Allot of people think that the faster they run the more they get done. Which, if you are doing an easter egg hunt or finders keepers might be true.
But in business it is the opposite. The higher up in a business a person goes the less busy they must become. Busy is incompetence.
Now this can fly in the face of intuitions.
But when you think it through it’s logical.
The person at the top values their time more. So, they only work on super important things and those are not measured by time invested.
Lower down the hierarchy people throw time at work. They are in some weird way, proud of the hours they work as some form of measure of how good they are doing or how valuable they are to the company. This is inverse to how it is.
As an individual evolves up the corporate ladder their ability to get more done in less time will become the key to their success. Taking the same time but doing more, which is what promotion means, requires a rethink of how you approach work.
Any person who aspires to sustain a role in a business above middle management (ie leadership) is required to operate in a completely different mind zone to where they were before. Any stimulation of adrenaline at work, in self or other, is going to lead to failure. It is unsustainable.
You might need to change your model of leadership at some point in your life. Typically late 20’s early 30’s but if you’ve managed to duck the illness that overwork usually causes, and the depression, exhaustion and divorces that followed, you may even be in your forty’s and having to re think your affirmations and visualisations of your leadership.
Subconsciously you might have watched movies or dad or mum work tirelessly to build business. You might have had a gym coach or priest or school teacher telling you “you only get out what you put in” and you’ve embedded that idea into your subconscious mind as “the way to the top.”
It’s not. You will need to reprogram your subconscious using one of my many techniques for a mental and emotional reset on your success formula.
Busy people, who do not have time in the day to sneeze are the adrenaline junkies and they really are heading for a huge problem. (please go to the innerwealth E-Learning to download the article on Adrenalin Junkies.) So, how do you recognise yourself, how do you know what it looks like to operate in the adrenaline zone? The answer is all too simple: when you hear yourself say “Got to” or “Have to” do this or that, you’re in the adrenal zone and about to blow it sky high.
More importantly, you can recognise yourself in the adrenalin bottom up management zone when someone says to you that you can get more done in the day and you say “No” I can’t. Imagine a general in an army saying “no” I can’t deal with another battle, or a coach in the Olympics saying “I can’t get more done” or the President of the USA saying “there’s too much on my plate, I can’t talk to the press.” No way you can imagine that. Your subconscious mind won’t allow it because it associates in your subconscious with failure. And you are success, not failure.
You can do your current job in half the time you do it with better results. I you can’t see that you are stuck in bottom up leadership and that’s the equivalent to the British sending thousands of Australian soldiers onto the beach at Gallipoli thinking that the more corpses that appear, the more likely they are to win the war. Or how stressed you become is a good measure of how hard you are working. Or how tense you are is some measure of good leadership. All these do not fit in a logical model of good success. But sometimes they are in your subconscious mind blocking your ability to innovate not on what you do, but how you do it.
Our neanderthal heritage makes fight flight an option at any time. That’s the adrenal zone so even mowing the lawn or having dinner or sex or doing yoga can drop into the GOT TO – HAVE TO zone and start the catastrophe without detection. It can be a subconscious habit copying a hero, dad or mum, or a legend you have in some aspect of life.
But Presidents are calm. Even when the World Trade Centre was attacked Major Rudy Giuliani in New York held calming press conferences every ten minutes while overseeing the rescue and emergency as it unfolded. He had no real information, no real data, but the world needed to be calmed and led, and he was superb. Not quite the same compliment for the President of the Day or retaliated with hate and revenge, a sign of overwhelm.
These moments where you become the leader are the moments when others buckle. When one of your team fails, misses a deadline, makes an error, isn’t panicking or is rushing around making a mess, your calm, your ability to handle to challenge with respect, poise, dignity and grace will be the defining moments in your life as your road to success is made.
