Category: Habits

Week In Weak Out

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Blog Post Cover - Week in weak out text over car on road.

Now that we’re through Christmas, and with 2021 firmly in our sights, I wanted to reveal my guiding phrase for the new year: Week In, Weak Out.

A Quick Year in Review

For many of us, 2020 has provided some tremendous growth opportunities. The changing world of remote work has given us commute time back while adding the stress of working around children.

The political discord in our country has given us the opportunity to listen and empathize with others.

The ongoing quarantine has revealed just how much we were wired for community, social gatherings, and physical contact.

Along the way of each of these national and global issues, have been the individual issues of our own stories.

Some of my personal notes from this year include:

  • Helping business owners transition to the quickly changing world of HR needs in the midst of a pandemic and forced shutdowns.
  • The selling of one house and the purchase of another.
  • Home renovation projects (here’s looking at you broken water pipes!).
  • Cancelled vacations, family visits, and social gatherings.
  • Kids entering puberty and leaving toddlerhood.
  • Elise starting a new job and her master’s program

All of this has revealed to me some of my next growth opportunities. As a success-oriented high achiever, I need my life to be at peak performance.

My guiding phrase for 2021 to help me achieve that is to get better: Day In, Day Out, Week, Weak Out. Blog Post Cover - Week in weak out text over car on road.

Future Growth Opportunities

2021 presents the next great growth opportunity.

Already, my coaching schedule is filling up. The new year always brings new challenges, HR laws, marketing campaigns, and growth strategies. Business owners are looking to turn the page on 2020 and start fresh in 2021. To help them (and all success-oriented leaders) I need to be at my best.

Leaders are hurting. Many are hurting. Most are facing burnout. All are tired.

Helping leaders stay healthy is why I started coaching in the first place, for me to do that well, I need to be healthy myself.

Here are some of my next growth opportunities in the new year:

  • Read and implement the knowledge from 100 books.
  • Take an extended work-free family vacation.
  • Help 100 business owners grow and expand their businesses.
  • Take Elise on a date at least once a month.

Some of these goals are continued extensions of daily habits, some are drastic increases in my thinking and mindset.

One personal project, however, is consuming a large portion of my time and mental space. It is the main thrust of my idea to grow Week In and Weak Out.

Parenting Well

One of the biggest failures American society has done for men is to provide significant and meaningful markers for manhood. We’ve largely left our boys to figure out puberty, manhood, emotional maturity, and personal development to themselves.

I decided to do something about it, starting with my own kids.

Starting at age 8, and continuing every three years until age 21, each of my boys will take a trip with me where we talk about growing into responsible manhood.

For my oldest son, that starts this year. We’re taking a trip to talk about his coming puberty, self-care and hygiene, service towards others, mindset, and selfless love.

Each and every trip will build on the last. We will spend time in the wilderness, examining what it means to be a well-rounded man.

The only way I can help him do that (and any others that join our journey) is to first work on myself.

Habits, routines, and discipline are built in the daily execution of small, repeatable, success steps.

Day In. Day Out. Week In. Weak out.

That’s how we grow. Every day, do something to get better. The next day, repeat that task and do something else. Next week, you’ll notice a small improvement. Soon, you’ll notice your weaknesses leaving.

Mindset improves.

Grit is stronger.

Compassion is amplified.

Love fostered.

Maturity achieved.

But only through consistent and deliberate attention. Done every day.

Day In. Day Out. Weak In. Weak Out.

 

I’ll be posting about this journey constantly. To keep up to date, find out more, and be a part of the journey, click any of the links below.

Subscribe to my newsletter and receive a FREE 5-day course on productivity: 

https://mailchi.mp/0b828bba9f13/emailsignup

Growing your Business

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Growing Your Business Blog Post Cover

We’re continuing our look at Marcus Whitney’s Book Create and Orchestrate and how you as the owner need to spend time growing your business.

If you missed any of the previous posts, don’t worry, links are at the bottom.

Growth is about understanding that change is always happening. You can and should drive and leverage change to realize the vision and live out the values of the company.*

Reinvestment, Anticipation, Innovation

While highlights the need for growth under the three ideas of reinvestment, anticipation, and innovation. His focus on core aspects of your business are helpful, below I’ll use those ideas to talk about how we approach the same topics throughout coaching.

Reinvestment

In life and business, reinvestment is primarily about the daily habits and routines we build into your schedule for success.

Reinvestment asks questions like: Growing Your Business Blog Post Cover

  • Did you give your best effort towards getting better today?
  • What goals did you accomplish?
  • What new goals did you set?
  • How were you successfully able to eliminate distraction and do something of significance?

