Across 20+ years we’ve worked with thousands of busy executives from hundreds of successful organisations of all sizes.
The shared mission is to improve human performance, wellbeing and personal effectiveness for business leaders.
Here are 6 crucial strategies we have learnt that are guaranteed to generate dramatic positive results for individuals and, in turn, for teams and entire organisations.
Businesses that focus on helping people shift their mindset towards these strategies can unlock human potential that may have been blocked for years.
The strategies also liberate individuals from the vicious cycle of deferring daily health, energy and enjoyment, and create a whole new virtuous circle of motivation, action and achievement.
Here are the mindset shifts that help create a successful culture of high performance.
1. Focus on progress not perfection
When it comes to making healthy living changes, many people wait to get all their ducks in a row before taking action.
What we observe is this simply delays progress.
Don’t wait for the perfect time to implement your perfect healthy living solutions.
The most important moment you have is right now.
Work with your current situation and break down your headline objectives into chunks as small as possible.
Tackle things one at a time.
Establish actions you can take that are small enough to formulate a daily commitment to making progress.
Take the first action today.
Not tomorrow.
Today.
And remember, a positive shift in your mindset and attitude counts as an action towards your goals.
For example, think about someone who’d like to be more active.
They’re waiting for work to be calmer, home life to be more stable, the weather to be better and all manner of other considerations to fall into place.
Encourage them not to wait.
Ask them, 'given your current circumstances, what are the options to get started right away with improving your fitness?'
Anything that moves you away from where you are now is valid.
Even just one change that will begin moving you towards your ultimate objectives.
Start thinking differently immediately and you’re on the way to new results.
Forget aiming for the perfect circumstances or solution.
Progress is perfection.
Take action now.
2. Set yourself up for dramatic results, not dramatic disruption
Most of the people we work with set ambitious goals in life.
They come from the 'go big or go home' school of thought.
Which is fine. We love to think big. With one proviso.
Focus on big results, and not the creation of big disruption to your routine as an anticipated means to achieve these results.
Changing too many things at one time, or trying to achieve too many wellbeing goals concurrently, is never as effective as breaking objectives down into their component parts – and then breaking them down yet further – and designing a progressive step by step plan for progress.
Aiming to fix everything quickly with overnight results often leads to little or no progress in the medium to long-term.
A plan that sets out consecutive steps that focus for 4-6 weeks each on sharpening up your activity, life balance, sleep, food, hydration and resilience can return amazing, and often unexpectedly positive, results across a period of 1-6 months.
And will also generate results that last.
3. Deal only in facts and data
Whatever your healthy living goals, there are literally thousands of changes you could make to your lifestyle that could have a positive impact.
But which of them would have the most positive impact? The greatest bang for your buck in the short, medium and long-term?
When it comes to changing behaviours and habits, be selective with how you focus your time, effort and energy.
You must highlight the most effective interventions based on what you’re looking to achieve.
To do this, you must put together an accurate assessment of what’s happening in your life right now.
Not what you thinks is happening.
Not what was happening 10 years ago.
What your days, weeks and months are made up of currently.
The easiest way to gather the data is to track your activities for a couple of weeks and then highlight adjustments that you’d like to make one by one.
One helpful process is to compile two lists.
The first is how I spend my time each day.
The second is how I’d like to spend my time each day in the future.
Analysing these two lists side by side will help you pinpoint the specific changes you can make right away to begin moving from your current schedule to the new desired schedule.
It's an easy way to create a manageable pathway to the daily and weekly routines that get you the results you want.
4. Accept that EVERYONE needs a unique solution
Every healthy living solution works for someone at some time.
But it’s a unique combination of habits and behaviours that work for each individual at every stage of their life.
It can be tempting to try to adopt exercise plans, healthy eating routines, sleep schedules and ways of managing work and life that are successful for other people.
After all, this could save you time.
And this strategy can be helpful with one important consideration.
