Category: Self-Discipline

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This video is about Building Trust – and how building Trust will Improve Relationships and the Enhance the Quality of our Lives. After you have food and shelter, it is the quality of the relationships that really make your life. Relationships are about trust. Where there is no trust, there is no relationship.

I’d love to hear your comments, thoughts, reflections and questions on this and the other educational videos on my channel.

I wrote a few years ago a longer post on The Trust Equation: https://conorneill.com/2011/11/17/trust/

How do you Increase Trust?

In order to Increase Trust =

  • Increase Perception of Credibility or
  • Increase Perception of Reliability or
  • Increase Intimacy or
  • Reduce Perception of Self-Orientation.

Ways to increase Perception of Credibility:

  • Tell the truth.
  • Don’t exaggerate.
  • Avoid saying things that others may see as lies (eg “We’ll put our best people on it”)
  • If you don’t know, say “I don’t know”. Quickly.
  • If you don’t belong, don’t go.
  • Do your homework.
  • Care about the work.

Ways to increase Perception of Reliability:

  • Make specific small commitments and deliver 100%.
  • Send meeting materials in advance.
  • Make sure meetings have clear goals, and that those goals are met.
  • Use the words your listener would use.
  • Review agendas for meetings.
  • Re-confirm events 24 hours before.

Ways to Increase Intimacy:

  • Ask insightful questions.
  • Share first.

Ways to Reduce Perception of Self-Orientation:

  • Ask questions.
  • Listen and paraphrase without adding anything.
  • Resist the need to fill silences.
  • Focus on defining the problem, not guessing the solution.
  • Say “I don’t know” if you don’t know.
  • Take responsibility for failed communications (Say “I have failed to communicate clearly”, not “You don’t understand“)
  • Think as if you were completely responsable for this person’s future success in all aspects that are important to the other person.
  • Care about the work. If you don’t care about the work, it is inevitable that you will focus more on yourself. Low self orientation is all about intensity of your commitment to help your listener.

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Jack Daly says “you are either practicing in private, or you are practicing in public”.

This video is about Excellence. What is the path to Mastery? What do successful people do differently?

Success is the choice to practice in private. in this video, I also celebrate this week’s milestone: 50,000 subscribers! Thank you to all who subscribe, comment, share and contribute to the community that helps support me as I develop these ideas.

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Jim Rohn had a wonderful saying: “Success is a few good habits repeated every day, Failure is a few bad decisions repeated every day”

If you are reading this via email, the video is here Success is a Few Good Habits Repeated Every Day

An apple a day keeps the doctor away. This is old wisdom but relates to success in our lives. What are your apples? Your daily positive habits? Let me know in the comments below 😉

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This week’s video is about Steven Covey’s 7th Habit of Highly Effective People: Sharpen the Saw.

Life is a marathon, not a sprint.

Burning yourself out is no service to anyone.  Running your car without changing the oil will destroy the engine.  Running at 100% all day and all night will destroy your own personal engine.

Feeling good doesn’t just happen.

Living a life in balance means taking the necessary time to renew yourself.  You know what to do, but do you make the time for renewal?

Sharpen the Saw means taking care of the greatest asset you have: you.  Here are some examples of activities:

  • Physical: Beneficial eating, exercising, and resting
  • Social: Making social and meaningful connections with others
  • Mental: Learning, reading, writing, and teaching
  • Spiritual: Spending time in nature, meditation, music, art

As you renew yourself in each of the four areas, you create growth and change in your life. Without this renewal, the body becomes weak, the mind mechanical, the emotions raw, the spirit insensitive, and the person selfish.  Not a good life.

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First understand the do-or-die importance of focus.

“If you don’t learn to focus, you will have a shallow and unrewarding life without any meaningful achievements.” Derek Sivers 

That is worth repeating.

“A shallow and unrewarding life.”

That’s bad.

You Need to Learn to Focus

So make it a priority.

Yes it’s hard.  The world is designed to distract you.  Facebook is a research laboratory focussed on human distraction.  They invest billions and are excellent at their work.  When facebook slip up, hard on their tails come Apple, apps, youtube, caffeine, bored friends, problematic neighbours and general office bullshit.

Apps are designed to be as addictive as possible.

Assume you are dealing with crack cocaine.  If you can see it, you will use it.  If you can hear it, you will use it.  Willpower is not going to get you through this.

