazy way out by just yelling to do the homework. It allows you to check off the box that you told him to do the homework, so when he doesn’t do it, you’ll have something to say that you tried to help. Also, the kid probably subconsciously picks up on that fact and isn’t well-spoken enough to say that he needs a new method.

    Imagine a routine where the first thing that happens, before their backpack is set down or shoes are off, is they write on a dry-erase board what subjects they have homework for today.

    Then you take masking tape and make a square on the kitchen counter the size of a piece of paper, one per child. Whatever reward mechanism you want to promote is put in the square immediately when the child finishes writing down the subjects on the dry erase board after they get home from school. It’s immediately “unlocked” when they put all of their homework on the homework square.

    Now, Jack has his Xbox controller on the square and Michelle has her cell phone on hers. Michelle can’t text any of her friends and Jack can’t play Call of Duty until they finish their homework.

    With a visible system for completion or non-completion, the incentive of whatever fun stuff they want access to being the reward for completion, and the benefit of removing what is the likely distraction from completing the homework being removed until the homework is done, you’ve set up the kids for simple and total success!

    Instead of you losing your mind from parroting “did you do your homework?!” – which you know the answer to, and so do they – you did the little bit of creativity necessary to make sure that your sanity is safe, and by the way, the kids are doing their homework faster and more completely than ever before!

    That’s the kind of victory that self-ownership can bring to the table. It only took a few feet of masking tape, a small dry erase board and a bit of creativity to solve one of the most common friction points between parents and kids about school work.

    Parenting is a good example of self-ownership in practice and principle. Yes, the broken wine glass was technically little Colin’s fault, but who was responsible for putting it within reaching distance of Colin? The fault is backwards looking, but the responsibility is forward facing: will you, as the adult, continue to put your glass where Colin can reach it? Then now, you’re at fault if another glass breaks. After all, didn’t you learn?

    As a quick side note, I’d like to share the self-ownership lesson from the story of The Boy Who Cried Wolf.

    Everyone knows the story: the boy was put in charge of telling the town when a wolf was coming, so they could protect the sheep from the wolf. For some reason, the boy cried wolf when there wasn’t a wolf. The townsfolk came, ready to fight off a wolf, and were disappointed when there was nothing there.

    They returned home, and then the boy called it again. The townsfolk came running again, and again found nothing. Finally a wolf comes along and the boy cries, but the people don’t trust him after all of his false alarms, the wolf kills the sheep and the boy learns a lesson about lying to people.

    That’s the lesson given to most kids, but most adults wrongly think there’s only a lesson for children.

  • Self Ownership Part 1

    Self Ownership Part 1

    Here’s a common situation that most of us have experienced in our careers or education:

    You’re working on a project with a tight deadline, the task is do-able, but difficult. Everyone has their specific tasks assigned, and the whole team is working together on a final document to turn in. Your section is the financial analysis portion of the project.

    The sections all reference each other, none of them can stand alone and have a chance at making sense together. Three of your four teammates are working on final editing of the document the night before it’s due, when the final teammate says “Ok, I think my part’s done, we can add it in now.”

    With just hours to go, the entire team has to work through the night to somehow integrate this into the final document – hoping that it still makes sense or doesn’t contradict the other portions.

    What went wrong here?

    You did your job.

    Your job was the financial analysis. You did your job.

    What went wrong is that your job description is almost never everything that you need to do to succeed, and you thought doing your job was enough for the team to win.

    What was really needed was someone to take ownership of the project. Not just to be another line cook flipping burgers, but making sure that the napkins are stocked, food is fresh, the bills are paid, make sure the silverware is clean and 238 other things got done.

    What you needed was self-ownership.

    Self-ownership is the awareness and implementation that, at the end of the day, almost every problem is on your plate. This means there’s no one to pass the blame onto.

    It’s the ability to look at a department in a company, a fundraising event for a non-profit, or the annual Halloween party for the 4th grade class and realize that even though you may not have the title of owner, if you want the project to succeed, you’re going to need to pretend that you have it.

    Most people’s first attempts at self-ownership fall flat, because they’re viewing the problem from the wrong direction. They hear about “self-ownership” and assume that they are in charge of the entire situation.

    They start out telling people what to do, frequently people who outrank them or have more experience and are rightfully put in their place.

