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  • 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.

  • Certification and Competencies

    Certification and Competencies

    Competency is defined as the capability to apply or use the set of related knowledge, skills, and abilities required to successfully perform a task or work safely and consistently to a required standard. Simply stated, Competency is a critical skill set needed to do a job successfully. On the other hand, Certifications are designated credentials earned by an individual or organization to verify their legitimacy and competence to perform a job or produce something in a stated environment. Certification is typically displayed as a document stating that you have acquired appropriate knowledge, been trained, and are prepared to meet a specific set of criteria as a professional. This certification is awarded only after you’ve passed the proper assessments administered by a recognized third-party credentialing institution or organization. Generally speaking, there are three general types of certification: Organization -internal, Product-specific, and Profession-wide, such as reliability and maintenance professional. Some examples of professional certifications are CMRP, CMRT, CRL, CMM, MLT, CAMA, etc.

    Professional certification is not a replacement for accredited degree work but instead is supposed to complement your education or professional experience in your field. Once you’ve earned a certification, you are given a designation that you can use after your name as a way to distinguish certified professionals. Obtaining professional certification displays your dedication to your profession and verifies that you’re well-trained to use your industry’s best practices and tools effectively. Taking the time and effort to obtain these certifications can show potential employers that you are a valuable contributor to your profession and help you gain recognition for your commitment to continuous learning and self-improvement.

    The significant advantages of becoming certified in your work include:

    • Knowledge and skills to implement best practices
    • Professional credibility
    • Improved Efficiency
    • Competitive advantage
    • Improved earning potential

    If you have any questions on this topic or others, please fill out the form below or get in touch with us at ReliabilityX!

  • 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.

  • Self-Accountability Part 4

    Self-Accountability Part 4

    Step Two: Be Honest With Yourself

    Self-accountability is meaningless without honesty. It can be difficult to be honest with yourself, because then you’re pulling away all the excuses and rationalization that stand between you and what you want, but it’s the only way forward.

    This is a two-part process, the first part of which is simply putting your ego aside and realize that you don’t know everything. No one does, and it might be a tough pill to swallow, but you aren’t the exception. Having the courage to admit that you don’t know everything opens the door to the second part of this process: asking for help.

    I can speak personally about this, having spent around twenty years in my career thinking I knew everything and struggling all along the way.

    – If you want to spend your career making every single mistake possible, at the end of your career you could be the wisest and most experienced person in your field. You also spent decades learning and likely re-learning the same mistakes over and over again.

    – If you’re able to have a little humility and ask for help from people who have been where you are, you’ll find your growth will explode. Instead of a decade struggling on XYZ, you can find a veteran who can cut literally years off of your learning curve with a few sentences.

    – The old phrase about touching a hot stove isn’t really how the world works. In reality, there’s about 90% of people who have touched the stove once, keep touching it and constantly wonder why their hands hurt so much. Then there’s 9% who touch it once, and realize “that was a terrible idea” and don’t touch it again.

    Finally, we have the 1% who see everyone else cursing at the stove, holding their hands and have the courage to ask someone if they should touch the stove while everyone else gets burned.

    When you compound all of the time that asking for help can get you, it’s almost unbelievable how much faster you can develop than your peers. There’s no reward for re-inventing the wheel, and the vast majority of problems you’ll face in your career are similar to problems other people have faced.

    The best thing about asking others for help is they’ve already done the work, burned their hands and as long as you ask politely, you get the answers to the test.

    Now that we’re taking the fast lane towards success, let’s talk about the final step in becoming more self-accountable.

    Continued…

  • Self-Accountability Part 3

    Self-Accountability Part 3

    A great tool to help diagnose where these problems come into play is using the four quadrants from Stephen Covey’s great book, “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” or sometimes called “The Eisenhower Matrix” after the famous General and President.

    Quad

    The quadrant is displayed at the left. Take any task that you need to perform and grade it on the two questions that follow.

