Instant Motivator

One of the most commonly asked questions in my personal development workshops is: how can I manage my time more effectively? Well, in this article, I have some absolutely top time management tips for you. As always, do remember that it is taking action that makes the crucial difference, so don't just read these tips, but actually make a solid commitment to giving them all a try, especially those that you think won't make any difference. You might be amazed at the huge positive effect that can ensue when you incorporate them into your game plan.

Make a List

When you are feeling overwhelmed, the idea of taking the time out of your busy schedule just to make a list might seem to be inefficient use of your time. After all, it takes time to make a list and it progresses none of the things that you already know need to be done. After making the list, you might reason, things would be actually worse because time will have passed and progress will have been temporarily halted. That's all true of course, but making that list enables you to get a proper handle on things. It can often enable you to see more clearly where your priorities lay and what needs to be done immediately. More importantly, it affects your attitude because it can help you to feel more in control of the situation. So, as Brian Tracy once said, "Feeling listless? Make a list!"

Red Time/Green Time

When you are fire-fighting, you have to just get on with it. It happens to us all from time to time. Just decide on that top priority and give it your all until you put the fire out. Tell the people around you that you have a situation that you are dealing with that needs to be attended to and that you will therefore be temporarily unavailable (red time); perhaps even put a sign above you desk or on the office door. If you do this, make sure you reserve the tactic for real fire-fighting (panics). People will begin to respect the fact that you occasionally need to engage in fire-fighting and will avoid interrupting you during red time if you do this well. When you are available again (green time) turn the sign around. You could make a little sign, with a 'please do not interrupt' message printed in red on the front (recto) and a 'normal service is in operation' message in green on the opposite (verso) side. Give it a try - it can work very well indeed.

Tackle Underlying Causes

Following any period of fire-fighting, find some time to ask yourself the question: why did that panic occur and what could we do to prevent it from occurring again in the future? You don't need to spend a lot of time on this, but a few minutes reflection immediately after each major panic has been resolved can prove to be very beneficial. At that time, you will have all the relevant facts to hand and your brain will be fully engaged in the detail that is pertinent to the situation. So you might find that you will be able to answer that question very easily at this precise moment. If you cannot prevent a situation from recurring, ask yourself: if it were to happen again, what could we do to respond better next time? Again, the answers will come quickly because your mind is effectively already on the case. Acting on these insights can significantly improve things for you in the future if you get into the habit of fire-prevention and do this consistently.

Don't Waste Your Valuable Thinking Time

When you are driving to and from work, try turning the radio off for a prolonged period of time - I mean a period of a few weeks or months. Also try not listening to radio or TV before you get into the car in the mornings during that same period. We get so very little time away from such distractions these days that the solutions to your problems often cannot find their way into your conscious mind simply because the opportunity to do so has been crowded out by constant background noise. That is, noise, as distinct to signal, in the sense of unwanted background perturbation. If you are in the habit of listening to morning radio, you will definitely miss it at first. But once you get into the new habit of using your valuable thinking time productively rather than squandering it listening to inconsequential nonsense that you don't need to give your attention, you will be amazed at how this method produces incredible results.

Take a Break

When you are very busy, you need to ensure that you take a proper lunch break so, whenever possible, get out of the office at lunchtime even if it is only for a few minutes: go for a walk, get some fresh air, get away from the hubbub of the office. Again this sounds counter-intuitive because working through lunch gives you more working time, potentially. However, a change of scenery can do wonders for your ability to stay focused when you are on the job so you will be much more efficient when you subsequently return to your work. If you remain in the office, trying to eat your sandwiches whilst continuing your work, you will find it almost impossible to eat properly as the phone is almost guaranteed to ring after you have taken a mouthful. That kind of eating is just plain bad for you, so even don't go there - get out of the office at lunchtime.