    Self-ownership doesn’t mean that you’re the King of the Welding Department, with ultimate authority. It means that your goal is ultimately the success of the welding department, and you’ll do whatever it takes to get there.

    These two attitudes show themselves in very different ways, in both actions and the internal and external dialogue people have with each other.

    When you’re focused on taking personal ownership of the welding department, for example, the successful perspective would ask where are we right now? What metrics are we failing to hit? What causes them?

    Is the sales team setting unrealistic expectations on delivery dates, making the welding team take dangerous risks, putting the safety of the crew at risk?

    Are certain shifts not putting out their quota of production? Is this because at the end of the shift, half the workers just walk away from their equipment, leaving the next shift to clean up their workspace for an hour instead of hitting the ground running?

    Compare that mindset of ownership versus just telling the welding team they need to work faster, especially Jeff and Mikey, or they’re going to get fired, hoping that will light a fire underneath them.

     

  • Self-Discipline Part 3

    Self-Discipline Part 3

    We’ve spoken enough about the psychology of self-discipline, let’s get into actionable steps, things that are easy to remember and implement on a day to day basis. If writing some of these down on a post-it note help remind you, do it.

    Let’s talk about developing determination – we have six steps that can help improve how determined you are, and how to avoid losing willpower.

    • Give everything 100%. This doesn’t mean that you’re going to change your diet from garbage to perfectly clean overnight, but you won’t give 25% effort and expect 100% results.
    • Avoid distractions that derail from your end goal. There’s countless examples, but the most common one I’ve seen are meetings at work. It’s a cliche because it’s almost always true – turning half your meetings into emails can double the amount of time you actually get things done.
    • Commit to the end goal at the beginning. You might be delayed, frustrated or hit road blocks, but you won’t let that stop you from reaching the end goal you planned on.
    • Fight negative thoughts. Negativity is a hole in your boat. The longer they’re there, the more you sink, even if you keep taking action. Reframe any negative thoughts to find specific actionable steps you can take to reduce the harm. Realize that everyone who thinks “I can’t do this” will prove themselves right.
    • Road blocks are to be expected. Nothing in life worth having ever comes without mountains to climb. When you know the road will be tough, not hoping it’s easy, you’re able to take the bumps in stride.
    • Act NOW. Hesitation is the hole that procrastination and doubt fit through. Waiting for the perfect time will allow negative thoughts to creep in, and make you question your entire plan. More is lost through indecision than wrong decision.

    Those six steps are the fastest and simplest way to increase how determined you are to get to your goals. We’re going to end the chapter with a little different advice, what not to do.

    If you’re ever looking to increase self-control, the simplest and most effective advice is to take ten seconds.

    Literally, take a deep breath, count for ten seconds, and then re-engage whatever problem you’re facing.

     

    If you have a hot temper, or have had a bad day and want to take it out on someone, you know that it is not going to make your situation any better, but you think it will make you feel better.

    The truth is, you’re taking your bad day and passing it to them without getting rid of it yourself. You are still in a terrible mood, and now you’ve spread that to someone else. Later you’ll feel guilty on top of whatever caused the problem and now you’ve made someone totally unwilling to help with whatever problem caused all of this in the first place!

    So just remember to take a breath and count to ten.

    Next we’ll cover where this self-discipline will be implemented, and it’s above and beyond just yourself

  • Self-Discipline Part 2

    Self-Discipline Part 2

    Self-discipline can be broken into two portions: the will to get the actions turned into habits, and the ability to create incentives to keep the habits going, long after passion fades away.

    The first thing we need to do is set some clear goals, which you can take from the personal development plan we created earlier. Next we’re going to look at the time audit we did where we broke everything into ten minute sections. We’re going to act like project managers for our days, and we’re going to micro-manage our time (to start) to make sure that our time we plan on investing in our goals is actually implemented.

    Use everything you can to help you: calendars (paper or digital), any number of apps, kitchen timers or alarm clocks, whatever it takes to remember you have something to implement, and that you actually do it.

    When you’re starting this out, it’s important to keep it as conscious as possible, if need be saying out loud “Now I’m going to study for my LSAT exam”. Commit to the time you chose. It will likely be a few weeks until it’s consistently ingrained in your schedule that it feels natural.

    The next question is “what will keep me doing this day-in, day-out?” The answer I’ve found works well is a good old-fashioned bribe.