    1. Is this urgent? – does this task require immediate attention or there will be negative consequences? Tasks that are urgent are like running water over a burned finger or paying rent on the first of the month. If you don’t handle them immediately, you’ll move significantly further from your goals.
    2. Is this task important? Will this specific task “move the needle” for whatever metrics you have designed in your personal development plan? This could be launching a marketing campaign for your business or applying to new jobs. The difficulty of a task can, but does not always, match the importance.

    The simple nature of the matrix is intuitive and easy to use, especially if you have experience running a team.

    The important and urgent (quadrant 1) is something you personally need to do immediately. This is the CEO returning the calls of the company’s attorneys: you don’t want the summer intern in charge of that, and you don’t wait until 3 months to call them back.

    The important but not urgent (quadrant 2) means you personally need to plan out where the process is going. When a home builder sells a home, one of the first steps is planning all of the components and craftsmen necessary to get the entire project done. If windows are on a 3 month lead time, not the usual 2 weeks, that’s not a problem the day the house is sold, but it’s an incredibly serious problem a month before turning the house over to the new owners. Taking that time to plan out what could turn from just important into important and urgent, and preventing those problems from happening is a huge return from a time perspective.

    Next is the urgent, but not important in quadrant 3. This could be something like “returning a current customer’s phone call about a non-critical issue”. If a customer wants clarification on a small item, it’s not something the CEO should focus on, but would be perfect for an hourly employee to do. The focus here is to delegate what is possible, to make sure you’re getting the best use of your time. Remember that as long as the task is done, you’re successful.

    Finally we have quadrant four, the least important and least urgent tasks. These are the easiest traps to fall into on your path to success, and eliminating these tasks completely is the goal.

    When entrepreneurs get started building their businesses, this is where so many get stuck in the mud: they want business cards, and logos, and talk about “what the company culture will be like”. Those tasks are great ways to avoid having to do the most important and urgent task entrepreneurs have: getting new, paying clients.

    – Jim Koch, the man who created the Boston Beer Company, best known for their Samuel Adams beer line, had a great story about when he was starting out. He had picked out the perfect logo, was looking at office space and had his eye on a massive computer system to handle processing all the orders he’d have.

    – The trouble was, he had zero orders. A family member who was an investor and had a background in finance finally sat him down and said “it doesn’t matter if you have the fanciest computer to process the orders, if you don’t have any orders to process.”

    – Jim was failing to properly categorize tasks using the quadrant above. He was luckily just wasted time, and not the precious start-up money, on the unimportant and not urgent tasks. After the conversation with the family member, he went into a bar with a six pack, sold his first few cases and now employs around 2000 people, generating over one billion dollars per year in revenue

    – Imagine what would have happened if he didn’t talk to the experienced family member? He could have spun his wheels for years, designing letterhead and who knows what other useless task, while the empire of Boston Beer Company faded away.

    The entire American craft brewing renaissance might not have happened if Jim didn’t have that one conversation – and more importantly – implement the action that was recommended.

    – How are you cutting yourself short in the impact that you’re able to make to the world? That’s what the quadrant is designed to improve, not just the insight, but how you can take the insights learned into action.

    – When you’re assessing your personal development plan, you can use this matrix on the front and back end, as both a planning tool and one for diagnosis of failure. If you’re finished with your whole plan, but before you implement it you do a quick check of all of the daily plans against this matrix, you can save yourself a ton of wasted time on the front end: could half of these tasks be delegated, and a quarter totally eliminated?

    – Next you can use it on the back end. Take time every three months, six months, whatever interval makes sense to do an audit of your activity. Were you actually delegating the urgent but not important? Did you spend two weeks building a social media presence for a business that isn’t necessary or likely to get new clients for your small consultancy? Did you prioritize your day to solve urgent and important problems, every single day?

    Use the feedback to change habits, not feel sorry for yourself, and your creativity at solving the problems will skyrocket, and so will your progress towards your goals.

    Once you’ve made the plan outlined above, you’re taking the daily action necessary to meet your specific goals that are all outlined and you’re taking a look at the plan every few months to make sure you’re not focused on unnecessary things, we can consider step one completed.

    The next thing we need to focus on is step two.

    Continued…