Visibility Helps Others to Understand Your Situation

If you find that you seem to be constantly fighting your boss about your priorities and therefore feel as if you cannot complete the things you know are most important, the answer is visibility. Get a whiteboard or find some other way that you can display your current task list and whenever you get a new request, there and then, add it to the public list whilst your boss is present. Do it pleasantly and smilingly and then remind him or her of your current priorities and ask for input into where this new task should fit. Once you have his/her view on the matter, you can then draw an arrow on the board, again, whilst he/she is there, effectively representing where it fits into your priorities according to your boss. As you do that, your boss should already be seeing what the effect of giving you this new work is going to do to your existing commitments. However, at this point you have the ideal opportunity to explain that, obviously, any previous commitments you made to all of those activities below the line will now need to be rethought. If your boss is a reasonable person, you can then discuss rescheduling those commitments.

What if the Boss is Unreasonable?

Sometimes, it happens. Logical thinking sometimes does not go down too well with intuitive decision-makers for example. Despite your best efforts, you just don't see eye to eye with the person you to whom you report. Often, these difficulties can be traced to differences in perception and decision-making processes that have become a part of our personalities. In these situations, they key to improving your relationship is to really learn to listen and empathise with the other person's view point. Again, this is completely counter-intuitive. We are inclined to think that the fault, if there is one, is with the other person, when the truth of the matter is that it is often the combination of personalities that produces the difficulty. Remember that you don't have to agree; just really try to understand the other person. Over the course of time, this attitude will have the effect of helping to open the other person's mind to your own views about how things might be best tackled.

Stay Committed to Your Goals

Remember that those around you and those to whom you report will inevitably lose sight of your goals. But you will never do that. If appropriate, write your mission and your top goals on that whiteboard. Again, it helps to remind others of what you are fundamentally trying to achieve. When circumstances conspire to draw you away from important activity that inhibits progress towards those goals, remember that you do sometimes need to fire-fight. That's OK. Suspend what you are doing, deal with the situation, reflect on how you can stop it occurring again or cope better next time, action anything that seems sensible in the light of the experience and then - get back to work on those goals.

If you enjoyed this article, you will also enjoy The Inspiration Blog

Will Edwards is Founder of http://www.whitedovebooks.co.uk/

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When I was a youngster, I remember going to see a career development officer who asked me, amongst other things, if I had set any goals for myself? As it happens, all of my life I have been setting goals and I was very happy to share the goal that I was working on at that time with him. It was, as I recall, to get a book published.

He took one look at my written statement and told me that it was not a proper goal. Why? Simple, because it did not have a deadline associated with it. You will, I am sure, be already familiar with the idea of setting SMART goals. Goals, we have always been told (at least by most people who teach this stuff) should be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timetabled.

Well, I have to tell you that my major goal at the time did not have any date attached to it and the reason for that was - possibly the opposite of what the guy might have thought - I was very serious about achieving it. It did not have a goal because I was determined to keep going for as long as necessary until I achieved the goal - simple as that.

As far as I was concerned, there would be no point putting a date on that goal simply because the outcome was not entirely within my sphere of control. What happens if you don't achieve the goal within the stated time frame? Presumably, you have to rewrite the thing. It was not because I was not serious, but because I was serious that I felt the date was not necessary. One way or another, I was going to make that goal happen.

The same is true about my current major goal - to achieve a passive income equivalent to my old full time salary. I don't have a time frame attached to that goal for the same reasons. I am serious about it and I am not going to stop putting the effort in until I get there - simple as that. There is a school of thought that says, however, that when we attach a date to our goal, we cause our brain to engage in a different kind of thinking about what would be necessary to achieve it within the stated time frame. Without a date, we can't benefit from such thinking some would argue.

So what is it to be: deadline or no deadline? Well, let's put that to one side for just a moment and consider another part of that same acronym - the achievable and realistic part. It was Jack Black that I heard first challenge that idea. He said that he has been privileged enough to be able to work with some of the world's top athletes including people like Seve Ballesteros.

The thing that I remember is that he reported asking some of these top performers questions about how they set their goals. When he asked if they set goals, he got a unanimous 'yes' but when he asked them if they set 'achievable' and 'realistic' goals, they were united in telling him that they did not. Jack said that was a real clue as to what is wrong with the way goal-setting is often taught.

The fact is that we need to see the difference between having a vision or mission that is further away, on the distant horizon and, whilst we are serious about achieving it, we just don't know how - that kind of goal - and the kind of goal that we just need to get on with. They are both valid types of goals, but for your vision and mission, don't let the idea of 'achievable' and 'realistic' stand in your way or constrict your imagination.