There are many reasons why we delay work.  I think the most insidious is that I have a belief that the person I will be in future will be better than the person who I am today.  I have a consistent inner belief that I will be smarter, better, faster in the future.  The work that is hard today will somehow become easier for the better future me.  But, what if’s not?  I will only be better in future if I do the hard work of pushing through distractions today.

Who is Good at Focus?

I have spent a lot of time interviewing high performance athletes. My goal was to understand their motivations, how they train, how they prepare mentally, and how they face anxiety.  These successful athletes have an ability to focus on the one next step and, in the words of Nike, Just do it!

Josef Ajram, one of Spain’s top endurance athletes, tells himself “I will run another 15 minutes. Come on. Anyone can run another 15 minutes.”  In Josef Ajram’s words, he has completed the Marathon de Sables – 243km across the Sahara desert in 6 days – by only ever allowing himself to think about the next 15 minutes.

How to Learn Focus?

Simple, noisy timer

Use The Pomodoro* Method.

Here are my simplified instructions for following the Pomodoro method.

Ingredients:

Instructions:

  1. Pick a specific project you would like to work on.  For example “Write a blog post on focus”.
  2. Set a timer for 20 minutes
  3. Work only on this project until the timer stops.  Stop completely no matter where you are when you hear the timer.  Mid sentence is excellent (it makes it easier to re-start this work later).
  4. Repeat.

Count how many timers you can complete in a day.  I bet you will not complete one single complete timer the first day you begin this habit.  I didn’t.

Some clarifications…

*Any interruption*, you must reset the timer to 20 minutes.

If you need a drink of water, go get the water, then reset the timer.

If you need the bathroom, go, then reset the timer.

If you must check wikipedia to find out a fact, check wikipedia, then reset the timer.  (better… resist the need to check facts now, and use a future timer to work on the project “research focus and collect sources”)

If you must respond to a phone alert, respond, reset the timer.

I think you get the idea.  Only by working on 1, and only 1 project for the full 20 minutes = you get to count it as 1 timer.

* You can find the original Pomodoro Method described here: Pomodoro Method.

This week’s Rhetorical Journey video is all about the Ability to Focus

If you are viewing this via email, watch the video on the blog here: the Ability to Focus

Inspired by Derek Sivers..

This was inspired by Derek Sivers in his frequently asked questions.  I recommend a quick read.  It is lots of content in a short bullet point list.

Derek on focus: He shares 3 further tips for improving your focus…

  1. Read the book “Deep Work”.
  2. Read “Trying to pursue many different directions at once?”.
  3. Practice meditation.  Maria Popova of BrainPickings listens to this guided meditation by Tara Brach every morning…

Tara Brach Guided Meditation

Gratitude

Personally, this video about Gratitude is one of my favourite ways to Meditate for a few minutes.  If you are reading via email, check out the video on the blog here: Nature, Beauty, Gratitude.

How many Pomodoro timers can you do today?  Reply in the comments if you get 1 full timer done today!

If you liked this post, you will also like Focus and The Urgent and the Important.

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If you are reading this via email, watch the video on the blog: Setting Goals for 2017

Each year I decide on a few words that set the theme for the year.  Last year was Connect, Create, Complete.  This year I have set Unconditional Peace of Mind as the theme.

I will explain more on what these words mean over the course of the year. Meanwhile there are two specific areas that I will be working to master in 2017.  I explain in the video above.

Scroll down, leave a comment, and tell me what you think.

PS The idea of setting 3 words as your theme for the year came from Chris Brogan.

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Do you plan your days, or do your days run as a reaction to what pops up?  In Washington DC, one of our EO leaders at the EO Leadership Academy was Christoph Magnussen – here in this he shares a tip we learnt about how to take control of your day.

This is a lesson that was shared with the group by Warren Rustand.  Warren Rustand was a White House scholar back in the 1970s and spent 4 years as the appointments secretary to President Gerald Ford.  This meant that for 4 years, he controlled how President Ford spent his time.

How does the US President Plan his Days?

If you are reading this via email, the video is here: How does the US President plan his days? 

Do your days reflect your highest priorities?  Do you plan how you want to spend your time?

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In a 1954 speech to the Second Assembly of the World Council of Churches, former U.S. President Eisenhower said: “I have two kinds of problems: the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.”

jp-kantorRobert Glazer shared this simple but powerful life management tool on his blog today – Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Urgent/Important matrix.

The image to the right shows a 2×2 matrix using the two axis of Important and Urgent.  This gives us 4 types of task:

  1. Urgent & Important
  2. Urgent & Not Important
  3. Important & Not Urgent
  4. Not Urgent & Not Important

In an un-disciplined person, category 2 tends to be completed before category 3.  In a disciplined person, category 3 is completed before touching category 2.