Throughout coaching, I highlight the need for these basic elements of our own growth. Many of my clients already know I’m going to ask these sorts of questions, even before I do. It becomes ingrained in the way we think during our times together.

Growing your business is about making small daily deposits of success, consistency, and routine. Otherwise, you will never achieve larger breakthroughs.

Anticipation

Anticipation is about your future self as much as it’s about the future market. 

When I started coaching, my focus was exclusively on leadership health and burnout. Part of that was my own circumstance at the time. I was in an organization that consistently produced burned out leaders and I wanted to avoid that trend.

But it was also partly cultural. I started coaching as the U.S. economy was still feeling the lingering effects of the 2008 market crash. While in many ways we were ‘out of it’ by the time I started coaching, many individuals were still terrified and afraid. They were still recovering financially and were scared that something else might happen.

This made them extraordinarily open to talks of leadership health and sustainability, especially my focus on all areas of life.

As the economy recovered, I began to focus more on small business and HR needs. Again, both a personal decision and a cultural one.

It wasn’t that the need for leadership health was gone, but for many a strong economy hid the need to talk about it.

Shifting Back

The current pandemic and economic collapse (and the resulting questions) have seen a large uptick in conversations around leadership health. People again are afraid and unable to mask their worry and anxiety.

I’ve had a number of individuals reach out to me about leadership health, including one organization who basically said, “We’re all hurting and can’t keep going on for much longer.” The long drawn-out year of 2020 has revealed the deep need for total leadership health.

Anticipation for me was preparing for this months ago and being ready to step in and offer coaching and consulting to these individuals and businesses. Your own anticpation needs might be different, but you can start by asking questions like:

  • What events, meetings, or opportunities are ahead of me in the next six to twelve months?
  • Who will I need to be to make those things happen?
  • How are my current behaviors limiting or enhancing my growth opportunities?

Growing your business starts by growing yourself and addressing your own needs first. Reaching your full potential allows you to serve others more.

Innovation

In coaching, innovation is finding new ways to meet current needs.

As a business coach, I often tell young entrepreneurs that if people aren’t buying their product, they aren’t meeting people’s needs. Unfortunately, it’s just that simple.

We’ve seen a huge growth in the online education market, and rightfully so. Gone are the days of needing to be present for live or in-class training. Now, the convenience and adaptability of online learning make this decision a no brainer. 

But smart entrepreneurs are already asking, “What’s next?” Online learning is the new, current, and necessary trend. But something will be next? Keeping an eye on upcoming methods of delivery, education, product placement, and advertising will keep facilitating steady growth in growing your business.

Here’s an example of an online course I highly recommend.

Eight Core Concepts

This list is updated as the blog series continues. Click on any live link to go to that post in the series. Create and Orchestrate Book Cover

  1. Leadership
  2. Finance
  3. Operations
  4.  Growth 
  5. Product
  6. Service
  7. Sales
  8. Marketing

* Whitney, Marcus. Create and Orchestrate: The Path to Claiming Your Creative Power from an Unlikely Entrepreneur (p. 79). Creative Power. Kindle Edition.

Eight Core Concepts

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Three P's to Strong Leadership

Today, we’re beginning a new series where we examine eight core concepts to help you grow your business. These eight core concepts come from Marcus Whitney’s book Create and Orchestrate. You can currently pick up a copy on Amazon Kindle for only $.99.

In his book, Whitney outlines eight core concepts that every business owner must track, measure, and invest in in order to grow their business.

In this series, I’m not going to rehash his points (you can read his book to know what he thinks). Instead, I want to use it as an outline as a frame for what I do with business owners and leaders in the context of coaching. I agree with much of what Marcus said and want to springboard off of that to give you some additional insights, pointers, tips, and business tricks on your entrepreneurial journey.

A software engineer by trade, Marcus outlines his eight core concepts in terms of ‘priority’ and ‘inheritance.’ Create and Orchestrate Book Cover

He says,

What’s counterintuitive about this framework is that if you get hung up on the “priority,” you’ll miss the importance of inheritance. In computer science, inheritance means that an object has all the capabilities of the object it inherits from, plus its own new capabilities. If you apply this to the Eight Core Concepts framework, it means that while marketing is the least core of the eight concepts, it is the most comprehensive. Marketing has aspects of leadership, finance, operations, growth, product, service, and sales within it. It is the only concept comprehensive of all other business concepts, and that’s why marketers are so elevated in today’s business world.*

Concepts Number One: Leadership

John Maxwell has made famous the line, “Everything rises and falls on leadership.” Whitney, in his book, agrees. Leadership is a necessity for any business to be successful. Without good leadership, a business is doomed.