    Take something you want, if it’s a tool set, a new car, a purse, a vacation, whatever you know you want to get. Make sure it’s size lines up with the size of the goal, so don’t use a new car as incentive to get to the gym four times a week or a new video game as incentive for completing medical school.

    Take this item and divide it down into small chunks, financially. If you’re looking to train your son to make his bed and clean his room every morning before breakfast, take stock of what size incentive would make sense, and how long is this of a goal to reasonably keep their motivation high – can they see a light at the end of the tunnel?

    In this example, a good method would be to break the $60 video game into $1 per day for successfully completing each day. This means the earliest he could get the video game would be about two months.

    This strategy has three benefits, all of which help build self-discipline. First, it breaks the goal into sizes that are big enough to chew: to a boy who wants a video game, two months is an eternity, but breaking it down into daily pieces is enough to get your arms around.

    Second, it provides constant forward momentum. After 15 or 20 days in a row, it’s starting to become “just what you do”, and as the count goes from 34 to 35, now 36, your son (or you) will be hesitant to break that momentum.

    Third, if you stumble, you’re not starting from absolutely zero. It’s easy for someone who wants to do a habit every day, like reading or studying, to get disappointed in themselves if they miss a day. Even worse is when they miss two days in a row, because now instead of positive momentum, they have negative momentum. Instead of thinking that they’re failing and sinking even further, it’s just one day of successful action to get right back into gear. Removing the catastrophic failure of thinking that your first missed day after 50 days of success means you’re starting at zero, makes the stress of missing a single day a bummer, but not something that distracts you from getting back into the positive habit you’re building.

    This same logic and strategy can be applied to teenagers with video games as well as grown men who want to get a professional certification and grown women learn a new industry.

    Just because it’s simple doesn’t mean it’s ineffective. The opposite is true: it’s easy to understand, simple to implement, and highly effective in building habits. Many people who graduate from school fall into bad habits because so much of the structure in their day to day life comes from schooling. If you take that structure away and don’t consciously replace it with something else, that vacuum is going to do nothing but cause trouble for you – know that is going to be an issue and actively work to replace it.

    The next thing to do is eliminate time wasters.

    After you’ve done the time audit we talked about in an earlier chapter, it should be obvious how much time there actually is in the day. Most people are just wasting the majority of theirs.

    The things that waste time will be highly contingent on what your goals are, and in what quantity you participate in them. Playing catch with your son once or twice a week is a great way to bond and talk about whatever’s on his mind. Unless your son wants to go pro, five days a week for the same is likely you procrastinating on a task that you know you should be focusing on.

    This procrastination is very frequently a symptom that you’re afraid of something. Many people find it easier to stomach the failure of not trying than trying and failing. This is why so many people find useless tasks to focus on that are related to their goal, but not urgent and important.

    If you’re starting a new business, you need one thing: paying clients. If you’ve ever been in sales you can see how cold-calling for new business can be intimidating, especially when you’re creating a new venture and can’t trade on an established name. You spend hours thinking about how people are going to laugh you out of the room, absolutely amazed at the nerve you had to even talk to them!

    Then you spend hours looking at your logo, if maybe the red section should be more of a maroon, or maybe crimson. Is your company slogan catchy, easy to remember, and shows what sets you apart?

    Admit to yourself what you’re doing, you’re putting off the work that you’re afraid of. Once you come out and name the problem, solving it is halfway done.

    Acquiring and practicing this self-discipline isn’t a weekend retreat: you’ll be working on this for the rest of your life.

    Being able to understand that this isn’t a crash diet, but a permanently changed menu is a big step in getting the discipline that gets you to where you want to go in life. Also remember, you’re not going to go from mozzarella sticks and milkshakes to spinach salads overnight.

    Too many people think they can grab the steering wheel and turn a cruise ship around. They want to become someone who exercises every day, reads an hour a day, eats perfectly and more; worse is that they try to start all of it at once. They’ll spend a week or two living like a spartan and then two weeks later are back to exactly where they started, except now they’re demoralized at their failure.

    Instead, slowly build up discipline in different areas of your life, at different speeds. My personal recommendation is to start with either earning more money or exercise and diet. Earning more money is very motivating but difficult for most people to ramp up quickly.