Success is rarely Urgent

Jim Rohn gives one of the most powerful definitions of success:

“Failure is a few bad decisions repeated every day.  Success is a few simple good habits practiced every day” Jim Rohn

There is a saying “an apple a day keeps the doctor away”.  Health success is an apple a day.  Failure is a donut instead of an apple each day.  You can say “what difference does 1 donut make?”  You won’t notice the damage today, you won’t notice tomorrow… but over a year: a donut a day starts to extract a price.

The urgent is often the result of avoiding the important.

By the time the painkillers are needed, it is too late for the vitamins.

Vitamins are important.

Practice Saying “No”

If you wish to spend more of your life on the important things, and less on the urgent things, there is a tool…

Warren Buffett’s definition of integrity: “you say No to most things”.  If you are not saying No to most things, you are dividing your life up into millions of little pieces that are being given to other people’s priorities.

Learn to say “No”…

…without the word “no”.

The most powerful ways to say “no” do not involve the actual word “no”.

  • Here is one powerful way: Strategic Unavailability.
  • Another is to raise the cost of your “Yes”: If someone wants to meet for coffee, I say “yeah sure, I am free on Friday at 7am at my office in Sabadell [25 mlles away]”. If the person still wants to meet then it must be important.  90% end up not following up.  The few that do, will come prepared and have done their research.  They know what they want from me.  They know whether it is worth their time.

Celebrities and Politicians have entire staffs dedicated to restricting access.  Bono, the singer of U2, has 25 people who review requests for his time, his money, his attention in order to allow only the important requests to reach Bono himself.  Barrack Obama has a whole White House staff whose mission is to ensure that he only spends time and energy on important things, that only he can deal with.

If you don’t start developing methods of saying “no” now, it will only get harder as you become wealthier, wiser, more famous, more experienced and more resourceful.

What urgent task will you say “No” to today?

Some other great posts on Robert Glazer’s blog Friday Forward:

 

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Pain or Gain?

There are two fundamental drives to human action:

  1. Avoidance of Pain
  2. Seeking of Gain.

This is how we work.

There are no other external causes of action.

We take action when we truly believe:

  1. It will avoid a Pain, or
  2. We truly believe it will deliver a Gain.

If I am not taking action, it is often because I do not truly believe that the action will achieve the end goal of pain avoidance, or deliver the gain.

The Pain Avoidance Driven Life

There are a set of things we do because we “have” to.  These tend to be actions driven by pain avoidance.

  • It is not hard to get a sick person to take painkillers.  They directly remove a current, real pain.
  • It is not hard to get a hungry person to eat.  The food directly removes a current, real pain.
  • It is not hard to get a scuba diver to come to the surface when they run out of air.
  • It is not hard to get myself to sleep when I am tired.
  • It is not hard to get myself to go to the toilet when I need to pee.

I don’t need any boss or discipline to do these tasks because the environment will just ramp up the pain steadily until I have no choice but to take action.

An entirely pain-avoidance driven life will inevitably leave a growing feeling of overwhelm.

The Gain Driven Life

“The things that will bring you the greatest results in your life don’t have a deadline.” Steve McClatchy

Perhaps the greatest positive of gain driven action is that it is entirely discretionary.  It is driven by choice.  It is the tool by which I change my fate.  It is the set of actions that define what type of human being I have chosen to be.

There is no need to take these actions.

In many cases, I live an internal fantasy life based on “I could do this, I could do that” that allows me to feel like I am the type of person I intend to be…  but only in my own inner life.  Not to the world.  Not in any meaningful way.

Anybody could write a blog post.

Anybody could go for a walk.

Anybody could eat 10% less calories for lunch today.

…and the fact that I know that I could is often my own barrier to actually doing.  I can maintain my inner image of myself as the highest potential version of me…  without seeing that my daily actions are not reaching this potential.

 

Resources

Two Forms of Human Motivation: Gain And Prevent Pain

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This graphic captures it all…

efficiency

Thanks to XKCD for the original.

“I take good decisions and then I work to make them great.”

It reminds me of a story about one of the founders of Tata Industrial group. He was asked “How do you take good decisions?”

He paused before answering:

“I don’t do anything special to take great decisions.”

“I take good decisions and then I work to make them great.”

If you commit to a path, you will find a way to make something great out of the path.  If you wait to see, you will ensure that it is a poor path.

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