Similarly, I would argue that the question of whether or not to put a date on a goal depends upon its proximity and whether or not the outcome can be produced entirely by your own effort. In short, if you are not dependent upon other people to some extent and if you can see what needs to be done, then yes, go ahead and put a date on your goal. However, if your goal is too big and/or complex for you to be able to set a date with certainty, then don't worry. What really matters is that you are serious about it.

So don't allow that old SMART acronym be a burden to you in goal-setting and don't let people tell you that you don't have goals just because you have refused to conform to their way of thinking about them.

If you enjoyed this article, you will also enjoy The Inspiration Blog

Will Edwards is Founder of http://www.whitedovebooks.co.uk/

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What are the success secrets used by the top motivational experts? It turns out that they are in fundamental agreement. Below are eight, solid principles that they all, without exception, teach.

Self help author, Michael Jeffreys, interviewed fifteen motivational gurus back in 1997, including Brian Tracy, Les Brown, Wayne Dyer, Mike Ferry, Patricia Fripp, Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen. He took notes and distilled the following eight secrets which he then published in his book, Secrets of the Motivational Superstars.

Each of the gurus were convinced that the following eight tips constitute what you need to do in order to be really successful:

1. Take 100% Responsibility for Your Life
2. Live Your Life On Purpose
3. Be Willing to Pay the Price
4. Stay Focused
5. Become an Expert in Your Field
6. Write out a Plan for Achieving Your Goals
7. Never Give Up
8. Don't Delay

Let's take a quick look at each of them.

1. Take 100% Responsibility for Your Life

If you are striving for success right now, that essentially means you have not yet achieved the level of success you desire. So who's fault is that? If your answer is that it is your own fault, then you are truly on the right path. Successful people never blame others when things go wrong, instead, they take full responsibility for their success and their failures too. If you think it is someone else's fault that you have not achieved success, it's not the end of the world, you just need to work on your attitude a bit.

2. Live Your Life On Purpose

Do you believe that life holds a purpose for you? Again, if you can answer, 'yes' you are on the right path. Successful people believe that they are here to make a difference and that's how they go about living their lives, as if what they are doing matters. If you answer 'no' to this question, perhaps you might like to open your mind to the possibility that life might hold a specific purpose for you.

3. Be Willing to Pay the Price

Someone once commented that they would do anything to be able to make a golf shot like a professional. The professional replied that they were mistaken, because if they were genuinely prepared to do anything, then they would be able to make that shot. So are you willing to do whatever it takes? Of course, this is another question where your answer must be 'yes', but going a step further, have you identified what that is and are you actually doing it right now?

4. Stay Focused

You must resist all temptations to be drawn off course. Once you know what your target is, you must give it your all. If you are serious about achieving success, you need to dedicate yourself to getting there and that means doing things the other people around you are just not prepared to do. Sure they all want success too, but if you are engaged in doing what they are not, then again it is healthy a sign that you are indeed on the right road.

5. Become an Expert in Your Field

Read, learn, educate and develop yourself so that you manage to achieve complete mastery within your chosen field. Whatever you have decided to do with your life, one obstacle that may be preventing you from joining the top performers is your lack of professional competence or your incomplete knowledge about the discipline, and achieving the necessary level of competence is directly related to your own desire and willingness to transform yourself.

6. Write out a Plan for Achieving Your Goals

Your goals won't materialise without effort on your part, no matter what anyone tells you about the law of attraction, cosmic ordering or the power of thought. You need a plan and the sooner you get it written down the better.

7. Never Give Up

There will be many times along the way that you will doubt yourself, your plan, your goals and your commitment especially when success does not come as easily as you first thought, despite putting in what you thought was all the effort that would be needed. That is the moment that separates the winners from the rest of the field because the others simply give up. But, if you want success, you will simply redouble your efforts, you will find ways of working more efficiently and you will ultimately break through provided that you don't give up.

8. Don't Delay

Now is the time, not tomorrow, not when you think the economic climate is better, not when you have more time, not when the kids are grown up, not when you retire, not when you give yourself permission; none of those times, but now. So, get cracking!