    Exercise, on the other hand, is something that almost every one of us could put more effort into, and see results very quickly. Even just 10-15 minutes a day of exercise, enough to go from sedentary to breaking a sweat can compound over the course of a month to noticeable differences. You used to get winded carrying groceries up the flights of stairs to your apartment, now you don’t. You moved one notch down on your belt. Your pants don’t fit as well now, but in a good way.

    These small wins are incredibly powerful for the psychological momentum needed to become a seriously disciplined person. They are tangible, easily measurable, and can remind you multiple times per day of your success.

    Every day that you put your belt on and notice you’re one notch lower, you’re reminded of the success you had. That success affects you both consciously and subconsciously. You’re going to notice that not only is it easier to overcome the “maybe-just-skip-today’s” but you’ll notice that the thought gradually stops coming to you.

    The thing you’re doing, everytime you exercise the will power it takes to make the right choice: eating healthy, helping your kids with their homework, helping a coworker through a problem; all of these are putting money in the option bank.

    When you’ve spent the last six months eating healthy for almost every meal, and the Fourth of July barbeque comes around, guess who’s got the option to eat three plates of food and dessert, and not feel a second of guilt?

    When you’ve helped colleagues through problems, stayed late to meet deadlines and worked extra to beat quotas (if your boss is good); guess who won’t mind if you take a Friday off early?

    What you’re doing when you make these sacrifices is that you’re not throwing the time away and getting nothing in return. You’re building up the money in the option bank so later, you can have a choice.

    If you spend years saving money and earning as much as you can, and all of a sudden there’s an emergency you have the choice to pay to get the problem solved.

    If you didn’t spend the time and effort saving up, you’d just have to eat whatever life puts in front of you, which is usually not an ice cream  sundae. What if your car breaks down and you can’t afford a new transmission, guess who just missed their shift? Now you’re still out of a car, but you also just lost your job, and good luck getting a new job without a car. It’s very common for small problems to snowball into life-changing

    If you had done the hard work of being disciplined up front, you would write a check to the mechanic and moved on with your life. Instead you went to the bar 3 nights a week and now you’re wondering about next month’s rent.

  • Self-Discipline Part 1

    Self-Discipline Part 1

    In our previous chapters, we talked about how the topics of the three previous chapters work together. In our analogy, we’re sailing a sailboat to the North Pole.

    This is done by using self-awareness as an understanding of where your starting point on the journey is, with a focus on radical honesty, as lying to yourself is as useless as not even starting to reflect.

    Next we have self-accountability, which means that no matter where you start, it’s important to understand you were the one who got you there. You are the sum of all of the life choices you have made up to this point, and instead of being paralyzed by regret, you’ll use that to jumpstart positive change.

    Next we have self-leadership, that makes sure that we’re constantly keeping the ship going forward, and checking our compass to make sure that we’re not just going forward, but that we’re heading due north.

    What happens when you’ve got the boat headed in the right direction, you’re moving forward quickly, and all of a sudden the weather turns. Whipping winds and stinging rain push you below deck.

    Now you’re hoping to sit below deck and wait for the rain to subside, and every minute you wait you’re veering further and further off course – and you don’t even know it.

    This is where self-discipline comes into play. Self-discipline is where you make the serious commitment to yourself, knowing that there’s going to be dozens or thousands of times you want to give up, but refuse to.

    Self-discipline is the committed and conscious acknowledgement that simply put: sometimes it’s just going to suck.

    Depending on what your goals are, the self-discipline will show itself in different ways, and the ways that you’ll try to avoid them will look different, but they all cut to the core of the issue.

    If you’re a boxer who has to wake up at 5 am to (hopefully not) get punched in the face, anyone can imagine how difficult day 100 of that training could be. Not every commitment to discipline is as obvious as it is for a boxer, it could be a mom who’s exhausted from her job that comes home and doesn’t want to cook for the kids.

    If she’s exhausted and doesn’t want to cook a healthy meal, maybe once she’ll order a pizza. Then it happens again three nights later, and again the day after that. Now the kids are eating pizza and fast food five nights a week, and she’s not living up to the personal development plan she made for herself and her family.

    She had plans to feed her kids healthy, home cooked meals as often as possible. While she wasn’t training to be a Navy Seal, being a mother who wants the healthiest options for her children is absolutely something that requires discipline. It just looks different, but it comes from the same place.