I’ve written a lot about leadership, especially in the workplace. The higher up you are in an organization, the more good leadership is expected (and demanded) of you. In order to provide this effectively, you must be rooted in the internal and external aspects of leadership health.

The internal dynamics of coaching include your spiritual, emotional, physical, and mental health. Internally healthy individuals ask questions like, “Am I spending time improving and leading myself well?” Strong morals are a part of internally strong leaders, but so are times of rest, physical activity, mental stimulation through reading, coaching, therapy, and times of quiet mediation.

Externally healthy leaders are focused on the relational and financial dimensions of growth. Their finances are in order so they can live generously and their relationships are strong. These strong relationships are found both inside and outside of work. Well-rounded leaders have close friends, a vibrant relationship with family, and uplifting and positive interactions in the workplace.

Strong leaders also have their finances in order. To lead a business well, they must lead themselves well. To grow a strong financial portfolio at work, they must know how to manage their personal money first.

Growing leaders know that they can only lead others as well as they have first led themselves and they take their own growth seriously.

Grow Your Leadership Capacity

Here are three ways to grow as a leader.

Professionally.

Professionally, seek out good coaching. This should come as no surprise. I’m a huge advocate for coaching. Coaches provide a judgement-free zone to explore serious topics. The higher you rise in an organization, the fewer peers you have to talk to, the more you need a coach. Find a coach who either specializes in your particular niche or area of growth and commit to twelve weeks of intentional investment in yourself. You’ll be surprised how much you can grow in twelve weeks. Reassess and recommit as necessary.

Three P's to Strong Leadership

Personally.

Develop deep relationships. One consistent problem I see with success-minded individuals is that initially, success can be viewed fairly small. Most of the time, success is thought of in relation to our work. We can be tempted to think, “I’m successful because I’ve made XXX amount of money.” This fallacy leaves us in danger not only of burnout but of disconnect in our relationships. If you ever hear a phrase like, “Dad made a lot of money but was absent most of my childhood and a jerk when he was around” you’ve failed as a leader. Success happens one drop at a time, make sure that you spend time putting effort and success into many aspects of your life, including deep and significant personal relationships. 

Privately.

Just yesterday, I spent time talking with my wife about some current frustrations in my business. There are parts of my business that I know are struggling and some that need to be reevaluated. As a solopreneur, finding time to balance everything can be difficult, and I was sharing some of that frustration with her. My failure to hit some of my more significant KPI’s left me frustrated. When I asked her what I should do, she said, “Ride your motorcycle.”

It was genius advice.

For me, more stress equals more I work. That helps no one. Instead, I needed to do the opposite of what my gut told me. Private leadership development is about finding life-giving and enriching hobbies that keep us sane. When stressed, I experience less productivity, decreased creativity, poor results, and increased anger. That’s not at all the type of person I want to be. In fact, that’s the exact opposite of what I’m trying to do. Privately, find and develop hobbies. Escape your workplace. Find ways to evade work. Unplug. Recharge. Breath. The only way to keep your sanity in the midst of a difficult time is to know when to turn off your work brain and turn on your fun brain.

Make a plan: As we work through the eight core concepts, make a plan for growth. Today, pick one of the “p’s” mentioned above and write out your growth plan. How do you want to grow professionally, personally, or privately in the next twelve weeks. Find someone to hold you accountable. If you need, you can email me your plan and I’ll follow up with you personally.

Eight Core Concepts

This list is updated as the blog series continues. Click on any live link to go to that post in the series.

  1. Leadership
  2. Finance
  3. Operations
  4. Growth
  5. Product
  6. Service
  7. Sales
  8. Marketing

 

* Whitney, Marcus. Create and Orchestrate: The Path to Claiming Your Creative Power from an Unlikely Entrepreneur (p. 57). Creative Power. Kindle Edition.

Three C’s For Personal Growth

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Blog Post Cover: Inner Critic and Personal Growth

Inside each of us is the self-destructive internal narrative that repeats phrases like, “I’m such a loser!” when we mess up. Learning to silence the inner critic is one of the key requirements to experience breakthrough success. The best way to do that is through the three c’s for personal growth.

“Failure is not fatal. It is the courage to continue that counts.” – Winston Churchhill

Setting the Stage

Deep down, you know that failure isn’t final. Yet, it is an inevitable part of the struggle in life.