If you enjoyed this article, you will also enjoy The Inspiration Blog

Will Edwards is Founder of http://www.whitedovebooks.co.uk/

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Apparently, this question goes back at least as far as Greek historian Mestrius Plutarchus, who was born in 46 AD. It is an interesting question to try asking your kids or grandchildren just to see what they come up with. Often they will answer before they have really thought through the implications of the question.

Anything that gets kids thinking for themselves is, in my opinion, a very good thing so by asking the question, you will have done them a great service once they can understand why it is a good question. You will have illustrated the concept of a paradox without boring the pants off them and you will have shown them that some questions really do require a great deal of thought.

The ability to do well in life will be dependent, to a very large extent, upon their talent for solving problems, so don't be too eager to provide your kids with any kind of answer. Let them chew it over and see what they come up with. I believe that any kind of well thought out and logical answer should be acceptable. It is not important whether or not they get the right answer; it is much more important that they exercised the old grey matter and did some original thinking.

Everyone who meets him would agree that the son of a friend of mine has exceptionally good reasoning ability, and he had been chewing this question over for some time. The last time I saw him, he told me that he not only had an answer, but that he knew it was right. This is quite an assertion, so I was very keen to hear what he had to say about the matter.

He said that the answer was: the egg. First off, I love the fact that he had thought about the question and come up with his own answer. Now for his reasoning. He said that the question did not stipulate a chicken's egg and that it was well known that eggs had evolved long before chickens; consider dinosaurs, for example. Wow! Great answer. Whether or not you believe in evolution is not the crux of the issue. What makes this a good answer is its logical consistency.

For a child to come up with that answer as a product of his own thinking is, I think, quite amazing. Is it the right answer? Well, as I said, it is a good answer, but you could argue the opposite way if you wished. As long as your answer is logically sound, it is a good answer.

As I said, by giving your kids questions like this to consider, I believe that you are helping them to acquire a key life skill. Who knows, perhaps they will become the philosophers of the future and eventually get to grapple with the big questions like, can God create a stone he cannot lift? By the way, I'll probably share the answer of my friend's son to that question in a future post.

If you enjoyed this article, you will also enjoy The Inspiration Blog

Will Edwards is Founder of http://www.whitedovebooks.co.uk/

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Somewhere along the line, I came across the idea of creating an imaginary board of directors. I think it was something that Thomas Edison actually did and I think he was eventually a bit worried about hearing people talking in his head. It was also something that Doc did in the movie Back to the Future. But put all of that to one side for a moment.

The basic idea is that you can stimulate your own creativity by first forming an imaginary board of directors and then, when you have a difficult problem to solve, consulting each of them mentally. I am aware that this might sound bit nuts, but bear with me here. The responses you get are simply your own thoughts, but this is a tool for accessing the creativity that is within you. It is an idea that really appeals to me and I am definitely going to try it.

So the first thing to do is select your own board. You can have a lot of fun here deciding who you will appoint. The people can be living or dead; it doesn't matter. What you need is people who you believe are, or were, in some way outstanding. You want people who will be able to represent different perspectives and you want people you admire.

Personally, I think you probably want to keep the board fairly small and select just one person to represent each perspective you will need to cover. So you don't want multiple people who all represent creativity, for example. After just a little thought, here is a candidate short-list for my own Imaginary Board of Directors:

And here are the five positions (perspectives) I have on offer:

As you can see, I had to do a bit of mental interviewing to select my final board. With Leonardo, Walt Disney and Albert Einstein all applying for the role of Director of Creativity, it was a tough choice and I may change the personnel from time to time. But here is the final choice for my own board:

Now, to make use of this idea, you first get yourself into that quiet meditative state we have spoken about in the past and then, in your imagination, you go into the boardroom. There you meet with your fellow directors and you hold your board meeting in which you raise the issues that are of immediate concern. And each of the directors gets the opportunity to make their point from their own perspective.

So there you have it: a really interesting idea for exploring your own creativity. I wonder if you would like to give it a shot too.

If you enjoyed this article, you will also enjoy The Inspiration Blog

Will Edwards is Founder of http://www.whitedovebooks.co.uk/

View the original article here