    Both come from the place of taking the easy way out, right now, when you know you’re going to regret it later. A 45 second phone call to the pizza place is easier tonight, but in five years everyone is going to regret those easy decisions.

    Self-discipline is one of the most crucial steps we talk about in this book because it’s where the thoughts, plans, and goals turn into real-world action.

    Everyone knows what it takes to have six-pack abs, or millions of dollars in the bank: for 90% of the population it isn’t a lack of knowledge, but a lack of the discipline to execute consistently, even when it isn’t fun, even when it’s raining, even when your friends are doing XYZ.

    It’s a cliche, but ask any fit person about gym memberships in January. January 1st rolls around, and there’s suddenly dozens of new faces, with treadmills and weight machines having waiting lines. Then February 1st rolls around, and about 75% of them have disappeared, and it’s not because they lost their goal of 75 pounds in one month.

    It’s because it’s easy to ride off of passion. When you’re enjoying New Year’s Eve, everyone talks about how this year is going to be different, but when it’s 6 am and snowing, suddenly the gym can wait until tomorrow.

    Self-discipline is knowing that you might not always be passionate, but you always have to push through it. Luckily, we know how to set yourself up to be as successful as possible when it comes to self-discipline.

  • Self-Leadership-Part 3

    Self-Leadership-Part 3

    We now know how to audit our time, to assess our self-leadership, but we can help even further explain how to become more effective and efficient leaders of ourselves.

    The first thing we need to do is be empowered to make our own strategy. This comes with a few requirements.

    First is the confidence to know that the rules are changing, which means the limits that we had on our previous strategies: real or fake, internal or external, all of them have to be re-assessed with fresh eyes. Like everything in life, it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than it is permission, so removing limits that you think might be imagined can always be quickly corrected and brought back into the calculation if you’re proven wrong. If you’re right though, and it wasn’t a real limit, you just greatly expanded the possibilities moving forward!

    Next is the courage to know in your heart that you will likely have failures along the way. For every successful business, more than a dozen attempts will fail. For every single three-pointer that Michael Jordan made, he also missed one…and he’s Michael Jordan! Failure is not only possible, it’s likely. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t work to minimize the cost of failure, or avoid obvious roadblocks, but you should accept that if you drive down enough highway, there’s going to be a few pot holes.

    An odd part of life is that if you’ve never experienced failure, then you’re not taking big enough risks. If you spend life focused on never being lower than first place, you’re never going to be fighting above your weight class, always focused on being the big fish in the little pond – which for most people ambitious enough to read a book like this is a tragedy in itself!

    It’s not always just “go bigger” in life. Personally, one of the things I’ve focused on improving in life is the soft skills side of business. I’ve never had trouble with hard work, or learning difficult concepts, but I knew that a part of what was holding my career back was my soft-skills needed to be improved.

    The fear of failure I was facing wasn’t about talking to CEO’s about what the problems were, or not understanding difficult situations, but failing to see how the little things, like being personable and sociable, can make it easier to achieve bigger and better goals.

    When you’re not only the guy who knows the most about a topic in the room, but the guy every likes and wants to see succeed just based off your personality, the fact that you know more means you’re going to get 100 times more accomplished than someone who snubs the receptionist and is sarcastic in meetings.

    This is one of the areas where mentorship can really accelerate your success. In a work environment, after a few years, you can very slowly get into bad habits. Sometimes so slowly that you don’t notice them.

    Imagine one day you ran late and skipped brushing your teeth. Then you stopped brushing your teeth every day, instead just every other day. Then after a month, every third day, and soon it’s once a week. Now you start talking to a stranger for the first time and they shout “OOH-WEE! Your breath stinks!”

    This is the advantage that mentorship can bring into life. Because they’re not constantly seeing you every day, but maybe once a month, maybe once a year, they’re going to be able to look at you and tell you, if you want to get to the North Pole, what the heck are you doing going southwest?!

    Mentors are the equivalent of having a port you can put your sailboat in, and they can tell you that your maps are all outdated, and your compass is crooked. The best part is they can save you years of work, without you even knowing you’re investing in all of the wrong areas.

    Even if you haven’t found a mentor, there’s likely other people in your life who can serve the same purpose. It might be a spouse, a friend from your past, previous colleagues, anyone who has the chance to see you over a long term period of time, and can have an external view.