If you’re a parent, you’ve seen this countless times with kids. What would happen if, the first time my child tried to talk a walk, he fell over and I determined that walking must not be for him. I’d pick him up, vow to never let him fail again, and prohibit him from walking. I don’t want him to be a failure after all!

You’d call me crazy and think I’d be a bad parent … and you’d be right. When it comes to children, parents are keenly aware that temporary failure is a part of the learning process. However, parental insecurities also pass on to offspring and soon children internalize that failure is bad, and not acceptable. The first time I heard my oldest child criticize herself as a failure was kindergarten.

Let that sink in. Somehow, I taught my child before her fifth birthday, that failure was to be avoided because it was a bad reflection on her.

Ouch

All of humanity is embedded with the Inner Critic. Success happens, not just by battling the inner critic, but by overcoming it. Once you acknowledge it, you then want to dismantle the power it has in your life. How? Through the three c’s of personal developmentBlog Post Cover: Inner Critic and Personal Growth

Three Sources of Feedback

Competency

The first step in the process is competency. When I first started coaching, I labeled this as an individual’s calling. It was the answer to the question: what on earth am I here for? It’s a deep examination of you life, purpose, skills, abilities, passions, and goals in life. Your calling, as Frederick Buechner so eloquently put is the place where, “your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” You were put here for a specific purpose. You will only truly be happy when you are fulfilling that purpose. I’ve worked with entrepreneurs who were looking to start a business, stay at home parents, career professionals in a variety of backgrounds. Each and every one of them had a unique purpose and we structured our time together to help them achieve clarity in their calling. Then, they were called to action.

You are too. Your calling, your greatest competency, is a gift to bless others. That new product or idea, the time with your kids, your neighborhood involvement, it all matters. Your legacy will long outlive you in the thoughts and minds of those around you. The more effectively you engage your calling, the deeper the impact you make on the world, the more significant your legacy will be. By discovering your core competency, your calling, you embrace who you are and fix your mind on completing the deepest parts of your existence.

Compassion

The second part of the process is compassion. More specifically, self-compassion. You beat the inner critic by extending grace on yourself. Several times over the last decade, I’ve posted a simple question online: do you find it harder to extend grace to others when they mess or to yourself when you mess up? While no results are ever 100% clear, and Facebook obviously isn’t a scientific platform, the results are always heavily skewed towards a struggle with ourselves. The problem is that you know your own internal moral compass. When you don’t live up to that, it’s a frustrating and embarrassing failure. When someone we love screws up, it’s a forgivable oversight, when you screw up, it’s a violation of your own personal moral code and honor.

In spite of how hard it is, the journey towards self-compassion is a necessary one. During my master’s program, my wife made me a shirt that said, “Be Tender To Yourself.” It was a reminder that just as I have forgiven others, I must also forgive myself. I spent years in counseling unable to do so. It wrecked my life. While your own journey may not see you in counseling, I’m guessing you also struggle with it.

Here are two ways to begin the journey towards greater self-compassion.

The first part of the problem is to put yourself, more pointedly your mistake, into someone else’s shoes. I’m not saying don’t accept responsibility or blame someone else. The idea is to imagine that someone else committed the error. If Bill had promised you the expense report at 7:00 last night, but got distracted dealing with a sick child’s vomit on the floor, would you refer to him as a lazy, good-for-nothing, idiot? My guess is (my sincere hope is) probably not. Instead, you’d reassure Bill that everything is okay. Extend yourself that same grace. If you’re not bothered by someone else doing it, don’t be offended when you do it.

The second way to engage in self-compassion is through humor. When you screw up, learning to laugh at yourself is a vital and necessary step. Spilled your orange juice? Instead of criticizing yourself for being an idiot, make a comment on how far it got. “Man, this time I was able to get it on the floor, the walls, and the ceiling. I really am talented!” Shifting your perspective, and in the process finding a way to compliment yourself, destroys the power of the inner critic.

Community

The final piece of the puzzle is community. In community, you can discover who you really are. Friends, parents, coworkers, a spouse or life partner, a trusted boss, mentor, and former professor all have insights into what makes you, you.

Seek authentic feedback from others. What are your strengths and weaknesses? How can those who know you best affirm your calling? What does your support network look like? By examining the community you participate in, you can assess that you are on the right path. During coaching, you can also use that time to change or adapt your community. If you try to assemble your feedback team and realize that no one supports you then you need new friends! Having a well-rounded, supportive, diverse community is key to your success, and the only way to make sure you have one is analyze it! Community grounds and surrounds us in the difficult moments of life, giving us the energy and strength to carry on.

This is an excerpt of my upcoming Shift. To receive news and alerts about its upcoming release, subscribe to my newsletter.