Every routine you adopt into your schedule will need to be flexed and adapted to suit your specific aims, circumstances and preferences.
These adaptations may be minor in many cases but they are the difference that makes the difference.
All you need to do, when you adopt new behaviours into your life is to regularly review your situation to ensure that everything you’re doing is consistent with what you’re aiming to achieve.
With becoming the person you want to be.
If it’s not all working, refine the process.
Target some small, specific refinements you can make right away.
With regular review you’re never far away from your unique prescription for success.
Adopt this approach and you’ll quickly develop a system that takes success strategies developed by other people and you then personalise them for your specific situation.
5. Manage your focus, not your energy, not your time
We’ve always advocated managing your energy rather than managing your time. Time is fixed but there are many things we can do to boost energy and therefore make every hour of the day and week more effective.
Beyond this, we now encourage managing focus. In an effort to be able to ensure you channel your energy in the right directions.
The aim is to be able to commit your full focus to whatever you’re doing, whether it be work, social, family or relaxation.
Multitasking, or rather super-fast task switching which is what we’re actually doing, can quickly sap your energy whereas systematically applying total effectiveness to tasks one by one can improve results and actually recharge your energy even when you’re busy.
Over the years we've had a lot of success with helping leaders and executives reshape their weekly routine to include more of what's important and more of what matters and what they enjoy.
One of the keys to this has been creating regular slots of pure strategy thinking. The moments of the day and the week that ensure the rest of the schedule is as effective as it can possibly be.
These are the vital slots that drive creative thinking by keeping the bigger picture in mind. By regularly visualising what's important in life and, crucially, why these things matter.
These are the golden moments that drive all further success strategies and prevent people from getting stuck down in the weeds being distracted by low level practical issues.
They keep you focused on actions, behaviours, communications and decisions that drive positive results.
But they don't happen by accident.
They must be planned and practiced.
6. Strive for work-life flexibility
The idea of balancing work and life often involves a shuffling around of the building blocks of your busy week and arranging then into an order that would appear to suit you better.
The downside of this approach is that it requires you to be in the desired frame of mind for each of the time blocks you’ve allocated for yourself when they arrive.
For example, during work blocks you need to be fully alert, engaged and focused on the job.
For family time you need to be clear headed and enthusiastic.
But what if you’re not in the right mood for the slots you’ve set up for yourself?
What if you're physically in the right place but mentally elsewhere or distracted?
This is where flexibility is key.
Not only should there be variety in your schedule, there should also be capacity to flex and change what you do when to suit your mood, energy, desire and abilities at the time.
This is best achieved by building in some spare capacity to your week.
When we ask people to map out what a good week looks like for them, their first instinct is to fill every minute with activity.
They usually begin by allocating time to work and then build in other commitments around this.
But rarely do they allocate time to just being rather than doing.
Because this seems indulgent.
When in reality if your schedule is fully committed there's no time for anything spontaneous.
No capacity to deal with emergencies without putting the rest of your week under real strain.
No space for things you might want to do.
Fun things that are best enjoyed on the spur of the moment.
Creating flexibility means carving out free time, me time, down time, spare time, whatever you prefer to call it. And this takes practice. Only by experiencing how impactful this time can be on how you feel about the rest of your week will you be motivated to prioritise this time every week.
Feeling that your week is proactive and flexible increases the quality of everything you do while also decreasing the quantity of thoughts and actions that preoccupy you at any given time.
The sooner you begin planning (and executing) moments of free time, the sooner you become comfortable with stepping back to allow yourself to plan your maximum effectiveness.
You become convinced that slowing down your day can actually speed up the results of your week.
How to use this knowledge to your advantage
We deliver wellbeing & performance coaching programmes that help leaders and executives develop successful and sustainable plans for health, energy and peak personal & professional results.
Email us today on info@the-tonic.com to arrange a meeting to discuss how we can support your colleagues.
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