    Another part of self-leadership is knowing that somethings just have limits, even if they’re critical for your success. You need to focus on keeping a steady ship moving, not just moving as fast as possible.

    To do this, you need to find out what the limits are by talking to the people in your life who you affect.

    For example, if you’re trying to grow your new business, and are putting every single dollar you make into it – which is very common for entrepreneurs to do for years, sometimes – there’s other people who need to be consulted.

    Just because you’re comfortable living on ramen and beans for the three years you think it will take to get your business where it needs to be, doesn’t mean that your spouse is comfortable there.

    This is where you need to find out what the limits to how hard and how fast you can push certain variables. You might want to be the next Elon Musk, but if spending time with your children while they’re young is something you value, you need to make that a conscious choice.

    Remembering back to the time audit we did earlier, if your goals include spending time with your kids, it’s not time wasted as long as it doesn’t derail your other responsibilities.

    That being said, you can’t use the fact that you love your children as an excuse to prevent you from going after your dreams. You have to make the tough call that sometime you might need to sacrifice one for the other, but make it consciously.

    With everything in life, it takes a balance, but finding out what that balance will look like is one of the core components of self-leadership. Having a conversation with yourself and the people you affect about really what the goals you have will be the guiding light that lights the way for self-leadership.

    The good news is that since you’ve bought this book and read this far, you’ve already started taking real action towards that goal.

     

  • Self-Leadership-Part 2

    Self-Leadership-Part 2

    Self-leadership is the constant step of focusing on forward motion, and taking out your compass to make sure you’re always still heading north. Constant action in the wrong direction can be just as harmful as standing still, sometimes worse.

    This is a constant three step process. As your journey keeps moving forward, you need to keep checking your sails to make sure the wind is moving you in any direction: this is self-leadership.

    Next, you need to make sure you’re constantly checking the compass for due north: this is self-awareness. Finally, having the courage to look at your compass and know that north actually means north, and not “let the wind take me where it wants” is self-accountability.

    The good thing is that as long as you’re constantly checking the compass for true north, don’t lie to yourself about what true north is, and that there’s always wind in the sails – you don’t need to worry much more about getting to your goals, it’s just going to be a bit more time until you’re having hot chocolate with Santa.

    The trouble that most people run into with this is realizing that you need to keep running through the cycle. It’s not a recipe to cook, and then you’ve “succeeded”; it’s a constant turning of a crank through those three steps mentioned above.

    It’s easy to become complacent after the first few miles of the journey, and believe that the journey is “on a good trajectory”. The reality is that currents and wind can change direction in an instant, much faster in real life than in a sailboat.

    Industries can be destroyed in a blink of an eye, ask any travel agent what happened when the internet came along. Your personal goals can change as quickly as a car accident or a family member gets sick. This is why it’s a constant cycle, in good times and bad, to keep rotating through these three steps.

    One of the important reasons that self-leadership is so important is because of passion. Passion is great when it’s getting you to jump out of bed, ready to conquer the day, but that’s not always there, and relying on that is setting yourself up to fail.

    “The difference between a professional and an amateur is that while the amatuer relies on passion for progress, the professional relies on habits and self-discipline to fill in for the days passion doesn’t show up.” – Greg Gylling, Author

    The reality of life is that everyone on Earth has 24 hours in their day, 7 days in their week and 365 days in the year. The difference between people who have achieved everything they want, and people who sit and suffer silently is the ability to really look at how their time is used.

    The best way to show your true motivations is to look at the difference between where your plan was, and where you actually focused your efforts.

    If you’re serious about getting your finances under control, take a month and look at what your budget was against the receipts of everything you bought. Sure you “really wanted to save money” but when you’re forced to look at each lunch eaten out, or money spent at the bar, or any other thing you promised you’d avoid, you’re getting what your true motivations are.

    It turns out that getting out of debt just really wasn’t as important as a taco lunch with two beers and appetizers.

    This same strategy is even more powerful when you focus it on the only finite resource you have: your time.

    A funny part of life is that people who would drive 15 minutes to save a penny a gallon on gasoline rarely treat their time as valuable as a few dollars. You can always make more money, but you can’t make more time.

    A great exercise to show your real preferences is as follows.

    Attorneys are known for billing every single minute possible to their clients, so they have to keep meticulous records. Attorneys can tell you what they were doing from 3:30-3:40 on January 17th, 10 years ago; and if you want to focus your time as effective as they do, then copy what they do!