To get help through coaching, contact me.

Create. Define. Act.

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Blog Post Cover Picture with lightbulb, day planner, and a team at work.

If I ever find my eyes wandering aimlessly over my computer for more than five minutes, I know something is wrong. That’s when I tell myself: create, define, act.

Deeper Magic

Recently, I had a conversation with a friend who wanted to know how I fit so much in. A partial answer is that I use the Full Focus Planner. Over the last several years of use, that continues to be a big reason. I schedule everything meticulously. 

(If you want to see exactly how I use the planner,  I walk you through every page right here).

But there’s another truth at work. Deeper magic, if you will. I mean deeper magic much in the same way C.S. Lewis does in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. In the book, after Aslan’s death and resurrection, the lion is explaining to Susan and Lucy how he was able to come back to life. He explains that in many ways, the witch was right. The circumstances dictated that a sacrifice be made. The witch, operating under the belief of how ‘magic’ works in the world knew that the laws had to be accounted for.

But, Aslan explains, there is deeper magic at work. Something that the witch knows nothing about. She doesn’t know about it, because it was created before her. The laws of deeper magic were in place long before the witch arrived on the scene. The magic that the witch knew about (the laws of the universe) were satisfied and yet, a deeper magic freed Aslan from the curse of death.

The Full Focus Planner is great. There’s a reason I’ve used it for the last three years and will continue to use it, but tools are only as good as those using them.

If all I own is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. Blog Post Cover Picture with lightbulb, day planner, and a team at work.

If I have a security system but never turn it on, it will fail to protect my home and family when it’s needed.

Having a planner and failing to use it isn’t any better than not having a planner at all.

Wandering Aimlessly

Over the last several years of using the planner, I’ve noticed that I’m still ineffective at times. To remedy this, I had to set up a new ritual that helped me get back on track.

I noticed that at certain moments of the day, I’d lose efficiency and productivity. This wasn’t failure based on exhaustion or overwork. Instead, it was because I lacked a proper plan. I knew I had things to do, but didn’t know how to go about doing them. Instead, I’d spend time looking at social media, scouring the depths of YouTube, or looking for new dad jokes.

None of which will help me reach my goals.

To change the drift, I created the ritual to create, define, act whenever I feel myself veering off course.

That mantra has helped me get back on track with my goals, accomplish meaningful and significant tasks, and free my mind to focus on my work.

Now, telling myself to create, define, act is more than a mantra, it is a call to arms. A battle cry that gets my body moving. It breaks me free from the monotony of mindless action and issues a challenge to my mind. It is a call to greatness.

I drift when I fail to have a plan. As has often been said, I was then planning on failing.

Whether you use the Full Focus Planner or some other calendar management system, the idea behind create, plan, act can help you too.

Create. Plan. Act.

Create

The first idea is to create. Create a goal. Vision. System. Plan. For me, this means to actually get into the planner and start to outline tasks. I drift when I don’t open my planner and put things into timeslots. My life drifts off course when I don’t intentionally plan my steps. Work fails to get done when I fail to put significance on my time.

Step one is always to create the plan. If you notice that you are having trouble focusing, begin to ask questions of insight: Do I know what I’m working on? What’s next? Who do I need to connect with? What is most important to me? How can I make progress?

Creating your plan of action is what breaks you free from drift. By creating a plan you free your mind up to focus on what it sees in front of you. When you create your goals, you connect the logic of your brain with the emotions of your heart and are inspired to take action.

Plan

Once your goals are created, write down the steps to the plan. This can honestly be as simple as first I will…, then I will… For me, it follows this system of progression:

1.) What are my larger goals for the quarter?

2.) What steps did I take to accomplish those goals last week?

3.) As a follow-up, what goals do I need to accomplish this week?

4.) Which of those goals can I accomplish (or make progress on) today?

First, you create your system and belief for success. Write down your goals and visualize your success. Then, write down the plan to accomplish those goals.

Only one step left!

Act

The final step is to act. I’ve discovered that this usually ends up being the easiest step. The irony is that before I began this planning phase, that was the one thing I couldn’t do. The acting was hard because I didn’t have a plan. By creating the vision and building the plan, I gave myself the freedom to act appropriately.

I can cure my aimlessly drifting in just a few minutes by following the simple plan to create, plan, and act. By following this formula, I bring clarity to my projects and eliminate brain fog, confusion, and misguided wastes of time that prohibit me from reaching my goals. Wherever you’re and, and whatever you’re working on, just remember to create your goals, make your plan, and then act with intention.

Need help? Reach out and see if coaching is right for you.