Our mind and body are capable of being hyper-focused when there is a crisis. What if you can hack this unique capacity to be your “normal”? Ken Courtright shares three self-inflicted crisis you can consider to get you to focus on the things that matter, tasks that need to get done first, and endeavors that contribute to your growth. Don’t miss this episode to learn how to maximize your executive time.
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Focus Without Crisis
This episode is titled Focus Without Crisis. I think everybody reading this has lived through a situation where your division, your business, your company or whatever you operate is under crisis. Maybe you are short of cash. Maybe a key employee passed away. Maybe there are HR issues in your company. Whatever the situation is, can you remember back when something tragic happened and you personally rallied and got so much done in such a short period of time? You not only surprise yourself, you literally took a vacation afterward. You were exhausted, but you look back, you worked sunup to sundown, eighteen hours a day, seven days a week. You don’t remember the time or the days, you just finished because you had to.
What is interesting is many great coaches and mentors have a phrase, “Never waste a good crisis.” The concept is it is during a crisis that causes incredible focus. It’s funny how we’re wired, but we are wired to focus under crisis. Focus means we weed out the ancillary, miscellaneous, unimportant information and we focus on the hyper urgent. As human beings, we accomplish so much during a crisis. The point of this episode is this, there are a few ways that I have done and these are also very much adopted principles and others. None of what I’m about to share is an original thought. All of these I stole from other people, executives, coaches, mentors and people I respect. Especially I have seven of the eleven ADD/OCD things. I definitely need to focus and I have had on occasion caused crisis internally to focus, meaning self-administered crisis. These are three random in no particular order ways to self-inflict crisis to get you off your butt to focus on something that you know you need to get done and it needs to get done right now.
Number one, in the next eight weeks, may I suggest that you only work every other week. That’s it. You can work nights and day, day and night, but you can’t work for the other four weeks, every other week. Think for one minute, “What would this cause you to do?” This would cause you to tell everybody around you, “I’m only working every other week.” They can’t bother you those other four weeks you’re out of town, on vacation or helping your mom. Whatever you’re doing, you’re doing, but the point is you’re not working.
Never waste a good crisis. Click To TweetThis one is interesting because it’s pretty much been proven that we do not rest from our work. We work from our rest. What do I mean by that? That was a sermon I heard in church a few years ago by a new pastor that came into our church. He made everybody raise their hand that was a manager and business owner. He said, “How many people can’t wait for the weekend, can’t wait to rest? I’ve got news for you. You don’t rest from your work. You work from your rest. Everything you’ve ever produced in your life, I’m willing to bet my whole year’s salary that every great idea you’ve had, every inspiration, every new thing you’ve created came to you during an idea of non-movement. It’s impossible to have incredible thought or vision while you’re checking email on the phone, using Skype in a meeting, working frantically. Your ideas come when you’re resting. You work from what you learned from the inspiration during rest.” For those of you that don’t do yoga, don’t practice meditation, are not a believer, have faith, you might want to reconsider.
One modality of getting hyper-focus out of yourself without a crisis is the self-inflicted crisis of time and lack of it and the extra time given with the work every other week modality. If you’ve never done it, you have to try it at least one month. It’s very powerful in the production of results. You’re physically working one week. You’ll find you almost have to work from 7:00 AM to 10:00 PM every day at least. The other week you don’t work. You can’t do whatever, but if you fake yourself out and you’re working during your supposed non-work, you’re missing the point. You’re gravely missing the lesson. Maybe that’s the week you take your father finally fishing or you write your book or whatever.
Here’s another one. This one is very common and as a matter of fact, this is more common with the super affluent who work four hours a day. You work four hours a day, the other eight hours and to me, a workday is twelve hours, you play, you fish or you do that. What happens is it instills a level of guilt. It takes some time on this one. I’ve done this one too. To where you maximize the four hours you’re working. Just pick up any Brian Tracy book and it will tell you how much wasted time is in the average corporation. I think the average sales reps are in a selling situation only seven out of 40 hours of a workweek. It’s terrible. It’s like 18%. The average executive wastes 40% walking to meetings, taking calls, all proven ancillary nothingness and only 60% productive. If you go down to four hours a day, do you take ancillary miscellaneous meetings? No. Do you keep your office door open? No, you work. You might want to try that one.
Here’s another one I’ve done twice. Go overseas for a week. I had to get my second book done. I knew the only way this is going to happen, averaging 200 emails, 100 Skypes, 150 texts a day. You’re talking about 400 inbound hits a day, “What do you think of this? What would you do?” The only shot I had was to go sit in the chair. Ernest Hemingway wrote his last book in that same leather chair. I think it’s in Port Royal in France, in Paris. I sat in the same chair and wrote the book. I wrote the second half of my book. These are the three modalities you might want to try. I’m dead serious about the go overseas. I’ve done all three of these. Work every other week, try it. Work four hours a day, try it and go overseas for a week, two weeks at a time. Try that. I would love if anybody reading this could use those modalities and give me the results. Hit me up at Ken@IncomeStore.com. I would love to discuss some of those results and see how they worked for you. Take care.
Important Links:
- Never Waste a Good Crisis – Previous episode
- Ken@IncomeStore.com
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