    Take two pieces of paper, and along the left hand side, divide it into 12 sections vertically, and label them one through twelve. These are going to represent the time from midnight to noon on the first page, and then noon to midnight on the second page. Then make 3 rows of 2 lines within each of the twelve rows. Each of these lines is going to represent a 10 minute segment, meaning you’ll have 3:00-3:10 on one line, 3:10-3:20 on the next and so on, until your full day is accounted for in ten minute increments.

    First comes the simple part!

    You’re going to record everything you do in a single day, in ten minute increments. It will take 5 seconds per section, and if you work for 3 hours on something you don’t need to fill in multiple lines, just draw an arrow until you’re done and moved onto another task.

    Now comes the painful part!

    What we have are the “receipts” for how you actually spend your time. Sure you budgeted for 30 minutes in the gym, but it turns out 30 minutes was actually spent “settling in the office” in the beginning of your day. Between getting a cup of coffee, catching up with co-workers about last night’s big game, refilling the coffee and finally sitting down at your desk, it’s been almost 45 minutes before you actually start the work you’re hired to do!

    Add in 15 minutes talking about where to get lunch with co-workers, 10 minutes on how the boss is a jerk and the quota’s we have are totally unachievable, 45 minutes at lunch, and then 15 more minutes to “settle back in” to work, plus 20 minutes of “checking facebook”, you’ve burned close to an hour and a half on something that gets you nowhere.

    The point of this exercise isn’t to make it so you’re going crazy over not wasting a single minute of your time, or not being polite to colleagues, but to make you conscious of the time that you are wasting now without thinking.

    When you do this for a whole week, which is enough for most people to consciously observe their behavior, you’ll see how quickly things like Facebook become (unpaid and totally unproductive) part-time jobs, with minutes adding into hours faster than you’d think. How many of these jobs have you signed yourself up for without ever thinking about it?

    Over the course of six months, even ten minutes in the morning, ten at lunch and ten at night turn into almost 3 work-weeks! Imagine what you could do if you didn’t let yourself get off course like that and found 3 free weeks of work you could bring back to your life, how much faster would you achieve your goals?

    • Would you have been able to get a realtor’s license and have a new source of income?
    • Would you have been able to complete a professional certification and brought your career to the next level?
    • Would your relationship with your kids be better if you could spend 3 extra weeks with them?

    Even just taking the time to write down a few days can be enough for your subconscious to kick in, whenever you open up Facebook, or start up the Xbox, or think about heading to the bar for what you know is another night of wasted time, money and likely brain cells.

    You know that no one but yourself is going to know, maybe you’re not really wasting your time, but when you shut the TV off, that’s when you’re exercising the self-leadership it takes to get what you want out of life.

  • Self-Leadership-Part 1

    Self-Leadership-Part 1

    Let’s do a quick recap of where we’ve come from. First we had to figure out where you are on your journey to success, in a totally honest way, which we covered in the chapter of Self-Awareness.

    Next we had learned how to hold ourselves accountable for what got us to where we are today. We discussed how to create a personal development plan to map out our different responsibilities in life, what those mean in specific, day-to-day terms, and how to monitor and measure our success on aiming for and achieving those goals.

    We’re able to quantify success in each of those categories and can use those to influence our behavior every day. After a few months, we’re able to look back at how we spent our time and how to audit whether or not we’re spending our time on the most important and most urgent tasks and what to do with tasks that don’t fall into that category to keep us focused on our highest and best use of our limited free time.

    Now we’re going to focus on self-leadership. Self-leadership is the next step, the one that develops and implements the strategy to improve yourself.

    This is where you set the vision for where you want to be. The best professional athletes visualize the game before they step on the court, seeing their path to victory in their mind. After that, all they need to do is execute on the path to victory – the hard work was visualizing what success would look like.

    Similarly, you need to visualize what kind of leader you want to be. This isn’t just for tomorrow but one month, six months, even five years down the road, what skills will you have acquired? How will you have grown your circle of influence? How have you set yourself up for success – if it’s through reward systems, what do those look like?

    When we talked about self-awareness and self-accountability, the name of the game was having to develop habits. Now that we’re here in self-leadership, you’re going to set what changes you’re going to put in place so that you can develop good experiences that then become habits. These habits accumulate, either positively or negatively, over time and will transform you into the leader that you focused on becoming.