Emotional ups and downs are daily occurrences. But these too, are like going to the gym. You do three sets of 20 reps with lighter weights in the gym four times a week to build the strength to do one single rep of your maximum weight once a month. Leadership is not a singular event in your life like the 911 crisis where Rudy Giuliani stood tall. Rudy Giuliani practiced every day as a lawyer, fighting against the Mafia and organised crime in NYC, then in his political career, every day dealing with the emotional ups and downs and learning not to be a victim of his feelings. His achievement in the 911 crisis was a single lift of a very heavy weight in the gym, but he’d been doing tens of thousands of smaller weight reps for years before it.
This is the essential nature of denials, affirmations and visualisations. Firstly to make them rise above your subconscious desire to experience and operate from feelings. Those feelings are a very very poor measure of truth and therefore sabotage your leadership. (and love). Secondly, denials, affirmations and visualisations require that you are willing to step away from the stand that “I am doing my best” because if this feeling is true, there is no where left to go.
Instead you can replace the “I am doing my best”, a stance that blocks your income, your leadership and career, with “How can I get more done in less time?” and you will override your subconscious and all it’s memories and unspoken thoughts with a universal law. We rise in life only by the daily answer to that single affirmation, “how can I get more done in less time?” and the answer is very rarely, work faster, talk faster or as Arnold Schwarzenegger suggests on Youtube, sleep faster.
We can become emotionally attached to how we do what we do. And in doing so become our own worst enemy. The issue is not one of inability to learn, or unwillingness to learn, the issue is the inability to let go of a role model. When we do things the way we do them we are always emulating a hero, and sometimes it’s hard to let go, or see through the way it’s done by those we admire. That’s the subconscious following what is called, MEME’s.
Let me give you a few examples and stray from this lesson a bit. I have been fortunate enough to work with some of the most powerful people in the world. Dalia Lama, Pattabhi Jois, Musicians, rockstars and business icons. They all have common traits that have been drilled into them, not always by birthright, sometimes by bitter, hard failure. Those common traits are:
- They know perfectly how to perform under pressure. The more pressure the better they perform and they achieve it by practicing between performances. In other words, everything becomes important.
- They are continually questioning not what they do, but how they do it. Ultimately trying to get more done in less time. (while improving the result of course)
- They save their emotional outbursts and crazy stress reactions for the coaching table where the public and their family are not watching so they do not lose face.
- They practice power success formula – denial, affirmation and visualisation and use it to drive past subconscious fear.
- They educate and train their support teams with fault free perfection so everyone around them knows what to do, and what is expected of them. Nothing is left to chance.
The image you have in your mind of nice leadership might be top down or bottom up, but ultimately bottom up leadership expires at around middle management around $130-$160,000 salary (in Australia). Above this top down is essential for sustainable, productive and reliable performance without adrenal or psychological burnout.
So if you hear yourself saying “I’m drinking from the fire hydrant” which means so much on my plate it’s just overwhelming, and I can’t get more done in less time, call out to your boss. Because the result of that is failure and you are a success.
Further, imagine if Arnold Schwarzenegger or Rudy Giuliani went into overwhelm at any time in their life. Their staff might cop an earbashing and they would, in someway, lose respect for them. Trust, which is essential to allow someone to lead you, would be broken. But worse would be either of these people demonstrating overwhelm or emotional ups and downs on camera, to broader staff, community, clients or press. Their career would be over. Evolved means, grow up emotionally.
It is impossible to trust someone who comes to work one day in a good space and the next all grumpy and emotionally down. Subconsciously we withdraw to safety from behaviour that is unpredictable at best.
There are many role models of people who shout and scream orders at people and get results. The internet and some gym classes are filled with it. But in many cases the individuals choose the leader who screams, the followers chose that style. In business, in public in service we do not have preselected audiences. The public is a cross section of individuality and so, the screaming model, if that’s the model you have absorbed, needs to be extinguished. In business, the critic fails, the mean person fails, and the kind person fails. All of these are not the model of leadership that leads to your success.
The higher you rise in seniority in leadership the more you must get done. You must get more done and, without quality loss, do it in less time. That is the secret of success and leadership.