    Notice that I didn’t say “the leader you want to be” but the “leader you focused on becoming”. Everyone wants to be an incredible leader, but like six pack abs or a big bank account, it doesn’t matter what you want, it matters what you consistently do.

    That’s where self-leadership comes in.

    Imagine, conceptually, that you wanted to sail a boat to the North Pole.

    Self-awareness is you understanding whether your starting point is in Maine or Mexico City. Both journeys will require very different preparation, and different help along the way, and self-awareness is going to dictate what clothes to pack, who to talk to, are there rivers nearby you can travel on?

    Self-accountability is you understanding that you’re the one who somehow ended up in Mexico City or Maine, and no amount of pouting or complaining is going to change where you are right now. It also means you realize that you’re going to have to move forward if you ever want to get to the North Pole.

  • Self Awareness

    Self Awareness

    The first step in any forward progress needs to be identifying the reality of where you are right now. If you’re trying to get to the North Pole, it doesn’t matter what map you’re given, if you don’t know where you’re starting.

    This is a difficult conversation to have with yourself, but it is the foundation of a solid framework for success and is absolutely critical for any sustainable forward motion.

    There are two types of self-awareness that need to be expanded on: Internal Self-Awareness and External Self-Awareness.

    Internal Self-Awareness is how well you know yourself, and External Self-Awareness is how well you understand how others see you. Both of them are important, and neither alone is sufficient. The intersection of these two metrics is how you diagnose and solve the problems that you face personally.

    Unless you’re highly self-aware both internally and externally, you’re not living up to your full potential as an employee, or as a person.

    These two metrics were well explained by Dr Tasha Eurich, published in the Harvard Business Review and explained in the diagram to follow.

    4 Self Awareness

    I can speak to this chart personally.

    Early in my career I would focus on specific numbers, to the point where it was causing problems with work relationships, exactly what the “Introspectors” corner talks about in the diagram above.

    I would only focus on how right my numbers were, and any other opinions be damned: I was right.

    After years of frustration, I became more externally self-aware, realizing that the bottom line isn’t the end-all, be-all in arguments.

    Without the external self-awareness, I was unable to see the whole picture, much less have a road map for where I should be going.

    For yourself, you need to look inward and ask:

    What characteristics are you utilizing to be successful?

    What characteristics are you utilizing that you think should, but just aren’t working?

    Are you willing to acknowledge that you have room to improve?.

    These questions transition to talking about the above quadrants:

    1. Being honest about your current state, knowing who you are. This includes your identity, your communication style, your leadership style, core beliefs, biases and being aware of the biases
    2. Your reputation: are you a problem solver, do you eliminate problems, or do you simple give hope to people who will inevitably will be betrayed by your failure.
    3. Having a backbone
  • Self-Accountability Part 5

    Self-Accountability Part 5

    Step Three: Develop good habits

    We will talk much more about this in the section on Self-Discipline, but good habits are building blocks that will get you to where your personal development plan, that we built in step one, is heading.

    The first thing to focus on when starting to develop good habits is to remove bad ones, and one of the worst habits is creating excuses.

    Excuses are like layers to an onion, once you peel one excuse back, you find a new bad habit every time you look closer.

    If you turn in a report at work that’s full of typos and has errors that should have been caught, the excuse is “I only had 3 hours to write the report.”

    If we peel that back, we see that you weren’t assigned the project at 1 pm, to present at 4 pm – you just failed to properly manage the much longer time you actually had for the project – and it’s very likely there was more than enough time.

    Now the question is “why is your time managed so poorly?”

    Are you staying up late watching TV, that leaves you scrambling the morning the report is due?

    Are you not serious about the job, leading to sloppy work?

    Are you blaming other people for your failures?

    Either way, the burden of responsibility is on you and as long as you fail to hold yourself accountable, these mistakes are going to keep piling up.

    You’ll continue to disappoint yourself, and you’ll continue failing to reach your goals in the personal development plan we outlined earlier in the chapter.

    The good news is that you can turn it all around. It’s not easy for some people to honestly reflect on the causes of their problems, but it’s the most important work that you can do.

    Now we’re self-aware of where we are, and now we’re holding ourselves accountable for how we got there. In the next chapter, we’ll discuss what comes after that.